Stéphanie Roza Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #336

Your thesis dealt with Morelly, Mably and Babeuf, and with the way utopia became a political program in the 18th century: how does that work anticipate the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment in Iran?

SR: I started out as a specialist of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The hypothesis guiding my work is essentially the same as that of a few other twentieth-century intellectuals who explicitly claimed the legacy of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, such as the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács or the historian Zeev Sternhell. Like them, I believe that the universalism, rationalism and progressivism of the Enlightenment — whose political expression is found above all in the successive Declarations of the Rights of Man — upended the political field and gave rise to the great oppositions and battles characteristic of the contemporary era. On one side, after 1789, the revolutionary crucible gradually gave birth to the two great tendencies of the progressive camp: socialists and liberals, enemy brothers who nonetheless share a common core of principles that is too often underestimated. On the other side, their common adversaries immediately began building a structured response: the conservative camp, in all its diversity, is the result of these theoretical and political efforts. Its representatives were well aware that they could not simply call for a restoration of the old order, but had to propose a new alternative (albeit rooted in the values of the past) to the democratic project of modernity.

This dividing line between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, or between progressives and conservatives if you prefer, has structured political camps and ideological struggles for more than two centuries now. I devote my work to studying these ideological struggles in the West but also in the East, because I believe there is no watertight border between the two worlds — quite the opposite. The clash between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment has been, at least since the end of the 19th century, a universal reality.

Is Ahmad Fardid the source of Iranian Heideggerianism?

SR: Ahmad Fardid is the most famous Iranian Heideggerian, because his lectures and courses had a great impact on his audiences. He was the one who trained several generations of “Muslim Heideggerians,” even under the Islamic Republic, which he embraced enthusiastically. But the first to introduce Heidegger’s ideas into Iran was the orientalist Henri Corbin, himself a translator of Heidegger from German into French; while he was setting up the department of Iranian studies at the French Institute in Tehran in the early 1940s, he proposed a religious reading of Heidegger in light of the Muslim theological tradition. Fardid spent a great deal of time with Corbin and drew inspiration from his teaching.

In The Left against the Enlightenment?, you already examined the divorce between part of the left and the rationalist, universalist legacy of the Enlightenment: do we find this same split in Iran?

SR: In a way, Iran is a laboratory of the left’s rejection of the Enlightenment legacy. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of the most important Iranian left-wing intellectuals (Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati) developed in their writings the idea that Iran had to forge its own path toward emancipation. It was not enough, they argued, to free oneself from the West’s imperialist grip on material resources or on Iranian governments; one also had to break free from its philosophical, cultural and political influence: secularism, gender mixing, materialism, and ultimately democracy itself had to be rejected (though this last point remains ambiguous in Al-e Ahmad’s work). In their own terms, the East had to be cured of “Westoxification,” a serious illness, and the remedy lay in a “return to the self,” a return to the self that had, one way or another, to bring Shia Islam to power. As early as the 1960s, Al-e Ahmad supported Khomeini in his opposition to the Shah, even though the Shia leader was fighting against the land reform and women’s right to vote championed by the monarch. Strikingly, Al-e Ahmad acknowledged finding similarities between his own approach and that of a nationalist, conservative German author such as Ernst Jünger.

Following in the footsteps of these anti-Western intellectuals, many Third-Worldist left-wing groups born in the 1960s took up the idea that Iran’s liberation had to come through Islam, or more precisely through an Islamic socialism. At the time of the 1979 Revolution, they were joined by the Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh) in an alliance with Khomeini against the Shah’s regime and its Western backers. This was an alliance that was not merely strategic but also political: by embracing the project of an Islamic Republic, the Iranian left thus contributed considerably to giving the Supreme Leader a socialist-tinged veneer. This unnatural political pact would tragically turn against them, since shortly after seizing power the mullahs set about massacring these “Islamo-Marxists,” as they were called at the time.

Do the mullahs buy into Nazism without the antisemitism?

