Foko and the Iranian Revolution

Michel Foucault, with his epistemological and political awareness, was alert to the fact that the Iranian revolution was able to inaugurate a new kind of paradigm for religious discourse in general and Islamic discourse in particular. It represents, in his view, a pivotal ontological and historical turning point in which religion emerged from the cocoon of the inwardly focused cogito to become a driving factor in the course of contemporary cosmic history and a main term in the narrative of modern world affairs. At the same time, politics moved out of its ancient guise to become more spiritual, making "political Islam" the issue of issues in what Foucault calls the ontology of the present.