LeVine and Salvatore 79only months before leaving for Tehran—that religion has always been a
political force; a “superb instrument of power for itself; entirely woven
through with elements that are imaginary, erotic, effective, corporal, sen-
sual, and so on.”^47 The Iranian revolution fascinated him; it seemed to plot
an “escape” from history; it was “irreducible ... there is no explanation for
the man who revolts. His action is necessarily a tearing that breaks the
thread of history and its long chains of reason.”^48 Even more so when the
man revolting is Muslim, since “the problem of Islam is essentially a prob-
lem of our age and for the years to come.”^49
oucault felt that the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati exemplified the F
possibility of such spiritual politics and enlightened mysticism enshrined
in religious activism.^50 Shariati’s early politicoreligious experiences as a
member of the “movement of God-worshipping socialists” reveals pre-
cisely the type of revolutionary sociopolitical program, rooted in Islamic
Iranian intellectual culture, that would appeal to Foucault. This is not sur-
prising, since for Shariati the root of Iran’s predicament was in significant
part due to “the penetration of European values” into the country, which
exacerbated the existing lack of faith and ignorance of the Qur’an. The
ideology of the group to which Shariati belonged, as laid out in its plat-
form, included the necessity of belief in God, the defense of the real rights
of workers and peasants, and the opposition to dictatorship, exploitation
and colonialism.^51
hariati was especially fond of Frantz Fanon, who taught that the S
colonized must return to their “true selves” to defeat colonialism.^52 For
Foucault, of course, there was no “true self” to which one could return;
rather one could return to a focus on the self as a project, a “complex
microsocial structure, replete with foreign relations,” and not the dis-
engaged autonomous self of the modern self-imagination.^53 What Shariati’s
approach had in common with Foucault’s was that the project of self-real-
ization involved the politicization of an ethical sensibility, one that solicits
us to join the quest for a different future. If we consider this ethical sensibil-
ity in a political register, we can understand the relationships it might estab-
lish with religiously motivated movements of resistance around the world.
et if the Iranian Revolution provides evidence of the utility of tech-Y
nologies of power from below against hegemonic systems of domination,
Foucault’s “revolt with bare hands” clearly lacked coherent long-term