Introduction

Thanks are due to the organizers of the Sydney conference in 2015 who invited me to contribute a paper with a similar title about Ennahda’s democratic learning curve. I thank a few colleagues who read an early version of this article, namely Laurence Whitehead (Nuffied College, Oxford University); Amal Ghazal (Dalhousie University, Canada); and Mohammed Moussa (Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University). I alone, however, accept responsibility for any lacunae or mistakes.

Islamism is the ideology of the sahwah or Islamic resurgence, and as such it has remained mostly ‘fixed’ and ‘singular’ in the minds of many scholars. This is a position that has intermittently been revised by dissenting scholars (Esposito & Piscatori, 1991). Generally, as an enduring and transnational socio-political phenomenon, Islamism has been the source of many of our most persistent stereotypes about Islam itself. Indeed, Islamism seems to be constantly taken for granted that it is increasingly difficult to appreciate its diversity, complexity and once reformist agenda. Every decade had its ‘Islamist bogey’ on the ‘radar’ of security practitioners (El-Affendi, 2013). The rise of Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘secret apparatus’ or al-Jihaz al-sirri in the 1940s up to the present (al-Qaida, Da’ish) marked an epoch in which Islamism became stigmatized by proneness to violence, secrecy, and aversion to democracy. With the surge of extremist groups, Islamism has partly become for decades shrouded in ‘security’ concerns and accounts. Voices that associated Islamism with democracy have remained largely marginal (J. Anderson, 2006). A minority of exceptions that pioneered research on the nexus of Islamism and democracy tried to buck the dominant trend in the field of scholarship on political Islam (Esposito & Voll, 1996).

When Arab protesters revolted against dictatorship, many scholars and political practitioners alike turned their attention to ‘testing’ Islamists as potentially bona fide claimants or contestants of power (Cavatorta & Merone, 2013). To an extent, the best way of rethinking the conundrum of Islamism and democracy is through in-depth analyses of case studies—e.g. Islamist parties. Through generalization and reductionism many works that, in the pre-Arab spring world, propagated the incompatibility of Islamism and democracy have today become, more or less, otiose. At the current historical juncture, it is apposite to revise and question the reigning wisdom with its hegemonic political language, and ‘foundationalist’ (favouring Euo-American paradigms) prism,Footnote 1 both of which narrowly frame the contours of democratic discourse. In this vein, the chapter addresses three intertwined issues, focusing on (1) Islamism as a brand of discourse, highlighting its diverse representations, with the specific aim of stressing that it is neither fixed nor single; (2) knowledge-making and practices, questions that cannot be transcended easily when democracy is discussed; and (3) tentative empirical findings (derived from author’s use of two sessions of participant observation in Tunisia in May 2016) that give a flavour of Ennahda’s democratic thought-practice after the 2011 revolution, the most sustained of all Arab uprisings despite ups and downs (Charles, 2012), and share of violence (Gall, 2013). Some have argued that it veered off its initial path-breaking course (Dakhli, 2013).

In this respect, Ennahda party seems to feature as a ‘trail-blazer’, inviting much scholarly attention (Piser). If there is such a thing as Tunisian ‘exceptionalism’, in the context of the Arab Spring, Ennahda, like its compatriot syndicalist movement, the Federated Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), (Chayes, 2014) forms part of its backbone. At the core of this ‘exceptionalism’ is the potential for coexistence of Islam and democracy (Stepan, 2012). True, the seminal ideologues who once invoked Islam’s teachings, values, laws and principles were opposed to the Westernizing practices and thought of the emerging postcolonial national-secular order. Founding fathers of Islamism, such as Imam Hassan Al-Banna, sought to reform and Islamize their society—and later on polity. For, they held a desire to found ideas and ideals to return Islam to the public as a beacon of morality, humanity, charity, justice, solidarity and renewal. They sought to found an Islamist ideology merely as a counterculture to colonialism, Westernization, namely secular politics. Ennahda seems to be dissenting from this worldview, as shall be explained below, even if it still clings, at least in rhetoric, to an Islamist ideal (McCarthy, 2015, pp. 449–451).

One Islam, Many Islamisms: A Contextualization

The terms ‘Islamism’ and ‘political Islam’ are generally used interchangeably. They are used throughout in preference to a number of other terms such as ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘fundamentalist movements’. The terms are used here to denote a particular brand of thought and praxis aimed at ‘Islamizing’ polity, economy and society. A process referred to in Arabic as ‘ta’seel’, which opposes privatization of religion. ‘Islamism’ is not monolithic: the diversity and nuances within it must be accounted for. Islamists differ in terms of thought and praxis. Their political behaviour ranges from the most apolitical and peaceful (Tableegh) to the most extremist (al-Qaida, Da’ish or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—ISIL). What is most noticeable about political Islam is the endeavour to undertake an inversion of the earlier ‘dis-establishment’ of Islam from the political realm. If dis-establishment refers to the separation of religion from politics, the inversion of ‘dis-establishment’ is generally about the blurring of the boundaries of the religious and the political. It can thus be said that the Western notion of ‘rendering to God what’s God’s, and rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ has no resonance in Islamist thought. Dis-establishment of religion was coterminous with the brand of nation and state-building that followed either de-colonization in most of the Muslim World or the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire when the Caliphate was abolished in the mid-1920s. ‘Ijtihad’ refers to the operationalization of the Islamic instrument to render a rational meaning to religious texts by the individual or believer. ‘Shari’ah’ is associated with Islamic law. ‘Jihad’ is spiritual struggle with non-violent connotations. Finally, ‘ummah’ is the Islamic community that is bound by faith and whose membership is conferred upon adherents of Islam who uphold the notion of ‘tawheed’ (Unity of God).

The semantic and conceptual field is literally replete with attempts to understand ‘political Islam’, which some imprecisely refer to as ‘fundamentalism’, a misnomer that has receded in explanatory power and linguistic clarity. As Table 4.1 shows scholars have all left their mark on the attempt to define ‘political Islam’. The French school, through Roy and Kepel, suffers from a ‘fetish’ for labels, often generalizations that all in some or another highlight the ‘failing’ nature of ‘political Islam’ and its extremist tendencies. What is positive in the various understandings is the dynamic and diverse nature of the phenomenon. What is negative is the presence of a derogatory residue in the term ‘radical’ and ‘radicalism’, perhaps from the days of communism. Radicals may want reform. But the bottom line is that they work against the centre of the establishment, deploy illegal and non-constitutional strategies, and even when they embrace democracy, they tend to fail in it or misuse it.

Table 4.1 Key understandings of ‘fundamentalism’
Full size table

Islamists practise ‘revisionism’, and this is something that continues to elude observers and scholars of Islamist movements and groups. I find Bayat’s notion of ‘post-Islamism’ (Bayat, 2005, p. 5) somewhat awkward. It assumes there is one Islamism. Islamism cedes to Islamisms, a concept that captures the essence of what I call the ‘constructivist’ nature of political Islam. That is, it is an ever-changing phenomenon, an open-ended project. Emphasis must be placed on open-ended-ness. Islamists, peaceful and violent, anti-systemic or systemic, are forced by local and global dynamics to adjust thought and practice or risk extinction. ‘Post-Islamism’, as Bayat puts it, refers to ‘the birth, out of the Islamist experience, of a qualitatively different discourse and politics.’ He gives the example of how Islamists look for a synthesis of Islam and Western ideas in democracy. I think it is more than a synthesis—there is a never-ending dialectic. Fundamentally, however, whilst violent groups, such as al-Qaida, tend to assume an exclusivist and singular view of religious truth, a majority of Islamists is renouncing such a practice. However, Bayat has a point in observing that Islamists are increasingly tending to ‘acknowledge…ambiguity, multiplicity, inclusion, and compromise in principles and practice’ (Bayat, 2005, p. 5). This quest for crystallizing a ‘centrist’ position, in accordance of what is termed in Islamist parlance ‘wasatiyyah’ (literally moderate), can be noted in the less successful attempt by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (EMB) before the 2011 revolution. In its quest for acquiring legal status as a political party, the EMB included Copts within its ranks; fielded female candidates in the country’s elections; and developed a dialogue with Western diplomats, especially Americans.

