The Professors and the Prophet

The Poet

In October 1977, on the garden grounds of the German-Iranian Cultural Association on Pahlavi Avenue in Tehran, ten consecutive nights of poetry readings drew thousands. The Dah Shab — Ten Nights — was co-organized by the Iranian Writers’ Association and the German Goethe Institute. Fifty-seven of the country’s most prominent poets and writers took the stage. Armed personnel carriers surrounded the venue. No violence occurred.¹

On one of those nights, a man recently released from prison stepped to the microphone. Saeed Soltanpour — poet, playwright, political prisoner — greeted the crowd: “Salam, you broken by the black years, you thirsty for freedom, brothers and sisters, Salam!” The audience gave him frenetic applause that lasted minutes.²

Ervand Abrahamian later wrote: “Nineteenth-century European revolutions often started in opera houses; the Iranian Revolution can be said to have begun in poetry-reading sessions.”³

Three and a half years later, in June 1981, Soltanpour was arrested at his own wedding reception. He was executed days later.

How did the country that produced that evening — poets reading to thousands, intellectuals reclaiming a public voice, a culture vibrating with the possibility of freedom — deliver itself into the hands of a regime that would murder the poet at his wedding? And how did the West’s most celebrated thinkers watch it happen and see something beautiful?

The University That Ate the Shah

The Shah built the university system that destroyed him. Iranian enrollment grew from roughly 20,000 students in the early 1960s to 154,000 by 1977 — a sevenfold increase. Sixteen universities, where none but a handful had existed a generation earlier. By 1978, approximately 100,000 Iranian students studied abroad, 54,000 in the United States alone — representing 8 percent of the world’s total international student body. No nation sent more students overseas.⁴

These universities produced the critical-thinking class that absorbed the revolutionary ideas of Ali Shariati. From roughly 1967 to 1972, Shariati lectured weekly at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran — a non-traditional lecture hall with a capacity of 1,700 that regularly overflowed, with crowds gathering in surrounding streets. His collected works eventually reached thirty-one volumes and over 15,000 pages. First editions ran over 60,000 copies and sold out quickly. Tapes of his lectures circulated through the same cassette culture that would later distribute Khomeini’s sermons from exile.⁵

Shariati’s core innovation was “Red Shi’ism” — a distinction between the quietist, establishment religion of the Safavid dynasty (Black Shi’ism: passive mourning, empty ritual, waiting for the Mahdi) and the revolutionary faith of Ali and Husayn (Red Shi’ism: Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala as a template for political resistance, not an event to weep over). His slogan — “Every day is Ashura, every place is Karbala” — would later be appropriated by Khomeini. It was, as scholars have noted, “an act of intellectual violence against the clerical establishment.”⁶

And Shariati was explicit about what clerical rule would mean. In Religion against Religion, he wrote: “the worst and the most oppressive form of despotism possible in human history, the mother of all despotism and dictatorship.”⁷

The other intellectual pillar was Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi — “Westoxification” — drafted in 1962, published underground in 1964, banned by SAVAK. It diagnosed the Shah’s modernization as “no more than a native brokerage for Western influence, with no aims and identity of its own.” It argued that Twelver Shi’a Islam remained the one element of Iranian life uninfected by Western cultural colonization.⁸

Al-e-Ahmad, per Homa Katouzian, “did not say his daily prayers, did not fast in Ramadan, was a heavy drinker and a self-confessed adulterer.” He saw Islam as civilizational identity, not personal piety. After his death in 1969, the Islamic Republic named highways after him, printed stamps in his honor, and reduced his complex diagnosis to a simple anti-Western rallying cry. Few who used “gharbzadegi” as a slogan had actually read the book.⁹

The revolutionary coalition held together through strategic ambiguity. “Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic” meant different things to each faction. Secular liberals heard “freedom” as constitutional democracy. Leftists heard “independence” as anti-imperialism. Bazaaris heard “justice” as property protection. Khomeini’s followers heard “Islamic Republic” as governance of the jurist. The concept of velayat-e faqih was, as Misagh Parsa documented, “entirely unknown, even among some of Khomeini’s close associates” during the revolutionary struggle. The ambiguity was not a bug — it was a feature. Clarity came after victory, and it was Khomeini’s clarity.¹⁰

The Philosopher Who Never Read the Blueprint

In September 1978, eight days after the Jaleh Square massacre, Michel Foucault — France’s most famous philosopher — arrived in Tehran on commission from the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. He returned in November. Over the following months, he published approximately fifteen articles and interviews — the most extensive philosophical engagement any major Western thinker has ever undertaken with a revolution in progress.¹¹

