by Lin Noueihed
In the aftermath of Ben Ali's removal, a new battle front has emerged, one that does not pit people against their system but pits Tunisia's Islamists, who faced the most brutal repression under the old regime but have emerged as the biggest winners in the country's first elections, against its powerful secularists. It is a struggle that has deep roots in Tunisia's history, and it is a struggle for the very identity of the new country Tunisians seek to build.
The Islamist Renaissance
Few of the Tunisians who went to greet Rachid Ghannouchi, when he returned to his homeland after twenty-one years in exile, managed to catch a glimpse of the diminutive Islamist leader. Now nearly seventy, Ghannouchi was swamped by the crowds that awaited him at Carthage International Airport on 30 January 2011. Thousands of men, neatly dressed in jeans and shirts, and women in muted head scarves and matching overcoats, thronged the car park and the arrivals lobby, threatening to spill across a bulging cordon into the baggage hall beyond. In the relative peace near the whirring luggage belts, small groups of relatives tearfully and privately embraced the returning exiles before they exited to the adulation of the waiting public. Some had found prime spots where they held bunches of flowers to hand to emerging returnees, only to be thrown into disarray as the crowd surged spontaneously forward with the arrival of Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's once-banned Ennahda party and no relation to the eponymous former prime minister.
Further back, a handful of secularist and feminist activists, conspicuous by their tight clothes and glossy hair, held a small protest that warned against what they feared would be the inevitable outcome of Ghannouchi's return: the Islamization of Tunisian politics and society. Standing at the edge of the scrum, their chants drowned out by the buzz of conversation and occasional cries of ‘Allah Akbar’, or ‘God is Greatest’, that rippled through the crowd, one of the activists held up a sign that encapsulated an attitude widely held in this most secular of North African countries: ‘No Islamism, no theocracy, no sharia and no stupidity’. Another secularist stuck in the traffic that gridlocked the streets outside later muttered that Ghannouchi thought himself Tunisia's answer to Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who returned from exile in 1979 to throngs of people and what history has called Iran's Islamic Revolution.
The handful of secularists at the airport were vastly outnumbered by Ennahda supporters, but sensing the fear and potential hostility among their less religious brethren, and perhaps confident in the strength of their numbers, the Islamists held aloft their own, more conciliatory, banners. 'No to extremism, yes to moderate Islam’ and ‘Do not fear Islam’, they implored in slogans that spoke directly to US, European and domestic concerns.43
With airport security hardly anywhere to be seen, volunteers, all of them young men sporting white T-shirts and baseball caps so that they could recognize one another, tried to marshal the throngs. Yet when he finally spoke in the car park, Ghannouchi's words were barely audible to the crowds that seemed to fill every corner of the tarmac, even through a loudspeaker. Some supporters had scaled pylons and street lights to catch a glimpse of the old man with the salt-and-pepper hair. Others looked down from a nearby bridge and, as the crowds dispersed, a cluster of men could be seen kneeling in prayer on a grassy verge, an unimaginable sight only weeks before. Struggling to keep Ghannouchi from being crushed, the volunteers clearly knew each other, they were organized, they were polite and softly spoken, and they had a plan – no mean feat for an organization whose members had been jailed, exiled or driven underground for most of the four decades since it was formed in 1981.
Ennahda played no organized role in the Tunisian revolt, but like Sunni Islamist groups in Egypt, Libya and Morocco, it is by far the biggest winner from the first phase of uprisings. It has emerged as the single most popular and organized political force in the North African country, winning 41.7 per cent of the seats in Tunisia's constituent assembly which is tasked with rewriting the constitution, much to the alarm of secularist Tunisians who fear it will use that position to Islamize Tunisia's basic law.
