“The Underdog Reflex – What Barbarik Can Teach Us about Power and Justice”, Pragyata, 08 Oct 2026.
“In the autumn of 1978, Michel Foucault went to Tehran twice and came back convinced he had seen something new. The uprising against the Shah struck him as a genuinely collective will, unarmed against an army, and in his dispatches he called what was being born there a political spirituality.
On 6 November, Le Nouvel Observateur published a letter under the heading “An Iranian Woman Writes.” The writer used the pseudonym Atoussa H., a leftist Iranian in exile in Paris, and she was writing to tell the French left, the Western liberal left specifically, that it had no idea what it was cheering for. She pointed to the punishments handed down under Islamic law elsewhere. She said Islamic rule could sit on a society that wanted change and crush it. She warned them not to be seduced by a cure worse than the disease.
She turned out to be right about nearly all of it. Within months of the revolution, veiling was made compulsory, and women were in the streets protesting against it. Executions of homosexuals began. The secular left that had marched alongside the Islamists was destroyed by them.
Foucault replied the following week. He did not engage her prediction, examine her evidence, or concede that she might know something about Iran that he did not. He said what he found intolerable was her merging of every form of Islam into a single thing and her dismissal of it as fanatical………..”
Read the full article at Pragyata.
