n the history of ideas, anomalies have always baffled settled minds and established theoretical frameworks. After the birth of modernity in the Eighteenth Century and its dominance in Europe in the long Nineteenth Century and expansion to other parts of the world in the short Twentieth Century, its intellectual framework has started to face a variety of anomalies in the post-modern period.

What we call the modern world is the world created by modernity in its own image. The anomalies in the philosophical discourse of modernity started to appear in the second half of the Twentieth Century. At the political level, the Iranian revolution in 1979 appeared as a deviation in the triumphant march of the universal reason that unfolded in the West in modern times. Since the revolution did not fit within the dominant framework of modern reason, it was dubbed as a product of un-reason. The exclusion of an anomalous phenomenon like this one does not help in understanding the complexity and multiplicity of ideas that contributed to the Iranian revolution. Such an exclusionary approach contributes less to thought and more to un-thought. That is why the current state of Iran and its ideology remain un-thought in Western political thought. This essay attempts to take stock of the philosophical meaning and implications of the existence of the Islamic State and theological political thought in the liberal age of modernity.

With two attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran in less than nine months, Iran is again on the radar screen of media pundits, analysts and commentators. Because of ideological reasons, this conflict has been reduced to a binary of modern and pre-modern; lunacy and sanity; and modernity versus regression in the Western media and academia. When the US officials call Iran a lunatic state, they reveal the strongly held belief and perception manufactured by a motley of epistemic and discursive structures in the modern West. However, this solipsistic categorisation and simplistic generalisation of the Iranian State, culture and society as lunatic do not help in understanding the complexity involved in the emergence of a theological state in the modern era and its existence well into the post-modern age. Such statements reek of an ethnocentric mindset that tends to see the world outside through monochrome glasses.

Owing to the enormous political, cultural and military power at their disposal, the elite class views the West’s relationship with the outside world through the lens of power. This does not mean that the ethnocentric approach is limited to short-sighted politicians of the West. It plagues the academia and the media as well. The enormous military power is supplemented by the academia and media industry that constructs images of other societies. Because the prevalent epistemic structures are based on binary logic, anything that does not fit with the episteme of modernity is rejected with negative appellations like retrogressive, obscurantist, fundamentalist, terrorists, extremists, radical, fanatical, backward, primitive and barbarian. The plethora of epithets for ‘others’ manufactured in academic institutions, think tanks and media provides everything except insight into an issue or conflict. This happens when people get entangled in the web of ‘knowledge’ spawned by themselves. They cannot escape their own mind and fail to see beyond their nose.

The tension between Iran and the United States that has persisted for nearly five decades is an example of an emerging phenomenon exceeding the available epistemic repertoire. Thus, the lacuna of un-thought is filled by the ideology, opinion and superficial perceptions.

However, some rare intellectuals try to comprehend an emerging phenomenon through a new and non-Western epistemic lens. Among the dominant political discourses in the West regarding Islam vis-à-vis the West, the Western man constructs his relationships and ties with the world and other cultures based on Euro-centrism. This goaded the West to seek world dominance at the start of modernity and planetary supremacy in the late modernity. Euro-centrism is an exceptionalist view towards human culture and civilisations. In the modern age, it has played a definite role in forming the cognitive structures that exclude and include societies and nations in its discourse.

Going against the grain of the Western epistemic regime, Michel Foucault went to Iran in 1978 to record the historical events unfolding there. Based on his observations, he wrote a series of articles for the Italian daily Corriere della sera expressing his ideas about religion and politics in Iran. Foucault termed the Iranian revolution as “political spirituality.” He saw it as an event when people could become “historical subjects” instead of being “subjects of history.” Foucault thought that the Iranian people were close to attaining agency in the bipolar world where no alternative thinking was allowed outside the communist and liberal blocs. He declared the Iranian revolution to be a Dionysian revolt against the modern and secular power structure of rationality. In the political dispensation, social structure and intellectual discourse of modernity, religion has either been relegated to private space or eliminated in liberal order and communist regimes, respectively.

According to Foucault, the revolt in Iran introduced a spiritual dimension into the political sphere and structures of modernity, from where the spiritual had been expunged. It is important to note that his ideas about the events “in the white-hot heat of the revolution” were journalistic, not purely academic. Therefore, they should be seen as a thin description. Foucault focused more on the unfolding events and less on their consequences. However, he provided excellent data for a thin description for the researchers interested in ideas and practices of alterity. It seems that for Foucault, the uprising against the dictatorship of the monarch was a manifestation of his intellectual project, which aimed at eliminating the ‘fascism of the mind.’ The Iranian revolution was more of an intellectual revolt than a political one. Politics was made subservient to the intellectual revolt. Unlike most of the modern scholarship, Foucault did not treat the Islamic revolution in Iran as the eternal recurrence of a pre-modern mindset. Rather, he treated it as a leap forward beyond the constraints of modernity. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabriz, in his book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, rejects the view that Foucault’s sympathy for the Iranian revolutionary movement had anything “to do with a romantic fascination with a pre-modern world and the pastoral exercise of power.” “Rather,” he says, “his enthusiasm was kindled by witnessing a moment of making history outside the purview of a Western teleological schema.”

