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

50 Foucault's Discourse
Foucault, who personally observed the anti-shah demonstrations, was nearly
mesmerized by the new attitude of the unarmed masses on the streets toward
death. For him, Iranian Shi'ites had a different Hregime of truth," an entirely
different attitude toward life and death. This set them apart from the logic of
the modern West.
Foucault was interested in both the festive manifestations of the rituals of
mourning and their healing power. During a visit to the shrine of an imam,
he wrote,
All around the mausoleum, there is stamping and jostling. The European
is probably wrong to seek to discern what part is village fair and what part
devotion. The present monarch has tried indeed to harness some of this
current. Very close to here, he erected the tomb of his own father. The father
Reza Sh ah also laid out a large avenue and designed concrete platforms
where there had been only vegetable gardens. He threw parties and received
foreign delegations, all for nought, fo r in the rivalry between the dead, the
[great-grand-Json of the imam wins, every Friday, over the father of the king.
("Tehran: Faith against the Shah, · app., 199)
Foucault was likewise intrigued by the relationship between the discourse of
martyrdom and the new form of political spirituality to which the lslamists
aspired. He held that the Western world had abandoned this form of spirituality
ever since the French Revolution. In the Paradise of Zahra Cemetery, the
largest cemetery near Tehran, political debates routinely followed mourning
rituals.
To Foucault, it seemed that Shi'ism had a different approach to death.
It was not seen as the end but simply one more stage in the drama of life.
In an imaginary conversation with an Iranian sociologist, he summarized
this worldview: "What preoccupies you, you Westerners, is death. You ask
her to detach you from life and she teaches you how to give up. As for us, we
care about the dead, because they attach us to life. We hold out our hands to
them in order for them to link us to the permanent obligation of justice. They
speak to us of right and of the struggle that is necessary for right to triumph"
("Tehran," app., 201).
Foucault feared that future historians would reduce the Iranian Revolution
to a merely social movement, with the religious elite joining the masses
to address sociaL economic, and political grievances. This would miss the
point, he warned. The driving force of the Iranian Revolution was religious
and culturaL he maintained. This could be seen in the public nostalgia for
the rituals and the discourses of Shi'ism, traditions that many Iranians had