The disillusionment of the useful idiots of the Khmers Rouge had not served as a lesson the same intellectuals, for proverbial clairvoyance, believed, again, finding in the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 the opportunity to confirm their revolutionary hopes. It was the same disappointment. Their ideology made the mojâhedin of the people, the heir to Bolshevik and Vietminh. The Iranian far left then thought of making common cause with the Chiite owners of Sharia law to reverse the “Western” power of the Shah and impose itself. From this first form of Islamo-leftism, it is Islamism once in power that consumed leftism. Today, rebellious France vilified the Israeli action in Iran so as not to offend a communitarian base which should serve as a step in the conquest of power. Putting on the previous Iranian might be likely to make it more cautious.
The modernization of the old Achaemenid power wanted since 1925 by the new King Reza Shah Pahlavi did not endow the Islamization of the country. Thus the abolition of Chador from Public Space (1936) did not allow the Iranian society to be withdrawn. Refugee since 1963 in Iraq, Rouhollah Khomeiny, for his part, was developing a uncongonted political thought of Western references and prepared, in secrecy, “her” taken from power. She was then based on the improbable alliance of a religious rigorism with revolutionary accents and a bourgeois nationalism capable of seducing frameworks. These contradictions, skillfully blunted by spiritual discourse, were surmounted by the common will to send the Shah. Islamists and Marxists, however, shared the conviction that the “return of the imam” would be an opportunity to restore justice for the benefit of “disinherdes” and to fulfill an emancipatory prophecy. It was no longer lacking in this coalition of circumstances than the competition of the West to triumph
Since 1953, the American interference in Tehran has been accentuated in the face of the risk of communist contagion. From coups in military and commercial agreements, the United States makes Shah for their obligatory ally. But in 1977, President Carter began this link by demanding respect for human rights weakening the pahlavi by giving discharge to his opponents. Consumed during his stay in Washington by Iranian students strangely free to approach him, the king, definitively released by the Americans, had to flee his country in January 1979. Nothing can no longer prevent the victory of Khomeiny that the White House anticipated by asking the Iranian officers to accept the authority. There is also no shortage of Ayatollah either for French on the French side. Paris has thus chartered a special flight from Air France to the exile, welcomed since 1978 in Neauphle-le-Château where he had the leisure to dispense his radical ideas and to charm the intellectual left.
Progressives have lost the monopoly on anti -liberal dispute
The Shiites quickly abandon the concealment policy, the Takiya, which had allowed them to conquer power to arrogate the monopoly. Taking the American Embassy on November 4 by Iranian students accelerated the clericalization of power. However, no one had thought possible the confiscation of the revolution by the religious. Discreet until 1978, they were stifled in the media by the bustle of third-worlds intellectuals. But in favor of major demonstrations, the mojâhedin of the people suddenly take light. Their ascent, by mass mobilization, is now irresistible. The progressives have lost the monopoly on anti -liberal protest. The Islamist movement animated by the convergence of universal struggles for oppressed is then refocused on the Muslim territory alone in a civilizational fight against the West. The confrontation no longer has anything with the class struggle and yet it is a moment chosen by French thinkers to support the Shiite regime.
The Parisian revolutionaries believed to see in the ayatollah “with bare hands”, the liberator of the dominated. Sartre, proud to chair the committee for the defense of Iranian political prisoners, exalts the anti -colonialist who humiliated America. Equally euphoric, Foucault goes to Iran convinced to attend the unprecedented irruption of a “political spirituality” capable of transfiguring revolutionary fight. Less oppressive than emancipatory, according to him, Shiite Islam would have no political claim. Denied by the facts, Foucault will never be fine honorable. In this ocean of blindness, some sagaces like that of Pierre Manent, will buy an intellectual world Fourvoyé. The Iranian progressive elites were not more lucid, dupped by the “revolutionary” discourse of the supreme guide which had however held only vague but sufficient social promises to rally the Marxist movements.
The Iranian far left is the first persecuted. Those who thought they replaced the religious deemed unable to govern are eliminated. Even the affidues of Khomeiny, but “supporters of the compromise”, are purged under the ferrule of the Guardians of the Revolutionary. Islamo-leftism has its founding story. Those who thought they were using Islamism to make their revolution triumph have been swept away by political Islam. The Iranian lesson should worry us. It highlights the clinical case of an unexpected takeover of power by Islamists worn on the shoulders of the far-reaching anti-witch and naive liberals. They will all end up devoured by those they have installed in power. It would be good to remember it.