The 9/11 tragic events have re-opened the proverbial gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) everywhere in the world. This trend is mostly manifest in the rich panoply of religious discourse and counter-discourse in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. What is most specific about the return of ijtihad is the phenomenon of Islam as a shared terrain for all discourses, top-down and bottom-up. All claimants of ijtihad deploy Islam to legitimate their thought and their praxis and de-legitimise opponents. Discursively, a variety of ‘islams’ (with small ‘i’ to use Dale Eickelman’s anthropology of Islam) is at play. Elsewhere in the Muslim World contestation has largely been most fierce between claimants of some form of ‘modern’ (Muslim Brotherhood movements), ‘radical’ (Salafi & Wahhabi), cultural-spiritual (Sufi brotherhoods), or missionary (Tableegh & Da’wah) brands of Islam against an ‘Ataturkist’-type of socio-political modernization.

Contextualization of ‘Political Islam’

The phenomenon of ‘political Islam’ must be read within specific contexts. This is vital for avoiding the pitfalls of generalization and reductionism—the flaws of some Orientalists (Western discourses about the ‘Orient’) and Occidentalists (Eastern discourses of the ‘Occident’ or ‘West’ by the ‘East’). Islam has thus far served as a legitimator of state-building along secular-nationalist lines (all former and current liberation movements prior to state-formation) or against the state (e.g. Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen) as well as a legitimator of political reform below the state. It must be pointed out that Islam is the shared ideological repository of political identity and value-assignment in most Muslim states, including self-professed secular states before the 2011 revolutions. In some Muslim states, where religion in the form of the Salafi puritanical creed provides a raison d’être, the state has coached religion into ‘clientship’.

Yet in other states, religion was dis-established. But the state, despite declaratory policies in favour of secularization, activates Islamic idioms and metaphors for the purpose of shoring us support from the public at large, and the religious voices and institutions in particular. Bourguiba was a staunch secularist—but one influenced by historical reformist figures such as Khayr al-Din (van Krieken, 1976). He was one who meddled in religion. He publicly advocated an image of Tunisia in which women were unveiled rather than veiled, and of renouncing the fasting of Ramadan (one of the five pillars of Islam). The Islamism that emerged in the former French colony reflected the local context: staunchly anti-secular politics that sought to efface religious and cultural identity. It went further, and mostly via peaceful means, to argue the case for a place for religion in society as is the case in the European Union where separation of the sacred and the political does not largely curtail religious freedom or worship. However, the many veil sagas over the years in France force these very Islamists to re-evaluate what is called ‘secular fundamentalism’. Like in Tunisia, non-establishment forces of Islam advance a different vision of polity, society and economy shaped by the dream of partial emulation of the ‘Medinan’ city-state built by the Prophet Muhammad by reference to legality, communal solidarity, mutual compassion, and toleration and protection of difference. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, older than the state and steadfast in its quest for an Islamist state, has contested the non-Islamic nature of the state from the time of King Farouk. It has been involved with the state in processes of mutual inclusion and exclusion, which entailed resort to violence during the 1950s and up to the 1970s, and again in 2013 prior to the coup that deposed the country’s first elected Islamist president (Brown, 2013). During Sadat’s reign, and before the peace treaty with Israel, the Brotherhood welcomed the margin of existence given to it by the late Sadat. It used him to rebuild its disorganized and weakened institutions and demobilized and largely oppressed membership. He used the Brotherhood to counter leftist forces that questioned and threatened his power in the immediate post-Nasser years. He, too, turned to Islam’s idioms to shore up his legitimacy and popularity; and he bankrolled al-Azhar to invest in another formidable ally, recruiting to his service a revered Islamic institution with a large bureaucracy and vital affective resources. His tax concessions to the resurging forces of Islam led to the proliferation of private mosques, eventual hot-beds of anti-systemic religious forces, including his very assassins in October 1981.

The anti-systemic forces of political Islam that thrived under Sadat have today all but gone. The notorious al-Jama’ah al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Group)—along with Islamic Jihad, the Takfeer wa al-Higra (Excommunication and Emigration)—which up to the late 1990s fought the state and targeted state symbols, including tourism as a Westernizing facet and activity—have gradually laid down their arms under a policy of ‘tawbah’ (repentance). The hundreds and thousands of activists who committed to the overthrow of the state in Mubarak’s Egypt have been tamed. Moreover, many of their leaders have become ‘defenders’ of social peace, with the state, before and after the 2011 revolution, benefiting a great deal from this unlikely source of favourable propaganda. This is one of the successes of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Hosni Mubarak—taming anti-systemic and violent Islamists. Islamism is often incubated in local matrices that must be understood. These matrices may ‘condition’ certain practices, both peaceful and violent.

In Algeria, a unique case of a state and society that rose from the embers and the ravages of a brutal war of liberation, a quasi praxis of violence (in the name of a spurious notion of ‘jihad’ since Muslim killed Muslim) followed the cancellation of the second round of elections in early 1992, which would have confirmed the FIS’s parliamentarian majority. The state chose violence—through a coup—and the Islamists followed suit. The rest is history. The state has not flinched as the Arab Spring proved infectious (Volpi, 2013). In neighbouring Tunisia, despite limited use of violence in the late 1980s by Ennahdah, without leadership endorsement, the Islamists tended to favour peaceful engagement, even emigration over anti-state armed tactics. Tunisia prior to the 2011 revolution was assumed to be more or less the most stable Arab state, and part of the credit was owed to the peaceful ways of its Islamists. There were others, of course, who expressed misgivings about the outcome of Tunisia’s revolution (Mullin & Rouabah, 2014). In contrast to Algeria, Tunisia was largely spared the brutality of liberation war in Algeria, next door. Why Islamists tend to be violent requires contextualization. Violence, extremism and intransigence are not givens that are invariably and indiscriminately ‘cemented’ to the forces of political Islam. They must not be treated as such. Accordingly, the linguistic field itself deployed by the security apparatuses that today engage with Islamism calls for revision. Islamism and Islamists are socially, spatially and temporally constructed. There is no ‘one “Islamist” size that fits all.’

Between ‘Political Islam’ and ‘Muslim Politics’

Eickelman and Piscatori view ‘Muslim politics’ as involving ‘the competition and contest over both the interpretation of religious symbols and the control of the institutions that produce and sustain them’. Consequently, ‘Muslim Politics’ is a sophisticated analysis of the ever-changing correlation between the sacred and the profane in the Muslim world Piscatori and Eickelman advance the idea that the politics of language that embed the expression and organization of Muslim politics must be ‘deconstructed’. The Muslim world has witnessed a process of ‘objectification of consciousness’, a process leading to fundamental questions in the minds of large numbers of believers. This objectification has come about as a result of mass education and wider channels of communication in the Muslim World, rendering exegesis widespread, especially as religious authority has itself been subjected to fragmentation. The learned monopolies of the past are receding. Religious discourse is wide-open and open-ended. As they put it, the levelling of the playing field has led to an element of danger owed to heightened contestation of the symbols and idioms of Islam. This contestation cultivates poly-centricity, and this poly-centricity, in return, spawns contestation. The two work in tandem, reifying a more plural community of inquisitive and active Muslims who leave not the question of religious decision to religious elites. The resulting diversity produces and enriches interpretation and understanding of the experience of being Muslim in the modern and post-modern ‘movement’. As if so-called ‘sacred authority’ has lost its sanctity. Sanctity of text is to be separated and differentiated from the sanctity of revelation and text. Context matters. Text is given meaning within temporal and spatial contexts. Meanings and symbols are deployed by radically different Muslim actors and agents for fundamentally different ends. Sacred authority has multiple uses. It has the potentiality for being used as the medium both for maintaining state power as well as challenging or winning it. Their processes of ‘protest and bargaining’ underscore the dynamics of internal struggles within Muslim communities everywhere for control of production and application of religious symbols. Fragmentation of religious authority has pluralized as well as enabled open discussion about how to be Muslim according to time and space, and the demands of both religious identity and modernity.

