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

Processions, Passion Plays, and Rites of Penance 39
ity. Indeed, his later writings on Christian rites resonated strongly with some
practices ofShi'ite Islam. Foucault and the Islamist movement in Iran seemed
to share three passions: (1) an opposition to the imperialist and colonialist
policies of the West; (2) a rejection of certain cultural and social aspects of
modernity that had transformed gender roles and social hierarchies in both
the East and the West; and (3) a fascination with the discourse of death as
a path toward authenticity and salvation, a discourse that included rites of
penitence and aimed at refashioning the self. Foucault recognized the Iranian
public's fascination with the seemingly archaic rituals of Shi'ite Islam.
He was moved by the active participation of the clerics in the anti -shah movement
and was intrigued by the use of religious processions and rituals for
ostensibly political concerns. Every time government troops shot and killed
protestors on the streets, the response was larger demonstrations. As was customary
in Iran, new processions were organized on the fortieth day after the
killings, commemorating the dead. Foucault grasped the crowds' enormous
fascination with death and the trust in the militant religious leadership this
implied. He understood that the religious gatherings, processions, and theatrical
performances of Shi'ism, like their counterparts in Christianity, were
politically charged ceremonies that forged new forms of communal solidarity.
What Foucault saw on the streets of Tehran may therefore have been a
realization of some of his fantasies and desires.
Despite his familiarity with the fascist Right in Europe, Foucault never
related the Islamists' selective reading of "modernity, " nor their equating of
"modernity" with a loss of spirituality, to similar political invocations by the
Right in Europe four decades earlier. There are many examples of such political
manipulations in Europe, and a comparison of these with the Iranian
experience could have demystified any notion that the Islamist movement
and its propaganda techniques were a distinctively "Oriental" phenomenon.
Perhaps Foucault's reading of Islam was "Orientalist" because he failed to
point out that Shi'ite narratives, like other invented traditions and identities
around which imagined national or religious communities are formed, lend
themselves to multiple readings (Anderson 1983). Instead, Foucault made
an abstraction of Islam and Shi'ism, never exploring the fact that a group
of opposition clerics and intellectuals had adopted a particular reading of
Shi'ism in the course of the revolution. Nor did he pay attention to the fa ct
that Khomeini's "anti-modernist" stance involved innovations, as well as inventions
of tradition. What Foucault witnessed in Iran was the result of a
carefully staged and crafted version of Shi'ism that had been first developed
in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the authoritarian modernization