On 10/8/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 10/7/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1. Whatever Foucault saw in the Iranian revolution, neither Khomeini
> nor his supporters nor any other segment of Iranian revolutionaries
> were interested in a romantic vision of pre-industrial Iran. Far from
> it, what they pursued was nationalization and modernization, just like
> many other revolutions. As a matter of fact, the Iranian Revolution
> was more of an urban revolution than any of the socialist revolutions
> before it.
but it's quite possible that he absorbed a lot of the romantic tone of
the Ayatollah's revolution. "We'll restore the moral order that the
Shah's type of industrialization destroyed!"
Khomeini didn't say any such thing, however.
<blockquote>Abrahamian, Ervand. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic
Republic. Berkeley: University of California, 1993.
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006wp/
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sixth, if fundamentalism means a dogmatic adherence to tradition and a
rejection of modern society, then Khomeini does not qualify. He
frequently stressed that Muslims needed to import such essentials as
technology, industrial plants, and modern civilization (tamaddon-e
jadid). His closest disciples often mocked the "traditionalists"
(sunnati) for being "old-fashioned" (kohaniperast). They accused them
of obsessing over ritual purity; preventing their daughters from going
to school; insisting that young girls should always be veiled, even
when no men were present; denouncing such intellectual pursuits as
art, music, and chess-playing; and, worst of all, refusing to take
advantage of newspapers, electricity, cars, airplanes, telephones,
radios, and televisions.[8] In the words of Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad
Javad Hojjati-Kermani, another Khomeini disciple: "These
traditionalists should be labeled reactionary [ertejayi ] for they
want us to return to the age of the donkey. What we need is not the
worship of the past but a genuine renasans [literal transliteration of
the word `Renaissance']."[9] The concepts, not to mention the
terminology, make mockery of the Orientalist claim that Khomeinism is
merely another recurrence of the old traditionalist "epidemic" that
has plagued Islam from its very early days.[10]</blockquote>
Khomeini was not a literal-minded fundamentalist or romantic
traditionalist but a steely modernist revisionist, as Abrahamian
argues -- a Lenin and Stalin of international Shi'ism at the same
time, I'd say.
> 2. In Europe, post-modernists were generally leftists critical of
> state socialism, esp. of the Soviet variety, some of whom were
> sympathetic to autonomist Marxism, anarchism, Maosim, etc....
I'm sure some of them were Trotskyists, who also rejected the Soviet
style of socialism (using different names for it).
Ueno Chizuko, a post-modernist feminist in Japan today, is said to
have been a Trotskyist. Maybe there are other examples.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