‘Muslim Politics’, aided by the dynamic of objectification of Muslim consciousness, has produced a transnational Islam. In this newly carved space of globality and trans-nationalism, voiced Islam rivals traditional printed Islam. It is within this space that the travel of the sacred idioms, symbols and metaphors of ‘islams’ (as interpreted and experienced locally not globally) opens vistas for both affinity with and hostility to the norms of globalism, modernism and internationalism and the norms underpinning them. How ‘fundamentalism’ is produced by which metaphors and symbols in which temporal and spatial contexts call for appreciating the endeavour of wedding the ideals of pristine, puritanical and textual Islam with the challenges and pressures of the daily lived ‘islams’ from Bali to Cairo. In the midst of multiple ‘islams’ (as Eickelman and Piscatori use this term), there exists a horizontal trans-nationalism forming a loose universal Muslim consciousness. This produces what has been described by some observers as ‘an intercalation of civilizations in which debates become more at hand and more complex’. This ‘intercalation’ of ‘islams’ and ‘modernities’ are misinterpreted with telling effect, feeding the familiar bias and depiction of a global Islamic ‘terror’ threat to world peace and civilization. This, in turn, reproduces the implicit notion of more than one level of Muslim consciousness.

From Al-Banna to Qutb and Islamic Revival

Sayyid Qutb stands for thought and action. He may come across as sitting astride Islam and the modern world. Qutb understands both. His treatise on modernity’s materialism reveals sharp insight. He is probably the first Muslim scholar to predict back in the early 1960s that communism, and to an extent party democracy, was doomed to failure and collapse. He develops a vision for an idealized Muslim state. To that end, he believed in a new paradigm along with a new praxis for the reification of the Muslim state. Only living under God’s law and under the banner of an Islamic state would solve the Muslim community’s problems of sovereignty, identity, religiosity, justice and Godly rule (hakimiyyah) (Moussalli, 1992). Qutb entreated the Muslims to work hard towards the objective of emulating a comprehensive form of Islam as practised in the time of the prophet: ‘Islam is an integrated and comprehensive system that in tradition of the salafiyyah should be understood exclusively from the Qur’an and the Sunnah’ (Jackson, 2006, p. 199). In Milestones (Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq) (Qutb, 1991), in some tracts, Qutb permits fighting against non-Muslims. On this account, many would disagree with Qutb’s belligerence against ‘Peoples of the Book’. This, however, is not the justification for Bin Laden and Co. in declaring war against what they called in the 1990s ‘the Jews and crusaders’. Qutb’s world and mindset were shaped by surrounding realities of colonialism, including occupation of Palestine.

While this radical side of Qutb’s discourse is what many Western critics focus on (interpreting Milestones as a handbook for fundamentalism and terrorism), the discourse he emits in his other seminal but overlooked work Social Justice is one of humanity and care. Like Al-Banna whose brand of Islam is one that ‘cares for health and well-being’ (Fifth Conference in al-Banna, 1987), Qutb invokes the Qur’an, especially the Godly commandments emphasizing communal obligation and the needs to sustain a good community and to care and exercise compassion: ‘Everyone of you is a shepherd and everyone of you will be held responsible for his flock—he who strives on behalf of the widows or the poor is like one who fights for the cause of Allah’ (Qutb, 2000). ‘Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind […] In short, all man-made individual or collective theories have proved to be failures’. Thus in Milestones Sayyid Qutb seems to engineer or construct a brand of reformist Muslim politics. The aim is to respond to what he considers to be a universal crisis of deficiency in the values of humanity and spirituality. Indeed, Milestones departs from the premise that man-made laws have failed, necessitating a wider search for meaning, delivery and superior values that ultimately lead to God for guidance. Another key premise, which Qutb shares with Al-Banna, is the necessity to ‘halt at the lines fixed by Allah and the limits fixed by the Holy Prophet’. For guidance, Qutb returns to the Qur’an and its basic teachings. He is aided by the empirical examples of the first Muslim community and Islamic order constructed by the Prophet and his companions. The aim is revival of the moral perfection of pristine Islam. Stress therefore is on the need for God’s law to govern all aspects of human life—the sacred and profane.

Unlike Qutb, Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, pragmatically prioritizes maximization of public utility and, to this end, contends that ‘Islam never avoids borrowing from any good system, provided it does not clash with its general principle and laws’. By contrast, in Milestones Qutb is adamant that all man-made systems and theories form a jahiliyyah (pagan order). For him, jihad against the pagan society is necessary. Only ‘true Muslims’, who abide by the law of God and the traditions of the Holy Prophet, are outside the realm of the decay and spiritual pollution of paganism. This is the pool of faith and piety Qutb endows with the potential to grow in numbers to eventually partake in his quest for reform of Muslim societies, ridding it of all un-Godly laws, knowledge and government. Qutb’s jahiliyyah includes Muslim and non-Muslim states as well as Western imperialists, reminding us of Qutb’s anti-colonial prism.

Qutb places human nature (fitrah) in the centre of the quest for delivery in every sense, spiritually, politically and socially. It is this God-given capacity and disposition for enacting God’s laws that render believers agents of positive transformation. But this agency and the praxis that goes with it are all instruments for self-discovery in a cosmos in which revelation must be humans’ main frame of reference. So a combination of pre-determinism—the Godly sanctions of what is acceptable and reprehensible set out in revelation—and determinism, the will to act in a Qur’anic fashion, enjoining the good and preventing wrongdoing. Thus the assignment of vicegerency (khilafah) on earth is truly enacted by the believers. That vicegerency is not possible without an Islamic state that implements and reflects God’s sovereignty and authority (hakimiyyah). Mastery is God’s, and is not divisible. God’s sovereignty is an essential precondition for a socio-political order in which all humans are equal by virtue of equality in powerlessness before God and equality in submission to the one and only authority, God’s laws. Qutb’s worldview, however, does not denude humans of all power. They are on earth to enact God’s rule, a purpose for which they have been endowed with a positive disposition to enjoin the good and work for the good of man, as well as with God-given subservience only to God and not to fellow-human beings. Hence—as elaborated in his seminal Milestones—the phrase God is greatest is in a manifesto for reclaiming God-given ennoblement, humanity and dignity. No Caesars are greater than man; and no earthly kings.

Qutb remains misunderstood. In Post-9/11, he is caricatured as if he plotted the mayhem heaped on New Yorkers in 2001, or as if he penned the plans for terror against Americans (Irwin, 2001). Of course, the context of inequality, authoritarian secular nationalism, colonialism and Muslim disunity around him perhaps led Qutb to produce political treatises (especially Milestones) the chief aim of which was to unhinge what he saw a state of moral decay and religious laxity. He was harsh in relegating fellow Muslims to a state to pagan existence (jahiliyyah), virtually anointing himself judge and arbitrator of right and wrong—exclusively God’s role. Qutb’s discourse declares unequivocal commitment to out-and-out renewal and reform of Islam and Muslims. Whilst strongly endorsing the role of education, Qutb looked for and found a practical solution for the re-Islamization of society for the purpose of instituting God’s order. His idea of the vanguard (tala’i‘) embodies the agency and positive will by the believers to fight and sacrifice themselves in the cause of a Godly just state. This script for reform of Muslim societies should not be read outside the temporal and spatial contexts within which Qutb lived, suffered brutality, imprisonment and censure, wrote and then died for his cause. That cause was primarily reform of Islam.

