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

Notes to Pages 87-102 287
1979, Foucault wrote a preface for one of Daniel's books. After Foucault's death, Daniel
wrote the preface to a 1989 reprint of The Order of Things.
15. Apparently a reference to oil deposits.
16. This was not the first time that Foucault had used the phrase "political
spirituality. " In a relatively unnoticed May 1978 roundtable on Discipline and Punish with
a group of French historians, he had mentioned "political spirituality' as an alternative to
the hyper-rationality of the modem disciplinary apparatus (1978c, 30).
17. Recall that its top editor, Jean Daniel, was a personal friend of Foucault.
18. As was revealed later, Khomeini had since 1965 organized from abroad a fairly
large underground movement based on ten-person Hay'at cells, which operated in a
classically vanguardist manner.
19. In France, Foucault was not alone in discounting the worries some were
expressing about the character of the anti-shah movement and its clerical leadership. In a
November 8 Le Monde article, for example, the noted scholar ofreligion Jacques Madaule
attacked political "realists" who "have excluded God and the Iranian people from their
calculations" (Madaule 1978; see also Chazi 1978; Albala 1978).
20. The statement about "love" by "everyone" for Khomeini seems astounding at
first. But it becomes less so when considered in light of earlier accounts by some Western
leftists of the adulation of Stalin by the Russians or of Mao by the Chinese.
21. As we will see in the next chapter, Foucault later expressed some reservations on
this issue.
22. For more discussion of Sartre and Foucault, see chap. 1, n. 9.
23. Sadly, Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) died just as our book neared completion.
For more background on the life and work of this remarkable scholar of the Muslim world,
see the following tributes to him upon his death: Alaoui 2004; Coroller 2004; Johnson
2004; and Harbi 2004. For additional background, see Vidal-Naquet 1993, 1 998. On the
Palestinian question, see also Daniel 2002.
24. An English translation appeared in Rodinson 1981. It is reprinted in the appendix
to this volume. The original French title was "ReveiI de l'integrisme rnusulman?" See
also Rodinson's introduction to the 1980 reprint of the English edition of Muhammad,
where he makes a similar but less pointed analysis of the Iranian Revolution and the
rise of Islamism more generally. A quarter of a century later, the prominent Iran scholar
Yann Richard testified to the importance of Rodinson's Le Monde series: "He was the
only one who was truly able to outline the dangers that were brewing; the Iranians
themselves, mesmerized by the wish to get rid of the shah, were not able to anticipate this
new form of ideological totalitarianism" (Richard, personal communication, January 28,
2004).
25. Criticizing one's opponents without naming them has been quite common in
French intellectual discourse, as can be seen in V'le writings of Sartre or Althusser.
26. Rodinson reported that Andre Fontaine, Le Monde's editor, had asked him some
months earlier to write an article on Islamism (1993a, 261).
27. One of the authors of this volume heard Keddie speak on the events in Iran at
City University of New York Graduate Center in December 1978. Like Rodinson, Keddie