Tunisian spiritual leader Rashid Gannouchi on Time 100 list

Manama: Time magazine has named Rashid Gannouchi, the spiritual leader of Al Nahda, the moderate Islamist party that won Tunisia's first true multiparty elections, to the 2012 Time 100, the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

"The Tunisian scholar-politician Rashid Gannouchi, once the enfant terrible of political Islam, is now widely hailed as its voice of sanity," Bobby Ghosh, an editor-at-large for Time wrote. "When Gannouchi, 70, returned home from a decades-long European exile last year after the Arab Spring toppled Tunisia's dictator, he quickly tamped down fears that the void left by President Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali would be filled by radical Islamists seeking to take the North African nation back to medieval mores."

Instead, Gannouchi offered a vision of a moderate, modern and inclusive political movement that was nonetheless rooted in the Muslim faith.

"When his Al Nahda party won a resounding election victory, Gannouchi endorsed a secular election partner as President. He took no office for himself. Perhaps more important, he created a template that is already being emulated — with varying degrees of enthusiasm — by Islamist parties across the Arab world," Ghosh wrote.