"The madness of Islam" Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran

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The madness of Islam

Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran

Ian Almond

Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe.
Michel Foucault in interview, 19781

In looking through the half-dozen articles Foucault published on the Iranian Revolution, it is interesting to see beneath the title of one piece – ‘The Mythical Head of the Iranian Revolt’ – a brief footnote:
‘The title proposed by M. Foucault was “The Madness of Iran”.’2 La
folie de l’Iran.

There is no explanation for why the title was rejected, no way of knowing whether it was too dramatic, too ambivalent, or perhaps simply misleading. La folie de l’Iran. It is a title which, after all, might have been bereft of irony had it been written by anyone but Foucault, Islam and mental derangement – the mad Mahdi, the crazed mullah, Christendom’s epileptic Prophet – being a standard motif in Western responses to Islam. The obvious irony of Foucault’s title and the thoughts it unwittingly provokes (what kind of madness did Foucault discern in Iran? How different was it from the madness Foucault described for us in the Hфpital Gйnйral, the kind of madness controlled and treated by the likes of Tuke and Pinel? What kind of histoire de l’Islam would the author of Histoire de la folie have written?) at once illustrate and problematize Foucault’s relationship with Islam. On the one hand, like Nietzsche, Foucault will always be aware of ‘the thousand-year old reproach of fanaticism’ which has been directed at Islam and the perennial outsider status it has been given by the West;3 on the other, the very European ‘outsiderness’ which Foucault analyses and appropriates will simultaneously be of use.

The complexity of Foucault’s approach to the Islamic Other – be it Tunisian demonstrators or Iranian Shiites – lies in this consecutive (at times even concurrent) analysis and appropriation of Islam’s alterity. A critique, in other words, of what makes Islam other, but at
the same time a use of such ‘otherness’ which keeps Islam squarely in its place.

When one considers the enormous influence of Foucault and his rigorous historicizing analyses upon a whole generation of cultural studies scholars, the significance of what Islam and Islamic cultures actually mean in Foucault’s writings becomes doubly important. Bearing in mind Edward Said’s own indebtedness (in his ground-breaking 1978 study
rientalism) to the Foucauldian notion of discourse – the central role ‘discourse’ plays in Said’s own classification and analysis of modern British and French Orientalism – it will be interesting to see how Islam features in the writings of a thinker who, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for the historical understanding of alterity.