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

80 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
certain level of national industrial development and who can now only imitate
the governing caste by placing their capital in California banks or in Parisian
real estate, are also discontented. (Ibid., 196)
Before he left France, everyone had told him that "Iran is going through a
crisis of modernization II in which members of its "traditional society" did not
want to follow this pathway but instead to "seek shelter among a retrograde
clergy" (ibid., 194).
As against this, Foucault concluded, implicitly situating himself in a postmodem
position, modernization itself had become an "archaism":
I then felt that I had understood that recent events did not signify a shrinking
back in the face of modernization by extremely retrograde elements, but the
rejection, by a whole culture and a whole people, of a modernization that is
itself an archaism. The shah's misfortune is to have espoused this archaism.
His crime is to have maintained, through a corrupt and despotic system, that
fragment of the past in a present that no longer wants it. Yes, modernization as
a political project and as a principle of social transformation is a thing of the
past in Iran. ('The Shah, " app ., 195-96)
Thus, the shah's plan for secularization and modernization, handed down
by his father Reza Shah, a brutal dictator lmown for "his famous gaze, " was
itself retrograde and archaic ("The Shah," app., 197). Here the allusion to his
Discipline and Punish was quite clear: The Pahlavi shahs were the guardians of
a modernizing disciplinary state that subjected all of the people of Iran to the
intense gaze of their overlords, most recently through the SAVAK.
Some French intellectuals were more critical of the Islamist movement,
however. One example is a September 30 opinion piece in Le Monde entitled
"The Future Is Fundamentalist," by the novelist and poet Gabriel Matzneff,
who had lived for many years in Tunisia and other Arab lands. 10
Like Foucault, he aclmowledged that Islamism was rapidly gaining headway,
"from the sands of Libya to the cities ofIran." Unlike Foucault, however,
Matzneff sounded a discordant note when he referred to "the severe beauties
of the Quran," and pointed out that "the Quran and the Book of Leviticus
have a family resemblance" (Matzneff 1978). Chapter 20 of the Book
of Leviticus, it should be recalled, mandated the death penalty fo r adultery
and homosexuality, as well as stoning to death for witchcraft. Although the
negative tone of Matzneffs commentary was rather the exception (see Rezvani
1978; Bromberger and Digard 1978), few French commentators at this