(Political) Spirituality and Revolt: Examining the 2022 Mahsa Amini Uprising through Foucault’s 1978 Iran Reports

This paper revolves around two questions posed by Foucault in his 1978–79 Iran reports. The first question is raised in the article entitled “What are the Iranian dreaming about?” which proved to be controversial following its appearance on October 16–22, 1978 in Le Nouvel Observateur. In this article, Foucault wonders that in the people’s “will for an Islamic government” and in terms of the relation between religion and state “should one see a reconciliation, a contradiction, or the threshold of something new?”

Foucault poses a second question in the wake of the Revolution, somewhat addressing his critics that urged him to acknowledge his errors regarding the revolutionary Iran and take responsibility for what they contended to be his flawed views on political Islam. Foucault writes an article entitled “Is it useless to revolt?” which is published in Le Monde on May 11–12, 1979.

Forty-five years after the moment when it was still possible to view the Revolution as the threshold of something new, the political climate in Iran suggests a contradiction rather than a reconciliation between (Shi’a) Islam and state power. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, several protests and uprisings have casted doubts on the original objectives of the 1979 Revolution. The election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1998 was a strong manifestation of the public’s desire for reform. However, the near-total quashing of the reformist movement after the 2009 presidential elections dramatically affected this fragile relationship. At best, the persistent unrest and dying calls for reform indicated that the revolutionary aspirations for a system that desired to harmonise religious principles with democratic values and self-determination remained unachieved. While religious factions within the opposition aimed to liberate Islam from the arbitrary governance of the Islamic government, non-religious groups were (and are) advocating for a complete separation of religion and state.

The 2009 post-election uprisings and the Green Movement focused on asserting the right to popular sovereignty and reviving the republican component of the Islamic Republic. During this time, freedom was primarily associated with democratic self-determination or even bound with it existentially, reflected by the enduring slogan “either death or freedom”. The most recent phase of the uprisings sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death in custody in 2022 is notably driven by women advocating for autonomy and individual freedoms. There is much to explore in this field, not only in terms of continuities and changes in perceiving freedom but also in terms of the relationship between forms of resistance and practising freedom. If we agree with those who contend that the 1979 Revolution is an unfinished project, then, unlike the revolutionaries of the 1970s, who primarily sought freedom from dependent dictatorship and overlooked, for instance, the significance of resolving the question of women’s equal rights and individual liberties vis-à-vis Islam, today’s revolutionaries are championing these previously less prominent issues. Women are leading a movement that is fundamentally rejecting what they understand to be subjugating “alien control”, inspecting myriad forms of domination, and creatively fight for self-government. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement evokes a question that Foucault raised in 1979, soon after post-revolutionary disillusionments: “Is it useless to revolt?”

To revisit Foucault’s notion of political spirituality, in the first part of the paper, I briefly review the highlights of his Iran reports in terms of what he calls “counter-conduct” of “revolts of conduct”. Then, I articulate political spirituality in terms of Foucault’s ideas of governmentality, power, resistance, subjectivity, and freedom and show that Foucault’s idea of spirituality is so vast, but carefully defined, that it can accommodate both a religiously-inflected political movement and its counter-point.

In the second part of the paper, I bring out key ideas in the article “Is it useless to revolt?” in terms of subjectivity and freedom in order to pose Foucault’s question in a seemingly opposite context of 2022. I briefly review the highlights of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and compare the two movements of 1979 and 2022 in terms of the absence of both politics and leadership, as well as their shared characteristics regarding two of Foucault’s key concepts of (resisting) governmentality and self-transformation. I suggest that political spirituality is a notion that needs to be understood in tandem with Foucault’s idea of freedom that is not normative and involves speaking truth to power or parrhēsia and self-transformation or “care of the self”. To make better sense of political spirituality in the context of 2022, I engage with certain aspects of this women-led movement and make sense of these aspects by means of Foucault’s idea of freedom and its relation to “revolts of conduct”.