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

82 Foucault's Writing s on the Iranian Revolution
and their workshops, by promising them a salary that can only be found
in earth-moving or construction (and this only sporadically), one exposes
them to permanent unemployment. Displaced in this manner, what refuge
do they have except the one they can find in the mosque and the religious
community? " ( " Tehran: Faith against the Shah," app ., 199)
Foucault continued to look at the dilemma of the displaced peasants and their
gravitation toward the Islamist movement: "Where can protection be sought,
how can what one is be found, if not in this Islam, which for centuries has
regulated everyday life, family ties, and social relations with such care?" (ibid.,
200; emphasis added). Here Foucault had fused the search for an authentic
personal identity-finding "what one is" -with a return to traditional Islam.
Now he began to summarize the comments of an Iranian sociologist on
Islam: 12 "Have not its rigor and its immobility constituted its good fortune? A
sociologist told me of its 'value as a refuge.'" Foucault, inspired as he was by
the mobilizing power of Shi'ite Islam, was critical of the Iranian sociologist's
expression about Islam's "immobility": "It seems to me, however, that this
man, who knew his country well, erred (out of discretion, perhaps, in front of
the European that I am) by an excessive Westemness" ("Tehran," app., 200).
At this point, something rather striking emerged in Foucault's writings on
Iran. On the one hand, when confronted with an Iranian voice that was less
religious, more leftist, or otherwise "Western, " Foucault appeared to suggest
that such thinking was inauthentically Iranian. On the other hand, he seemed
to view as authentic those Iranians (including former leftists and secularists)
who had come to support Khomeini uncritically. Foucault saw only this latter
group as the true and indigenous Iranian voice. "I know more than one
student, 'left-wing' according to our categories, who had written in big letters,
'Islamic Government: on the placard on which he had written his demands
and that he was holding up with outstretched arms" (ibid.) .
Considering the angry sermons of the Shi'ite clergy, he compared them
to those of the fifteenth-century Italian religious leader Girolamo Savonarola
and of early Protestant revolutionaries:
In the mosques during the day, the mullahs spoke furiously against the
shah, the Americans, and the West and its materialism. They called for
people to fight against the entire regime in the name of the Quran and of
Islam. When the mosques became too small for the crowd, loudspeakers
were put in the streets. These voices, as terrible as must have been that of
Savonarola in Florence, the voices of the Anabaptists in Munster, or those