LeVine and Salvatore 83This focus on insanity as a moment of resistance to the modern condition
is clearly related to Foucault’s desire to move beyond a Kantian ethics.
However, the spirit of martyrdom of the millions in Iran who took to the
street in September 1978 can turn into the suicidal-homicidal madness of
militant istishhādiyyūn, if there is no space for either a truly revolutionary
or a reform-oriented and electoral process that can absorb and channel
this “praxic” religious territoriality. It is clear to us—as it is clear now to
several generations of Islamist leaders and cadres—that while reform and
a democratic process is the preferred path for several mass-based socio-
religious movements, if the prevalently secular forces controlling regional
states and the international system effectively prevents such a process
or poses unrealistic conditions to it, the only alternative becomes one
between an unlikely revolution and a much more likely spiral of violence
in which repression and the continuation of military occupation might
endlessly beget a readiness to (suicidal-homicidal) sacrifice—whose “reli-
gious” nature in turn becomes increasingly difficult to assess.
s part of a brief genealogy of fanaticism as an accusation hurled A
against socioreligious movements, we would find that in Gramsci’s own
writings this label was used neither to stigmatize violence or militantism
nor scripturalism-literalism, but rather to denounce the sheer refusal to
participate in official politics and public sphere debates, as did Italian
Catholics between 1870 and the end of World War I, due to the unitar-
ian Italian state’s suppression of the pope’s temporal powers. On the other
hand, we must certainly discount some naïve enthusiasm and even neo-
Orientalism in Foucault’s position and in the notion of “political spiritu-
ality” itself, as ultimately nourished by a projection and displacement of
subjectivity and will from the “West” to an “Orient” still uncontaminated
by modernist ideologies.^63 The Gramscian approach to the sociopolitical
potential of religious traditions and movements, though immune from
such neo-Orientalism, was itself trapped in a too rigidly secular notion of
hegemony and accordingly of the role of intellectuals vis-à-vis the “ordi-
nary people” or the “masses.”
e key concept of Th buon senso was epitomized by how intellectuals
might capitalize on the fact that the peasant masses of southern Italy do
not possess any ideology of liberation but have a latent passion for justice.
In current jargon, we would say that while for Gramsci religion represents