The Iranian Revolution of 1979 stands as one of the most dramatic upheavals of the late twentieth century. It overthrew a secular, Western-aligned monarchy and replaced it with a theocratic regime under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. What began as a broad coalition against the Shah rapidly transformed into an Islamist state that imposed strict religious law, executed thousands of opponents, suppressed women’s rights, and exported revolutionary zeal through terror. Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, a significant segment of Western leftist intellectuals greeted the events with enthusiasm, even ecstasy. Among them, Michel Foucault occupies a particularly prominent and troubling place. His writings on Iran reveal a philosopher so enamored with the spectacle of revolt that he blinded himself to the emerging totalitarian character of the new regime. This enthusiasm did not emerge in a vacuum. It drew heavily—explicitly or implicitly—from the intellectual legacy of Frantz Fanon, whose works on decolonization and revolutionary violence had become canonical for the post-1968 Western left. Fanon’s justification of violence as cathartic and necessary for the birth of a new humanity provided a ready framework for interpreting Third World upheavals as inherently liberating, regardless of their actual ideological content or human cost. When Western intellectuals like Foucault looked at Iran, they saw not the rise of a clerical-fascist state but a Fanonian moment: the wretched of the earth rising against Western-imposed modernity, cleansing themselves through struggle, and creating an authentic new order. The result was a profound moral failure. By projecting their own anti-Western fantasies onto the Iranian Revolution, these intellectuals abandoned the very universalist principles—human rights, individual liberty, secularism—that they claimed to defend in other contexts. They became apologists, however reluctant or temporary, for a regime that would soon reveal itself as one of the most repressive of the postwar era. This essay examines the intellectual trajectory from Fanon to Foucault, the specific character of Foucault’s engagement with Iran, and the broader pattern of moral bankruptcy that it exemplifies among Western intellectuals confronting Khomeini’s regime. Frantz Fanon and the Romance of Revolutionary Violence Frantz Fanon’s influence on the Western left cannot be overstated. A psychiatrist from Martinique who became a spokesman for the Algerian FLN, Fanon produced two major works that shaped radical thought: *Black Skin, White Masks* (1952) and *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961). The latter, written as he was dying of leukemia, became a bible for anti-colonial and Third Worldist movements. Its central argument is that colonialism is a system of absolute violence, and that decolonization must therefore be equally violent. Violence, for Fanon, is not merely instrumental; it is therapeutic. It allows the colonized to reclaim their humanity, to purge the inferiority complex implanted by the colonizer, and to forge a new national consciousness. “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence, ” Fanon wrote. The act of killing the settler restores the colonized subject’s self-respect: “For the native, this violence represents the absolute praxis.” He warned against compromises with the colonial power and celebrated the spontaneous, peasant-led uprising over the cautious maneuvers of urban elites. The book ends with a call for the Third World to invent its own path, free from both Western capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy: “Let us leave Europe… Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her.” These ideas resonated deeply with a Western left disillusioned by the failures of Soviet-style socialism and the persistence of imperialism. Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to *The Wretched of the Earth* amplified Fanon’s message, declaring that violence was a “cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.” For a generation of intellectuals who felt powerless in their own societies, Fanon offered a vicarious experience of revolutionary agency. The Third World became the theater where history was truly being made, and violence the midwife of a new humanity. Yet Fanon’s framework carried dangers that became evident in subsequent decades. His emphasis on cathartic violence and authentic national consciousness could be detached from any specific political program. It provided a template for celebrating almost any anti-Western uprising, regardless of its leadership, ideology, or consequences. The peasantry, the lumpenproletariat, the spontaneous masses—any force that rose against the West could be cast as the authentic voice of the oppressed. Political content mattered less than the fact of revolt itself. This opened the door to a romanticization of movements whose goals were reactionary or theocratic. By the 1970s, Fanon’s ideas had been absorbed into the broader anti-imperialist consensus of the Western left. The Palestinian struggle, the Vietnamese victory, the Cuban revolution—all were seen through a Fanonian lens. When Iran erupted in 1978, many intellectuals were primed to interpret it in similar terms: a spontaneous uprising of the oppressed against a Western-backed tyrant, a cleansing violence that would birth a new society. Michel Foucault and the Iranian “Spiritual