Democratic Knowledge

Any understanding of democracy that excludes a thorough grasp of ‘knowledge’ and ‘democratic knowledge’ would lead to a circuitous route to contextualizing how democratic learning may unfold in Muslim settings. The reproduction of power through management of knowledge practices and production, including the cultural sphere, is scantily addressed in the field of scholarship on Arab and North African states, but there are exceptions. Joffé and Paoletti make this case in relation to Gaddafi’s use of his Green Book and the creation of what they refer to as ‘shared cultural paradigms’, superimposed top-down (Joffé & Paoletti, 2011, p. 186). Democracy and democratization are defined as essentially contested concepts, and even more so in the Arab Spring historical moment (Valbjørn, 2012). Ideally, defining democracy should go beyond the stress on institutional arrangements involving competition over a share of the public vote to secure a mandate for democratic decision-making (Schumpeter, 2003). The linearity of three-stage sequential progression from liberalization phase that leads to openings of transition through elections and wider participation the culmination of which is consolidation that routinizes the democratic game is not adopted here (Linz & Stepan, 1996). O’Donnell doubts the utility of this supposedly consolidation-bound process of democratic transition (O’Donnell, 1996). This type of process is applied uncritically to the Arab region (Lesch, 2014). The understanding proposed for democratization favours notions of open-endedness and indeterminacy and for democracy a meaning that defines it as neither single nor fixed (Sadiki, 2009). In his book Democratization: Theory and Experience, Whitehead suggests that democratization stumbles upon a variety of experiences and contexts. The disjunction between what theory surmises and experience suggests is a point not missed by Whitehead. Thus, he puts forth an interpretation of democratization as an essentially contested concept. He reasons that if democracy is an essentially contested concept so is democratization (Whitehead, 2002: 7–22). The Arab setting is illustrative of this line of argument (Ottaway, 2003).

In order to define democratic knowledge, the question of how knowledge itself is understood must first be clarified. The departure point of this article is the idea that good government must be in the first instance rooted in a local system of knowledge. The term ‘local’ speaks to locality and specificity in the assimilation, application and interpretation of ideas, values, morals, myths, symbols and the technologies they necessitate. This system or repertoire, called in Arabic makhzun, which people adaptively and inter-generationally transmit and supplement as they manage change over time and space, is integral to the identity template of society as a whole. Such a makhzun (from the root verb khazan, i.e. to store from which the term makhazan is derived) or knowledge system does not only embody the full repository of cumulatively inherited and adapted learning, spiritual, intellectual and technological, it also engenders belonging. Integral to this is the totality of the socio-cultural imaginary, a filter, as it were. In Arabic this is rendered as al-mikhyal or socio-cultural imaginary. A social imaginary furnishes the only keys for reading and mapping out the world and making sense of it in the quest for self-conception (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). Thus, social imaginaries construct social identity and a kind of group solidarity and in-built narrowness. This is what Castoriadis means by the idea of society creating themselves ‘in and though the closure of meaning’ (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 152). This is one reason why the editors of The Imaginary and its Worlds (Bieger, Saldívar, & Voelz, 2013) echo Friedl’s criticism of Taylor’s ‘social imaginaries’, making a powerful point: The concept ‘epitomizes the neglect characteristic of socio-centrism of those dimensions of being that transgress what is already socially scripted’. All social imaginaries present blind spots owing to their inherent socio-centrism. Nonetheless, a social imaginary is closely tied a society’s biggest project of creation of all: ‘self-creation’ (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 149). That is ‘ontological creation’, the glue of which are, according to Castoriadis, ‘institutions (language, norms, family forms, tools and production modes, etc.) and…the significations these institutions embody (totems, taboos, gods, God, polis, commodities, wealth, fatherland, etc.) (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 149). Castoriadis closes the circle by describing the psychological hold a social imaginary has over a group: ‘social imaginary significations create a proper world for the society considered—in fact, they are this world [author’s emphasis, not mine]; and they shape the psyche of individuals. They thus create a “representation” of the world, including the society itself and its place in this world’ (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 152). This is of import here. It raises questions about the possibilities or impossibilities of self-creation when navigating the world, trying to make sense of it, and perhaps perennially chasing after the illusion of ‘we’ or of ‘self’ when not equipped with one’s own institutions or significations, or seeking to cognize the social world when afflicted with a huge chasm between institutions and significations. For example, ‘democracy’ travels the world and may be challenged by the variety of settings that are built with Castoriadis’s ‘closure of meaning’. It stumbles upon understandings of norms, family forms, God and city that may not mirror the origins of democracy in a different context where it was conditioned by surrounding institutions and significations, and attendant meanings used for self-representation and representations of evolving reality.

The Arab mikhyal is no different from any other social or cultural imaginary anywhere else. It is not static and is today like other social imaginaries, whether coloured by secularity or religiosity, subject to revision due to encounters with competing imaginaries, including millennial processes of cross-cultural fertilization. Like colonization in the past, modernization and globalization have opened up the social space of formerly colonized peoples. The mikhyal in question has in the course of nation and state-building underwent processes of close scrutiny and even disputation pitting Arabisants against Francisants (such as in Algeria), national-secularists against Islamists (everywhere in the Arab region), and Westernizers against champions of the local turath (heritage) as deftly captured by Hourani, amongst others (Hourani, 1991). This is part and parcel of cultural dynamism. As Eugene Rogan eloquently observes ‘…to say that the Arab World has been subject to foreign rules does not mean the Arabs have been passive subjects in a unilinear history of decline. Arab history in the modern age has been enormously dynamic, and the Arab peoples are responsible for their successes and failures alike’ (Rogan, 2009, p. 6). Indeed, all societies inevitably suffer from ‘auto-centrism’. Their representations of themselves and the world around them indulge their most cherished and endeared norms, symbols, myths, and gods, etc. This makes representations outside what is cumulatively culturally and socially scripted, as noted above by Bieger et al., challenging. The ‘neglect’—or the silence—in any social imaginary has in the modern era of globalization and close encounters are what sets all societies in search of new learning as part and parcel not only of self-preservation, but also of supplementing the local makhzun. The makhzun or repertoire includes also what Castoriadis calls ‘a transcendent, extra social, source of the institutions and significations, that is, religion’ (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 152). Besides Islam’s staying power as a frame of spiritual and religious reference Charles Taylor argues that belief in God within Muslim societies has remained unproblematic despite the advent of secularity in the modern age; (Taylor, 2007, p. 3), there is the intellectual repository, from the time of pagan or (Jahiliyyah) epics to the literary and non-fiction marvels that adorn the Arabic library, including al-Farabi, al-Mutannabi, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, al-Jabarti, al-Tahtawi, Kayr al-Din, Gibran, Taha Hussein, Al-Jabiri, among other luminaries. This makhzun is the over-arching corpus or compendium and filter, the mikhyal inclusive, informing interactions, aggregations, representations, and imaginings of community and self in the world.

Accordingly, when broaching the subject of democratic knowledge, the stress is not so much on the epithet ‘local’, ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’. Rather, the emphasis is on ‘democratic’ as interpreted and filtered through the makhzun aided by the mikhyal, or social imaginary. The search is not only for the local continuities provided by cumulatively preserved and adapted sets of institutions and significations, but also for the discontinuities be they violent (colonization) or voluntary (globalization). These discontinuities constitute the cracks through which novelty flows to any social life steeped in historical continuity and yet tattered by the trials of time. Rogan mentions the full gamut of outside processes that Arabs have encountered, prompting responses, adjustments, reactions, intersections, accommodation and rejection. As he puts it ‘Nationalism, imperialism, revolution, industrialization, rural urban migration, the struggle for women’s rights—all the great themes of human history in the modern age have played out in the Arab world’ (Rogan, 2009, p. 23). These series of encounters—colonization-cum-Westernization-cum-modernization-cum-globalization—have all left inedible imprints, inevitably ‘transgressing’, to invoke Bieger et al., anew, all that is ‘already socially scripted’. Just as in the case of imagining nation and community (B. Anderson, 2006, pp. 3–10) imagining democracy deploys not only Anderson’s ‘cultural artefacts’ and Castoriadis’s institutions, significations, and the social-extra of religion, but also the intermittent borrowings that encounters with the ‘other’ bring to the fore.

