Forty Years After Foucault's Death, His (Mis)Understanding of Islamism Lives On
by A.J. Caschetta
Special to IPT News
June 23, 2024
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11/5/1979: Closeup of Michel Foucault smiling, French philopsopher and historian. Photo Credit: Bettmann/Bettmann via Getty Images
Forty years ago, on June 25, 1984, the French philosopher Michel Foucault died of AIDS at age 57, leaving behind a mixed legacy of literary and political writing that crossed over into activism.
The anniversary of Foucault's death offers a new opportunity to assess his most important and lasting impact on Western society. I refer not to his work on "biopolitics" or his subtle deconstructions of ideas about sanity, or his linguistic analysis, but rather to his role in establishing a leftist-Islamist alliance and profoundly influencing the way the West views Islam.
Islam and America
At the nation's founding, American vessels and American citizens were being seized by Barbary Coast pirates on behalf of sheikhdoms of Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli, who were enslaving them because the Koran gave them that "right and duty," as the Ambassador of Tripoli told Ambassador Thomas Jefferson in 1786. But then President Jefferson defeated the Barbary pirates, and for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Islam and the Muslim world was removed, distant, exotic, unfamiliar.
By 1979, Islam was virtually unknown in the U.S. The Iranian Revolution changed all that, abruptly forcing Americans to pay attention to Islam and make decisions about it. Leftist intellectuals became apologists, following the lead of Edward Said who taught academics that criticizing Islam was the racist sin of "Orientalism." Most liberals embraced not only Islam but its violent offspring Islamism and accepted its excesses in ways that contradicted their core beliefs, especially those about freedom and women's rights. Michel Foucault was at the center of it all.
Why Iran?
Surely one of the most attractive aspects about the Iranian Revolution to leftist intellectuals was its anti-Western, anti-American character.
In an interview conducted in September 1978, Foucault told Baqir Parham that "industrial capitalism ... [is] the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine." He expressed special animosity for "vicious American imperialism."
Foucault's solution to this problem was a "spiritual politics." He found it in Iran, symbolized in the person of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Enter Foucault
Foucault taught at the College de France from 1971 to 1984. He was chair of something called "The History of Systems of Thought" and described himself as, variously, a philosopher and a genealogist. He also wrote dozens of books and became one of a handful of French post-modernists whose ideas dominated literary and historical discourse from the 1960s to the 1980s and still exert a great deal of influence among American academics.
Foucault's job requirement was to provide 26 hours per year of teaching, which he fulfilled by giving a public lecture every Wednesday evening from January to March. The lectures were recorded, and later translated into English by Graham Burchell, and published as books.
But Foucault barely mentions Iran in these lectures. He published his writing on Iran in popular journals, so he traveled to Iran twice in 1978 and wrote extensively on the revolution for the Italian daily Corriere della sera and several French dailies and journals. In October 1978, he also met with Khomeini, then in exile at the Neauphle-le-Château near Paris, but left no record of their conversation.
What Foucault Wrote About Iran
Like many leftists, Foucault railed against the Shah of Iran and made him the objective correlative of their anti-American, anti-imperialist angst. It was linguistic Marxism, promulgated during the height of the Cold War, safely on the comfortable side of the Iron Curtain, protected by the American Capitalists he despised.
But Foucault misunderstood Islam, Shiism, and Khomeini.
Almost all of his writing on Iran is missing the deep understanding of ideas and history characteristic of his other work. He didn't approach Islam with the same critical framework he employed to write about the prison system, madness and sanity, human sexuality, science, language, civilization, or epistemology.
Foucault's writing on Iran attracted both defenders and critics. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson outline them in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (2005). An appendix in the book contains all of Foucault's writings and several interviews on Iran, translated into English. All subsequent quotations from Foucault's Iran essays are followed by citations referring to Afary's and Anderson's appendix, pages 179-277.
Before Khomeini's return to Iran, Foucault minimized the idea of Iran's coming theocracy, for example, writing in October 1978, "By 'Islamic government,' nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control" (206). He defended the idea of an Islamic government by assuring his readers that "[m]inorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not injure the majority; between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights" (206).
