Iranian articles

Michel Foucault's stance on modernity led him to a journalistic project studying the Iranian revolutionary event; he appeared as a student of Nietzsche and rebellious against him, at the same time; he adopted from Nietzsche the commitment to "transcend the self," but he politicized that activity, which in Nietzsche's field was limited to the phenomenal world; it manifested in Foucault as a violation of prevailing social practices and mentalities. On this aesthetic critical level of Western modernity, Foucault received Islam as a political–moral experience through his writings on the Iranian revolutionary event. From here, Foucault's study of the Iranian revolutionary event was closely linked to Kant's old question: "What is Enlightenment?"; because the revolution is the peak of the modern political self-curve. Foucault added Islam to the modernity equation, and he was able to see in it a solution to its main dilemma: the absence of "political spirituality," the factor that is ignored in the context of modernity and its philosophical and political problems. Islam, with its dynamic political spirituality, offers an alternative to the dominant form of Western material selfhood, through establishing a spiritual selfhood formed in the process of Islamic religious practices. Perhaps the most important aspect of these articles is Foucault's understanding of how Islam, amidst the Iranian revolutionary event, was able to eliminate secular politics; and to define both the political and spiritual through each other, in order to pave the way for a new political life that does not pose an obstacle to the spiritual component, but rather ensures its existence and flourishing.