Protecting the Sacred: Tunisia's Islamist Movement Ennahdha and the Challenge of Free Speech

Abstract

Since the 2011 uprising, Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahdha has proposed a political project based on reclaiming the nation's Arab-Islamic identity. At the heart of this is the issue of 'protection of the sacred', which seeks to define limits to freedom of expression to protect religious symbols from criticism. This is part of Ennahdha's post-Islamist evolution. The movement has drawn away from its earlier ambitions to Islamize the state and now seeks to reconstruct the role of Islam by asserting a cultural Islamic identity, which recasts religious norms as conservative values and which has yet to determine the precise limits of new individual freedoms. The result was to propose a new set of rules for the community under which Tunisians would freely express their religious belief in a way denied them under the former regime, but would also live under a state that defended and guaranteed their religious values.

Closing the Arab Democratic Gap: A Re-Assessment of the Tunisian Democratic Transition

“…Their rise challenged Ennahda's position as the main authority on political Islam (Hamid, 2014), which forced it to sometimes perilous compromises as an attempt to both demonstrate its Islamist credentials to satisfy its base and try not to alienate its secular partners (Drumberg, 2014). This balancing act proved sometimes too difficult to maintain and led to the loss of some voters to more extreme movements (Hamid, 2014), which has been used to explain the slow response of Ennahda to the 2013 events as well as earlier polemics by fear of alienating its conservative fringe and losing further support (McCarthy, 2015) 6 . This phenomenon also increased pluralization within Ennahda.…”

“…The Peculiar Story of Ennahda If Tunisia stands alone as the success story of the Arab Spring, Ennahda is often viewed as an unusual and potentially non-representative examples of Islamist movements and its moderation and democratization tendencies have been heavily scrutinized. For many, its democratic participation can be attributed to the dynamics identified by Villalón: they argue that its choices have been directed by its intrinsic edge in the democratic game brought by the popularity of political Islam, which led it to embrace democracy and kept it invested in it (Noueihed and Warren, 2012;Esposito et al, 2018), that they are the result of progressive socialization and civic habituation (Dalmasso and Cavatorta, 2013;Sadiki, 2018), or that both phenomena are playing out at the same time (McCarthy, 2015).…”

From Islamists to Muslim Democrats: The Case of Tunisia’s Ennahda

“… 10 Asma Ghribi, “The Problem with Tunisia’s New Constitution,” Foreign Policy , January 9, 2014, . For more context on these controversies, see Hartshorn and Yadav (2018) and McCarthy (2015). …”

Political Islam in Tunisia. The History of Ennahda. By Anne Wolf. Hurst Publishing, London, 2017. ISBN 9781849048262, pp. 304. Price: £30 (hardback); £18 (paperback, published 2018, ISBN 9781787380332).

“…The search for a common ground in the name of national cohesion continued to be the key-concept of Ennahda's public discourse from early 2011, when a process of consensual national decision-making laid down the rules for political transition. At the IX Congress in June 2012 Ennahda's leadership prompted an embryonic debate on the division in the party's activities between preaching ( da'wa ) and politics (McCarthy 2015). Following this discussion, Ennahda provided evidence of willingness to undertake a process of consensual national decision-making laying down the rules for political transition with secular forces.…”