Few philosophers have exerted so great an influence on the humanities and social sciences as Michel Foucault—who was also one of the first Western enthusiasts for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Reza Parchizadeh writes:
Foucault’s interest in Islamism started in 1978, [the year before the Islamic Revolution], when the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera asked him to write a series of articles about Iran. To fulfill that assignment, Foucault spent time among members of the left-leaning Confederation of Iranian Students and other opponents of the Pahlavi regime, [Persia’s then-ruling dynasty], in Europe. He then went to Tehran and met with many prominent revolutionaries. When he returned to France, he visited Ayatollah Khomeini in the village of Neauphle-le-Château near Paris where he was exiled at the time.
Foucault strongly supported what he called the “spiritual revolution” in Iran, an event he believed was meant to save humanity from the clutches of materialism and capitalism. Though he was occasionally called out in French intellectual circles and in the French press for taking such a stance, he did not stop supporting the Islamists.
While the ayatollahs’ brutality eventually left Foucault disenchanted, and may even have led to a moderation in his anti-capitalism, his embrace of their radical ideology had a lasting impact:
[Foucault’s approval] made it much easier for the Islamists to justify their positions to Western audiences despite their tyranny and violence in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Leftists, who are hostile on principle to Western values under the all-encompassing term “capitalism,” felt free to ally themselves with Islamists and thereby helped to promote their agenda in the West.
Almost from the very beginning of the revolution in Iran, it became fashionable in the Western academic world to employ Islamist professors, scholars, and researchers. The recruitment of Islamists at Middle East Studies centers in Europe and North America, and their promotion in influential Western media, became commonplace. Over the past 40 years, the global intellectual approach to Iran has thus been firmly in the clutches of Islamists and their left-leaning allies.
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/michel-foucault-iran/