This. Seen plenty of this on the CITME threads.
With millions of Iranians protesting on the streets against its theocratic rulers today—and a hope that the regime will fall over the coming year—it’s informative to look back to the past, and to the rise of the Ayatollahs in the late 1970s.
Michel Foucault in Iran
In 1978, one of the West’s most prominent intellectuals decided to go to Iran and interpret it for a Western audience.
His name was Michel Foucault, and he championed himself as a sort of critic of power in society. In books like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, he argued that modern Western power is imposed through institutions—schools, prisons, hospitals, clinics, psychologists, bureaucrats—that define what counts as normal and abnormal, healthy and sick, sane and deviant, permitted and perverse.
He believed that modern domination often arrives speaking the language of health, safety, progress—then quietly reorganises life around standards you didn’t choose.
All of which makes his encounter with Iran so strange.
He used his experiences in Iran travelling and interviewing protestors as a basis to write his essay “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” In it, Foucault tells European readers that they are misreading the revolution because they keep trying to translate it into familiar categories—liberal revolution, socialist revolution, nationalist programme. Iran, he insists, is something else: a revolt animated by what he calls political spirituality.
Foucault reports that many protesters want an “Islamic government.”. He relays—often sympathetically—the idea that “Islamic government” would function as a moral check on corruption and tyranny. (Oh, the irony). He sees Western secularism as a refusal to imagine that a non-Western society could generate a political form the West can’t categorise.
He had built an entire intellectual career on the idea that power comes from the institutions that claim moral authority; from the categories that define purity and deviance; from the systems that demand confession, repentance, and conformity in the name of truth.
Yet faced with a mass movement explicitly demanding an Islamic theocracy he largely chose to treat that demand as an ethical and indeed mythical aspiration rather than what it obviously was: the right of religious authority to stand above politics, to adjudicate law, to define dissent as sin, and to reorganise an entire society around obedience to a religious order.
It’s a symptom of something that is quite widespread now, in the post-October 7th era: a recurring habit in certain strands of the Western left to become exquisitely critical—hyper-literate, hyper-suspicious, almost paranoiacally alert—when the subject is Western power, while becoming oddly credulous when the subject is non-Western power.
For Western governments and movements, motives are interrogated down to the bone. Behind every policy they look for a hidden interest; behind every moral claim, they look for a domination strategy; behind every humanitarian gesture, they look for structural violence.
But when a non-Western movement or government acts—especially one that defines itself against the West—those same critics often reach for a different vocabulary altogether: authenticity, resistance, spirituality, anti-imperial dignity. The knife goes back in the drawer. The skeptic becomes a poet.
The miserable thing, of course, is that these movements have consequences. Millions of Iranian people have suffered terribly from the Islamic Republic’s fusion of clerical authority with state violence: the moral policing, the censorship, the imprisonment of dissidents, the crushing of women’s autonomy. A revolution that Foucault described in the language of ethical transformation and political imagination hardened—quickly—into a machinery of domination that regulates everyday life down to clothing, speech, art, sex, and belief.
And this is the point where the romance becomes obscene.
The price is rarely paid in Paris or London, or by well-heeled anti-Western professors or commentators with multi-book deals, The Guardian columns, or thousands of paid Substack subscribers. It is paid by the people who wake up the morning after the revolution and discover that “spirituality” now has a uniform, a court, a prison, and an execution list. It is paid by those killed in the name of Islamic domination, and those intimidated into silence.