Ignatieff in Iran: Pragmatist thinkers like Rorty are favoured to radicals like Foucault

I found this article by accident. It is Michael Ignatieff's account of his last year's visit to Iran, with invitation from Ramin Jahanbegloo who was later arrested on charges of acting against the national security:

Jahanbegloo says he thinks of himself as a bridge between Iran and those universities. He invites a steady stream of philosophers like Richard Rorty from Stanford and Agnes Heller from the New School in New York to give talks to students. He sees some signs that their ideas are finding a toehold in Tehran. Three decades ago, the intellectuals du jour were Michel Foucault and fellow radical theorists. They arrived in Tehran proclaiming their solidarity with a revolution that actively despised them while persecuting its own freethinkers. Now the pendulum in Tehran has swung toward pragmatic liberals like Berlin.

It's quite interesting how Ignatieff dismisses Foucault's support for the Iranian revolution with just labelling him as radical and praises Jahanbegloo's attempts to bring the liberal, pragmatic thinkers such as Rorty and Heller.

This is of course a cheap shot at Foucault from the right, by Ignatieff, a strong supporter of the US invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds.

But also from the left has been emerged attacks on Foulcault's praise for the Iran's revolution, the most famous of which, by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson in their book (an excerpt), titled 'Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism.' (I have ordered it recently to read Foucault's original dispatches for Corrierre Dela Serra in his two visits before and after the 1979 revolution.)

A recurring theme these days is that the lines between the right and the left, when it comes to Iran, has become so blurry that they has almost become meaningless.

The left has started to challenge the Islamic Republic's legitimacy in a similar fashion to the right. This is what living in the American paradigm does to one's intellect, I suspect.

I know, I have to elaborate on all this...