Mick Hartley

We're seeing this again now, with the Free Palestine crowd after Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, singing the praises of the ayatollahs. Adam J Sacks at Fathom – The Right Side of History? Iran, Intellectuals, and the Far-Left.

John Maynard Keynes famously dismissed the work of Marx, and in particular Das Kapital, by comparing it to the Koran: both being works of historical significance but without contemporary relevance. The pairing was astute, as much as the judgment was off, as moments of alliance between the two traditions, Communism and Islam, have proven explosive. Many may not remember that the revolution in Iran which deposed the Shah and led to the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was once celebrated by many putatively on the left, whose antipathy to religion is presumably a part of their intellectual tradition.

This initial reception of Iran’s world-changing 1978-9 revolution was strange, and deserves another look, especially in light of current events. After all, this was the first openly Islamist government take-over in modern times, with a ‘divinely guided’ Supreme Leader at its head. So the embrace of this revolution – one ultimately, indissolubly linked with Islam – calls out for historical explanation for adherents of a philosophy one of whose most enduring ‘meme’ is that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses.’ Whatever one’s opinion on the regime of the Shah, the long-term effect of this revolution has been fateful. To wit, Hezbollah and Hamas trace their roots back to this original example. In 1982, just three years after Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood staged a revolt in Syria, and many also link the Iranian revolution to the assassination of Egypt’s peacemaking president Anwar Sadat in 1981.

As Sacks shows, this strange alliance started with the Soviets, who spared Islam the scorn with which they attacked Christianity and Judaism, and continued in the West – still to this day – with the various Trotskyist groups like the Socialist Workers Party. Most famously, though, it was the leftist intellectuals who cheered on the Islamic fundamentalists:

The Swedish Sartre, Jan Myrdal, the son of Nobel Prize winners and scion of the elite, was a die-hard anti-imperialist convinced that Islam was somehow a proletarian religion in a category apart from Christianity, etc. As late as the 1990s, this most visible and published intellectual of 20th century Sweden defended not just Khomeini’s Iran but also Saudi Arabia. Myrdal went one step further when, on a trip to Iran in the 1990s, he defended the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, suggesting that it furthered the ‘oppressed Muslim masses in their struggle for human dignity.’…

Perhaps the most well-known and debated case of revolutionary romance with Iran was that of the French star thinker Michel Foucault, whose theories remain absolutely de rigeur in the academy the world over. Every methods seminar on the humanities has to this day at least a week devoted to Foucault….

He was entirely taken with the transformative power of the politics of the Iranian revolution. Entranced by the sense of novelty, it was as if he was desperate for new ideas, stemming from the persuasion that those in the west were somehow exhausted. Visiting Iran twice at the peak of the revolution (in September and November of 1978) he claimed to see the literal embodiment of the old Rousseauean idea of the ‘collective will,’ and used romantic imagery such as: ‘there was literally a light that lit up in all of them and which bathed them all at the same time.’ He coined the term ‘political spirituality’ to denote an enchantment of history and employed it as an alternative to a more Marxian notion of historical determinism. Yet when it came to scrutinising the role of religion, Foucault often resorted (perhaps wilfully) to obtuse circumlocutions: ‘religion constituted a force that perpetuated the hermeneutics of the subject on the streets of revolutionary Iran.’ Foucault went on to personally interview Khomeini and proclaimed this Islamic movement as stronger than anything Marxist or Maoist. It is here that one may find the intellectual roots of Judith Butler’s, a Foucauldian thinker, more recent pronouncement that Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive and that are part of the global Left.

An explanation for this grotesque alignment must surely start from the obvious point that all these left groups and "radical" thinkers come from a position of hating the liberal West. Any system that also hates the liberal West then becomes a potential ally, and all critical faculties fly out of the window in the joy of sharing that hatred. If that also includes a hatred of Jews, well – so much the better.

See also, Heidegger. 

Has ever a philosopher had as baleful an influence as Martin Heidegger? The reasons for his extraordinary importance in modern Western philosophy are many and complex, but essentially, in the words of Radical Philosophy founder Jonathan Ree, it's because of the great man's critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity". The fact that he was an enthusiastic Nazi was somehow overlooked in the clamour to celebrate a thinker who could, supposedly, see through the false gods of liberalism and the enlightenment. But when you're keen, as so many of our modern critical thinkers are, to analyse the shortcomings of the West, it's perhaps wise not to base your analysis on the works of a philosopher who saw enemies in world Jewry and British democracy, and the answer in National Socialism.

Big in radical philosophical circles here, and big in Iran:

Heidegger in particular is central to the Iranian story. Beginning in the 1960s, during the rule of the American-aligned and dictatorial Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and continuing through the 1979 Islamic Revolution until today, the German thinker has been one of the dominant philosophical figures in Iran. His critique of Enlightenment liberalism, and his emphasis on the need to “remember” an authentic way of being that modernity has forgotten, resonated particularly strongly. Heidegger’s thought owes continuing prominence in Iran to a single figure, Ahmad Fardid. Born in 1910, Fardid left Iran to study in France and Germany in the years after the Second World War and returned a committed Heideggerian, espousing a doctrine of “Westoxification,” the idea that Iran had been infected by and must rid itself of Western culture and ideas. Writers and thinkers like Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, who shaped the intellectual climate that led to the revolution, adopted Fardid’s views and terminology—“Westoxification” was popularized by Al-e Ahmad in a book by that same name—casting Heidegger a famous Western philosopher who legitimized their already existing anti-modernism.

Before the revolution, Fardid employed his convoluted rhetoric, heavy with mysticism and dubious etymologies, to defend the shah’s regime; afterward, he applied the same tactics to justify Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini’s rule. This species of Heideggerian-infused thought, in style as well as substance, remains popular among both secular and religious intellectuals, those inside the regime as well as among its opponents.