To prepare, Foucault read Henri Corbin, the French specialist in Shi’ite mysticism, and Louis Massignon, the scholar of Islamic esotericism. He did not read Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih — published in 1970, readily available — which explicitly laid out the blueprint for clerical rule. He did not speak Persian. His interpreters were sympathetic to the revolutionary movement.¹²

What Foucault wrote was rhapsodic. He introduced the concept of “political spirituality” — describing the struggle as “a great joust under traditional emblems, those of the king and the saint, the armed ruler and the destitute exile.” He met Khomeini at Neauphle-le-Château and called him “the old saint in exile.” 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.”¹³

In November 1978, an anonymous Iranian woman writing under the name Atoussa H. published a letter in Le Nouvel Observateur that now reads as prophecy. She was “very distressed by the matter of fact commentaries usually made by the French left.” She demanded to know why Iranians must choose between “the SAVAK and religious fanaticism.” Her conclusion: “The Western liberal left needs to know that Islamic law can become a dead weight on societies hungering for change.”¹⁴

Foucault’s response was condescending. He accused her of bringing “hatred” and reframed her feminist concerns as Orientalism. He never addressed her substantive warnings.¹⁵

The Women Who Warned

On March 8, 1979 — International Women’s Day, five weeks after Khomeini’s return — an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 women gathered outside Prime Minister Bazargan’s office despite snowfall. It was the largest women’s action in Middle Eastern history. Protests continued for six consecutive days, with ranks growing daily. Their slogan: “Dar sobh-e azadi, azadi nadarim” — “In the dawn of freedom, we have no freedom.”¹⁶

The revolution’s first governing acts had targeted them. March 3: women banned from serving as judges. March 4: only men could petition for divorce. March 7: mandatory veiling decreed. March 9: women banned from sports. The Family Protection Law was abrogated. The minimum marriage age for girls reverted to nine.¹⁷

Kateh Vafadari orchestrated the protests. Haideh Daragahi physically climbed Tehran University’s locked gates to join demonstrators. Kate Millett arrived from America on March 5, recorded six days of women’s voices, and was expelled on March 18. From Paris, Simone de Beauvoir founded the International Committee for Women’s Rights: “Until now all revolutions have demanded that women sacrifice their demands for the success of action led essentially and exclusively by men.”¹⁸

The gender split among Western intellectuals was stark. Men romanticized the revolution as philosophical experiment. Women recognized its material consequences because those consequences arrived at their doors first. As Iranian-French sociologist Chahla Chafiq identified: “The Left still considered the number-one enemy not to be Khomeini but the West!” — and the anti-imperialist framework made any critique of the revolution’s internal dynamics appear as collaboration with Western power.¹⁹

The feminists were the most accurate analysts of the Iranian Revolution. Not because they were smarter, but because the revolution showed them what it was before it showed anyone else.

The Anti-Imperialist Trap

Here is a technique worth naming before accepting the comfortable explanation that hindsight is easy and no one could have predicted the outcome: the anti-imperialist syllogism. It works like this: The Shah is a creature of American power. Therefore opposition to the Shah is progressive. Therefore the revolution must be progressive. This three-step logic made it structurally impossible to recognize that a post-Shah regime could be more authoritarian than the Shah himself.²⁰

Foucault was not stupid — and this is the honest acknowledgment the story requires. His anti-imperialist framework was shared by most of the Western left. His career-long critique of Enlightenment rationalism led him to celebrate what appeared to be its antithesis. Edward Said’s emphasis on Western representations, intended to combat Orientalism, created a secondary effect: it became difficult to criticize practices within Islamic societies without being accused of projecting Western values.²¹

Maxime Rodinson — the French Marxist who could read thirty languages, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz — saw through the fog immediately. He characterized the Khomeini movement as fascisme islamique — “Islamic fascism” — years before the term entered common usage. But he also offered the most generous possible reading of Foucault’s failure: “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… would exhibit bad grace if they became indignant at the incredulity of the Muslim masses.”²²

Imagine watching a country you’ve never visited, in a language you don’t speak, through interpreters who have their own agenda — and feeling confident enough to tell the world what its people really want. This is not an exotic failure. It happens every time an expert with a theory encounters a reality that fits the theory’s shape but not its substance. The revolution was the shape of liberation. Its substance was theocracy.²³

The pattern Paul Hollander identified persists: intellectuals project onto foreign movements the transformation they desire in their own societies. The revolution was not about Iran for Foucault. It was about escaping the “iron cage of rationality” that he believed defined the West. Iran was the screen onto which he projected his own longing. The people living behind that screen paid the price.²⁴

