Iran’s French Revolution

• Author: Roxanne Varzi
• Published date: 01 September 2011
• Date: 01 September 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716211404362

It is difficult for many to grasp how and why Islam
would remain a powerful form of protest against Islamic
governments. Going back to the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s to explore the work and lives of two important
pre–Iranian Revolution thinkers, I will show how Shiite
Islam came into play with postcolonial and postmodern
theories to bring about the Islamic Revolution—which
explains why 30 years later, Islam continues to provide a
framework for protest among those disillusioned by the
Islamic Republic.
Iran’s French Keywords: Islam; philosophy; revolution; Iran; Western
philosophy; postcolonialism; French theory
Revolution:
Religion,
Philosophy, and In July 2009, for the first time since the Iranian
Revolution, masses of Iranians took to the
streets to protest what they saw as the fraudulent
reelection of a president they no longer wanted.
Crowds
While the protests themselves came as a sur-
prise to many outside the country, what was even
more of a surprise for those not familiar with the
philosophical history of the revolution was the
use of Islam to stand up to an Islamic regime.
By
My first response as an anthropologist1 was:
ROXANNE VARZI
why should it be so surprising that Islam would
once again be used as a shield against the state?
Looking deeper, however, we see that this is not
just a battle of surfaces, a polemical plight, or
merely a necessary shield. The reason that the
rhetoric and discourse from the revolution is
used again is not simply to throw it back in the
face of the oppressors, but because it has deep
roots in postcolonial and mystical philosophy
that, even after a revolution gone awry; a 10-year
bloody war; and 30 years of economic, social,
Roxanne Varzi is an associate professor of anthropology
and film and media studies at the University of
California, Irvine. She is the author of Warring Souls:
Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran
(Duke University Press 2006) and the director of the
documentary Plastic Flowers Never Die (2009). She was
the first Fulbright fellow to Iran after the revolution
and the youngest senior Iran fellow at St. Anthony’s
College, University of Oxford.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716211404362
ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011 53

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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
and physical hardships, has not yet been made obsolete. Philosophy moves in all
directions, and Iran has never been a hermetically sealed Islamic nation, espe-
cially when it comes to its revolutionary discourse. Postcolonial theory, and its
antihegemonic, anti-imperialist, and antiracist discourse, is incredibly relevant
today and perhaps even more so in the Middle East. And mysticism, because of
its slippery relationship to authority and its contemporary appropriation by
Western self-help and New Age authors who consistently revalue and represent
its use and authority in an alternative frame, will always remain a balm in times
of hardship.2
To truly understand why Islam remains a powerful call to action, and how it is
that mysticism and Western philosophy came together to form a powerful revo-
lutionary discourse for Iran, it is important to go back to the early 1960s, when
postcolonial theory and Western philosophy, mysticism, Marxism, capitalism, and
a new kind of cosmopolitanism were coming together to define a post–oil-rich
Iran. What I am interested in here is how religion came into play with postcolonial
and postmodern theories in the early 1960s and 1970s and mixed with mysticism
to bring about the Islamic Revolution and to explain why and how, 30 years later,
Islam continues to provide a framework for protest among those disillusioned by
the Islamic Republic.
In this article, I will concentrate on two important prerevolutionary thinkers:
Henry Corbin, a French philosopher, translator (German and Persian), and profes-
sor of Islam; and Jalal Al Ahmad, an Iranian sociologist, Marxist thinker, translator
(of French), and writer, both of whom directly or indirectly radicalized the gen-
eration of Iranians who participated in the revolution.
Henry Corbin
We will begin our story in Paris, for many reasons. To begin with, French was
the court language of the Qajar monarchy, and Paris, through the Pahlavi regime,
continued to function as Iran’s cultural capital for the elite, students, artists,
Marxists, and, even later, the clergy. While Paris first provided the Iranian elite with
the French Enlightenment (beginning only in the late nineteenth century), it
most usefully gave would-be Iranian revolutionaries a new radical framework for
their own religious tradition through postmodern and postcolonial theories.
This can be traced back to World War II Paris, where young professors were
either sent off to the front lines or purged from the university, leaving a xenophobic
and nationalist institution (that rarely allowed a nonnative speaker of French to
lecture in the academy) with a shortage of lecturers in philosophy. This shortage
of French professors allowed Russian immigrant Alexander Kojève to lecture at
the Sorbonne on the teachings of Hegel (some Iranians have called Hegel the
Rumi of the West). In his lectures sat some of the foremost creative thinkers and
philosophers who would come out of postwar Paris: Georges Battaille; Jean-Paul
Sartre; Jacques Lacan; and Henry Corbin, who, shortly after the war, traveled to
Iran and found his spiritual home. Not only was Tehran Corbin’s spiritual home,

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IRAN'S FRENCH REVOLUTION
55
it was also where he lived half his life, teaching Islamic philosophy at Tehran University.
He was one of the first and only Western philosophers to teach Islamic philoso-
phy in Iran, and this had a major effect on an Iranian generation’s interpretation
of key mystical texts. His deep engagement and debates with some of Iran’s fore-
most religious thinkers and clerics when many young revolutionaries and religious
thinkers were coming of age suggests that he gave Iranians a new reading of their
own Islamic tradition, updated and made socially relevant. To this end, genealogy
is incredibly important. What is important is that Corbin read Hegel through
Kojève (1980), who had a very particular interpretation of death. The absolute
master became significant later when martyrdom became a key subject of Iranian
revolutionary Islam, and this concept becomes especially apropos when Khomeini’s
Islamic Republic begins to look a lot like Hegel’s Christian state. Here, a proto-
typical Christian thinker splinters Islam’s political framework (Varzi 2006). It is
through Corbin that we can most likely trace the influence of Hegel, Heidegger,
and Kojève in Iranian revolutionary notions of martyrdom and religious state-
formation (Varzi 2006). According to Tom Cheetham, another “defining encoun-
ter in Corbin’s spiritual odyssey was his reading of Martin Heidegger’s foundational
work of phenomenology, Being and Time. It gives us some sense of the unique
perspective of this truly Catholic philosopher to note that his copy of the notori-
ously difficult and very German work was marked throughout by glosses in
Arabic” (Cheetham 2003, 5). Contemporary Islam repays Heidegger the favor by
glossing over its revolutionary call to arms with his theories, as I experienced not
in only reading various cultural architects of the revolution, but firsthand while
doing fieldwork among Iranian government cultural producers who asked me to
engage in a discussion about Heidegger and Islam. As a consolation prize for a
long evening of debate, I was given a contemporary Persian translation of Being
and Time.
Philosophy moved both ways; Corbin was also a major translator of Persian—
especially Shii theosophy—and...