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Appendix 241
will want to be the force that settles the ambiguity and that clarifies the situation:
"outflanking," the better to divide.
This nonviolent uprising of a whole people that overthrew an all-powerful
regime-an incredibly rare outcome for the twentieth century-faces a decisive
choice. Maybe its historic significance will be found, not in its conformity
to a recognized "revolutionary " model, but instead in its potential
to overturn the existing political situation in the Middle East and thus the
global strategic equilibrium. Its singularity, which has up to now constituted
its force, consequently threatens to give it the power to expand. Thus, it is true
that, as an "Islamic" movement, it can set the entire region afire, overturn the
most unstable regimes, and disturb the most solid ones. Islam-which is not
simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a
civilization-has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level
of hundreds of millions of men. Since yesterday, any Muslim state can be
revolutionized from the inside, based on its time-honored traditions .
Indeed, it is also important to recognize that the demand for the "legitimate
rights of the Palestinian people" has hardly stirred the Arab peoples.
What would happen if this cause experienced the dynamism of an Islamic
movement, something much stronger than the effect of giving it a Marxist,
Leninist, or Maoist character? Additionally, how strong would Khomeini's
"religious" movement become, if it were to put forward the liberation of
Palestine as its objective? The Jordan no longer flows very far from Iran.
Khomeini and the "Primacy of the Spiritual"
by Maxime Rodinson
Originally published in Le Nouvel Observa teur, February 19, 1979.
Jacques Julliard made intelligent use of the events in Iran in order to reexamine
the conventional wisdom ofthe European Left. (See Julliard 1978.)97 He
boldly questions a basic judgment inherited from our venerable intellectual
ancestors: Religion is organically tied to obscurantism and oppression. Nothing
good can come of it. Freeing oneself from it is "pulling the mind out of
the dungeon," as the good Communard Pottier expressed it in verse. 98 This,
at least, is a first step toward total liberation. What irony that the transcen­
dence of this conception, at the very least a simplistic one, takes place under
the influence of the most archaic men of religion, the Iranian mullahs and
the Orthodox popes, whose message is conveyed, it is true, by the eloquent
Solzhenitsyn.