When a religion manifests in different times and spaces, it appears afresh, donning the views and concerns of the prevailing zeitgeist. Islam during the time of revolution provided a vent or platform to the people to get rid of a regime that believed in alien modernity. By doing so, it introduced anomalous modernity in Iran. On the heels of revolution, the revolutionary vanguards suppressed the leftist and liberal voices to make room for an alternative narrative in the world dominated by two meta-narratives. By doing so, they restored the philosophical undercurrent of Shia Islam back into religion and politics. One of the salient features of Shia philosophy is the belief in the coming of the messiah in the shape of the Mahdi. The messiah is considered the saviour of humanity. Thus, contrary to the commonly held view of Shi’i Islam being regressive, the messianic ideology helps propel it into the perpetual future. Seen in this context, the re-configuration of the ideological basis of the Iranian state appears to be a forward-looking approach. At the same time, it nullifies the essentialist claim of the unchanging nature of religion.

What we call the modern world is the world created by modernity in its image.

In social and religious space, the future flows into the present like the unbrokenness of absolute time. It arrives in “non-totalising” shape in fragments, segments, pieces, crack walls, hybrid ideas, ruptured structures, shattered brick and partial objects. Unlike the Marxist approach to waiting for the objective conditions to become ripe, the omnipresent absence of future drives Twelver Shi’ism to change the objective conditions to attain its religious correlative in the world. This cannot be done unless the political domain is brought under the purview of religion. This idea was put into practice by the revolutionaries in Iran, who tried to pave the way for the future by taking charge of political power. By suppressing his religious opponents, the monarch, Mohammad Raza Shah Pahlavi, tried to defer the future in the lives of Iranians. The effort backfired and expedited the process of change instead of postponing it. This is evident from the alleged murder of one of the seminal ideologues of the Iranian revolution - Dr Ali Shariati, in June 1977 in England. Instead of cancelling the destiny, his murder in the words of Foucault “gave him the position, so privileged in Shi’ism, of the invisible Present, of the ever-present Absent.”

Modern-day revolutions, in their secular variants, are also messianic acts as they aim at attaining their ideological utopia. So, the revolutionary movement strives for emancipation from the existential situation now to realise something new in the future.

While revolution contains potential for change and realisation of its ideas and ideals, it also harbours seeds of its own undoing as discourse, images, figures and ideals associated with the revolution ossify once ideology gets hold of the power. The Iranian revolution succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy and detoxifying its society and mind of Westoxification (Gharbzadegi). It also closed the door for new and alternative possibilities. Today, the revolutionary ideals of yesterday constrain the aspirations and dreams of highly literate youth in Iran.

The international sanctions have aggravated the economic situation, thus closing the window to the outside world. The convergence of internal and external factors has given birth to internal consternation. Now Iran has a large number of youth who do not have a memory of the monarchy or the revolution. It is a classic case where the aspirations of agency exceed the available political ideology and space and institutional capacities. The diminishing of political space also narrows the window of the future upon which the edifice of the Islamic revolution rests.

Despite rejecting Western modernity and democracy, the Iranian state continues to follow the practices of a modern state, such as a constitution and elections. Unlike a majority of the Arab countries, especially in the GCC, where autocrats reign supreme, Iran has precluded dynastic politics and autocratic rule by establishing a strong system where individuals do not matter. It is the only country in the Middle East which goes by the book in its processes and procedures of electing and selecting key leaders of the state. The system is riddled with contradictions and is unable to address the emerging aspirations and needs of its population, yet it has forestalled autocracy. The very shortcoming in the system opens new pathways for political and economic empowerment of the Iranian people and vistas of alternate thinking, which are not necessarily in line with the demands of Pax Americana.

It would be better for Iran to open the spaces for new ideas and forms of politics. It will open the windows for the future, which has been constricted by internalities and externalities. Some of the current leaders of Iran are in a better position to take that decision. They have the required intellectual and contextual understanding of both Iran and the West.

