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

Processions, Passion Plays, and Rites of Penance 59
ever, Khomeini's blueprint for an Islamist revolution might have remained in
the drafting stage. Jalal Al-Ahmad (1923-69), author of the now-classic 1963
book Plagued by the West, was one of these, the first leftist to contribute to the
new discourse of militant Islam. By the early 1960s, AI-Ahmad saw Islam as
the only remaining barrier to Western capitalism and rampant consumerism.
Plagued by the West blended a Nietzschean critique of modern technology
with a Marxian one of alienated labor, also attacking the cultural hegemony
of the West. 20 The text was peppered with references to Albert Camus, Eugerie
Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sanre, and Franz Kafka, who had written on the contradictory
impulses of modernity in philosophical treatises, novels, and plays.
To Al-Ahmad, the plagues and demons in the works of these authors referred
to a modern technocratic capitalism that had run amuck. It was a world that
had abandoned all faith and all ideas, except for science and materialism.
This scientific worldview had ushered in the atomic age, beginning with the
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: "I understand all of these fictional
destinies to be omens, foreboding the Hour of Judgment, warning that the
machine demon if not harnessed and put back into the bottle, will place a
hydrogen bomb at the end of the road for mankind" (AI-Ahmad 1982, 1 11).
AI-Ahmad believed that modern technology could only be tamed through
a return to the twin concepts of martyrdom and jihad, the latter in its strictly
combative meaning. For nearly two centuries, he wrote, a variety of nationalist
camps in Iran, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire had used Islam as a weapon
to resist Western colonialism in the Middle East. But the Muslim world had
been weakened by the Shi'ite-Sunni divide and especially by the institutionalization
of Shi'ism in Iran under the Safavids. Shi'ism had lost its vitality
and exuberance once the discourses of jihad and martyrdom had been abandoned.
From "the day we gave up the possibility of martyrdom, and limited
ourselves to paying homage to the martyrs, we were reduced to the role of the
doormen of cemeteries" (Al-Ahmad 1982, 68).
Ali Shariati (d. 1977), one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of his
generation, was another leftist intellectual who contributed to this new line
of thinking. A lay Muslim theologian who was the son of a cleric, he became
involved in the international movement for Algerian Independence while
studying in France (Keddie 1981, 294). Shariati, who had a Ph.D. in Persian
philology from the Sorbonne, galvanized the youth, helping to pave the
way for Khomeini's hegemony over the revolutionary movement in 1978-
79. Shariati's reinterpretation of jihad and martyrdom was influenced by his
philosophical studies in France, though he also claimed to present an "authentic
Islam."