Identifying a tension

Michel Foucault welcomed the Iranian Revolution and its “Islamic spirit” as an intellectually exciting revolt against the rigidity of modern-secular imagination. He sarcastically asked, “What is it about what happened in Iran that a whole lot of people, on the left and on the right, find somewhat irritating?” Answering this question requires a serious exploration into the genealogy of the Western narrative of modernity and its dichotomizing representation of non-Western cultures and societies. Is modernity a totalizing (dominating and exclusionary) ideology primarily, and inescapably, grounded in European cultural and moral experience, and therefore incapable of understanding other cultures as anything other than as its inferior “other”? Or, is modernity a mode of social and cultural experience of the present that is open to all forms of contemporary experiences and possibilities? The dilemma here is how to reconcile the tension between modernity's promise of openness and inclusive qualities (the Enlightenment moral promise and the modernist radical vision) and the blatant Eurocentric narrative of modernization that forecloses the possibility of real “local” experiences and of their contribution in the realization of modernity. This study lays out a story of Iranian modernity, intending to explore this troubled, and troubling, situation.