Revolution” Michel Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution is the most striking—and most criticized—example of this Fanonian inheritance. In 1978, at the invitation of the Italian newspaper *Corriere della Sera*, Foucault traveled to Iran twice to report on the unfolding events. He wrote a series of articles and interviews that expressed unqualified enthusiasm for the revolution. What he witnessed, he claimed, was not merely a political upheaval but a “spiritual” one—the first great insurrection against “global systems” of domination. Foucault was particularly impressed by the role of Islam as a unifying political force. In a September 1978 article titled “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” he praised the way Shi’ite Islam had provided “the vocabulary, the ceremonial, the timeless drama” through which the people could recognize themselves and act collectively. He contrasted this with the hollow secular nationalism of the Shah’s regime. The Iranians, he wrote, wanted “to be governed not only in an Islamic manner but by Islamic people, ” meaning clerics. In November 1978, after the revolution had already begun to reveal its Islamist character, Foucault published “The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt, ” a glowing portrait of Khomeini. He described the Ayatollah as a figure who embodied “the perfectly unified collective will.” Khomeini’s tapes, smuggled into Iran from exile in Paris, had created “an extraordinary emotional upheaval” that unified the nation. Foucault dismissed concerns about theocracy: “Religion for them is like the promise and guarantee of finding something that radically changes their subjectivity.” He called the uprising “the first great insurrection against global systems, the most modern and the most insane.” Most notoriously, in an article titled “Is It Useless to Revolt?” (published in May 1979, after Khomeini’s return), Foucault defended the very idea of revolt even if it led to undesirable outcomes. He acknowledged that the revolution might disappoint some of its liberal and leftist supporters, but insisted that the act of insurrection itself had value: “The spirituality which animates political movements… is what gives them their historical weight.” He rejected the cynical view that revolutions always end badly, arguing that the Iranian people had demonstrated that revolt was possible and meaningful in itself. Foucault’s language throughout these writings echoes Fanon in striking ways. Like Fanon, he emphasizes the cathartic, transformative power of collective action. The Iranian masses, rising against the Shah’s modernizing dictatorship, are purifying themselves through struggle. Their revolt is authentic because it is rooted in their own cultural and religious tradition, not imposed from outside. The violence of the revolution—street battles, executions of regime officials—is implicitly justified as the necessary cleansing force that Fanon described. Yet Foucault went further than Fanon in one crucial respect: he abandoned even the pretense of universal humanist criteria. Fanon, for all his celebration of violence, retained a commitment to human liberation and social justice. He criticized the pitfalls of national consciousness degenerating into tribalism or dictatorship. Foucault, by contrast, had spent the 1970s developing a radical critique of universal norms. Power, for him, was everywhere; all regimes were repressive in their own way. The Shah’s regime was repressive because it was modern, rational, Western. The emerging Islamic Republic might be repressive in a different way, but at least it was not modern. It represented a different “political spirituality, ” an alternative regime of truth. This relativism allowed Foucault to dismiss criticisms of the revolution’s direction. When reports emerged of summary executions, repression of women, and attacks on leftists, Foucault initially downplayed them. In a 1979 exchange with Iranian critics living in Paris, he refused to condemn the executions, arguing that it was not his place as a Westerner to judge. Only later, in private conversations and some unpublished notes, did he express private reservations. Publicly, he remained silent as the regime consolidated its power through terror. The Blind Spots: Gender, Minorities, and Secular Opposition One of the most glaring failures of Foucault’s analysis—and of the broader Western leftist response—was its blindness to the revolution’s impact on women. From the earliest days of Khomeini’s return, women were forced to veil themselves. Female protesters who had marched against the Shah found themselves targeted by the new regime. Yet Foucault barely mentioned gender in his Iran writings. When pressed in interviews, he offered vague assurances that Islamic government would respect women’s rights in its own way. This silence is particularly damning given Foucault’s later work on sexuality and the body. The man who would write *The History of Sexuality* seemed unable to recognize the profound disciplining of female bodies under the Islamic Republic. The compulsory hijab, the segregation of sexes, the reduction of women’s legal status—these were not minor cultural adjustments but fundamental reconfigurations of power over bodies. Yet Foucault’s fascination with “political spirituality” prevented him from seeing them as such. Similarly, the revolution’s treatment of sexual minorities, leftists, and ethnic groups received little attention. Homosexuality, punishable by death