Today, the world is riddled with paradoxes. There has never been an epoch in history that has amassed so much knowledge and communicated across the world and outer space at this volume. At the same time, we see an increase in ignorance about one another and a degradation of thought. It’s not that this happened overnight. There were telltale signs that we ignored. When the Nineteenth Century was closing, the world, especially the West, was witnessing universal enframing of rationality begotten by the Enlightenment. Its mind-boggling success in several spheres of life affected and impressed people across ideological and cultural divides.

It was against this universal encompassing of the ethnocentric rationality and modernity that Friedrich Nietzsche appeared to blast the rock-solid foundations of rationality. His discerning mind saw what was coming. Unlike the philosophers who consider modernity as an incomplete project and firmly believe that the rationality of modernity will end in “liberal eudaimonia,“ Nietzsche warned us that rationality would end in the universal outbreak of madness. Modern societies rally their populace around collective or total identities such as the state and, now, increasingly, civilisation. Fearing collective identities and passions, Nietzsche wrote, “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples and ages, it is the rule.“ The modern madness is collective. Nietzsche believed that groups, parties, and nations can fall into collective delusions, vindictive anger or “wolf pack syndrome.“ The madness of the crowd will overpower the meditative ascetic. In this madness, individuals surrender their independence to the collective mentality and morality of the herd. The mobs consider themselves rational and enlightened but are ready to act irrationally. Today we bomb innocent people to bring peace.

Following Nietzsche, Foucault made it his lifetime goal to unearth the archaeology of power in its diverse manifestations. In his philosophical reflection on Iran he might have failed to see its consequences. However, he was percipient enough to see the philosophical elements in the revolution. It released enormous Dionysian energy that enabled people to take on the Apollonian gods of modernity. By showing the alterity of Iranian society and an alternate political vision, Foucault tried to prove that alterity was not a puritan affair. Rather, it showed cross-pollination even in a situation where two different ideologies and visions opposed each other as stanch enemies. This is best illustrated in the case of some of the current leaders of the Iranian state.

Take the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi. He completed his PhD in political thought under the supervision of a renowned scholar of Marxism, David McLellan. Aragchi penned a book named Negotiations: The Power of Diplomacy. Ali Larijani, the assassinated security chief of Iran, similarly held a PhD in Western philosophy. He was a potential successor to the late Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Larijani was a Kantian scholar. He authored philosophical books such as The Mathematical Method in Kant’s Philosophy, Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences in Kant’s Philosophy and Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Kant’s Philosophy. The reference to the intellectual background of both Aragchi and Larijani is not meant to show them as innocent, but to highlight the exchange of ideas across ideological and cultural divides. At the same time, it shows an incongruence between the power structure and the mind serving it.

We live in a topsy-turvy world. Strangely, while philosophers are serving a state deemed as archaic and lunatic, the mighty USA is ruled by populists like Donald Trump and his ilk. From their training, qualification and aptitude, the two Iranian leaders were suitable for high offices in their enemy country, the United States. It may be argued that the intellectual ignorance and aptitude of the cabal in Washington makes them appropriate candidates to take charge of the state they perceive as oppressive and regressive. An antagonism is not necessarily exclusive.

Modern rationality has become blind to the multiplicity of histories and ideas in different societies and to the fact that modernity is experienced differently in different corners of the world because it has closed itself within its cultural cocoon. As a result, the world is witnessing the disappearance of dialogue and the strengthening of deadlock. To come out of this intellectual impasse, people must reject totalities and celebrate the fragments. The putative conflict between civilisation and barbarians, liberalism versus illiberal, and rational versus lunatic are the clash of totalities. Such totalities beget totalitarian ideologies and fascistic tendencies in societies. Consequently, they end up in bloodbaths.

Against the blood dim tides of totalitarian ideologies and identities, fragments provide the bulwark. It is at the level of fragments that the real interface and dialogue between humans and cultures take place. Contrary to the oppositional stance and subjugated mentality of modernity and its opposite tradition at the supra-structure of ideology and collective identities, the fragments of opposing entities continue to interact and exchange with each other. This is evident from the fact that despite their opposition to Westernisation, Aragchi and Larijani have immersed themselves in Western philosophy. But the very icons who claim to represent the rationality of liberal civilisation of the West are devoid of empathetic understanding of the “Other.” That is why they are acting irrationally and illiberally. In the battles of totalities, let the fragment fuse, confuse, break and interact at the cultural and individual level. Only by understanding the detail, we can get rid of the devil presiding at the highest level representing totality and make totalitarian pronouncements of the end of history, alternative ideas and the world from the pulpit of power.

The writer is the author of Nomadic Meditations: Wandering in the History of Ideas. He may be reached at [email protected]