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

74 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
women had gained university degrees and taken up professional, civil service,
and corporate positions. At a cultural level, the media were filled with images
of women in short skirts and other "provocative" clothing. This led not only
the clerics, but also many first-generation university students to believe that
"Western corruption" had infiltrated the Shi'ite Muslim culture.6 As we saw
in the previous chapter, the Shi'ite clergy, now led by Khomeini, organized
protests against the shah's 1963 White Revolution. A major factor here was
the ulama's opposition to women's suffrage, which was nonetheless enacted.
In the decade after 1963, the country experienced strong economic growth
as well as burgeoning class polarization. In 1966, the regime established the
Women's Organization ofIran (WOr). Within the context of the authoritarian
state, the WOI fought for gender reforms, most importantly for the 1967 Family
Protection Law. Female-initiated divorce now became possible and, with
the law's 1975 amendments, so did a wife's limited right to child custody.
It was during the 1970s that Ali Shariati, and later Khomeini, began to win
a mass following among urban, educated youth for the new, anti-imperialist
form of Islamist politics discussed in the last chapter. ' 7 Crushed by the shah,
who refused any type of democratic opening, the remnants of the National
Front and the Tudeh either compromised with the regime or gravitated in
the direction of the new Islamist opposition, which was allowed at least
some refuge in the mosques and seminaries. A third but numerically much
smaller element, the youthful leftists of the Mujahedeen and Fedayeen guerrilla
movements, both (and especially the latter) influenced by Maoism, also
played a role. Increasingly, the leftist discourses began to emphasize that the
shah had been installed and was propped up by the United States. This led
to the predominance of an anti-imperialist politics that saw the regime not
as an indigenous growth, but as a creation of Western imperialism. In this
period, .secular nationalists and leftists argued that the shah's gender reforms
had nothing to do with true equality and were instead an example of West em
imperialist influence. 8
A Conversation in Iran on Intellectuals and Revolution
Soon after his arrival in Iran, Foucault, accompanied by Voeltzel, traveled
to several cities and met with various sectors involved in the revolutionary
movement, including Ayatollah Shariatmadari. In a dialogue during his stay
in Iran with the writer Baqir Parham, Foucault explained his fascination with
the Islamist movement and his reasons for coming to Iran. He held that
Europe and the West had witnessed two "painful" social upheavals in the
past two centuries, movements in which philosophers and intellectuals had