Have you actually read what Foucault wrote about Iran, aside from "What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?" which is available online at <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/007863.html> and quotations included in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson's New Politics essay (at <http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue37/Afary37.htm>)?
> > To conclude, post-modernism, especially of the Foucauldian sort, given
> > its criticism of the ideology of Progress, is indeed likely to be a
> > better philosophy than modernism for intellectual reconciliation of
> > Islam and democracy.
>
> Yes, that's the first thing I look for when I'm out shopping for
> philosophies - what will best reconcile Islam and democracy?
What you are not interested in may be an important subject for many, due to many reasons (US foreign policy's increasing focus on the Middle East, emerging social forces in the Middle East, ideology of many immigrants in Europe, and so on), and as a matter of fact, there is a lot of intellectual production about it.
> You'll like how Ervand Abrahamian says that Ahmadinejad has a lot in
> common with Cheney. What we call neocons in the U.S. are "principled
> conservatives" or "principalists" in Iran, says he.
If there is one thing that Cheney and Ahmadinejad have in common, it's that they both know what they want, which we can't say about leftists.
Other than that, their social bases are not the same, and neither are their goals. If they were, there would be no conflict. -- Yoshie