It Figures

Among the Western journalists who covered the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that swept Islamists to power, among the liberals and leftists who supported the populist uprising against the Shah, only one openly, lyrically ambraced the growing power of radical Islam: the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

"IT IS PERHAPS the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and most insane. ... As an Islamic movement it can set the entire region afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb the most solid. ... Islam — which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization — has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men."

Foucault's Iranian adventure was a "tragic and farcical error" that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography "The Passion of Michel Foucault" contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault's search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of political Islam's subsequent career, and makes for odd reading now as observers search for traditions in Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy. But at a time when religion is resurgent in politics and Western liberals are divided between interventionists and anti-imperialists, Foucault's peculiar blend of blindness and insight about the Islamists remains instructive.

Some longer excerpts here.