John Stuart Mill — the author of On Liberty — opined that masses are nothing more than “collective mediocrity”. They have taken “their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State”, he lamented, although that was part and parcel of human history for millennia. It took a while, but a renaissance emerged and ushered in — at least in Europe — the kind of separation that allowed for devotion to be practised away from political diktats. Are we on the verge of a similar experiment in the Arab world?
The surprise came when the leader of the Tunisian Al Nahda party pledged to separate politics from religion. At a time when just about every commentator threw in the proverbial towel and concluded that the 2011 Arab uprisings were utter failures, what Rashid Gannouchi said was epochal. His assertion is simple: There is no room left for political Islam within the Tunisian constitution. Though time will tell whether this is the real deal, a separation between religious activities from political ones bodes very well for both his country and just about everyone else.
“Tunisia is now a democracy,” Gannouchi affirmed, as he underscored constitutional limits on both “extreme secularism and extreme religiosity”. In a moment of candour, the Islamist leader declared that what he wanted was for “religious activity to be completely independent from political activity ... so that religion would not be held hostage to politics”.
Critics doubted Gannouchi, asserting that he was the leader of an extremist group and called on him to apologise “for decades of incitement carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood under religious cover to reach purely political purposes”.
Some saw a ploy to persuade western partners that the Tunisian party wished to distance itself from the Muslim Brotherhood, while others insisted that Gannouchi and his allies not only were inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but that the Islamic Tendency Movement, which was created in 1981 before the latter was transformed into Al Nahda in 1989, was still part of the extremist system.
Notwithstanding such perspectives, few can ignore that many party activists were persecuted under Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali and even his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, whose government sentenced Gannouchi to jail and exile.
In reality, political Islam in Tunisia and elsewhere lost all hope long before 2011 because the overwhelming majority of Arabs rejected extremism that, regrettably, was what the Brotherhood and similar tangential groups practised. To be sure, there were active pockets of extremist supporters throughout the region, even if these folks represented little more than a tiny proportion of Arab populations. In the event, those who believed that political Islam would bring true democracy and socio-political reforms to a region torn by centuries of struggle for genuine representation, confronted governance realities with gusto.
Islamist parties in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, failed to serve their respective nations, though they were not short on rhetoric. For Arabs, and others — including Persians and Turks — correctly perceived the encroachment to attain more power by pseudo leaders instead of serving, improving socio-economic conditions and encouraging the creation of wealth.
Even if Gannouchi’s latest declarations raised doubts in certain minds — that a full separation of church and state could not be envisaged in the Arab context — Al Nahda prompted debate around political Islam that will slowly but surely address, perhaps even repair, outdated and extremist concepts that shaped several generations, transformed disillusioned believers into extremists and empowered competitors to label them enemies who ought to be destroyed.
Time will tell whether Tunisia will rise to the occasion, though few ought to be surprised by what will probably occur next, a gradual separation of powers.
Gannouchi reaffirmed his devotion to faith as he insisted that his points of reference remained rooted in Islam and its tremendously rich values, though he also confirmed that the party, as a political institution, intended to “enter democratic Islam”. He added: “We are Muslim democrats who no longer claim to represent political Islam.”
Naturally, Gannouchi spoke from experience as Al Nahda failed to deliver after 2011, when Tunisia fell into a deep political crisis, which was only resolved in the 2014 parliamentary elections that ushered in the relatively secularist Nida’ Tunis Party led by President Beji Caid Al Sebsi. Even if Al Nahda became the single largest parliamentary bloc in January 2016 (69 out of 217 parliamentary seats), when some Nida’ Tunis Party members joined it, the writing was on the wall because Tunisians clamoured for more freedom (F), genuine liberties (L), specific opportunities (O) to succeed and, perhaps as important as anything else, the means to create wealth (W).
They and Arabs in general wanted the FLOW that allowed great nations to value individual creativity and not pretend to deliver a chimerical world caught in the whirlwind of religiosity.
To its credit, Al Nahda embraced compromises with secular forces, abandoned the most religious aspects of its ideology, adopted rationality, reneged extremist positions that revolted citizens and joined the long process to draft a constitution. In short, it has nurtured and strengthened Tunisia’s burgeoning democracy and is neither a proponent of theocracy nor an amalgam of fanatical extremists. It tolerated every vanguard idea, but practised genuine participation, which was the essence of democracy away from Mill’s “collective mediocrity”.
A few years into the rapidly developing Arab uprisings, Tunisia is showing that Arabs and Muslims can practise democratisation as long as leaders adapt to the will of increasingly educated and alert citizens. How one adjusts to political circumstances, adopts FLOW, and encourages ideological moderation will surely confirm whether the necessary transformations will become a reality.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the forthcoming From Alliance to Union: Challenges Facing Gulf Cooperation Council States in the Twenty-First Century (Sussex: July 2016).
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