Tunisians are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims and tribal loyalties are weak, potentially avoiding the bloody tussles that convulse more religiously or ethnically diverse democracies like Iraq or Lebanon, but a struggle over the appropriate role of religion in politics has coloured much of Tunisia's post-independence history and polarizes public opinion like no other issue. Mistrust runs deep between the two camps and has been the source of deepening tensions as the country picks its way along the treacherous road from dictatorship to multi-party democracy. The stakes are high not only for Tunisia but for other Arab countries which have sought to emulate its uprising and which face similar challenges in the post-election phase. Unlike in other Arab states, Tunisia's secular tradition is strong and while secular parties are splintered with no single dominant player, together they won almost 60 per cent of seats in the constituent assembly. A change in the secular approach to politics in Tunisia would mark a break with the national identity nurtured since independence and with the idea of laïcité, or secularism, imported by the former colonial power.
Independence leader Habib Bourguiba had championed the fight against the French, but once they were gone he had accelerated their drive to banish the trappings of religion from public life and began to appropriate the functions of existing Islamic institutions for the newly sovereign state. In 1956 he abolished the sharia courts, which had been run in accordance with Islamic laws, and nationalized the habous, religious trusts that owned 150,000 hectares and funded mosques and religious institutions as the church once did in Europe.44 In 1958, Bourguiba began a programme to abolish the religious curriculum in favour of French-style education that had been fast gaining popularity, and by 1961 Tunisia's ancient Islamic college of al-Zaitouna was given over to the new and secular University of Tunis.45
Bourguiba also introduced the Personal Status Code. Jealously defended by Tunisian feminists to this day, the code abolished polygamy and gave women greater rights in marriage and divorce, introducing a minimum age for marriage and demanding that it be mutually consensual. The Personal Status Code afforded women more freedoms in the 1950s than constitutions in most Arab countries half a century later. It was a daring move. Even today, many Arab governments impose civil law on all areas of life except the family, which remains under the control of the religious courts. In a society that frowned upon those who broke the fast – publicly, at least – during the holy month of Ramadan, Bourguiba launched a campaign in 1960 to denounce fasting as an impediment to the economy. He was even shown on television drinking a glass of orange juice during Ramadan.46
Bourguiba, who later declared himself president-for-life, was not merely concerned with crushing old elites who might threaten his power. In the mould of Turkey's Kemal Ataturk, the bespectacled autocrat saw himself as a modernizer, seeking to move Tunisia away from what he saw as outdated religious customs and towards a new secular nationalist identity. In that vein, Bourguiba discouraged women working in the public sector from wearing the hijab, the traditional Muslim headscarf, going so far as to call it a rag. In a 1957 speech, Bourguiba argued: ‘If we understand that middle-aged women are reticent about abandoning an old habit, we can only deplore the stubbornness of those who continue to oblige their children to wear a veil in school. We even see civil servants going to work in that odious rag?…‘47
He also granted Tunisian women the right to an abortion, regardless of their marital status, and in 1957 allowed women to vote for the first time in municipal elections. Even by European standards, the reforms were progressive. In France, women were only granted the vote in 1944, and in Switzerland in 1971. Abortion remains a highly divisive issue in the United States today and is banned in many Christian-majority countries around the world. By the standards of North Africa and the Middle East, Bourguiba's policies were revolutionary and they made him deeply unpopular among some Tunisians, who felt their identity as Muslims was under assault.
