82 Philosophical Frames
class composition; a gender-related division of labor and attitudes toward
national goals; and a reschematization of the public sphere from the view-
point of grassroots reconstructions of ties of solidarity and communica-
tion generated by the potentially counterhegemonic activities of socio-
religious movements.
s state of the art on the ground can be compared with the alter-Thi
native genealogies of religious mobilization we have presented, as well as
with their impact on the notion of the public sphere. In response to his
Iranian experience Foucault called for a “hermeneutic of social action”
that, if combined with the “rhetoric of authenticity” articulated by Iranian
clerics, had the potential for engaging in the kind of praxic philosophy
that Antonio Gramsci famously advocated.^60 Gramsci too saw religious
spirituality as an embryonic force of reform if not of revolution, both as
a collective will and as a lived idea. If Foucault argued that the Iranian
Revolution saw a convergence of the individual need for personal trans-
formation and traditional religion emerging as revolutionary practice,
Gramsci too saw this possibility in a potential alliance between work-
ers and peasants through a rejuvenated Christian ideology-cum-praxis,
where religion would be lived as a “radically transformative,” revolution-
ary force.^61
learly the Foucauldian perspective has the potential to deepen C
and complicate the concept of religious mobilization emerging from
discrete case studies. It involves a deeper revision of Western paradigms
than allowed among conventional critics of Habermas’s approach. Even
when publicly criticized by a Muslim woman for believing that “Muslim
spirituality” was preferable to the shah, Foucault argued that the Iranian
Revolution should remind the West of something it had forgotten since
the Renaissance and the Reformation—the possibility of a political spiri-
tuality that in Iran had created a
unified collective will ... perhaps the greatest ever insurrection
against global systems, the most insane and the most modern
form of revolt ... the force that can make a whole people rise
up [importantly, even ‘with no vanguard, no party’], not only
against a sovereign and his police, but against a whole regime,
a whole way of life, a whole world.^62