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

Notes to Pages 163-1 91 293
Epilogue
1. Kepel (2002) provides the best empirical survey of the various radical Islamist
movements. For an overview of Islamism and gender, an issue Kepel tends to minimize,
see Afary 1997, 2004a. See also the informative discussions of Islamism's social context by
Fred Halliday (2002) and John Esposito (2002), and of Islamism and totalitarianism by
Paul Berman (2003).
2. For overviews of the human rights situation since 1979, see Mayer 1995; Sanasarian
2000; Afshari 2001 ; and Afary and Afshari 200l.
3. Throughout the 1990s, there was also evidence that some of the worst outrages by
the GIA had been orchestrated by the military regime itself, which had deeply infiltrated
their movement.
4. For a good collection of recent essays by feminists on religious fundamentalism,
with an emphasis on the challenge of Islamism, see Reed 2002, a volume that we draw
upon below.
5. Information provided by the Iranian feminist and human rights activist Mehrangiz
Kar in a November 2001 lecture at Purdue University.
Appendix
1. This city is the Shi'ite religious center of Iran.
2. In Persian, the pronoun u can be male or female.
3. The shahs of the Safavid Dynasty (1501-1722) were the first Iranian rulers to
make Shi'ism the country's official religion.
4. Literally, the Shi'ism of Ali. Imam Ali was Prophet Muhammad's cousin and
son-in-law, as well as the fourth caliph (656-661 eEl. This notion of returning to
an original. supposedly uncorrupted Shi'ism, for which martyrdom was the supreme
virtue, was developed by the lay Muslim theologian Ali Shariati. Shariati, who had a
doctorate from the Sorbonne, died in 1977 while living abroad. At the time, the Iranian
government was blamed for his sudden death. His writings had a dramatic impact on a
whole generation of Iranian activists. At the time of the revolution, his picture was carried
alongside that of Khomeini in the demonstrations.
5. During the years 1524 to 1534, in the aftermath of Martin Luther's break with
Rome, Germany experienced a series of radical peasant revolts, which are the subject of
Frederick Engels's Peasant Wars in Germany (1852).
6. The green flag represents Islam.
7. On Friday, September 8, "Black Friday, " the army massacred several hundred
protestors at Djaleh Square in Tehran. The Tabas earthquake happened a few days later.
8. This unfounded rumor suggested that Iran's mainly Muslim army had nol really
carried out the September 8 massacre.
9. The traditional army was based on universal male conscription, similar in some
ways to a national guard.
10. The Praetorian Guard were the bodyguards of the Roman emperors; the