Ultimately, however, ‘Athens cannot exist without Athenians … but Athenians are created only in and by Athens’ (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 149). A Democratic knowledge—by the same token—suited for Arabs must be created only within the local makhzun and mikhyal and via local agency. This does not preclude useful comparisons or exchanges (Kaldor, 2011). There is of course an important proviso that Castoriadis adds to the mix. Any society is constantly under construction, ‘undergoing a process of self-alteration’ (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 149). The point of relevance to the Arab region here is that this process of continuous creations, involving institutions and significations, necessitates responses to internal, external and historical ‘constraints’ for the purpose of functionality and self-institution (Castoriadis, 1994, p. 152). This is partly akin to Taylor’s mid-point along the journey to modernity (Taylor, 2007, pp. 111–113). Therefore the makhzun and its mikhyal are not, by these accounts of transformation of social imaginaries, ‘brim- full’, so to speak.

In seeking to crystallize a notion of democratic knowledge, the stress is on the dynamic nature of the makhzun. It is neither in a state of abeyance, nor is it inhospitable to cross-cultural engagement. The Arab makhzun has had encounters with democracy since the ninth century AD. Al-Farabi stands out as one of the best known Muslim students of Greek democracy (Sadiki, 2012, pp. 123–127). Democratic knowledge in an Arab context will find it difficult to transgress the symbiosis of God and man, and the individual and the group. As Taylor notes the Western world might have gone a long way down the track of secularity but this has not dinted the credibility of divinity in Arab countries (Taylor, 2007). There is a great deal in the social imaginary whether as regards family forms, norms, God or economic distribution that remains governed by the symbiotic character of social life in Arab contexts. Co-evolution with religiosity and with community (group solidarity) is difficult to ignore. In the same vein, co-evolution with ‘otherness’ from time immemorial makes it imperative for designers of a democratic knowledge didactic framework to factor this into future learning. What this actually means is that any realistic conception of a democratic knowledge system may not be able to eschew religious sensibilities—not organized religion. Toleration, social justice, a moral economy (Tripp & NetLibrary, 2006), communal obligation and responsibility approximate many of the values one finds in literature on social capital (Putnam, Leonardi, & Nanetti, 1994). If harnessed under civic arrangements by a spirited citizenry, it could furnish values that can help undergird democratic knowledge systems in the region. Therefore, visions of democratic knowledge must be guided by holistic approaches. Moreover, the idea of ‘situational knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) adds a critical dimension that appeals in the conceptualization of democratic knowledge, namely in terms of its contingent nature—its dependence on inescapable facts of life of language, history, culture, social imaginaries, etc.

Based on the foregoing, a working definition of democratic knowledge may be offered thus: Democratic knowledge refers to the intellectual and practical capacities, skills, ethics whose primary cognitive weight lends itself to democratic learning, and civic habituation and socialization via an open-ended, constructivist, interactive, cross-cultural but also reflexive process, across time and space, cumulatively and collaboratively, relative to the local context in which good government is formed, grounded within the inherited repertoire of ideas, morals, including faith based, and within institutions, significations and experiences, but without excluding global adaptations. Ontologically speaking, this definition mirrors the fundamental idea of the very reality of knowledge, like society’s own existence, being continuously under construction and creation—ideas raised by Castoriadis. Moreover, as a process, democratic knowledge is almost sui generis, being neither entirely local, even if context specific, nor global. Similarly, it presupposes the blurring of intuitive/spiritual, intellectual and practical know-how, in a sense favouring a holistic approach. Dynamism is integral to the construction of democratic knowledge: reflexive (internal) and cross-cultural (external). There is a didactic substance to it, stressing learning with a view to long-term habituationFootnote 2 and socialization. The analysis now turns to Ennahda’s emerging democratic thought-practice.

Revisioning Islamism: Ennahda’s Democratic Learning Curve?

  • Tunisia: Ennahda’s ‘Second Founding’

Ennahda’s tenth congress has been a leap of faith into re-endorsing the movement’s historical leadership as well as into learning to ‘Tunisify’ its specific brand of Islamism—or whatever is left of it. However, the stakes are high and so are the challenges lurking ahead. At a historical juncture of intra-Islamists divisions over mattes of substance and organization, from Morocco to Egypt, and parallel divisions within secularists, Tunisia’s Islamists seem to be favouring the contest of power over the contest of ideology. Policy is primary; ideology is secondary.

Have they ‘killed’ Imam Hassan Al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, the late Hassan Al-Turabi, and Imam Khomeini and Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (both prominent religious references or marja’ in the Twelver Shia school), all iconic ideologues whose writings have stamped Islamist dogma with the dictum that Islam is din wa dawlah (religion and politics)? Tunisian Islamists, like their Moroccan and Turkish counterparts before them, seem to have rethought their ideas, which have over nearly a 100-year period postulated the inseparability of Islam and politics. Ennahda’s resolve to put to bed once and for all the conundrum of religion and politics, by finally declaring their separation, in its 10th Congress in May 2016, may be a turning point in the movement’s 36-year history. It amounts to quasi ‘second founding’. This is not necessarily motivated by tactical manoeuvring. ‘Civic habituation’ is a moderating force too, as I shall argue below.

Neo-political Islam and the Primacy of Practical Knowledge

Why a ‘second founding’? Three key observations are in order.

First, the tendency today by Islamists such as in Morocco and Tunisia to ‘separate’ religion and politics or more aptly deemphasise religion in their brand of politics speaks to the failure within political Islam to translate theoretical ideals, agendas and knowledge into a convincing and satisfactory practice in terms of political behaviour, and civic engagement in many Arabo-Islamic settings. There are qualified exceptions (Turkey and Malaysia may be imperfect examples but both function well). Second, separation of religion and politics by Islamists subverts the original paradigm: instead from moving from theory to practice, the new trend to focus on the experience of political Islam has the potential to inform theory-building. Perhaps, it will be the practice of political Islam at the level of the state that will eventually enable deeper appreciation of the theoretical potentialities of Islam as a religion. This will help the incorporation of practical knowledge into the organization of politics by Islamists informed by theories that have thus far eluded application. Reconciling this ‘contradiction’ is a huge challenge for Arab politics, in general. It is easy to pontificate about an ideal, such as social justice, or its ethical foundations as do many Islamist theoreticians, as being an indispensable virtue of Islamic democracy or governance. It is more of a challenge to apply it as part and parcel of lived Islam.

Third, the tendency today to separate religion and politics may bode well for levelling the playing field. The interpretation of religion ceases to be the exclusive bastion of righteous voices whose missionary zeal in some settings may have turned them into self-appointed speakers on behalf of ‘Islamic correctness’. No one reserves the right to claim the moral high ground and dictate what religion in the public sphere should and should not mean.

The Tunisian Context

Islamism is not going away. Scholars ranging from John Esposito and John Voll (1996) to Khaled Abou El Fadl (2004) have established this axiom. What comes under close scrutiny or is subject to tactical shifts or rethinking is the dogma that underpins the variety of Islamisms vying for attention in the Muslim world. Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori view ‘Muslim politics’ as involving ‘the competition and contest over both the interpretation of religious symbols and the control of the institutions that produce and sustain them’. Consequently, ‘Muslim Politics’ is a sophisticated analysis of the ever-changing correlation between the sacred and the profane in the Muslim world. They advance the idea that the politics of language that embed the expression and organization of Muslim politics must be ‘deconstructed’. The Muslim world has witnessed a process of ‘objectification of consciousness’, a process leading to fundamental questions in the minds of the community of believers. This objectification has come about as a result of mass education and wider channels of communication in the Muslim World, rendering exegesis widespread (Eickelman & Piscatori, 1996). Tunisia, like other Arab Spring countries, is today awash in contestation over meaning, in politics, religion and culture. It is a facet of maturing pluralism, civic engagement and freedom.

