Rachid Ghannouchi: A Democrat Within Islamism

By Tamimi, Azzam S.
Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster Contents
Chapter One: From Qabis to Paris Chapter Two: The Journey to Democracy Chapter Three: The Question of Democracy Chapter Four: Secularism Chapter Five: Civil Society Chapter Six: The Territorial State and the New World Order Chapter Seven: Islamist Obstacles to Democracy Chapter Eight: Ghannouchi's Detractors Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

RASHID GHANNOUSHI: DEMOKRAT YANG ISLAMIS Preface

It was by virtue of my involvement in Liberty for the Muslim World, a London-based organization concerned with monitoring human rights and democratization in Muslim countries that I developed an interest in pursuing academically the issue of Islam and democracy. Like many Muslims, I had been greatly disappointed with the forcible termination of the democratic process in Algeria and was dismayed by the attempt in some circles to justify the January 1992 military coup as having been inevitable in order to protect democracy from its enemies, the Islamists. I embarked on this work believing democracy to be compatible with Islam and hoping to establish this compatibility by means of academic research. The idea was to refute the conclusions by some renowned Muslim political writers that Islam and democracy did not work. I also was motivated to pursue this line of research by the democratic experiment in Jordan, where, despite a fully-fledged Islamist participation in the political process, there was still a debate within Islamic movement circles as to whether democracy did, or did not, contradict Islam. This debate had actually been going on in much of the Arab world since the mid1980s when the breeze of democratization seemed to blow across the region. The most significant development accompanying this trend had been the emergence within political Islam of groups willing to take part in the democratic process and pledging to respect the results of the elections and to play by the rules of the game.

Researching this topic necessitated an exploration of the concept of democracy in Western literature, followed by an investigation of the position of various Islamic schools of thought on the subject. It is no secret that contemporary Islamic revival movements generally dislike ideas that originate in the West, in reaction to Western colonization of much of the Muslim world and out of fear of loss of identity under the hammer of modernization. Writers affiliated with the Sayyid Qutb school, which had the greatest influence on Arab Islamic movements from the mid-1960s through the 1970s to the mid-1980s, had insisted that democracy was an ideology alien to Islam. By the mid- 1980s this school started losing ground to another school of thought that maintained that democracy was not an ideology but a set of tools and mechanisms designed to control government power, which they considered to be perfectly compatible with the Islamic concepts of bay'ah and shura. To be fair, these ideas were not entirely new; they were espoused before by Afghani, Abduh, Kawakibi, Rida, and Malik Bennabi long before the incompatibility school took hold. The focus of my interest shifted slightly in the wake of the international symposium on PowerSharing Islam, which was organized in London by the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster and Liberty for the Muslim World on 20 February 1993. The symposium hosted a number of intellectuals and representatives of Islamic movements. Papers on Islam and democracy, the concept of power-sharing and pluralism, and the experiences of the Islamic movements in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Malaysia, Yemen, and Kuwait were submitted. Drawing on the symposium, I developed an interest in exploring the problems that faced Islamic movements as they participated in the process of democratization. I felt 3

