Foucault’s 1978-79 interventions into the movements that coalesced into the Iranian revolution, his conversations with Iranian and regional intellectuals and figures, and the theoretical claims that both informed this work and emerged from it – perhaps especially the vexed notion of “political spirituality – are among the most misunderstood and controversial aspects of Foucault’s career. However, new scholarship in Foucault’s late project and the revolution itself, including richer understandings of the context and conditions of its emergence, have deeply complicated this picture. This panel will re-approach Foucault on Iran and Islam more broadly, in order to more clearly wrestle with his engagements with Islam and the Islamic world. Further, we will investigate the ways that Islamic traditions, contemporary movements, and intellectual currents challenge and complicate Foucault’s work within and beyond these specific interventions. Finally, we will ask how these particular conversations intersect with historic and emerging scholarship within all of these areas.
Following the death of Mahsa Amini in custody in 2022, after her arrest for not fully complying with the Islamic Republic’s dress code, a movement known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement emerged that is mainly characterized by its resistance to state control through various means, including unveiling and promoting a discourse of disobedience and self-government. While this discourse marks a radical departure from 1979 regarding Islamic governmentality, echoes of Foucault’s arguments in “Is it Useless to Revolt” are evident. In this paper, I examine the 2022 movement in tandem with this article and through the lens of Foucault’s key notion of revolt against subjugation [assujettissement]. I argue that Foucault’s concept of (political) spirituality is so broad that it encompasses both these divergent political movements, framing them primarily as revolts against governmentality that entail transformative practices of self-government.
This paper explores the way Foucault’s thinking is entangled with efforts to think, to defend, and to critique the secular. On the one hand, Foucauldian genealogy and discourse analysis are at the heart Talal Asad’s critique of secularism. On the other hand, some of the most vocal critics of Asad and his followers are acolytes of the late Edward Said and adherents to his notion of “secular criticism.” This paper attempts to gather these two conflictual streams of Foucault reception and read them back into Foucault’s text. It then asks: what secular tropes are at work in the organization of Foucault’s thinking? Does some notion of the secular inform the way Foucault writes history, thinks between epistemes, and conceives his periodizations? Might there be a political theology at work in his ethics? The paper works up and works through this problem space.
Islam has been a key feature in the history of Malaysia, and Muslims have been considered a majority community. The spread of Islam in transforming the population has been narrated as a process of Islamisation. Since the 1970s to recent times, this Islamisation narrative has gained further dominance in influencing the youths and civil society movements, educational institutions, government policies, and also legal and political decisions in the country. However, critics have perceived the Islamisation narrative as to be over-simplifying the complex inter-relations between Islam and the Malay-Muslims population. Thus, this paper aims for a critical examination, by using the Episteme as a key concept. This paper shall demonstrate how Islam is related to three different epistemic phases; under the Malay Sultanates, British Colonial rule, and the nation-state in the history of Malaysia, and its relation to knowledge and power in shaping the Muslim population in Malaysia.
Apocalyptic resistance, a term that this paper uses to refer to the resistance presented in and by the apocalypse, is inseparable from the notions of knowledge and power. However, the conception of knowledge and power and their interrelation in apocalyptic resistance deserve more examination that goes beyond the simple moral representation of (revealed) knowledge as good and pure or the common reading of a unilateral causation – knowledge giving rise to the power to resist. This essay will conduct this examination by critically engaging with Michel Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge and showing how it problematizes the general apocalyptic understanding of revealed knowledge as merely a reception occurring in an external process outside the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world, unrelated to its existing power relations. This essay argues for a wholistic understanding of revelation, with which the power-knowledge complex that exists in apocalyptic resistance can be better identified and examined.