Forty years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic and the rise of “theocracy”, we have almost completely forgotten the original role that Islam played in Iranian uprising in 1978-79. Instead, in late 1978, such an originality was grasped by Michel Foucault who, in his analysis of Iranian facts, developed the concept of "political spirituality". This paper aims therefore to show the genesis of this core concept, on the one hand, in the tradition of Shia Islam and, on the other hand, in the research program on the counter-conducts that Foucault himself was developing at the end of the 1970s. The need to clarify this concept is due to at least two reasons: firstly because it provides an hermeneutic key to highlight the irreducibility of the Iranian uprising - and of its Islamic inspiration - to its theocratic results; secondly because it conceptualizes the most radical form of resistance to power in terms of an autonomy that is gained in the exposure of life itself to the risk of death.