Bourguiba's
Tunisia was not secular in the strict sense of the word – the constitution clearly identified Islam as the religion of the state – but his reforms shaped Tunisia into the country it is today and defined the cleavages that still divide it long after his death. Significant swathes of Tunisia's elite, even if they profess personal faith, are secularists in the Bourguiba tradition and are deeply suspicious of efforts to return Islam to political life. ‘Tunisia will not change to adapt itself to the Islamists and their ideas. The Islamists must adapt to modern Tunisia,’ Neji Bghouri, then head of the journalists’ union, said soon after the revolution. ‘This is an issue of great sensitivity among Tunisia's political elite.‘48
Other Tunisians, however, have yearned to return to the Islam that they equate with an identity that was ripped painfully away from them first by the French and then by the independent state. It was a yearning that Ghannouchi both felt and sought to respond to. Asked at Ghannouchi's triumphant return how a group banned for so long had managed to organize itself so quickly, one of the young volunteers touched his chest and answered softly that the faith had remained in his heart: ‘Our activities were stopped, but you cannot disperse an ideology.‘49
Understanding that it would be a kiss of death for the nascent Tunisian revolution, Ennahda was careful not to issue any statements during the uprising, and no Islamists among the crowds raised religious slogans. Ghannouchi waited two weeks to return to the country, partly to avoid any accusations that he was returning Khomeini-style to claim victory. In an atmosphere of post-revolutionary suspicion, Ghannouchi took pains to strike a conciliatory tone, saying he took Turkey's ruling Islamist AK Party as his inspiration for Tunisia. Despite winning such a large chunk of the vote, Ennahda did not field a candidate in the presidential election, trying to reassure sceptics that it did not aspire to seize the highest office and declare an Islamic state.
After the elections, it backed the nomination of the new president Moncef Marzouki, a former human rights activist and leader of a non-religious party banned under Ben Ali. Even before the election, Ennahda had agreed not to challenge the Personal Status Code, a major concession for an Islamist party, on the condition that the constitution retained the existing first clause that identified Tunisia as a state whose religion is Islam and its language Arabic.
In fact, Ennahda's concession on the Personal Status Code is not new. In November 1988, as a prelude to Ben Ali's fateful 1989 election, Ennahda, along with all other groups, signed up to a National Pact that involved the acceptance of the code, a position it reiterated in 2005 when it signed up to a charter with other liberal, leftist and nationalist opposition groups including Chebbi's PDP and Marzouki's Congress for the Republic.
More generally, by the end of 2011, there was no real dispute among the main parties on the form of future government. All the largest parties, including Ennahda, agreed on the principles of freedom of belief and expression, democracy, political pluralism and rotation of power. There was already a general consensus on the principle of a separation of powers among the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Learning from their lengthy experience with authoritarian rule, most favoured limiting the power of the president and vesting more authority in the government. Even in the elections for the constituent assembly, Ennahda accepted the system of proportional representation, even though this is often less advantageous to larger parties, tends to give smaller parties a role in parliament, and encourages coalition-building. The election rules also required half of the candidates fielded on a list to be women, another progressive principle that Ennahda accepted, going as far as to run at least one unveiled woman. Of the 49 women who won a place in the 217-seat constituent assembly, 42 were Ennahda candidates.50 The sight of so many veiled women in parliament may be a shock for secularists, but boasting a similar ratio of female MPs as parliaments in Europe, the assembly refuted any suggestion that women's rights had been set back.
Among the men sporting jeans and T-shirts and waiting at the airport to greet Ghannouchi, one stood man stood out. He had a long, orange-tinted beard, wore an Islamic skull cap and a traditional white jalabiya robe cut above the ankles in the style of conservative Salafist Islamists, and he was holding aloft a Koran. Approached by a young woman journalist, he declined to answer her questions, refused to look her in the eye and, sensing her confusion, eventually traced his hands around the edge of his face, as if to signal that she should be veiled. Seeing this, a group of female Ennahda supporters fell upon the man, thumping his arms. ‘Ennahda would never tell you to wear the hijab. It is your choice. We are against these extremists who misrepresent us,’ said Samda Jbeili, one of the main detractors, dressed herself in a muted pastel-colour headscarf.51
Those are sentiments echoed by Ghannouchi himself, who was careful to distance himself both from Iran's Shi'ite theocratic model, where a cleric is the head of state and is considered the representative of infallible imam on earth, and from the Taliban's narrow and inflexible interpretation of Sunni Islam in Afghanistan. ‘There are countries that, in the name of Islam, force women to wear particular attire, and there are countries that, in the name of modernity like Tunisia, ban women from wearing particular attire,’ he said. ‘We are against either. We consider one a theocracy and the other a secular theocracy. We are with a woman's freedom to decide her clothes, to decide her life partner and not be forced into anything.‘52
The day after winning Tunisia's first free multi-party elections, Ennahda officials visited the bourse to reassure the business community that it would not impinge on business or ban the paying and earning of interest (considered usury in Islam), reversing an initial drop in share prices on news of the Islamist victory. Ennahda has indicated that it would not ban alcohol, which would enrage secularists and hurt the tourism sector that provides 400,000 jobs, but would tax it as European countries do. It has also said it would not impose modest clothing on tourists and would, in fact, do nothing to damage a sector so vital to the country's oil-poor economy.53
Ghannouchi has been careful to say that the creation of a pluralistic, democratic and civil state running according to the rule of law is Ennahda's priority and, since it has emerged as the biggest single winner in elections, there is little reason to imagine that it would oppose a system from which it has the most to gain. Winning less than half the seats in parliament, Ennahda will also not be able to govern alone, and in late 2011 it entered a coalition with the parties of Mustafa Ben Jaafar and Moncef Marzouki, both non-religious groups that performed strongly in the polls and could force it to compromise.