Shortly after Khomeini's return to Iran, Foucault wrote that "[r]eligion's role was to open the curtain; the mullahs will now disperse, taking off in a great flight of black and white robes" (239).
An Admirer of Khomeini
Foucault admired Khomeini with a gullible, uncritical devotion. He called him "the old saint in exile in Paris" (217) and wrote glowingly that his "inflexible refusal to compromise" had inspired "the love that everyone individually feels for him" (218). He claimed that, "once the [Shah's] dictatorship is abolished, all this mist will dissipate. Authentic politics will take command, and we will soon forget the old preacher" (204).
But Foucault didn't understand Khomeini, whom he viewed as a "liminal" figure. Blinded by his zeal, he wrote that, "Khomeini is not a politician. There will not be a Khomeini party; there will not be a Khomeini government. Khomeini is the focal point of a collective will" (222).
Khomeini's Islam, however, was not a revolutionary vehicle to be cast aside once the Shah was defeated. Khomeini had been clear for decades that the era of Shia Quietism was over and that Iran, indeed the world, needed an Islamic government. He lectured on the topic of Islamic governance for decades before he published his book on it in 1970, introducing the concept of the velāyat-e faqīh or "governance of the jurist."
Foucault either suppressed or was ignorant of Khomeini's plan. He projected onto Iran and its revolutionary leader a retrograde spiritualism that both pre-dated and, he believed, precluded modernism. He portrayed Khomeini like a Rousseauvian "noble savage," faultless, pure, and somehow above the fray of politics.
Foucault's Attraction to Islam
An Islamic government seems like the last thing a 1970s Leftist would support, especially a homosexual. With Saudi Arabia as the model of Sharia-based governance, replete with its gruesome hands-and-feet chopping, sexual restrictions, and anti-feminist core, the prospect of an "Islamic Republic" should have struck Foucault as antithetical to his ideas, his anti-Americanism excepted.
But in truth, Foucault knew almost nothing about Islam. His knowledge seems to be based almost entirely on two books by Louis Massignon and Henry Corbin, who focused on the mystical aspects of Sufism and Shiism and led Foucault to view Shiism as a mostly spiritual search for justice. Foucault ate it up and spouted slogans and sophomoric generalizations such as his October 1978 claim that, "Islam values work; no one can be deprived of the fruits of his labor; what must belong to all ... shall not be appropriated by anyone" (206).
Foucault's Fascination with Martydom
While mostly ignorant of Islam, he nevertheless found it a convenient tool to beat against modernism. Like Voltaire, who similarly used Islam to inveigh against Christianity, Foucault's haphazard and myopic endorsement of Khomeini's Islamism reflected his preference for outcome over process. Ethics and evidence be damned – results are what matters.
What he did know about Islam fed into some of his interests and obsessions, among them his fascination with death, suicide, and martyrdom. As his biographer James Miller puts it: "Foucault sought out potentially transformative 'limit experiences' on his own, deliberately pushing his mind and body to the breaking point." He described these experiences as a "zone full of turbulence, unformed energy, chaos – 'l'espace d'une exteriorite sauvage,' he called it." By pursuing this "suffering-pleasure," he sought to obliterate "the boundaries separating the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason, pleasure and pain – and, at the ultimate limit, life and death."
Foucault's search for the "limit experience" drew him to Iran. His "spiritual politics" needed something to supply the "spiritual" dimension, and Islam was exotic enough, distant enough, to supply it. He was drawn to the Shiite mysticism he found in Massignon and Corbin, and to the martyrdom rituals he read about and believed the Iranian people were replicating in the streets of Teheran as they confronted the Shah's forces. In November 1978, he wrote glowingly that "the crowds are ready to advance toward death in the intoxication of sacrifice" (216).
In an interview with Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchet in March 1979, Foucault said that "nobody has ever seen the 'collective will' and, personally, I thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter" (253). But after traveling to Iran in September 1978, he had changed his mind, claiming that, "We met, in Tehran and throughout Iran, the collective will of a people" (253) – an absurd assertion about the multifaceted anti-Shah movement.