The Poet

The revolution that began in the garden of the Goethe Institute ended in the offices of the Cultural Revolution Headquarters. In June 1980, Khomeini ordered all universities closed. They remained shut for nearly three years. The Ministry of Culture’s own data showed 44 percent fewer professors in 1982 than in 1980. An estimated 50,000 to 200,000 students were expelled or blocked from readmission by gozinesh — the ideological vetting system.²⁵

Khomeini’s comment on the resulting brain drain: “They say there is a brain drain. Let these decayed brains flee. Do not mourn them.” By the early 1990s, 25 percent of all Iranians with post-secondary education were living abroad. The estimated cumulative cost in human capital through the early 1990s: $50 billion.²⁶

Every significant intellectual who contributed to the revolution would have opposed the theocracy it produced. Shariati called clerical rule “the mother of all despotism.” Al-e-Ahmad never prayed. Bazargan resigned in despair. Banisadr fled for his life. The universities that had produced the revolution’s thinkers were shut down and purged before those thinkers could object.²⁷

And Soltanpour — the poet whose greeting at the Dah Shab had brought thousands to their feet — was arrested at his own wedding reception in June 1981. He was executed days later. He was forty-one years old.

Rodinson, the man who saw through the revolution from the beginning, also predicted its lifespan: “Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another thirty or fifty years — I don’t know how long. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it took in Europe!”²⁸

That prediction was made in the early 1980s. How much longer?

This article is part of a series on how the Western media gets Iran wrong. For the full Foucault story, see Political Spirituality. For the women who warned first, see The Women Who Saw It First. For the revolution’s cultural overture, see Ten Nights.

Dah Shab from Carter-era liberalization records and Iranian Writers’ Association accounts; “57 writers” and “thousands” from contemporary reporting. ↩
Soltanpour’s greeting from contemporary accounts of the Dah Shab readings. ↩
Abrahamian’s comparison from his scholarship on revolutionary origins. ↩
University enrollment from Encyclopaedia Iranica and Higher Education in Iran records; students abroad from Cambridge University Press. ↩
Shariati’s Hosseiniyeh Ershad lectures, publication figures, and cassette distribution from Rahnema’s biography and Abrahamian. ↩
“Red Shi’ism vs. Black Shi’ism” from Shariati’s 1971 lecture, published 1972; “act of intellectual violence” from scholarly analysis. ↩
Shariati quote from Religion against Religion. ↩
Al-e-Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (1962/1964); “native brokerage” from the text. ↩
Al-e-Ahmad’s personal character from Katouzian; post-revolutionary appropriation from Abrahamian. ↩
Revolutionary slogans analysis from Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution; velayat-e faqih unknown to associates from Parsa. ↩
Foucault’s commission and output from Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005). ↩
Foucault’s reading and interpreters from Afary and Anderson. ↩
“Political spirituality” and “old saint” from Foucault’s published articles; “nobody in Iran means” from Le Nouvel Observateur. ↩
Atoussa H.’s letter from Le Nouvel Observateur, November 1978. ↩
Foucault’s response from the following week’s Le Nouvel Observateur. ↩
March 8 protests from multiple contemporary accounts; scale from Duke University’s description; slogan from protest recordings. ↩
Gender rollback timeline from post-revolutionary government decrees; marriage age from Family Protection Law abrogation. ↩
Vafadari, Daragahi, Millett, and Beauvoir from women’s movement records and published memoirs. ↩
Chafiq analysis from her published scholarship. ↩
Anti-imperialist syllogism analyzed in multiple scholarly assessments of Western intellectual response. ↩
Foucault’s intellectual framework from Afary and Anderson; Said’s secondary effect from critical analysis. ↩
Rodinson’s fascisme islamique from Le Nouvel Observateur, February 1979; generosity quote from his published assessment. ↩
Perspective-taking passage by the author. ↩
Hollander’s analysis from Political Pilgrims (1981). ↩
Cultural Revolution from Khomeini’s 1980 Norouz message; university closures from Ministry of Culture data; gozinesh from post-reopening records. ↩
Khomeini’s “decayed brains” quote from October 31, 1980 speech; brain drain figures from IMF and OECD data. ↩
Intellectual fates from Abrahamian and multiple scholarly assessments. ↩
Rodinson prediction from his early 1980s assessment. ↩

The Poet

The University That Ate the Shah

The Philosopher Who Never Read the Blueprint

The Women Who Warned

The Anti-Imperialist Trap

The Poet

Footnotes