Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of Khomeini was over-determined by his own distaste for the political and economic systems – industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic nation state – created by the Atlantic West. (Foucault in this sense followed Montesquieu in using Iran to pursue an internal critique of the West.) Earlier that year of the revolution in Iran, he had told a Zen Buddhist priest that Western thought was in crisis. Foucault was hostile to Communism, which had attracted many of his fellow intellectuals in France. But he was equally contemptuous of the capitalist West: in his words, ‘the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’.
Driven by an intense loathing of both Western and Soviet universalisms – similar to one that led Heidegger into the delusion that Nazism was capable of creating a genuine ‘regional’ culture – Foucault failed to notice that Khomeini was actually a radically modern leader. For one, the cleric’s notion that the Iranian nation did not stem from any general or popular will but derived from God’s mind, which as a charismatic leader he arrogated himself the right to interpret, was wholly novel: an extraordinary deviation, in fact, from a politically quietist Shiite tradition in which all government appeared illegitimate in the absence of the Twelfth Imam.
Khomeini belonged in the long line of revolutionary nationalists that began with Giuseppe Mazzini, who had also called for a holy insurrection by the oppressed masses. As with Mazzini, who laid the foundation for what his clear-eyed critic Gaetano Salvemini called a ‘popular theocracy’, Khomeini’s ideas were embedded in modern notions of representation and egalitarianism. His notion of state power as a tool to produce a utopian Islamic society was borrowed from the Pakistani ideologue Abu Al-Ala Maududi, whose works he translated into Farsi in 1963. (Maududi’s vision of imposing Islamic order from above in turn was stimulated by Lenin’s theory of an elite as vanguard of the revolution.) American-educated left-leaning technocrats such as Mostafa Chamran, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Ebrahim Yazdi had scripted, and even rewritten, Khomeini’s public statements during his exile in France.
Nevertheless, Foucault was right to think that that, unlike their Russian and Japanese counterparts, the Iranian intelligentsia had articulated a genuinely popular alternative to the project of top-down modernization – one that would also force Sunni thinkers to reassess the role of Islam in modern politics, and much later embark on their own journeys into radicalism. In a society dominated by unresponsive, venal and culturally alien elites, these thinkers were able to persuade, initially at least, the masses with their imagined moral community of like-minded people, held together by a shared belief in the Islamic ideals of equality and justice.
They seemed to offer a truer form of egalitarianism, one with sanction in Islamic law, and enforced by a trained clergy. Their quick and thunderously applauded overthrow of the despised Shah seemed to prove Tocqueville’s assertion that people in the democratic age ‘have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion’ for equality, and that ‘they will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy’.
Khomeinism did not score a complete triumph in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The state’s legitimacy today is drawn from the popular vote rather than the faqīh. The ‘supreme leader’ is appointed, and can be dismissed, by a council of ‘experts’ that is itself elected on a regular basis. Khomeini himself repeatedly revealed Khomeinism to be an improvised programme of action rather than a coherent doctrine. Having opposed voting rights for women in the 1960s, he exhorted, after 1979, a greater role for women in strengthening the revolutionary nation state. He forbade the government from retaliating in kind to Saddam Hussein’s attacks with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war (1981–8); he stigmatized nuclear bombs as un-Islamic. Just before his death, however, he wrote to the then president, and now supreme leader, Khamenei, that any aspect of Islam could be abrogated to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of Islamic tradition, which borrowed from modern idioms and used secular concepts, particularly those of Shariati, and also incorporated a Third Worldist revolutionary discourse. Islamists negating top-down modernizers ended up mirroring, even parodying, their supposed enemy, cancelling their own simple oppositions between Us and Them. The Islamic Revolution in Iran resulted in another repressive state. With its many affronts to dignity and freedom, the Revolution was in this respect like the many self-defeating projects of human liberation since Rousseau started to outline them in the eighteenth century.
But, in the postcolonial age of escalating egalitarianism, the Islamists stood for republicanism, radicalism and nationalism – the real thing, or almost. They offered dignity – often a substitute for freedom in the postcolonial context – and made modernizing elites appear callous tools of Western imperialism. The ideologues and activists of the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini as well as Ali Shariati and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, and all those who followed them, grasped more clearly than modernizing-by-rote monarchs and despots the deeper and transformative potential of the idea brought into being by the Enlightenment: that human beings can radically alter their social conditions. In this important sense, they were a product of the modern world, in the line of the alienated strangers Rousseau addressed, rather than of some irrevocably religious or medieval society.
There Is a Leak in Your Identity
A religious or medieval society was one in which the social, political and economic order seemed unchangeable, and the poor and the oppressed attributed their suffering either to fortuitous happenings – ill luck, bad health, unjust rulers – or to the will of God. The idea that suffering could be relieved, and happiness engineered, by men radically changing the social order belongs to the eighteenth century.
The ambitious philosophers of the Enlightenment brought forth the idea of a perfectible society – a Heaven on Earth rather than in the afterlife. It was taken up vigorously by the French revolutionaries – Saint-Just, one of the most fanatical of them, memorably remarked, ‘the idea of happiness is new in Europe’ – before turning into the new political religions of the nineteenth century. Travelling deep into the postcolonial world in the twentieth century, it turned into a faith in top-down modernization; and transformed traditional ways of life and modes of belief – Buddhism as well as Islam – into modern activist ideologies.