Tunisia’s Transformation… Ennahda and Secularism

Tunisia’s Transformation… Ennahda and Secularism

International and Arab News

The transformations underway in Tunisia, at the popular, state and constitutional levels, are the most prominent push back against fundamentalism today…

Since the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime in Egypt fell, the Ennahda Movement has been trying to promote the project of the Brotherhood, betting on detoxifying it. However, it failed very badly and has been accused of being implicated in establishing terrorist cells, money laundering, and corruption.

Ennahda has been working to “reassure” Tunisian society over this period for fear of seeing the Egyptian model applied in Tunisia. Ennahda founder and leader Rached Ghannouchi thought this could be achieved by pursuing two ploys in parallel. The first was watering down the party’s views of his movement regarding principles that Tunisians fear for, especially secularism. The second was pushing a narrative that the Ennahda Movement was clean, in contrast to the corrupt civic parties. Both ploys failed.

In April 2022, Ghannouchi published a paper entitled Secularism and the Relationship between Religion and the State from the Ennahda Movement’s Perspective. Writing for Alhurra, Faisal Babiker summed it up. Ghannouchi had the following to say about secularism: Teaching us how to manage our agriculture, industry, and government, and how to run the state is