under the new regime, was invisible in Foucault’s accounts. The Kurdish and Baluchi minorities, who faced repression, were ignored. The Tudeh Party and Fedayeen guerrillas, who had fought against the Shah, were soon persecuted by the Islamists. All of this was sacrificed on the altar of anti-imperialist purity. The pattern repeated itself across much of the Western left. Figures like Maxime Rodinson initially supported the revolution but later criticized it. Others, like the French Maoists, maintained support longer. In Britain and America, sections of the anti-war movement and academic left viewed Iran through the same Third Worldist lens. The enemy of my enemy—the Shah, backed by the United States—was automatically my friend. The Fanonian Template and Its Misapplication At the root of this moral failure lies the misapplication of Fanon’s framework to a revolution that bore little resemblance to the anti-colonial struggles he described. Algeria in the 1950s was a settler colony with a clear racial hierarchy. The FLN, for all its flaws, fought for national independence and land reform. Iran in 1978–79 was a sovereign state with a modernizing autocracy. The opposition was a coalition ranging from secular liberals and Marxists to bazaar merchants and clerics. The driving force that ultimately prevailed was not a peasant uprising but an urban religious movement led by a hierarchical clergy. Khomeini’s ideology—velayat-e faqih, or guardianship of the Islamic jurist—was not a liberation theology but a theocratic absolutism. It subordinated popular sovereignty to divine law as interpreted by clerics. This was not Fanon’s “new humanity” but a return to medieval political forms dressed in anti-imperialist rhetoric. The violence of the revolution was not cathartic for the nation as a whole; it was instrumentalized by one faction to eliminate all others. Western intellectuals who applied Fanon’s categories to Iran ignored these distinctions because they needed the revolution to fit their narrative. The Third World had to remain the site of authentic revolt against Western domination. To acknowledge that Iranians might be exchanging one form of tyranny for another would complicate the story. Better to celebrate the uprising and avert one’s eyes from what followed.

Aftermath and Reckoning Foucault’s Iranian episode damaged his reputation in some circles. Critics like Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson have documented the extent of his misjudgment in *Foucault and the Iranian Revolution* (2005). Foucault himself largely stopped discussing Iran publicly after 1979. In private, he reportedly expressed regret to friends like Thierry Voeltzel and Claire Brière. Yet he never issued a formal retraction or apology. The broader Western left took longer to reckon with Iran. Throughout the 1980s, as the regime executed thousands, waged war against Iraq, and sponsored terrorism, many continued to view it as anti-imperialist. Only with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 did significant portions of the left finally break with the regime. The episode reveals a recurring pattern: the willingness of Western intellectuals to sacrifice universal principles when confronting movements that challenge Western hegemony. The same pattern appeared earlier with Stalinism and Maoism, and later with certain Islamist movements. The Fanonian romance of violence and authenticity provides the intellectual justification: if the oppressed are rising, criticism risks aligning with the oppressor. Lessons for Intellectual Responsibility The moral bankruptcy exemplified by Foucault’s response to the Khomeini regime stems from a toxic combination of Fanonian romanticism and postmodern relativism. Fanon’s celebration of revolutionary violence, detached from concrete political analysis, became a license to celebrate any anti-Western uprising. Foucault’s rejection of universal norms completed the process, allowing him to view the Islamic Republic as merely a different regime of power rather than a worse one. The consequences were tragic. Thousands of Iranians—leftists, women, minorities, secularists—paid the price for this intellectual blindness. The regime that Western enthusiasts helped legitimize in its early days became a lasting source of oppression at home and destabilization abroad. The lesson is not that intellectuals should refrain from supporting revolutions. It is that support must be grounded in universal principles rather than anti-Western animus. The oppressed deserve solidarity not because they oppose the West but because they suffer injustice. When a movement begins executing its former allies, veiling women by force, and establishing clerical dictatorship, solidarity requires criticism, not silence. Fanon himself warned against the pitfalls of national consciousness degenerating into dictatorship. Western intellectuals who invoked his name while ignoring those warnings betrayed both his complexity and their own professed values. The Iranian Revolution exposed the moral bankruptcy at the heart of a certain kind of Third Worldism: the willingness to sacrifice real human beings on the altar of abstract anti-imperialism. Today, as new authoritarian movements arise cloaked in anti-Western rhetoric, the temptation remains. The ghosts of Fanon and Foucault hover over contemporary debates about populism, Islamism, and decolonization. Remembering their missteps in 1979 is essential to avoiding similar failures in the future.