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

294 Notes to Pages 1 91-1 96
Janissries o/ere elite slave soldiers recruited by the Ottoman sultans from among Balkan
Christian boys. Foucault was in fact referring to the shah's Immortals (Gard-i Javidan) , an
elite unit of royal bodyguards named after an earlier one from the pre-Islamic period.
11. The combat anny was composed of professional career soldiers, separate from
the traditional army.
12. This could.also be translated as "toy rattle" and refers to ridiculous or childish
behavior.
13. In August 1953, the United States and the British helped organize a coup that
overthrew the democratic and nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadeq, restoring
Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to absolute power.
14. The reference is to Reza Shah Pahlavi, who reigned from 1925 to 1941. A member
of the British-led Cossack Brigade, he carried out a successful coup in 1921 with the
support of the British. In 1925, the majlis (parliament) disbanded the Qajar dynasty, which
had ruled since 1795, and Reza Shah (formerly Reza Khan) became the first monarch of
the Pahlavi dynasty.
15. This refers to Major Edmund Ironside, commander of the British forces in Iran in
1921.
16. The brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile in 1973 with
U.S. support, ousting the democratically elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende;
his counterpart General Jorge Videla held power in Argentina from 1976 to 1982.
17. In 1955, twenty-seven officers linked to the banned pro-Soviet Tudeh Party were
executed, but in 1956, the shah was invited to the Soviet Union for an official visit.
18. The unrest started in Qom in February 1978, when soldiers killed several talabehs
(seminarians), who were demonstrating against a scurrilous letter in the newspaper Etela'at
attacking Khomeini. It soon spread to Tabriz.
19. While predominantly Muslim, the army included non-Muslims as well.
20. In April 1978, Mghanistan's ruler General Muhammad Daud was overthrown
and killed in an uprising by the pro-Soviet People's Democratic Party.
21. The French term populaire, often counterposed to bourgeois, has several meanings,
among them "popular," "of the people," "of the common people," and "people's." It
became part of communist ideology in the sense, for example, of "people's war" (guerre populaire)
as applied by Mao Zedong to his guerrilla campaigns in China. It was also used to refer
to what were termed the "people's democracies" (democraties populaires) of Eastern Europe.
22. According to the editors of Dits et ecriLs, the title proposed by Foucault was "The
Dead Weight of Modernization." This article was almost immediately translated into
Persian and pasted on the walls of Tehran University.
23. The 1906-11 Constitutional Revolution established a strong parliament within
a constitutional monarchy. The Constitution, which included the principle of equality
before the law of all male citizens, continues even today to be a point of reference for many
nationalists, liberals, and leftists.
24. Foucault was referring to the shah 's "White Revolution" of 1963, whi ch initiated
a limited land reform program and women's suffrage, but no opening toward democracy.
Khomeini led his first pol itical campaign against the referendum supporting the shah's