Sending Hoveida to the gallows, he stopped the Shah’s nuclear programme, and also mothballed his first-rate collection of modern art. He assured fellow revolutionaries worried about rising inflation that ‘Iran’s Islamic Revolution was not about the price of melons.’ This vigorous contempt for the religion of the modern age – economic growth and material improvement – was part of Khomeini’s Rousseauian nostalgia for a lost community of virtue. As he put it:
For the solution of social problems and the relief of human misery require foundation in faith and morals; merely acquiring material power and wealth, conquering nature and space, have no effect in this regard. They must be supplemented by and balanced with, the faith, the conviction, and the morality of Islam, in order to truly serve humanity, instead of endangering it.
If the emphasis on morality and scorn for material success is reminiscent of Rousseau, the argument for religion reminds one of Robespierre in his last phase as well as such Catholic reactionaries as Joseph de Maistre and Vicomte de Bonald. Khomeini’s emphatic rejection of human pretension and appeals to transcendental authority led Foucault to see a form of ‘spiritual politics’ emerging in Iran. In his view this politics was emphatically not shaped by an abstract, calculating and incarcerating reason, but a ‘groundswell with no vanguard and no party’.
Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of Khomeini was over-determined by his own distaste for the political and economic systems – industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic nation state – created by the Atlantic West. (Foucault in this sense followed Montesquieu in using Iran to pursue an internal critique of the West.) Earlier that year of the revolution in Iran, he had told a Zen Buddhist priest that Western thought was in crisis. Foucault was hostile to Communism, which had attracted many of his fellow intellectuals in France. But he was equally contemptuous of the capitalist West: in his words, ‘the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’.
Driven by an intense loathing of both Western and Soviet universalisms – similar to one that led Heidegger into the delusion that Nazism was capable of creating a genuine ‘regional’ culture – Foucault failed to notice that Khomeini was actually a radically modern leader. For one, the cleric’s notion that the Iranian nation did not stem from any general or popular will but derived from God’s mind, which as a charismatic leader he arrogated himself the right to interpret, was wholly novel: an extraordinary deviation, in fact, from a politically quietist Shiite tradition in which all government appeared illegitimate in the absence of the Twelfth Imam.
Khomeini belonged in the long line of revolutionary nationalists that began with Giuseppe Mazzini, who had also called for a holy insurrection by the oppressed masses. As with Mazzini, who laid the foundation for what his clear-eyed critic Gaetano Salvemini called a ‘popular theocracy’, Khomeini’s ideas were embedded in modern notions of representation and egalitarianism. His notion of state power as a tool to produce a utopian Islamic society was borrowed from the Pakistani ideologue Abu Al-Ala Maududi, whose works he translated into Farsi in 1963. (Maududi’s vision of imposing Islamic order from above in turn was stimulated by Lenin’s theory of an elite as vanguard of the revolution.) American-educated left-leaning technocrats such as Mostafa Chamran, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Ebrahim Yazdi had scripted, and even rewritten, Khomeini’s public statements during his exile in France.
Nevertheless, Foucault was right to think that that, unlike their Russian and Japanese counterparts, the Iranian intelligentsia had articulated a genuinely popular alternative to the project of top-down modernization – one that would also force Sunni thinkers to reassess the role of Islam in modern politics, and much later embark on their own journeys into radicalism. In a society dominated by unresponsive, venal and culturally alien elites, these thinkers were able to persuade, initially at least, the masses with their imagined moral community of like-minded people, held together by a shared belief in the Islamic ideals of equality and justice.
They seemed to offer a truer form of egalitarianism, one with sanction in Islamic law, and enforced by a trained clergy. Their quick and thunderously applauded overthrow of the despised Shah seemed to prove Tocqueville’s assertion that people in the democratic age ‘have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion’ for equality, and that ‘they will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy’.
Khomeinism did not score a complete triumph in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The state’s legitimacy today is drawn from the popular vote rather than the faqīh. The ‘supreme leader’ is appointed, and can be dismissed, by a council of ‘experts’ that is itself elected on a regular basis. Khomeini himself repeatedly revealed Khomeinism to be an improvised programme of action rather than a coherent doctrine. Having opposed voting rights for women in the 1960s, he exhorted, after 1979, a greater role for women in strengthening the revolutionary nation state. He forbade the government from retaliating in kind to Saddam Hussein’s attacks with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war (1981–8); he stigmatized nuclear bombs as un-Islamic. Just before his death, however, he wrote to the then president, and now supreme leader, Khamenei, that any aspect of Islam could be abrogated to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of Islamic tradition, which borrowed from modern idioms and used secular concepts, particularly those of Shariati, and also incorporated a Third Worldist revolutionary discourse. Islamists negating top-down modernizers ended up mirroring, even parodying, their supposed enemy, cancelling their own simple oppositions between Us and Them. The Islamic Revolution in Iran resulted in another repressive state. With its many affronts to dignity and freedom, the Revolution was in this respect like the many self-defeating projects of human liberation since Rousseau started to outline them in the eighteenth century.
