Michel Foucault on Iran
"Nearly four decades later, Foucault’s premonitions about the Islamic Revolution appear to have been exonerated, despite the severe criticisms by certain European intellectuals, many of whom had naively expected the revolutionary clergy to simply pave the way to other, more organized groups. Indeed, the notion of “Islamic populism” as a transitional phenomenon still persists in the scholarly literature, predicated on the eventual evaporation of Islamic utopianism and the return of ‘secular politics’ as the telos of Iranian history. Typically, such analyses suffer from their own utopianism, secular bias, narrow rationalities, and their underestimation of the mobilization potential of Islamist ideology that, in Iran’s case, has blended theocracy with democracy."
Iran: The ‘Spirit Of A Spiritless World’, 2016, K L Afrasiabi
"I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong (1978)."
"Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment."
