3
misrepresenting the revolution, misreading foucault A Revisionist History Did the mullahs steal the revolution? For more than three decades, the myth of the stolen revolution has served as the master narrative of countless scholarly works as well as political treatises written by those who found themselves on the defeated side of the postrevolutionary struggle. In order to see the significance of Foucault’s reading of the Iranian Revolution, I believe it is essential to set aside this myth, which is driven by a commitment to a progressive, universal History and a binary understanding of secular versus Islamist politics. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is emblematic of how this myth is constructed, deployed, and disseminated. In their book, Afary and Anderson evoke this myth both to indict Foucault for his failure to foresee the looming Islamist disaster and to cast the revolution as a regressive denunciation of modernity (or modernization, they use the two terms interchangeably). This chapter responds closely to their reading to show why it is empirically necessary to recognize the singularity of the revolution and to liberate it from the constraints of universalist narratives. Through a close engagement with Afary and Anderson’s book, I intend to save the integrity of the revolutionary movement from its later outcomes. By doing so, I also try to disentangle Foucault’s writings from those oppressive consequences of the postrevolutionary state-building. Afary and Anderson claim that the originality of their book lays in the fact that they have shown that Foucault’s support of Islamism and his fascination with political spirituality was simply an extension of his “anti-modern” philosophy. But in so doing they produce serious flaws 75