But, in the postcolonial age of escalating egalitarianism, the Islamists stood for republicanism, radicalism and nationalism – the real thing, or almost. They offered dignity – often a substitute for freedom in the postcolonial context – and made modernizing elites appear callous tools of Western imperialism. The ideologues and activists of the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini as well as Ali Shariati and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, and all those who followed them, grasped more clearly than modernizing-by-rote monarchs and despots the deeper and transformative potential of the idea brought into being by the Enlightenment: that human beings can radically alter their social conditions. In this important sense, they were a product of the modern world, in the line of the alienated strangers Rousseau addressed, rather than of some irrevocably religious or medieval society.
There Is a Leak in Your Identity
A religious or medieval society was one in which the social, political and economic order seemed unchangeable, and the poor and the oppressed attributed their suffering either to fortuitous happenings – ill luck, bad health, unjust rulers – or to the will of God. The idea that suffering could be relieved, and happiness engineered, by men radically changing the social order belongs to the eighteenth century.
The ambitious philosophers of the Enlightenment brought forth the idea of a perfectible society – a Heaven on Earth rather than in the afterlife. It was taken up vigorously by the French revolutionaries – Saint-Just, one of the most fanatical of them, memorably remarked, ‘the idea of happiness is new in Europe’ – before turning into the new political religions of the nineteenth century. Travelling deep into the postcolonial world in the twentieth century, it turned into a faith in top-down modernization; and transformed traditional ways of life and modes of belief – Buddhism as well as Islam – into modern activist ideologies.
Meanwhile, the religious impulse had not simply disappeared in Europe, as is often supposed, before evidently secular, even anti-religious, ideologies and under the pressures of political and economic modernizatio
n. The French Revolution, Tocqueville wrote, was like Islam in that it ‘flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs’. The decades preceding it constituted, as Herzen pointed out, ‘one of the most religious periods of history’, consecrated by ‘Pope Voltaire’, a ‘fanatic of his religion of humanity’.
Europeans simply had erected new absolutes – progress, humanity, the republic – to replace those of traditional religion and the monarchy. With the advent of modernity, the metaphysical and theological core of Christianity began to manifest itself differently; it was often found at the heart of modern projects of redemption and transcendence that needed their own metaphysics and theology to guide thinking and action. Revolution or radical social transformation effected by individuals was increasingly seen as a kind of Second Coming; violence initiated the new beginning; and, in the final approximation of Christian themes, history was expected to provide the final judgement on the moral community brought into being by men.
The eschatological impulse, a reflection (or distortion) of the Orthodox Church, was recognizably at work among Russian revolutionaries, notably Belinsky and Bakunin. The most fanatical engineers of the human soul, such as Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov and Stalin, were either children of priests or seminarians (like, remarkably, Al-e-Ahmad, Shariati, Qutb and many Islamist ideologues). But nearly every major thinker in Europe – whether liberal, nationalist, Marxist, atheistic or agnostic – also transposed Christian providentialism into would-be rationalistic categories.
Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society. Herzen cautioned that liberalism with its invisible hand alchemizing selfishness into general welfare ‘is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this’; and its ‘theology is political theory’, whose ‘mystical conciliations’ are to be achieved on Earth. Christian eschatology even suffuses the political ideals of today’s insistently Islamic radicals and Hindu nationalists – an inescapable irony of history that would enrage these vendors of gaudy particularism if they became aware of it. And the West’s campaigns for ‘Infinite Justice’ or ‘Enduring Freedom’ mimic global jihad in their will to conflict and open-endedness.
In every human case, identity turns out to be porous and inconsistent rather than fixed and discrete; and prone to get confused and lost in the play of mirrors. The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations – the Nazi reverence for Atatürk, a gay French philosopher’s denunciation of the modern West and sympathy for the Iranian Revolution, or the varied ideological inspirations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) – reveal that the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon. They break the simple axis – religious-secular, modern-medieval, spiritual-materialist – on which the contemporary world is still measured, revealing that its populations, however different their pasts, have been on converging and overlapping paths.
Radical Islamists or Hindu nationalists insist on their cultural distinctiveness and moral superiority precisely because they have lost their religious traditions, and started to resemble their supposed enemies in their pursuit of the latter’s ideologies of individual and collective success. They are driven by what Freud once called the ‘narcissism of small difference’: the effect of differences that loom large in the imagination precisely because they are very small. Khomeini managed to conceal his appropriative mimicry with some ingeniously invented tradition, and his cleric’s authentically frugal lifestyle. But there is much that is clearly parodic today about ISIS’s self-appointed Caliph sporting a Rolex and India’s Hindu revivalist prime minister draped in a $15,000 Savile Row suit with personalized pin stripes.
