http://www.nytimes.com/2016/
TUNIS — “Islamism is dead!” announced Said Ferjani, a leader of the
progressive wing of Ennahda, Tunisia’s main Islamist party, as we
drank coffee in a hotel cafe here last month. Mr. Ferjani, a former
hard-liner who once plotted a coup against the regime of President
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, was upbeat as he described the historic
transition his party was about to make.
His wing had combined with the party leadership to push through a raft
of resolutions that would not only rebrand Ennahda but also break with
the tradition of political Islam that began with the Muslim
Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in the late 1920s. According
to Mr. Ferjani, Islamism had been useful under the Ben Ali
dictatorship when “our identity and sense of purpose” was threatened
by an authoritarian state. Now that Ennahda is engaged in open, legal
party politics under a new Constitution, which it helped to write, and
competes for national leadership, the Islamist label had become more a
burden than a benefit.
The party’s co-founder and leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, was more
circumspect when I interviewed him at his home. He shifted uneasily
when I asked him whether he thought Islamism was dead.
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” he commented. But he did reject the
label, saying, “We don’t see any reason to distinguish ourselves from
other Muslims.” Both Mr. Ghannouchi and Mr. Ferjani prefer the term
“Muslim Democrats” — which deliberately draws an analogy with the
Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe — to describe their
new, post-Islamist identity.
In particular, Mr. Ferjani’s explicit commitment to the principles of
freedom and equality makes him perhaps the foremost post-Islamist
political figure in the Sunni Arab world. While he calls himself a
conservative and extols “family values,” Mr. Ferjani says he regards
sexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity — including the
transgender issues preoccupying the United States — as private and
personal, and not matters for the state or legal authorities to
prescribe.
Mr. Ferjani also adheres to the neutrality of the state on religious
matters. He equates religious freedom with freedom of conscience, and
believes agnostics and atheists should enjoy the same civil rights as
monotheists.
Again, in our interview, Mr. Ghannouchi was predictably more cautious.
He advocated equality among Muslims of all sects, somewhat more
grudgingly extending it to Christians and Jews, and legalistically
referring to “constitutional protections” for atheists and agnostics.
At last month’s Ennahda Congress, the 1,200 delegates approved most of
the sweeping changes to the party’s platform that the Ferjani faction
and the Ghannouchi leadership had called for. The most important
measure drops the party’s commitment to “dawa,” proselytizing Islamic
values. This makes the party a purely political organization, with no
overt religious mission — a radical break from the Muslim Brotherhood
tradition from which the Ennahda movement sprang.
In Tunisia and across the Arab world, liberals, secularists and
critics of Islamism remain skeptical. On more than one occasion here
in the capital, I witnessed the idea of Ennahda’s new stance evoking
peals of laughter from prominent political opponents. They support
dialogue, cooperation, even coalition partnership with Ennahda, but
this “post-Islamist” declaration they found impossible to take
seriously.
It is true that many of the movement’s leaders have not fully
reconciled with the idea of moving beyond the Muslim Brotherhood
vision. After the 2011 revolution, which helped bring Ennahda to
power, the party seemed determined to cling on at all costs — until a
critical moment in 2013 when the Brotherhood government of President
Mohamed Morsi in Egypt was ousted by a military-backed uprising. After
seeing the downfall of its Egyptian counterpart, Ennahda scrambled to
protect itself by stepping down and agreeing to a series of
compromises.
That experience, combined with a new realism about most Tunisians’
lack of sympathy for an avowedly Islamist government, gave rise to
this project of rebranding. There’s no question that it’s all part of
Ennahda’s long-term plan to return to power.
But the sincerity of its transformation is hardly relevant. Ennahda is
no longer an underground movement or secret society. It is an
aboveboard political party that is vying for power in Tunisia’s
fledgling constitutional, democratic system.
This was always how Islamism was likely to evolve in practice. There
would never be an epiphany in which old-school authoritarian Islamists
were instantly converted in a moment of supreme insight into
democratic social conservatives. It is necessarily a messy, contextual
transition, primarily driven by the search for power in an Arab world
where most people are devoutly Muslim but remain suspicious of the
proponents of political Islam.
What Ennahda’s critics and supporters alike should understand is that
the intentions of its leadership don’t matter — in a democracy, it is
public words and deeds, not secret thoughts, that count. Even if the
rebranding as “Muslim Democrats” is a cynical ploy, the party will
have to follow through to gain power in a Tunisian society that won’t
accept old-style Islamism. Muslim Democrats will be what Ennahda has
to become.
The future of Islamism in Muslim countries everywhere is deeply linked
to the progress of the new-look Ennahda. And its fate is therefore
bound up with the survival of the new Tunisia.
Partly against its own inclinations, Ennahda has become the first
post-Islamist political party in the Arab world. The stakes, for the
region and for the world, in Tunisia’s fragile democratic experiment
have just increased immeasurably.