Political Islam or Islamism is simply refashioning itself according to the exigencies of time and space. Old conundrums are being tackled head on. Tunisian Islamists are no exception. In his recent book Young Islam, Avi Spiegel makes a few points—with special reference to Morocco—of relevance to those pondering the state of play within Islamism today (Spiegel, 2015). Taking a leaf from the book of Eickelman and Piscatori about how ‘Muslim politics’ is actually lived, Spiegel considers political Islam in practice, the way it is being operationalized, especially by the younger generation of activists. This is where research on Islamism leaves much to be desired.

He makes two points worthy of consideration when accounting for transformative processes within Islamism.

  1. 1.

    Islamist–Islamist relations inform behaviour and thinking more than external factors: This is more relevant to Morocco than Tunisia. Morocco’s Islamism is more dispersed and plural. There are competing versions of Islamism, including establishment Islamism, that compete for influence in the monarchy’s ‘public sphere’. Ennahda in Tunisia has been shaped by its relationship to the state (which Spiegel says is not the case in Morocco). A brand of secular nationalism led by Bourguiba did provoke Islamists into voicing opposition to the suppression of Tunisia’s Islamic identity and heritage in nation and state-building. Ennahda today says that the question of identity no longer divides Tunisians. It is doubtful whether Ansar Al-Sharia, (Zelin, 2013) now much weaker than three years ago, has forced policy rethinking within Ennahda.

  2. 2.

    Separation of civic activism/politics/or al-siyasi and religious/proselytisation activities/or da’awi has been in the offing within Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD—known by its French acronym). Through the examples of Abdelali Hamiddine, amongst others, Spiegel, marshals evidence of how there is a separation between the religious movement (harakah) and the political party (Spiegel, 2015, p. 178). This is the direction taken by Ennahda today.

Ennahda’s emerging brand of rethought Islamism provides a more open engagement in the socio-political sphere after the democratic reforms that routinized the Islamist party as a major stakeholder in Tunisia’s fledgling ‘public sphere’. This brand of civic Islamism that slots the political and the religious into two different compartments works in tandem with increasing civic engagement, contest of power, a power-sharing record since 2011, and massive investment in the professionalization of the Islamist party.

Concomitant with this newly found status as a power broker in Tunisian politics, Ennahda is engaging with deeply entrenched leftist and secularist forces through both dialogic (including alliance with secularists in government in 2011 and currently) and concessionary means (Brody-Barre, 2013). Ennahda has adopted a declaratory policy of deference to the state when it comes to the management of mosques—leaving them as venues of worship. It has also supported current plans to re-educate Imams and professionalizing their functions. This may also be a defence mechanism at a time when the state is eager to counter terrorism and overall religious radicalization, especially amongst youth (Khechana, 2016). Religiously inspired actors in the Muslim world are trying to define themselves in opposition to the likes of ISIL. Ennahda is no exception. A narrative pitting ‘moderates’ versus ‘radicals’.

Distinguishing between the fixed (al-thabit) and the mutable (al-mutaghayyir) may explain Ennahda’s recognition of the state. Politics belongs to the sphere of the changing. There’s a question of public utility or ‘maqasidi framework’ at play here I would propose. Exigencies and necessities of the Tunisian context have influenced this move. In the Tunisian national milieu, Ennahda is also probably responding to the misgivings of its detractors that it is hiding a secret theocratic agenda: that once in power it will impose dictatorship. The shift is intended also to pre-empt criticisms from liberals and secularists that it does respect Tunisia’s political identity. Ennahda can now claim it is transcending politics of identity.

In a nutshell, the plan to refashion Ennahda as announced in the movement’s 10th Congress in May 2016 can be summed up in the following areas: It commits to a civic state (dawlah madaniyyah), which rethinks earlier Islamist positions to make shariah (Islamic legal system) the law of the land (Amara, 2012). (For example, Imam Al-Banna did commit to this objective). It moves away from the revivalist brand of Islamism, by locating itself as a national actor which shares a political space with other power claimants and contestants. The old claim by Muslim Brotherhood movements that ‘Islam is the solution’ is no more (Ennahda did not really make use of this motto in its discourse). Ennahda Redefines Islamism more or less as ‘political ethics’ rather than ideology that informs political ends in the contest of power. In this sense, Ennahda is attempting to become post-ideological. This is a quasi ‘end of ideology’ moment.

It embraces the market unambiguously. This position breaks with earlier Islamist reservations about capitalism (Sayyid Qutb is a leading voice in this regard, with Islam’s social justice being a key tenet of his political thought). Ennahda’s discourse after the revolution embraces social justice. It renounces moralization in the social realm in a society which is 99% Sunni Muslim. This aims to end the pursuit of da’wah or call for religion by the newly professionalized political party and monopoly over the interpreting of religious dogma—much less endeavouring to implement it. Where Ennahda is concerned all of the fundamentals (e.g. “The Quran is our Constitution”; “jihad is our method”) that defined Muslim Brotherhood-type movements no longer apply to it in any evaluative (normative) or practical (political) sense.

Civic Habituation

Like other Islamist parties in Morocco, Ennahda is undergoing a phase of ‘civic habituation’. Islamists today are faced with real power, reversing exclusionary practices of the past (Sivan, 1998). So moderating policy and political behaviour may not be tactical or ephemeral. The party has a fixed constituency and following (sympathisers and members) that secure it political visibility and prominence, not always as the winning party as was the case in the 2014 parliamentary elections (“Why Did Islamic Party Lose Election in Tunisia,” 2014)—unlike in the 2011 elections of the Constituent Assembly (Murphy, 2013). It has gained kudos, status and know-how that deepen civic habituation. Ennahda was before the revolution at the receiving end of the dictatorial proverbial ‘stick’. Now its political fortunes have improved and with the gained territory come increased legal participation, recognition of the political system, legitimacy and shared power.

As a stakeholder, Ennahda is now concerned with self-reproduction: via the contestation of power, effective political strategies and responsive public policy platforms. Ideology ceases to be a guiding force. Even if in the minds of many members and the wider Islamist transnational community the separation of religion and politics may seem heretical. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt showed how contest and acquisition of power play a moderating role, thus informing incipient civic habituation. Most of the EMB has observed a de facto separation following the Arab Spring, the Egyptian MB founded a party, the Freedom and Justice Party, open to members and non-members, which accepted the civil state and political pluralism, at least in theory.

Adaptation is the name of the game: the challenge to measure up to the demands of pluralism, freedom and democratic transition through constant training into the art of politics. That is, finding a shared or ‘wasati’ space for engaging self and other through clear messages, legal and democratic strategies, shared values and rallying multi-partisan objectives. Thus Tunisia’s Islamists may contribute in a practical sense to a form of ‘Islamic democracy’, an ‘oxymoron’ for many of their detractors (Krämer, 1993). In fact, as the so-called ‘Arab liberals’ continue to fragment or are slow at self-reforming (Alterman, 2004), it is legalized Islamists that seem to be turning the learning curve of democratic government.

Of course, it is a moot point whether civic habituation through increased participation as a result of the adoption of the separation of religion and politics produces radicalization or de-radicalization within society. It is undeniable that there is demand for a role for religion in political affairs in Tunisia, as in many other Arab states. Abandoning a powerful tenet of Islamism may be read as a form of retreat, which may have a radicalizing effect (Georgy & Perry, 2013). Nonetheless, the rule of thumb is that civic engagement spells moderation and de-emphasis of ideology, not radicalization.

The Learning Curve

Table 4.2 is a tentative summary of two sessions of participant observation with two small groups of Ennahda members. I conducted the research in Tunisia on 21 and 22 May 2016 during Ennahda’s historical tenth congress in Yasmine Hammamet (Nabeul, Tunisia).

Table 4.2 Ennahda Islamists’ perceptions of civic/democratic habituation
Full size table

  • The first had 8 members (six of whom were in the 2011 elected Constituent Assembly that drafted the 2014 democratic constitution).