SR: On the contrary: the mullahs are the ideological heirs of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood — even though the latter are Sunni — who, from the 1930s onward, partly modeled their own organizational structure on that of the NSDAP, relayed Nazi antisemitic propaganda, and even received money from Germany to fight the British as well as the establishment of Zionism in Mandatory Palestine. Their organic intellectual, Sayyid Qutb, wrote in the 1950s, in Our Struggle Against the Jews, that Allah should send another Hitler to punish the Jews for their misdeeds. Qutb was translated into Persian in the 1960s by certain Shia clerics close to Khomeini, starting with Ali Khamenei himself, the future Supreme Leader.

For their part, the mullahs did not exterminate the few thousand Jews still present on Iranian soil; but they have reprinted Mein Kampf and, many times over, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a classic of European antisemitic literature since its publication in the early twentieth century. Since 1979, they have proclaimed that Israel is a cancerous tumor at the heart of the Muslim world and that its eradication through jihad is a sacred duty for every Muslim. Moreover, since the late 1990s, Tehran has become the world capital of Holocaust denial, and the mullahs work hard to spread the idea, throughout the world, that the Jews are the perpetrators of genocide against the Palestinian people. Not without success.

How did you meet Amirpasha Tavakkoli?

SR: We were both attending a conference on Jean-Paul Sartre, where Amirpasha was presenting a paper on how the Iranian left of the 1960s and 1970s received Sartre’s famous preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. After the talk, we had a long discussion about the Iranian left and the French left of that era. Our rapport and our friendship were almost immediate. Amirpasha wrote his doctoral thesis on the British debate over the French Revolution. We are both specialists of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, and our views converge on its precious legacy.

You have worked on the Lukácsian reading of Sartrean existentialism: does Georg Lukács help us better understand the Iranian phenomenon?

SR: From Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 onward, Lukács embarked on a very long reflection on Nazi ideology and its roots in European culture. The result of this reflection appeared in the early 1950s: The Destruction of Reason, a work that, because of certain excesses but also the context of its publication, remained largely misunderstood. Yet its author, in my view, put forward a very powerful thesis by identifying a philosophical and political tradition dating back to 1789 — that of “irrationalism” — rooted in the absolute rejection of the rationalism, universalism and progressivism carried by the French Revolution, of which National Socialism appears to him, in the history of ideas, as the ultimate twentieth-century offshoot. For my part, I believe this analysis holds true beyond its original setting of Europe. The struggle between rationalism and irrationalism has since moved to other latitudes, and the Iranian mullahs are, in my view, the Eastern version of irrationalism — or, to use another term, radical anti-Enlightenment figures. This explains the closeness of their worldview — mutatis mutandis, of course — to that of certain major figures of the Western Counter-Enlightenment tradition, from Joseph de Maistre to Spengler, by way of Alexis Carrel (an author who greatly inspired Sayyid Qutb). In a sense, then, I have transposed Lukács’s hypothesis onto the non-Western world.

Does a left-wing current of thought exist today running through Iranian society?

SR: The mullahs paradoxically succeeded where the Shah of Iran, with his authoritarian methods of modernization, had failed: they achieved the secularization of Iranian society. Today, it is estimated that at most 15 to 20% of the population still supports the regime — which broadly corresponds to its clientele. 50,000 of the country’s 75,000 mosques have closed in recent years for lack of worshippers, and the 25,000 that remain are half-empty. Demonstrations rejecting the mullahs, their morality and their foreign policy of pouring money into terrorist organizations that destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond have gone on unabated for decades. They range from massive protest marches to refusals to wear the veil in public, to schoolchildren refusing to sing hymns to the Supreme Leader, and more. These Iranians also largely reject official antisemitism, as can be seen from numerous signs (visits to foreign websites dealing with the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War, the success of the play about Anne Frank in Tehran, slogans chanted at demonstrations). The mullahs’ efforts to enlist young people in support of the Palestinian cause sometimes meet with fierce hostility — directed, it seems to me, less at the Palestinians themselves than at their turbaned supporters. At every demonstration for several decades now, protesters have braved death to voice their hatred of the Islamic Republic and their aspirations to democratic rights and freedoms, as they showed once again in January 2026. Faced with this groundswell, the regime has had no solution other than to unleash horrific bloodshed. For now, the mullahs remain firmly in power. But nothing they do can change this fact: today’s Iranians are, overwhelmingly, children of the Enlightenment. They hate theocracy and aspire to fulfill, in Iran itself, the promises of 1789.