Emmanuel Razavi

Even though he said he wanted to establish a democracy, he imposed Islamic law and the veil on women. Suspicious of the army, he had his senior officers executed and, on the advice of the historian and activist Mohsen Sazegara, set up the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary militia which in just a few years became the armed wing of the Iranian regime, as well as a veritable financial trust.

Contrary to what left-wing intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault have said, we must remember that Iran in the late 70s, although ruled by a king – Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – was a country where there was equality between men and women, where the veil was not compulsory, where there were cinemas and access to education for all. Their historical revisionism is in fact based on a form of naivety, combined with a lack of understanding of Iranian realities and an insatiable desire for a great revolutionary night, even if it is Islamist. 15 years earlier, the Shah of Iran had launched a programme to nationalise certain industries, forests and water resources, at the same time as launching a major literacy campaign and reorganising the public administration. Importantly, it also granted women the right to vote. Finally, to make up for the shortage of teachers, the regime is forming a “knowledge army” made up of young conscripts who, after a few months’ training, will go and “teach” in rural areas. Convinced that a change in customs was needed, the Shah also organised a referendum that won the support of over five million Iranians. He proposed an agrarian reform that consisted of buying up land to redistribute it to the poorest people, even though 75% of the population worked in the agricultural sector, and 20% of this land belonged to religious foundations and 50% to large landowning families who behaved in a quasi-feudal manner towards the peasants. Acquiescent to Western ideas, the ambitious Mohammad Reza Shah wanted to transform Iran into a regional and international power, while gaining a certain legitimacy among the working classes. But his plans met with a certain amount of resistance, particularly from the Shiite clergy, the landowners, who saw them as a confiscation of their property and prerogatives in the field of education. In reality, the clerics were panicking at the idea that the Shah was hindering their freedom of action in areas they had controlled for centuries. They also denounced – even if they were as corrupt as the government – the corruption surrounding this “white revolution”, otherwise known as the “Revolution of the Shah and the People”, suspecting that the regime was allowing some of its supporters to benefit from the redistribution of land.

Inspired by the communication strategies of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian clerics began to position themselves as victims, accusing the Shah of wanting to upset the established order in Iran and sweeping aside Iranian customs and traditions with a wave of the hand. They invent thousands of political prisoners in Iranian jails, when in fact there are no more than 200 – which is too many – and “forget” that the Shah opened up Iranian prisons, where prisoners were allowed to take diplomas to help them reintegrate, to major NGOs so that they could investigate.

In France, of course, Sartre and Foucault were silent about this, just as they were silent about the deadly announcements that Khomeini might have made. One of them, published in one of his books and relating to his desire to wage jihad, should have alerted them: “Jihad means the conquest of all non-Muslim territories. Such a war could well be declared after the formation of an Islamic government worthy of the name, under the leadership of the Imam or under his orders. It will then be the duty of every able-bodied adult man to volunteer for this war of conquest, the aim of which is to put Koranic law into force from one end of the Earth to the other”.

But they don’t care. The alliance between left-wing thought and Islamist revolutionaries, whom these intellectuals see as the new proletariat, embodies for them the convergence of struggles, ideal for advancing their ideas. They have not understood that Khomeini has a fierce hatred of all forms of secular and democratic ideas.

As soon as he came to power, Ayatollah Khomeini relentlessly hunted down the main leaders of the Iranian left who supported him, whether communists or Islamo-Marxists. Thousands were executed or forced into exile.

From Tehran to Paris, the same mechanisms

In 1978, left-wing intellectuals were denying the obvious and suggesting that Islamism would never take root in Iran, while Khomeini had been talking about his “Islamic government” project since his years in exile in Iraq. Jean-Paul Sartre, who was part of a support committee for Ayatollah Khomeini, even uttered this telling phrase in reference to the Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati, whom he considered to be the ideologist of the Iranian revolution: “I don’t have a religion, but if I had to choose one, it would be Shariati.” The author of the play Les Mains sales thus endorsed the ideology that is supposed to have inspired an Islamist murderer: Khomeini.

Let’s make no mistake about it: what’s happening today in Europe, and particularly in France, where the far-left parties are playing to electoral gain by supporting the theses of the Islamists – such as the promotion of the hijab or the concept of Islamophobia – is very similar to what happened in Iran between 1978 and 1979.

Despite the horror of the pogrom committed by the Hamas terrorist organisation in Israel on 7 October, some leaders of La France Insoumise (LFI) find themselves supporting it by describing it as a “resistance movement”, or finding extenuating circumstances for the Lebanese Shiite Islamist militia Hezbollah, which takes its orders from Tehran and relentlessly bombs civilians in northern Israel. What’s more, some of them, like Aymeric Caron, believe that banning the abaya from schools is an anti-secular act, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon, after many U-turns, has made his support for the most anti-secular Islam his hobbyhorse.

We’ll pass over the astonishing complacency of these armchair revolutionaries with the “honour killings” perpetrated by kids whose brains are gangrened by Islamism. They see these murderers as victims of society, when in fact they are inquisitors and executioners.

And it is this lack of foresight in the face of the rise of this Islamism, among thugs and academics alike, that will be their undoing.

Of course, it could be argued that comparison is not reason. And the Iran of 1978 bears no resemblance to the France of 2024. Yet the same mechanisms and the same alliances are being played out again and again. Even in universities and grandes écoles like La Sorbonne and Sciences Po, where far-left students’ support for Hamas, their Holocaust denial and their anti-Semitic stance – under the guise of anti-Zionism – are taking onworrying proportions.

Ignorant of the history of alliances between Islamism and the far left, these “useful idiots” have no idea that those they support hate them and only use them for politico-religious ends.

They should be wary, however, because if they fail to learn the lessons of history, it will end up repeating itself..