The transformations underway in Tunisia, at the popular, state and constitutional levels, are the most prominent push back against fundamentalism today…
Since the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime in Egypt fell, the Ennahda Movement has been trying to promote the project of the Brotherhood, betting on detoxifying it. However, it failed very badly and has been accused of being implicated in establishing terrorist cells, money laundering, and corruption.
Ennahda has been working to “reassure” Tunisian society over this period for fear of seeing the Egyptian model applied in Tunisia. Ennahda founder and leader Rached Ghannouchi thought this could be achieved by pursuing two ploys in parallel. The first was watering down the party’s views of his movement regarding principles that Tunisians fear for, especially secularism. The second was pushing a narrative that the Ennahda Movement was clean, in contrast to the corrupt civic parties. Both ploys failed.
In April 2022, Ghannouchi published a paper entitled Secularism and the Relationship between Religion and the State from the Ennahda Movement’s Perspective. Writing for Alhurra, Faisal Babiker summed it up. Ghannouchi had the following to say about secularism: Teaching us how to manage our agriculture, industry, and government, and how to run the state is not religion’s job because all these are all technical questions. We learn these techniques through the accumulation of our real-life experiences. The mission of religion is to answer questions about our existence, origins, destiny and purpose, as well as giving us a value system and teaching us principles that can guide our thinking, behavior and governance system.
We safeguard the people’s freedoms and rights, which is the purpose religions came to serve, is to distinguish between religion and politics and determine the constants of religion and its adaptable aspects.
Ghannouchi- according to this report on his lecture- did not distinguish between religion and the state; rather, he distinguished between politics and Dawa (Islamic missionary work). He followed the same plan in his press conferences with international press agencies: religion is not primarily concerned with the state but personal convictions. As for the state, its job is to provide good healthcare, education and other services and create employment for citizens whose religiosity and hearts are left to God. In this lecture, Ghannouchi defends freedom, democracy, and other political principles. He used the most dangerous rhetoric we have become used to seeing from the Muslim Brotherhood, as he sought to appear closer to “Tunisia’s identity” in order to implement his political project, that of an essentially fundamentalist movement. Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood has a knack for concealing its core beliefs and pretending to agree with its rivals, and Ghannouchi did just that.
His rhetoric did not only fool Arab thinkers and writers but also analysts and researchers, among them Allison Pargeter, who has written a book that I have criticized in several articles. In The Muslim Brotherhood and the Ennahda Movement... Return to the Shadows, she claims that Ennahda has settled its position on the question of secularism despite its apprehensions regarding the term, as it was the only way it could save itself politically.
She then claims that Ghannouchi’s party changed and proclaimed to be a “Muslim democratic” party, which she believed would reflect positively on their global image but was unsure of how it would impact the party’s base. This base, she adds, sets it apart from the other parties in the country and is the ultimate source of the party’s power, and is now threatened with losing its cohesion, especially when Ghannouchi leaves the political scene.
While she follows this up with claims about Ennahda distancing itself from other Islamists by attacking ISIS extremely sharply, she does not see the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a terrorist organization, on the basis of the false claim there is no evidence that it had been implicated in terrorist attacks, neither directly nor indirectly. She maintains this position despite accepting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt sees ISIS soldiers as mere overenthusiastic youths who should be shown the light and taught the right way to understand Islam.
In fact, Ghannouchi’s approach of avoiding the question of “separating religion and state” by reframing it as one of “separating Dawa from politics” has confounded several researchers who had not seriously delved into the dark world of fundamentalist movements, writing shabby analysis like that of Pargeter as a result. The problem is that she makes a claim that even inexperienced journalists would never make. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has been implicated in acts of violence, while Ennahda’s “secret organization” has been accused of assassinations and attempted assassinations of parliamentarians and journalists.
Ghannouchi has said that his party believes that secularism is not a requisite for democracy, as some claim, as “one can be a secularist and be a terrorist or a dictator.” “You can be a secular democrat. You can be an unjust Islamist or Muslim, a terrorist or a fighter. And you can be a Muslim democrat. The idea that secularism is inextricably linked to modernity and democracy is arbitrary. Thus, we consistently affirm that Islam and democracy go hand in hand and that democracy is the modern version of the Shura.” Here, either intentionally or unintentionally, he does not address the question of where Islam allows secularism.
To claim that Ennahda has reconciled with secularism is to fall into the rhetorical trap that Ghannouchi had set a long time ago. Indeed, several Arab philosophers were fooled by his book Public Freedoms in the Islamic State. However, when his party held power, it showed its teeth and, according to the charges brought against it before the judiciary, was implicated in terrorism and corruption and violated the country’s constitution.