Foucault Should Have Known Better
Foucault's lack of skepticism about Islam was revealed in the interview with Briere and Blanchet where he explained that "religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity. Shi'ism is precisely a form of Islam, that, with its teaching and esoteric content, distinguishes between what is mere external obedience to the code and what is the profound spiritual life" (65-66).
In 1979 Foucault was still defending the Iranian Revolution. His "open letter" to Mehdi Bazargan, Prime Minister of Iran's "interim government," was published in Le Nouvel Observateur on April 14, 1979, well into the era of purges Khomeini had undertaken. For months, Shah loyalists (imagined and real) had been hanged, adulterers had been stoned, suspected spies had been tortured, and homosexuals executed in a variety of ways. Foucault urged restraint, reminding Bazargan that he must "do what is necessary in order that the people will never regret the uncompromising force with which it has just liberated itself" (263). But it was in vain, as Bazargan himself was on borrowed time and would soon be forced out after Khomeini's followers stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. As Miller puts it, "the chimera of a 'political spirituality' was dispelled by the reality of a ruthless theocracy."
Foucault refused to admit his lapses in judgment and barely acknowledged criticism. He just moved on. When the editors of the French periodical Le Matin offered him a platform to respond to his critics, he responded sarcastically by refusing their invitation: "I am 'summoned to acknowledge my errors.' This expression and the practice it designates remind me of something and of many things, against which I have fought. I will not lend myself, even 'through the press,' to a maneuver whose form and content I detest" (249).
Foucault and the Left-Islamist Alliance
Perhaps more than any other academic with the exception of Edward Said, Michel Foucault is responsible for today's alliance between Leftists and Islamists. In his book Orientalism (1978), Said acknowledges his debt to Foucault's discourse theories and writings on the penal system as inspiration for his framing Western interpretations of Middle East culture (i.e., "Orientalism") as a kind of thought prison. Together, so goes one view, the two men created the entire field of postcolonial studies. They also made it acceptable and popular for academics to overlook the realities of Islamism. As Reza Parchizadeh put it, "the legacy of Foucault's advocacy of Islamism remains with us to this day. His favor made it much easier for the Islamists to justify their positions to Western audiences despite their tyranny and violence in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia."
Whereas Foucault went silent on Iran and Islamism after Khomeini proved to the world that he was no saint, Said would go on to exert his malign influence for another 25 years after the Iranian Revolution. I interpret Foucault's silence as a tacit acknowledgment that he had gotten many things wrong – something unimaginable in Said.
What Foucault Got Right
In spite of everything Foucault got wrong about Iran – bad predictions, misrepresentations of Islam, hagiographies of Khomeini – he did get one thing right. In "A Powder Keg Called Islam," published on February 13, 1979 in Corriere della sera, Foucault warned that Islam "has a good chance to become a giant powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men" (241). The warning was prescient. So too was his fear that, since the Iranian Revolution had shown that "any Muslim state can be revolutionized from the inside" (241), it might lead to a Palestinian Islamic Revolution.
Today, Foucault's notion of "biopolitics" is used as a weapon against Israel, sometimes to ridiculous ends. But Foucault was neither an antisemite nor an anti-Zionist. In fact, as the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut pointed out in 2019, "Foucault was very attached to Israel." He referred to the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism as "ignominious," and his life partner Daniel Defert claimed he was "profoundly philo-Semitic."
Writing at a time before there was a Hamas or Hezbollah, when the Palestinian movement was framed in ethno-nationalist terms and funded by Communists, Foucault wondered, "What would happen if this cause experienced the dynamism of an Islamic movement, something much stronger than the effect of giving it a Marxist, Leninist, or Maoist character?" (241). Further demonstrating his insight, he asked, "Additionally, how strong would Khomeini's 'religious' movement become, if it were to put forward the liberation of Palestine as its objective?" (241).
Forty years after Foucault's death, the Palestinian movement has become an Islamic one, and the Islamic Republic he championed has become its global patron and primary arms dealer.
Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.
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