Indeed, if Ennahda can live up to its moderate, democratic and inclusive rhetoric, Tunisia could become the first Sunni-majority Arab republic in which Islamist, secular and other minority groups compete in a multi-party democracy to govern a civil state in tune with local specificities. In much the same way as it became a model for peaceful revolution against a rotten regime, it could set the standard for post-revolutionary rule in other Arab countries that are still struggling to throw off the yoke of dictatorship. Yet mistrust between secularists and Islamists remains deep, and many secularists fear that Ennahda is striking a conciliatory tone to defuse opposition in the short term, and will set about slowly but surely Islamizing society and building grass-roots support for increasingly religious and conservative laws with a view to eventually declaring an Islamic state.
Secular Tunisians already accuse Ennahda of using a ‘double discourse’, saying one thing in public and another to their own followers. Months after the January revolution but before the October elections, the local rumour mill spun wildly with the latest allegations about what Ennahda really thought of women. A party official had apparently suggested that Tunisia could solve its unemployment problem by encouraging more women to devote themselves to home-making, presumably freeing up jobs for the boys. Secularists were also alarmed when a video surfaced on the internet showing Hamadi Jbeli, a senior Ennahda official who was soon to take up the newly empowered
post of prime minister, triumphantly declaring to supporters that ‘we are in the sixth caliphate’, referring to the Islamic empires that dominated the region until early last century. Ennahda said his comments were taken out of context but they caused an outcry among secularists, who saw them as proof of a secret agenda.
Most Tunisians are too young to remember the Ennahda of the 1980s, but older generations recall a spate of violence that was linked to Islamist militants and raised fears that their country would go the same way as neighbouring Algeria, which descended into years of civil war from the early 1990s. Secularist critics point to violent demonstrations held by Islamists in the 1980s, to the 1991 arson attack on the offices of the ruling RCD, and to a spate of acid attacks.54 This was evidence, they said, that Islamists would accept democracy so long as they won elections but would turn violent if they did not. Rumours spread like wildfire in the brittle atmosphere of suspicion that surrounds the issue of religion in Tunisia. Secularists denounce Ghannouchi as an extremist posing as a moderate, pointing to fiery speeches he made in the early 1980s.
In reality, Ghannouchi's views have evolved over the decades from a more conservative focus on prayer and morality to an explicit embrace of democratic principles that have manifested themselves in the internal functioning of Ennahda from the outset, and through a number of writings that have influenced Turkey's AKP.
In contrast to French-educated Bourguiba, who came from the affluent coastal town of Monastir, Ghannouchi was born and raised in Hamma in the south-east of Tunisia. His father was a farmer and a Koran teacher who at one point was married to four women, and Ghannouchi was educated partly at a French-system school and partly at a local Islamic school before completing his degree at al-Zaitouna's Islamic university just before it was closed.55
