Volume 52, Number 18 · November 17, 2005
The Misunderstood Muslims
By Pankaj Mishra
No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
by Reza Aslan
Random House, 310 pp., $25.95
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism
by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson
University of Chicago Press, 346 pp., $60.00; $24.00 (paper)
In the fall of 1978, Michel Foucault traveled to Iran for Corriere della Sera to write about growing mass protests against Reza Shah Pahlavi's regime. Famous for his theoretical analyses of European attitudes toward madness, hospitals, and prisons, Foucault knew little, by his own admission, about Persian or Islamic history; and he hadn't previously been a journalist or reporter. Nevertheless, as he put it, 'we have to be there at the birth of ideas.'
Review, 4251 words
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