The wretched of the earth I believe?
A reflection on the revolution in Iran
In a 2022 interview with Jacobin magazine, Iranian writer Chahla Chafiq reflected on how they got it so wrong back in 1979. ‘They never thought that Khomeini would bring socialism,’ she wrote of her fellow leftists: ‘They thought that he was just one step toward the socialist state they wanted to bring. They were aligned behind him because he represented this anti-Western anti-imperialism. The other thing was that they didn’t think that this mullah and other mullahs standing with him would be able to form a power structure that could hold. They thought that he would have some power, and then he would leave.’
They weren’t alone in their naivety; the Ayatollah’s message chimed with many in the West who saw in his cries of injustice their own desires. Most notoriously, Michel Foucault enthusiastically cheered the Iranian Revolution and viewed Islam as a force of ‘spiritual awakening’ against western imperialism.
Foucault saw in the revolution ‘the most modern form of government’ and called Khomeini a ‘saint’. Jean-Paul Sartre looked forward to the Ayatollah leading an ‘anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist regime’, and the paper he founded, Libération, called it ‘Shiite socialism.’
The revolution was a lesson in the dangers of western progressives and socialists allying themselves with exotic religious conservatives. Iran became among the most repressive societies on earth, notorious for its brutal violations of human rights, its murder of gay men and oppression of minorities like the Baha’i. Vast numbers of Iranian socialists and communists ended up executed by the new regime.
There were good reasons for the politically gullible to be drawn in by the Ayatollah, especially those who revered the power of language. When the Iranian Shia revolutionaries spoke of the Koranic phrase the ‘disinherited of the earth’ - al-mustad'afun fi al-ard - Tom Holland noted in the recent Rest is History series, many heard Frantz Fanon’s famous phrase ‘the Wretched of the Earth’, the seminal text of the modern anti-imperial left. If the clerics were speaking up for the world’s oppressed against western imperialism, they were surely to be welcomed as allies.
