Indeed, they hint, Foucault was worse than Heidegger, who is famous for his own errors of political judgment. Heidegger was either naïve or complicit. Foucault, however, had an impact. Not only were his mistakes significantly connected to positions he had taken elsewhere in his work, his mistakes had consequences (p. 135). More than once, Afary and Anderson mention that when Khomeini first arrived in France as an exile, Foucault passed along to him the message that Khomeini would do well to tone down his anti-shah rhetoric, lest he jeopardize his position in France and, we are told, Khomeini immediately thereafter did just that. The implication is that he took Foucault's advice and, had he not done so, things might have gone differently.
2.
Here they cite a curious list including Solidarity, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger strikers, and Liberation theology in the Caribbean and Latin America. The example of the IRA hunger strikes seems especially inapt, since the strikers themselves were not especially observant, and after the first two rounds of strikers died, their action was finally brought to an unsatisfactory end (from the IRA's perspective) by the intervention of the Church. The Hunger Strike Commemorative Web Project (http://larkspirit.com/ hungerstrikes/1981.html) notes that “Various religious leaders tried to put pressure on the IRA leadership, the prisoners and the prisoners' families, and this pressure, unsuccessful at first, finally convinced several families to intervene to save their sons' lives in August and September 1981. The prisoners blamed the Catholic Church hierarchy, as well as the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Irish Republic's political parties, for the pressure they put on the prisoners. In large part because of actions on the part of priests and prisoners' relatives, the hunger strikes were called off on 3 October 1981 (citing “Hunger strike ends,” An Phoblacht/ Republican News 10 October 1981, 2; P. O'Malley, 64-5). Other Catholic groups played other roles but these were not seen as nurturant of Irish nationalism: “a delegation representing the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, a group of Catholic bishops hoping to bring about an end to the violence, had a series of unsuccessful negotiations with the Northern Ireland Office in late June/early July . . . After the ICJP discussions the prisoners demanded that the British deal directly with them, not with intermediaries (citing H-Block/Armagh Bulletin, no. 21, Belfast H-Block/Armagh Committee, July 10, 1981, 3).
3.
There are many more of these partial or misread quotations. See pp. 16, 49, 51; also contrast Afary and Anderson versus Foucault on the “timeless drama.” Foucault refers more than once to the timeless drama of the situation he observes. As he makes clear more than once, he means to refer to the timeless drama of a people in revolt against its sovereign, which is enacted in this instance through Shi'ite scripts like the Ashura. (e.g., p. 131). But Afary and Anderson take him to be saying that Shi'ism is itself timeless (p. 123) and charge him, again, with orientalism.
4.
See Franz Rosenzweig , “Atheistic Theology,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, edited with notes and commentary by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000) and on this point in Rosenzweig, my Emergency Politics: Law, Paradox, Democracy (forthcoming).
5.
Savak is not mentioned much in Afary and Anderson's text, and the Shah is depicted as an authoritarian ruler who was, however, liberalizing women's rights, and was also extending minority protections to Jews and Bahai's. They say these rights and protections were immediately withdrawn under Khomeini's religious leadership. Followers of the Bahai faith were singled out for intolerance, and of course the Savak was replaced by other brutal forces.
6.
For a diagnosis of this insistence and an analysis of it as an outgrowth of the demands of secularism in politics, see Elizabeth Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, Chapter Four: “Contested Secularisms in Turkey and Iran,” (Princeton, 2007).
7.
Immanuel Kant, “ Conflict of the Faculties,” in Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991 ) 181-182, italics original.
