London: Late last year, largely unnoticed in the West, Tunisia’s President Munsif Marzouqi gave an interview to Chatham House’s The World Today.
Commenting on a recent attack by Salafists on the US embassy in Tunis, he remarked in an unguarded moment: “We didn’t realise how dangerous and violent these Salafists could be. They are a tiny minority within a tiny minority. They don’t represent society or the state. They cannot be a real danger to society or government, but they can be very harmful to the image of the government.”
It appears that Marzouqi was wrong. Following the assassination of opposition leader Shukri Belaid, which plunged the country into its biggest crisis since the 2011 Jasmine Revolution, the destabilising threat of extremists has emerged as a pressing and dangerous issue.
Violent Salafists are one of two groups under suspicion for Belaid’s murder. The other is the shadowy, so-called neighbourhood protection group known as the Leagues of the Protection of the Revolution, a small contingent that claims to be against remnants of the old regime, but which is accused of using thugs to stir clashes at opposition rallies and trade union gatherings.
The left accuses these groups of affiliation with the ruling moderate Islamist party, Al Nahda, and says it has failed to root out the violence. The party denies any link or control to the groups. But it is the rise of Salafist-associated political violence that is causing the most concern in the region.
Comeback
Banned in Tunisia under the 23-year regime of Zine Al Abedine Bin Ali, which ruthlessly cracked down on all forms of Islamism, Salafists in Tunisia have become increasingly vocal since the 2011 revolution.
The Salafist component in Tunisia remains a small minority, but it has prompted rows and mistrust among secularists and moderate Islamists. The Salafists are spread between three broad groups: new small political movements that have formed in recent months; non-violent Salafists; and violent Salafists and jihadists who, though small in number, have had a major impact thanks to violent attacks and arson. It is not only in Tunisia. In Egypt, Libya and Syria, concern is mounting about the emergence of violent fringe groups.
In Egypt last week it was revealed that hardline cleric Mahmoud Sha’aban had appeared on a religious television channel calling for the deaths of main opposition figures Mohammad Al Baradei, a Nobel peace prize laureate, and former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi.
In Libya, Salafists and other groups have been implicated in a spate of attacks, including the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi.
Terminology
It is difficult to describe what is happening because of the terminology.
Although many of those involved in violence and encouraging violence could accurately be called Salafists, they remain an absolute minority of a wider minority movement that has emerged as a small, but potent political force across post-revolutionary North Africa.
Although the encouragement to violence from this minority has been most marked in Tunisia, it is not absent in Egypt. “We’ve already started to see real threats,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Centre. “There are many instances in Egypt where Salafists have used the language of incitement against opponents.
“Last year, one Egyptian Salafist cleric, Wagdi Guneim, called for a jihad on protesters against President Mohammad Mursi, a demand he repeated this month. Another, Yasser Al Burhami, reportedly banned Muslim taxi-drivers from taking Christian priests to church.”
Yasser Al Shimy, Egypt analyst for the Crisis Group, said: “All it takes is for one guy to take it upon himself to carry out a fatwa. But the prospects of that happening in Egypt are less or certainly not more than they are in Tunisia. In Egypt, there was a deeper integration of Salafists into the political process as soon as the revolution had taken place.”
Most tellingly, two leading Egyptian Salafists have condemned the death threats against Al Baradei and Sabbahi.
Nader Bakkar, a spokesman for the Al Nour party, said: “The Salafists in Tunisia are not organised well and they don’t have the scholars who can teach them how to deal peacefully with things that they don’t like in their country. It gives you a clear vision that we will not see in Egypt what we saw happen in Tunisia.”
Fatwa
Bakkar also argued that Sha’aban, the cleric who issued the fatwa against Al Baradei and Sabbahi, had little currency in Egyptian Salafism.
“He doesn’t have many followers,” said Bakkar, who claimed that Sha’aban came from a school of Salafism that had preached obedience to former dictator Hosni Mubarak, and whose reputation had therefore been ruined in the post-revolution period.
If there are differences between the strands of Salafist extremism in North African countries, there are some striking similarities.
Like Egypt, as Anne Wolf pointed out in January in a prescient essay on the emerging Salafist problem in Tunisia for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre, “certain territories have traditionally been more rebellious and religiously conservative than others.
“Tunisia’s south and interior, in particular, have found it difficult to deal with the modernisation policies launched by the colonial and post-independence governments, whose leaders came from more privileged areas.”
And while violence and the threat of violence by the “minority of the minority” of Salafists has the potential to disrupt the post-revolutionary governments of the Arab Spring, for the new Islamist governments it also poses considerable political problems, which are perhaps as serious.
In Tunisia, the government estimates that 100 to 500 of the 5,000 mosques are controlled by radical clerics. Although the majority of Salafists are committed to non-violence, the movement has been coloured by the acts of extremists.
That has created problems for Al Nahda, which secular opponents suspect of secretly planning with Salafists the ‘re-Islamisation’ of Tunisia, not least because of the government’s unwillingness or inability to move against the most extreme Salafist groups.
For Al Nahda, confronting extremist violence has become a challenging balancing act.
Fearful of radicalising the wider movement by cracking down too hard as the former Bin Ali regime did, it has sought instead to have a dialogue with those renouncing violence by condemning the “rogue elements”. This is a policy that has led to accusations that it has been too soft or has secretly tolerated violence against secular opponents such as the murdered Belaid.
Criticism
In particular, Tunisia’s secular leftist parties were critical of the setting up of a religious affairs ministry under Nour Al Deen Al Khademi, an imam affiliated to the Al Fateh mosque in Tunis, known for its Salafist presence and protests.
Khademi’s office vowed that several hundred mosques in Tunisia which had been taken over by Salafist preachers after the revolution would be brought back under moderate control. Last year, his office said that around 120 remained controlled by extremist preachers, of which 50 were a serious problem.
Even Al Nahda MPs have recently woken up to the problem. Ziad Ladhari, an MP for Sousse in the Assembly, said the Salafist issue was a concrete part of the heritage of the Bin Ali era and “must be handled in a concrete manner”.
He said violent Salafism “presents a danger for the stability of the country”, while non-violent Salafism “a way of life and literal reading of Islam” often “imported and foreign to our society” was something that Al Nahda distinguished itself from. “The violent element must be fought very firmly by police and the law,” said Ladhari. “Then there should be dialogue with the peaceful element, in the hope of evolution through dialogue. It’s more of a sociological issue than a political one.”
He said social-economic issues and fighting poverty and social exclusion were crucial. He said: “We have to deal with it seriously and with courage, a drift must not take hold.”
Selma Mabrouk, a doctor and MP who recently quit the centre-left Ettakatol party in protest over the coalition’s stance on the constitution and power-sharing, said: “The problem is the violent strain of Salafism, not the strain of thought, because we now have freedom of expression, everyone can have their views.”
She warned against an “ambiguous” stance by Al Nahda and the centre-left CPR in the coalition towards street violence, hate speech and attacks which she said were going unchecked. She was also highly critical of the fact that two Salafists arrested for the US embassy attack died in prison after a long hunger strike without a proper trial procedure coming into effect.
She said: “There is this ambivalent attitude from the government, a permissivity on street violence on one side and, on the other hand, indifference to prisoners and the hunger strike.”
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