The key to mimic man’s behaviour lies not in any clash of opposed civilizations, but, on the contrary, in irresistible mimetic desire: the logic of fascination, emulation and righteous self-assertion that binds the rivals inseparably. It lies in ressentiment, the tormented mirror games in which the West as well as its ostensible enemies and indeed all inhabitants of the modern world are trapped.
5. Regaining My Religion
– Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.
– But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
– Yes, says Bloom.
– What is it? says John Wyse.
– A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
– By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.
…
– Or also living in different places.
– That covers my case, says Joe.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
I. Nationalism Unbound
Beatifying Gandhi’s Assassins
On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting on the grounds of his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range, in the chest and abdomen. Gandhi, then seventy-eight, and weakened by the fasts he had undertaken in order to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing one another, collapsed and died instantly. His assassin made no attempt to escape and, as he himself would later admit, even shouted for the police.
Millions of shocked Indians waited for more news that night. They feared unspeakable violence if Gandhi’s murderer turned out to be a Muslim. There was much relief, but also some puzzlement, when the assassin was revealed as Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse had been an activist in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association, or RSS), a paramilitary outfit of upper-caste Indians devoted to the creation of a militant Hindu state. He was also a keen disciple of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the chief ideologue of Hindu nationalism, and Gandhi’s bitter rival for nearly half a century.
In a passionate speech in court, Godse echoed his mentor (who was also on trial for Gandhi’s murder). He accused Gandhi of harming India by appeasing Muslims and by introducing such irrational things as ‘purity of the mind’ and individual conscience into the realm of politics, where, according to him, only national self-interest and military force counted. He claimed that Gandhi’s ‘constant and consistent pandering to the Muslims’ had left him with no choice. Godse requested that no mercy be shown him at his trial; and he went cheerfully to the gallows in November 1949, singing paeans to the ‘living Motherland, the land of the Hindus’.
* * *
More than half a century later, Hindu nationalists have never been closer to fulfilling Godse’s and Savarkar’s dream of making India a land of the Hindus. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the most important among the various Hindu nationalist groups affiliated to the RSS, holds power in India. Narendra Modi, a lifelong member of the RSS, is India’s most powerful prime minister in decades, though he still stands accused, along with his closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002 to extrajudicial killings.
Gandhi’s assassin is revered by many among a young generation of Indians. Repeated attempts to build a temple to Godse have been foiled. But Savarkar, whose portrait hangs in the Indian parliament, is securely placed at the centre of a revamped Indian pantheon. In 2008 Modi inaugurated a website (savarkar.org) that promotes a man ‘largely unknown to the masses because of the vicious propaganda against him’. On his birthday in 2014 the prime minister tweeted about Savarkar’s ‘tireless efforts towards the regeneration of our motherland’.
‘Hinduize all politics,’ Savarkar exhorted, ‘and Militarise Hindudom.’ While Modi’s neo-Hindu devotees on Facebook and Twitter render the air mephitic with hate and malice against various ‘anti-nationals’, his government moves decisively against ostensibly liberal and Wes
ternized Indians, who belong to what the chief of the RSS in 1999 identified as that ‘class of bastards which tries to implant an alien culture in their land’. Denounced by the numerous Hindu supremacists on social media as ‘sickular libtards’ and ‘sepoys’ (the name for Indian soldiers in European armies), these apparent Trojan horses of the West are now being purged from Indian institutions.
This cleansing of rootless cosmopolitans is crucial to realizing Modi’s vision in which India, once known as the ‘golden bird’, will ‘rise again’ and become a ‘world guru’. India’s absurdly uneven and jobless economic growth may have left largely undisturbed the country’s shameful ratios – 43 per cent of all Indian children below the age of five are undernourished, and 48 per cent stunted; nearly half of Indian women of childbearing age are anaemic, and more than half of all Indians still defecate in the open. A minority of upper-caste Hindus have long dominated a diverse country, which contains the second-largest Muslim population in the world. But many ‘rising’ Indians, who feel frustrated by India’s failure to be a great power, share Modi’s fantasy of imminent glory.
The Coldest of Cold Monsters
India, V. S. Naipaul declared in the mid-1970s, is ‘a wounded civilization’, whose obvious political and economic dysfunction conceals a deeper ‘intellectual crisis’. As evidence, Naipaul offered some symptoms he had noticed among upper-caste middle-class Hindus – the same amalgam of self-adoration and self-contempt that Dostoyevsky had detected in the Westernized Russian. These well-born Indians betrayed a ‘craze for phoren’ consumer goods and approval from the West as well as paranoia about the ‘foreign hand’. They asserted that their holy scriptures already contained the discoveries and inventions of Western science, and that an India revitalized by its ancient wisdom would soon vanquish the decadent West.
Age of Anger Page 15