foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

248 Appendix
to the Precepts of the Quran"; thieves and adulterous women flogged. Iran
has had a narrow escape. When one thinks that after decades of ferocious
dictatorship under the shah and the SAVAK, this country almost fell into the
trap of a "Spanish-type" solution, of a democratic parliament, this news is
proof enough of that country's good fortune.
October 1978: "The Saint, " "the destitute exile, " "the man who rises up
with bare hands, " "Ayatollah Khomeini" ruined it all. He sent out an appeal
to the students . . . the Muslims . . . and the army to oppose, in the name of
the Quran and in the name of nationalism, these ideas of compromise con­
cerning elections, a constitution, and so forth. Thank God, the call was heard.
What fo rm was this Islamic government supposed to have taken? "Ab­
sence of hierarchy in the dergy . . . importance of purely spiritual authority,
a both echoing and guiding role that the dergy must play in order to sustain
its influence . . . " Spiritual light "that is capable of illuminating from the in­
side, a law that is not made to be conserved . . . " -this is so stupidly the sign
of "Western" democracies-no . . but to release over time the spiritual mean­
ing that it holds." Pertinent: Shoot a homosexual, and you have revealed,
it is true, the spiritual meaning of the law "in the Islamic fashion. " "In the
pursuit of this ideal" . . . (very old and "very far in the future " . . . a brighter
future) . . . "distrust of legalism seemed essential to me." As a matter of fact,
the Islamic government, each day, proves its illegalism by way of bullets. This
"political will" therefore will have been "sufficiently intense to prevent itself
from aiming toward a Western-style parliamentary regime."
This spirituality that disciplines and punishes allowed the people of Iran
to rise up. Spontaneous armed groups, benevolent Islamic committees that
"counterattack" and take immediate revenge, sweeping away the odious and
stage-managed bourgeois courts with their well-known and oppressive trail
of interrogations, investigations, witnesses, proofs, hearings, and supposedly
neutral judges-this is the people's justice for which Michel Foucault passion­
ately yearned, notably in "On Popular Justice: A Conversation with Maoists"
(Temps modernes, no. 310 bis, 1972). 107
No, the philosopher is not responsible for the blood that flows today in
Iran. It is not he who invented Islam and the ayatollahs. It is not he who,
sitting cross-legged in a mosque in Qom, fulminates his "firmans, "108 like
Mao, not long ago, with his "supreme directives." The philosopher contents
himself with painting and offering images, holy images: the abridged illus­
trated imam, sequel to the hurried marabout of people's justice. 109 He is no
more responsible than Leon Daudet for the Holocaust, 110 or than the Western
communist intellectuals for the socialist gulags.
Also, no one is forced, with a gun to the head, to declare that Daudet,