  • The second had eight members (4 of whom are members in the current parliament elected in 2014).

I have chosen this research methodology for various reasons, including familiarity with the party and its members, many of whom are friends or good acquaintances (Ennahda formed part of my Ph.D. thesis at the ANU in the mid-1990s). I was able to immerse overtly myself in the ‘informal’ discussions in an atmosphere that did lend itself to maximizing contact with Ennahda members (over three consecutive days in Hammamet). The gist of the exercise was to make the most of the setting and the congress and experience the participants and the event Tunis by allowing a firm grasp of the changes, the motions discussed and passed by Ennahda during its congress. In particular, my aim was to use participant observation to understand the changes through Ennahda members’ perceptions and interpretations of the proposed changes and the motions voted on during the congress. In conducting the research, I obviously was aware of the challenge to observe the highest standards of objectivity required for performing the research (Gans, 1999). For instance, the motion related to the separation of the religious and the political are not read as rigidly by my interlocutors. They do not view Ennahda as parting company with its Islamist ideals. Shaykh Rachid Ghannouchi himself (evening of May 21 and again on the morning of May 22) told me that the ‘fine-tuning’ is not intended to abandon the Islamic values of truthfulness, justice, fairness, and gradualism etc., which he views as not too different from the civic values any democrat subscribes to in any type of established democracy. He stresses the ‘civic’ nature of the changes. That is, voting more within the party, holding members to account, respecting due process, deepening alternation of power, and building a civic institution with a democratic structure and whose members are sufficiently professional, taking their responsibilities very seriously. Ghannouchi says a civic party is not intended to engage in proselytization. Islamist civil society can fulfil functions abandoned by the professional civic party—including charity work and alleviation of poverty.

What follows is a brief summary of the key findings in Table 4.2 that have transpired through participant observation in five areas. Three of these are explained briefly below.

Internal Democratization

All interlocutors view Ennahda as paying more attention to the historical low level of intraparty democracy. However, they blame this on the nature of the party’s evolution through exclusionary measures and security risks involving all members, especially prominent leaders. Ennahda, they point out, had not until the 2011 revolution had a continuous respite from oppression to develop its internal democracy. Internal democratization, in the new era including from the time of the ninth congress of 2012, has been on the party’s political agenda. The perception of internal democratization is that of openness in all internal decision-making processes. To turn Ennahda into a fully electoralist party will take at least a decade as a good number of decision-making positions, including one-third of the party’s Shura Council is appointed by the president. So gradualism is thought to be the way forward so long as internal party policy keeps up with reforming the party and this is partly what is being achieved in the tenth congress, my interlocutors point out. They are of the view that Ennahda will not be atrophied by mistrust and that internal democratization is key to transparency, higher degree of inclusiveness, legality and systematic reform. One main challenge of internal democracy, which for my interlocutors constitutes the backbone of power-sharing and power alternation internally, is to rise above the intra-party wrangling.

Decentralization

Generally, my interlocutors view Ennahda as heading towards greater decentralization and reproach secularist parties in Tunisia for nepotistic practices (a reference to parties where spouses or family members command almost full authority over these parties—a few parties where named but they prefer this to be suppressed) and a high degree of centralized leadership. Nonetheless, in relation to the selection of all posts and leadership positions, there is almost invariably a stress on the need to orient party policy towards greater decentralization so that regional party branches assume greater autonomy in the management of local issues. All take this policy preference to have the potential enhance internal inclusiveness and, by implication, greater internal democratization.

Democratizing Reforms

Most perceptions in relation to this area agree on the need to make Ennahda Tunisia’s leading party, in the generation of ideas and overall democratization for the entire country. This, according to their perceptions of democratizing reforms, calls for a party that is not narrow-minded ideologically. Its agenda must square with Tunisia’s needs and interests. Thus, the rationale for democratic reforms must be geared towards enhancing the party’s public image as primarily a Tunisian party working for the good of all Tunisians. These reforms, they observe, would help rebrand the party from that of the ‘khwanjia’ (derogatory term meaning ‘Islamist brethren’) to that of all democratic citizens. This is why they all support the motion to open up membership to all Tunisians and abandon former strict rules for joining Ennahda, which required endorsement from existing party members. Such reforms, they contend, will be able to enhance electoral appeal among all voters, including secularists, especially after the 2014 electoral setback. So these reforms would also improve the party’s future electoral performance.

  • ‘Neo-Ennahda’?

Is Ennahda renouncing ‘Islamism’, its doctrinaire sine qua non and the basis of its foundational identity? Since its emergence in the late 1970s as the ‘Islamic Tendency Movement’, identity politics, namely promoting the idea of Islam as an organic frame of reference for imagining polity, society and economy has defined the movement’s declaratory policy, rhetoric, discourse and political engagement. This template and attendant agency came at a high price: exile, imprisonment and exclusion under both Habib Bourguiba and his successor, ousted dictator, Zinelabidine Ben Ali. Under Ben Ali, Ennahda sought accommodation and even contested bi-elections showing in the late 1980s early indications of electoral support, which made the then dictator buckle and shift policy from coexistence to systematic exclusion and coercion. No single political current in Tunisia’s history suffered as much at the hands of Ben Ali’s police machinery, and the confrontation with the ousted dictatorial regime was not fully of its making (Allani, 2009).

Neo-Ennahda over a three-day historic congress (20–23 May 2016, Yasmine al-Hammamet, Tunisia) punctuated by fascinating and heated but pluralist debates, part of which I witnessed first-hand, is refigured into a national political party with an Islamic frame of reference that deploys democracy as a mode of political engagement. To this end, Neo-Ennahda is now committing to separate the religious (al-da’awi) and the political (al-siyasi). A vision that was upheld for more than three decades has ceded to a new brand of civic Islamism. That is, as an analogy neo-Ennahda has not only edged closer to the notion of a civil state, but also to Turkey’s AKP and further from Egypt’s standard Muslim Brotherhood or ‘Ikhwani’ model: the former operationalizes politics with minimum ideology, the latter has historically harboured ambitions of Islamizing polity.

This is why in one of his interventions during the congress, the party’s president Shaykh Rachid Ghannouchi adopted a new discourse angled at stressing the primacy of the market, economic growth, renouncing the politics of identity (huwiyyah), very much part of the fundamentals of his thought for over 30 years. I think there are three interconnected motivations.

First, normalization of Ennahda with the ‘deep state’, which has preserved the imprints of Bourguiba’s political modelling of it in a ‘Francophile’ fashion: secular in nature (Perkins, 2004). Modern Tunisia’s society is similarly shaped, manifesting a deeply hybrid national persona that reveres Islam but with a bent for civic engagement of all aspects of the horizontal side of life, including politics. Tunisia’s Islam was historically stamped with a dosage of liberal exegesis (Ashur, 1984). Today, Ennahda seems finally to be intelligently and deftly adaptive, seeking a brand of ‘Tunisification’ of its identity as a major political force with a fixed 35–40% political following.

Second, professionalization, and this is common to all major parties anywhere as they mature politically. So by defending a new identity that separates the religious and the political, Ennahda has turned an important learning curve on the way to a fully-fledged civic political party. The amendments that have all passed with absolute majority—800 plus votes by the conferences—all prove that several months of internal debates have come to full fruition for the reformists within the party. This includes further empowerment of the party’s Shura Council, of which 100 are directly elected by the conferences, and another 50 by the Council’s elected 100 representatives. Ennahda’s partnering in the troika government that delivered the country’s democratic constitution in early 2014 provided the party with an invaluable ‘reality check’, which it used to reflect, revise and adjust. Some have even reproached Ennahda’s leaders for concessionary deals and compromises that might have eased a return of the old order (Bozonnet).

