How the Media Gets It Wrong

Political Spirituality

by Iran Prism 9 min read

The Philosopher Arrives

On September 16, 1978 — eight days after Black Friday at Jaleh Square — Michel Foucault landed in Tehran. He was France’s most famous philosopher: author of Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, the intellectual who had reshaped how the world thought about power, institutions, and knowledge. He had been commissioned by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera for a column titled “Michel Foucault Investigates.”1

To prepare, Foucault read Henri Corbin — the French specialist in Shi’ite mysticism who had also translated Heidegger — and Louis Massignon, the Catholic Orientalist who had studied Islamic esotericism. He consulted Paul Vieille, who had introduced Ali Shariati’s revolutionary Islam to French audiences.2

He did not read Velayat-e Faqih — The Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist. Published by Khomeini in 1970, available in Arabic and Persian, the book laid out an explicit blueprint for theocratic rule by clerics. It was not hidden. It was not obscure. It was on the shelf. Foucault did not pick it up.3

He did not speak Persian. His interpreters included figures sympathetic to the revolutionary movement. His knowledge of Islam came entirely from the mystical and spiritual traditions — the esoteric, the philosophical — not from the materialist political tradition that would actually govern.4

He visited twice: September 16-24 and November 9-15, 1978. He published approximately fifteen articles and interviews — the most extensive philosophical engagement any major Western thinker has ever undertaken with a revolution in progress. Most were unavailable in English until Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson published their definitive 2005 study, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.5

What He Wrote

The articles are extraordinary documents — brilliant in their prose, catastrophic in their predictions.

In “Tehran: Faith Against the Shah” (October 8, 1978), Foucault reported that “nine times out of ten” Iranians answered they wanted “not ‘revolution,’ but ‘Islamic government.’” In “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” (Le Nouvel Observateur, October 16-22, 1978), he introduced the concept that would define his engagement: spiritualité politique — “political spirituality.” He described the struggle as “a great joust under traditional emblems, those of the king and the saint, the armed ruler and the destitute exile.” He concluded: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.”6

In October, he met Khomeini at Neauphle-le-Château — the village outside Paris that had become the revolution’s command center. He called Khomeini “the old saint in exile” and “a man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people.” He told readers of Le Nouvel Observateur: “Nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.”7

On gender relations under an Islamic government, he wrote: “There will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference, since there is a natural difference.” Afary and Anderson describe this as “reproducing Islamist talking points without critical examination.”8

He claimed Shi’ite clergy lacked hierarchy — a factual error. Shi’ism has the most hierarchical clerical system in Islam, organized through the marja’iyya. The man whose entire career was built on understanding how power operates in institutions failed to understand the power structure of the institution he was celebrating.9

Intellectual honesty requires naming what Foucault got right. He correctly identified the revolution as a genuine mass popular uprising — millions in the streets — not a faction’s coup. He was among the first Western intellectuals to recognize its fundamentally Islamic character when many leftists insisted the religious trappings concealed a secular core. His February 1979 prediction that Islam would become “a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men” was prescient about subsequent global Islamist mobilization.10

But what he got wrong was not a matter of nuance. It was the central question.

The Woman Who Saw Everything

In November 1978 — before the revolution even succeeded — an Iranian woman writing under the pseudonym Atoussa H. published a letter in Le Nouvel Observateur. Her identity has never been publicly revealed.11

She wrote that she was “very distressed by the matter of fact commentaries usually made by the French left with respect to the prospect of an ‘Islamic’ government replacing the bloody tyranny of the Shah.” She observed that Foucault seemed “deeply moved by ‘Muslim spirituality,’ which, according to him, would be an improvement over the ferocious capitalist dictatorship.” She demanded to know why Iranians must choose between “the SAVAK and religious fanaticism.” She noted that unveiled women were already being insulted on the streets.12

Her concluding warning: “The Western liberal left needs to know that Islamic law can become a dead weight on societies hungering for change. They should not let themselves be seduced by a cure that is perhaps worse than the disease.”13

This was written before Khomeini’s return. Before the first executions. Before the mandatory veiling decree. Before the Cultural Revolution shut the universities. Before any of it. One anonymous woman, writing from a position of vulnerability, saw what France’s most celebrated philosopher could not.

Foucault’s response, published the following week, was condescending and evasive. He accused her of merging “all the aspects, all the forms, and all the potentialities of Islam within a single expression of contempt.” He lectured her: “The first condition for approaching it with a minimum of intelligence is not to begin by bringing in hatred.” He reframed her feminist concerns as a form of Orientalism — the very move that would make substantive critique of Islamist governance nearly impossible for decades.14

The Silence

After Khomeini took power, Foucault briefly doubled down. In February 1979, he mocked doubters: “The Mullahs will now disperse themselves, taking off in a big group of black and white robes. The decor is changing.”15

Then the executions began.

On March 24, 1979, Claudie and Jacques Broyelle published a direct challenge in Le Matin: “Returning from Iran a few months ago, Michel Foucault stated that he was ‘impressed’ by the ‘attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.’ Today there are little girls all in black, veiled from head to toe; women stabbed precisely because they do not want to wear the veil; summary executions for homosexuality.” Their demand: “When one is an intellectual, when one works both on and with ‘ideas,’ then one also has some obligations. The first one is to take responsibility for the ideas that one has defended when they are finally realized.”16

Foucault’s response was dismissive.

