Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: The Philosopher, The King, & The Holy Man
Aired: 2026-04-13
Duration: 08:19


=== The Revolution That Failed (07:36) ===

[00:00:03]  Once upon a time, there was a revered French philosopher famous for his critique of coercive power and manipulative discourse in the West.
[00:00:12]  Captivated by developments elsewhere, he waxed poetic about a revolutionary movement that would depose a king and put a holy man on his throne, saying it carried the pure vitality of the spark of life itself.
[00:00:30]  Then this happened.
[00:00:34]  To an anti Khomeini rally yet.
[00:00:36]  The imposition of Islamic law here has started with an order to women to cover their heads in government offices.
[00:00:42]  Many are furious.
[00:00:43]  Only a minority in Tehran already follow the instruction.
[00:00:48]  But the issue has provided an escape valve for many of the men here who, for days, have been spoiling for trouble.
[00:00:54]  Led by a few Islamic zealots, several hundred men eventually attacked the protesters.
[00:00:59]  Several of the women who stood their ground with considerable courage were stabbed as they chanted slogans for equal rights.
[00:01:06]  That was a news report on the ground from Tehran.
[00:01:09]  On March 8th, 1979, International Women's Day, it was less than a month after the Islamic Revolution declared victory.
[00:01:18]  It is estimated that 100,000 women came out to protest the legal imposition of the Shador, or hijab, as well as the looming abolition of the Family Protections Law, which had in 1975 raised the legal marriage age to 18 for women.
[00:01:35]  That law had also given women equal divorce rights and limited the number of wives a man could marry.
[00:01:42]  As you heard, those women were met over the six days of the protest by groups of Islamist men who beat and stabbed them and even brandished and fired guns.
[00:01:54]  These men formed the first iteration of what would come to be called Hezbollah, or the Party of God.
[00:02:01]  And while the women, looking at this point in dress and hairstyle like they could have been in any secular Western city, chanted slogans against losing their rights, the men chanted back at them that they would submit or be beaten.
[00:02:17]  The family protection law was abolished in the coming days, meaning it became legal again for men to marry girls with their father's permission as young as nine years old and to take up to four wives.
[00:02:31]  The exploitive practice of temporary marriage, a loophole in religious law which allows men to legally have sex with women for a set period of time under the guise of a short term marriage arrangement, was also back on the table.
[00:02:47]  Now, the Western world was shocked at all of this, but they shouldn't have been.
[00:02:52]  The new ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, he's the holy man in our story, had published a book while in exile about his vision for the new but deeply regressive Islamic State.
[00:03:05]  Back in 1971, but in the years since, especially since his relocation to a picturesque village west of Paris, France, the Ayatollah had leaned into anti imperialist, pro democratic language and played up his image as a calm, noble, religious leader wanting to free his country from the oppressions of monarchy under the authoritarian Shah.
[00:03:32]  He's the king in our story.
[00:03:35]  I'm going to tell you about our philosopher.
[00:03:39]  He is to this day the most widely cited scholar in the humanities.
[00:03:44]  He's most well known for his analysis of power dynamics.
[00:03:48]  Even after his death in 1984, Michel Foucault remains a towering figure of the progressive and intellectual anti imperialist left, a huge influence on critical theory, feminist studies, queer theory, and political science.
[00:04:04]  He visited Iran twice in 1978 as the Islamic Revolution was reaching its climax.
[00:04:11]  And published a series of articles about it in an Italian newspaper.
[00:04:15]  Foucault was captivated, even intoxicated by what he saw, dubbing it a new form of spiritual politics, writing that the revolution was a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience.
[00:04:41]  Islam, he said, is not just a religion, but a source of moral energy capable of resisting the West.
[00:04:48]  And then, about the holy man and his political agenda, Foucault said Khomeini is not a politician.
[00:04:55]  There will not be a Khomeini party.
[00:04:56]  There will not be a Khomeini government.
[00:04:58]  He is the focal point of a collective will.
[00:05:01]  The Islamic government exists only as a utopia, a political will.
[00:05:07]  Once the Shah's dictatorship is abolished, all this mist will dissipate.
[00:05:11]  Authentic politics will take command.
[00:05:14]  And we will soon forget the old preacher.
[00:05:18]  Now, feminist Iranians who'd actually read Khomeini were, however, raising the alarm about what was to come.
[00:05:25]  And one even published a response to Foucault's enthusiasm for the revolution in a French newspaper.
[00:05:31]  He replied to her in print, dismissing her concerns.
[00:05:34]  But we'll get into all of this and unpack what actually happened in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, what led up to it, what happened afterwards.
[00:05:45]  Today, as the U.S. and Israel's very one sided, illegal, and unpopular war against the Islamic Republic continues, and an overwhelming majority of their population cry out for freedom after at least 30,000 were killed in the streets for protesting back in January,
[00:06:03]  all of the old ghosts and questions they murmur are being stirred up again, while almost every day the regime silences another young person by summary execution for the crime of daring to talk back.
[00:06:19]  Is the last 47 years of brutal theocratic tyranny in Iran, as well as Islamist extremism in general, explainable as a cultural response to Western imperialism?
[00:06:31]  Were the seeds of the 1979 revolution sown 26 years previous by the CIA and MI6 enacting what has since been called a coup against a democratically elected prime minister and then installing the Shah?
[00:06:49]  Iranian communists and liberals, along with the Western intelligentsia, represented here by esteemed philosopher Michel Foucault, that overthrowing the king would lead to a more open, free, and equal society, only to then drag his citizens kicking and screaming back into an ultra conservative pre modern theocracy.
[00:07:11]  I'm going to suggest to you that how we learn and think about these kinds of questions informs our understanding of the world we live in.
[00:07:20]  And the forces that shape it.
[00:07:22]  But rather than providing a quasi conspiratorial team sports political faith, we may find that a more fleshed out picture leaves us with fewer simple solutions, even if we have a clearer view of the puzzle itself.

=== Bonus Episode: Philosopher and King (00:38) ===

[00:07:40]  I'm Julian Walker, and you're listening to a bonus episode titled The Philosopher, The King, and The Holy Man.
[00:07:47]  You've been listening to a conspiratoriality bonus episode sample.
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