Foucault's ignorance

A new book has been published on the relationship between the influential French philosopher Michel Foucault and radical Islam, entitled Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.

Arts & Letters Daily are linking to an excerpt from Foucault's writing in it and a review of the book in the Boston Globe.

The question is, whether this throws any new light on the tendency of today's far left to make political alliances with Islamists.

What were Foucault's specific errors? The Globe says that this leading scholar

[...] accepted at face value the idiosyncratic reading of Islam promulgated by Ali Shariati, an Iran-born, French-educated sociologist who promulgated a militant Islamist ideology identifying martyrdom as the only true path to salvation. He also spoke of an Islamist ideology shot through with Western elements as if it were a unified and absolute Other. He accepted a mythological rendering of Shi'ism as a historical religion of resistance, when, in fact, it was imposed by authoritarian force upon Iran in the 17th century and had collaborated with authoritarian power more often than it had resisted it.

Like today's apologists for terrorism in Iraq, Foucault didn't know or care to find out what sort of revolution he was in favour of, as long as that revolution was against "industrial capitalism". It is good to have the details of his ignorance on record.