His final public statement on Iran came on May 11-12, 1979, in Le Monde: “Is It Useless to Revolt?” He refused to judge the revolt by its outcomes: “One does not dictate to those who risk their lives facing a power.” He acknowledged horror but drew no connection between his own writings and what was happening.17

From June 1979 until his death on June 25, 1984, Michel Foucault never again publicly spoke or wrote about Iran. He never recanted. He never apologized. He never expressed solidarity with those suffering under the Islamic Republic. His friend Jeannette Colombel concluded the controversy “wounded him.” His biographer Didier Eribon wrote that “the criticism and sarcasm that greeted Foucault’s ‘mistake’ concerning Iran added further to his despondency.”18

Five years of silence. Thousands of executions. A philosopher of power who could not face the power he had blessed.

The Structural Trap

Multiple scholars have compared Foucault’s Iran engagement to Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism — in both cases, a philosopher’s critique of modernity led to an embrace of a movement far more brutal than the modernity it opposed. But the comparison, while instructive, risks flattering the wrong lesson.19

The deeper problem was not one philosopher’s blindness. It was a structural trap that ensnared an entire intellectual generation. The pattern is old. Lincoln Steffens visited Soviet Russia in 1919: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Beatrice Webb admitted of her Soviet credulity: “Old people often fall in love in extraordinary and ridiculous ways — with their chauffeurs, for example: we feel it more dignified to have fallen in love with Soviet Communism.” Paul Hollander’s research identified the mechanism: intellectuals projected onto foreign revolutions the transformation they desired in their own societies.20

You have almost certainly experienced a version of this: the certainty that something you admired from a distance — a company, a movement, a leader — would work differently than the people living inside it warned you. The distance is what makes the projection possible. Proximity is what destroys it.

Why Iran was the purest case: Western leftists were romanticizing an explicitly theocratic, religiously fundamentalist movement — requiring even greater projection than secular revolutionary ideologies. The speed of disillusionment was measured in weeks rather than decades. And the warnings were explicit, immediate, and came from the revolution’s own victims.21

Maxime Rodinson — the French Marxist who could read thirty languages, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, who had lived in the Middle East — saw through the revolution from the beginning. He characterized the Khomeini movement as fascisme islamique — “Islamic fascism” — years before the term entered common usage. But he also offered the most devastating and most generous analysis simultaneously: “Those who, like the author of these lines, refused for so long to believe the reports about the crimes committed in the name of the triumphant socialism in the former Tsarist Empire… would exhibit bad grace if they became indignant at the incredulity of the Muslim masses. Michel Foucault is not contemptible for not having wanted to create despair in the Muslim world’s shantytowns.”22

Rodinson predicted what would follow: “Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another thirty or fifty years. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it took in Europe!”23

Forty-seven years later, the balance sheet proves the feminists right rather than the philosophers. The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement — driven by a generation born under the Islamic Republic, who needed no Western intellectual’s validation and asked for none — echoed the March 8, 1979 protests on the same streets, with the same demand. Atoussa H.’s letter is no longer a warning. It is a history that the women of Iran have been living for nearly half a century. The philosopher who dismissed it never had to live it at all. Which raises a question that extends well beyond Iran: when anonymous women warn and famous men dismiss, how long does it take before we learn whose voice to trust?24

This article is part of The Professors and the Prophet. For the women who warned, see The Women Who Saw It First. For the revolution’s cultural overture, see Ten Nights.

Footnotes

  1. Foucault’s commission and arrival from Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005). ↩

  2. Foucault’s reading preparation from Afary and Anderson. ↩

  3. Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih (1970); Foucault’s failure to read it from Afary and Anderson. ↩

  4. Language barrier and interpreters from Afary and Anderson. ↩

  5. Visit dates and article count from Afary and Anderson; English unavailability until 2005. ↩

  6. “Nine times out of ten” from “Tehran: Faith Against the Shah”; “political spirituality” and “great joust” from Le Nouvel Observateur, October 16-22, 1978. ↩

  7. Neauphle-le-Château meeting from Afary and Anderson; “old saint” and “nobody in Iran means” from Foucault’s published articles. ↩

  8. Gender quote and Afary/Anderson assessment from Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. ↩

  9. Hierarchy error from Afary and Anderson; marja’iyya system from Shi’ite institutional scholarship. ↩

  10. Foucault’s correct observations from scholarly reassessment; “gigantic powder keg” from his February 1979 writing. ↩

  11. Atoussa H.’s letter from Le Nouvel Observateur, November 1978. ↩

  12. All Atoussa H. quotes from her published letter. ↩

  13. Concluding warning from Atoussa H.’s letter. ↩

  14. Foucault’s response from the following week’s Le Nouvel Observateur. ↩

  15. “Mullahs will disperse” from Foucault’s February 1979 writing. ↩

  16. Broyelle critique from Le Matin, March 24, 1979. ↩

  17. “Is It Useless to Revolt?” from Le Monde, May 11-12, 1979. ↩

  18. Silence from June 1979 to death June 25, 1984; Colombel and Eribon assessments from biographical sources. ↩

  19. Heidegger comparison from multiple scholarly analyses. ↩

  20. Steffens, Webb, and Hollander from Political Pilgrims (1981) and primary sources. ↩

  21. Iran as purest case from Afary and Anderson. ↩

  22. Rodinson’s fascisme islamique from Le Nouvel Observateur, February 1979; generosity quote from his published assessment. ↩

  23. Rodinson’s prediction from his early 1980s assessment. ↩

  24. Woman, Life, Freedom movement from 2022 reporting; 2023 Simone de Beauvoir Prize from award records. ↩