that investigating the attitude of Islamists vis--vis such problems would make a more interesting, and at the same time more challenging, topic of research. The idea was to show that recent democratization experiences in countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen prove that serious obstacles confront the transition to democracy in these countries. As far as I could see, most of these obstacles emanated from outside the Islamic camp, mainly from local authoritarian governments and from global powers seeking to preserve the status quo. There are, however, obstacles emanating from within the Islamic camp itself caused by the emergence of radical trends within the phenomenon of Islamic revival that reject democracy and consider it a heresy imported from the West. In the meantime I had been in contact with Rachid Ghannouchi, one of the most prominent thinkers in the realm of contemporary Islamic thought and the exiled leader of the Tunisian Islamic movement Ennahda. I developed an interest in Ghannouchi when I met him in London in February 1992, during which time I was asked to translate a paper submitted by him to a conference on Islam and Democracy in North Africa organized at the London School of Economics by its Islamic Society. Thereafter, whenever Ghannouchi was invited to give a talk or present a paper I was asked to interpret his talk or translate his paper. The talks and papers covered issues such as democracy, secularism, civil society, human rights, the nation-state, civil liberties, Islam and the West, the role and future of Islamic movements, Islamic minorities, and the political situation in Tunisia and North Africa. Rachid Ghannouchi leads a school in modern Islamic political thought that advocates democracy and pluralism. He believes democracy to be a set of mechanisms for guaranteeing the sovereignty of the people and for supplying safety valves against corruption and the hegemonic monopoly of power. While insisting on the compatibility of democracy with Islam, he believes that because of their secular foundations, contemporary forms of liberal democracy may not suit Muslim societies. Ghannouchi's last and most important book, Al-Hurriyyat al-'Ammah Fid-Dawlah al-Islamiyyah (Public liberties in the Islamic state), has been an important contribution to the current debate within Islamic circles on the nature, duties, and restraints of government in Islam. Yet, although he has authored ten important books, very little of his thought has so far been made available to readers of English. Little has been written about Ghannouchi in English, and most of what has been written about him by academics happens to be part of a discussion of either the Tunisian Islamic movement or the question of Islam and democracy. Because I have translated many of the talks he has given and the papers he has written for English audiences since he settled in London, I therefore feel something of an authority on his political perspectives. I feel well placed to research the genealogy of his political thought and the way he perceives the process of democratization and the obstacles facing it in the Arab world, especially in the North African region. This book, which is a treatise in the field of political theory, begins with a biography of the first twenty-five or so years of Ghannouchi's life, depicting his childhood and maturation from the time he was a young boy frequenting school in a remote Tunisian village until he interrupted his postgraduate studies in Paris and returned home. The genealogy of Rachid Ghannouchi's political thought finds its roots in his youth when he was first attracted to Nassirism, then abandoned it for an Ikhwan-Salafi style of religiosity, and finally progressed to an Islamic activism of Tunisian specificity. 4

Several factors contributed to the development of his personality and political thinking. These included the traditional az-Zaytouna school curriculum, the Muslim Brotherhood school of thought, the thought of the Algerian thinker Malik Bennabi, his Islamic movement's interaction with local Tunisian forces, such as those of liberalism and communism, the Iranian revolution, and the Sudanese model of Islamism. The biographical account leads to an analysis of Ghannouchi's understanding of democracy and his theory of compatibility between democracy and Islam. In this, Ghannouchi is indebted to Malik Bennabi, whose essay on Islam and democracy was Ghannouchi's launching pad and the seed that germinated and gave rise to the lofty work of Al-Hurriyyat al-'Ammah. To assess Ghannouchi and to analyze his conception of democracy, it is necessary to reflect on Western democratic theory. It is also necessary to examine some of the core themes of liberal democracy and determine Ghannouchi's position on them. An example of the last point is Ghannouchi's rejection of the widely accepted assumption in the West that secularism is an essential prerequisite of democracy. His argument that democracy is not an ideology, but a tool for electing, checking, and dismissing or replacing a system of government and for protecting the civil liberties and basic rights of citizens, is found to have opponents and supporters both in the West and in the world of Islam. The same approach is made in the analysis of Ghannouchi's theory that democratization in the Arab world is hindered by secularism, the modern territorial-state, the new world order, and radical trends within Islamism. Ghannouchi's use of the terms secularism, liberalism, modernity, and civil society is contrasted with Western conceptions of these terms. In analyzing his response to Islamists who reject democracy, his theory of faragh (space)that Islam consists of that which is dini (religious) and that which is siyasi (political)is discussed at length. Finally, Ghannouchi's critics are considered. Apart from his political foes and ideological opponents, and notwithstanding his influence and popularity, Ghannouchi is criticized by two groups of Islamists: the first is a traditionalist elite that considers him to be too concessionary to the West; and the second is a class of converts from liberalism or Marxism to Islam, who criticize him for not recognizing, or acknowledging, some of the serious shortcomings of Western democracy and secularization. The book gives consideration to the current debate in and around Ghannouchi about the adequacy, and possible limits, of his comments on secularity. The overall aim of this book is to introduce to English-speaking audiences a prominent contemporary Islamic thinker, little of whose writings have been translated into English. I have tried to the best of my ability to consider analytically the meaning of Ghannouchi's overall output, which is very prolific; to highlight its key themes; to examine potential inconsistencies within his work; and to try to explain those inconsistencies. A. S. T. London March 2001