Third, democratization via ‘factionalization’: a salient feature of maturing political parties anywhere. One of the most fascinating debates and the first ever in the history of Ennahda took place on the morning of May 22. Three leading leaders representative of first and second generations took to the floor to openly contest and defend their respective views of how the party should be internally organized, led and administered (I am not at liberty to disclose more). This was unthinkable before the revolution. Ennahda’s practice of internal democracy has produced a kind of factionalization. Factionalization may over time serve to reduce huge concentration of power in party executive. Islamist parties, like Arab secularist parties, tend to be resistant to democratic transformation in party structures and internal democracy. From this perspective, factionalization must be seen as having a democratizing effect, at least in the long term.

Al-Banna’s Islamism no more?

Surveying the state of political Islam (Islamic movements) in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, what is most conspicuous is the presence of a specter of stagnation, crisis and fragmentation. From Egypt to Tunisia there are signs that there is confusion in the ‘Islamic project’ adopted since the days of Hassan Al-Banna (assassinated in 1949), the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood ideal and model of socio-politico-moral organization. Morally, the flame of the ideal has not dimmed. It still lights up millions of ‘subaltern’ lives. Al-Banna—and after him other like-minded iconic figures ranging from Sayyid Qutb (seminal ideologue and scholar, Egyptian, hanged by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966) to Maulana Abu Ala Maududi (leading Scholar of Indian–Pakistani origin, d. 1979)—have made a strong case for ‘Islamic governance’. They find in Islam an organic repertoire not only for giving the former colonized a voice, but also the means to resist subjugation, Westernization including secularization, moral decay and dissolution into followers of Euro-American models of organizing polity, society, economy and morality.

In a brilliant but short ‘foreword’ to Sayyed Abul Hassan Al-Nadwi’s famous book, Islam and the World (Qutb, 2005, p. vii), Sayyid Qutb seconds the author’s ideas of an Islam that sanctions liberation from ‘superstitions and banalities’, ‘slavery and degradation’, and from religious and political ‘tyranny’. Islam, Sayyid Qutb argues, blesses life with faith, a font of ‘knowledge, fraternity, justice and self-confidence’. These are in turn life-giving values that through hard work maximize humans’ potential for realising the quest for a ‘just, healthy and balanced system’ (Qutb, 2005, p. vii).

The genius of Islam resides in the telos of a ‘just’ and ‘balanced system’. Just as in social justice, and a balanced system defuses the tension between dualisms such as God/man, this world/the hereafter, Muslim/non-Muslim (or peoples of the Book), community/individual and theory/practice. Sayyid Qutb does not mince his words when it comes to articulating the primacy of Islam (as din wa dawlah or religion and state) but also in terms of visibility and leadership in world (and worldly) affairs. He affirms that there is ‘good’ to be had when Islam assumes a leading role ‘to fashion life according to its own special genius’ (Qutb, 2005, p. vii). There is no doubt in his mind that justice and a balanced society or polity derive from Muslims leading not following. He takes leadership to be intrinsic to Islam. Moreover, he affirms that ‘proving’ and ‘testing’ Islam’s mettle obtains only when assuming responsibility. Thus in his view, Islam is predisposed to ‘lead the caravan of life. It cannot be a camp follower’ (Qutb, 2005, p. vii).

Perhaps this is no longer the case. Muslims, being today plugged into the international economy, integrated in an international order not of their making, and, of late, as they are being converted to the view of separation of religion and politics, cannot be but ‘camp followers’. The issues that shaped the thinking of Sayyid Qutb more than fifty years ago (Khatab, 2006)—the ideological standoff with the ‘West’, colonial penetration, Muslim identity—do not seem to feature large in the thinking of current Islamist ideologues. Sayyid Qutb found both capitalism and communism to be inferior to Islam (Qutb, 1949).Footnote 3 He found both to be steeped in materialism and even when they valorise justice, such as communism, they expunge it of all spiritual content. So in its continuous transformation, Islamism has shifted emphasis according to time and space, oscillating between phases of confrontation and reconciliation, and of rejection and accommodation:

  1. 1.

    Deployment of Islam as a moral and educational medium for raising levels of consciousness and resisting colonialism.

  2. 2.

    As a medium of resisting secularization to the point that mere political participation in secular politics was considered a heresy.

  3. 3.

    Resurgence or sahwah islamiyyah that positioned the question of identity at the heart of the quarrel with national-secular elites and states.

  4. 4.

    Islamization of state, society, morality and knowledge, all overlapping agendas that gave rise to transnational rethought Islamisms, recognizing authoritarian regimes (what the Muslim Brotherhood and the PJD did, respectively, in Egypt in Morocco) and approving of engaging the secular state by equating shura with democracy.

  5. 5.

    Islamism going hand in hand with revolution, and emergence of Islamist resistance movements.

  6. 6.

    Wahhabi Salafist explosion promoting literalist interpretations of Islam spread to all corners of the Muslim world.

  7. 7.

    Intra-Salafist divisions and the rise of intellectual and radical salafisms.

  8. 8.

    Divisions within moderate Islamisms (Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, etc.) and attendant ‘rationalization’ of Islamism through adoption of formerly rejected positions such as separation of religion and politics.

The End of Political Islam? End of Ideology?

It is too early to state with confidence the shift that marks the end of political Islam. Because it depends on how one defines political Islam in the first place. A strict ideological one will inevitably lead to the conclusion that in a certain sense it is the end of political Islam. But if one allows for the elasticity of ideas and practice then no. Islamists come in all shapes and colours: they are neither fixed nor unitary. For me, as a Tunisian who follows closely the politics of a fledgling democracy (Redissi, Nouira, & Zghal, 2012), I never cease to remind myself of the enduring legacy of Bourguiba’s secularism. It lives on and today reshapes Tunisia, including obviously its Islamists.

Many Tunisians and even Ennahda sympathizers and members are left with a big question: has Bourguiba been right all along? This is a question Ennahda has to ponder. For, after the tragic experiences of torture, martyrs, exile and suffering doing a big volte face on this issue is not easy. Was the suffering for nothing at all? Has Ennahda abandoned its original vision that Islam and politics belong to an organic sphere in which they are mutually reinforcing as a matter of conviction or necessity? These are questions that will not for some time go away.

Conclusion

There are no fixed or universal ‘keys’ for reading the intellectual map of political Islam. Traversing the vast terrain of this phenomenon, across various and variable contexts of time and space unearth diversity, contingency and fluidity. There is no ‘one fundamentalism fits all’ formula for generalizing about a complex current that is multi-vocal and discourses within speak to multiple ‘islams’ in the name of a single and universal ‘Islam’. What is certain about political Islam is that it is not about to retire from engaging modernity and all that it offers, positively and negatively. Likewise, modernity or those claiming to be its agents are not to give up engaging with all matters Islamic, positively and negatively.

Ennahda seems today to be oscillating between two stark paradigms of Islamism: an old and dying one, an ideologically rigid morally grounded, and perhaps politically sterile brand of Islamism that originated in colonial times, and an emerging version of political ethos noted by pragmatic fervour and intellectual fluidity. The quarrel with the ‘West’ and ‘Westernizing’ other is no more. Ennahda seems to be taking ‘Qutb-ism’ (metaphorically speaking) out of Islamism without furnishing it with any intellectual artefacts that distinguish the brand of political Islam intended by its original founders to reshape identity, morality (long-term goals), society and polity (short-term goals). The new Islamism is largely geared towards prioritizing the management of matters concerned with political competition—and without rejecting sharing space with secularists and non-Muslims. Ennhada experimented with this through the 18th of October anti-Ben Ali grand coalition prior to the revolution.Footnote 4 To this end, Ennahda’s Islamism seems to be coaching itself into the art of democratic politics. For the foreseeable future, it seeks to be equipped with it to navigate the travails of a polity, society and identity that are far from ideal, on many fronts (Byrne, 2014). Thus, it seems that it is the quest for the democratic society that Ennahda is now seeking first. The ‘Islamized’ polity and society seem for now to be going out of fashion and are thus relegated to a secondary—perhaps delayed—phase.