Rachid al-Ghannouchi Imagines Democratic Future for Tunisia
For more than three decades, Rachid al-Ghannouchi has preached that pluralism, democracy and Islam are harmonious. As his country, Tunisia, heads toward the first elections after the Arab revolts on Sunday, Mr. Ghannouchi, a renowned Islamic thinker, faces a reckoning between his principles and intentions.
Mr. Ghannouchi boldly predicted Wednesday that his Renaissance Party would win a majority in the elections, contested by more than 80 parties, to choose an assembly charged with drafting a constitution for a country that was once one of the Arab world’s most repressive. That would be one of the most startling achievements for an Islamist party in the Arab world since 1992, when the military in Algeria deprived a religious party there of an almost certain electoral victory, igniting a civil war.
Many secularists are bracing for the prospect with foreboding, worried that Islamists will seek more regressive laws on marriage, divorce and inheritance, and encourage — or mirror — the Arab world’s growing cultural conservatism. Mr. Ghannouchi’s many critics draw on fears that democracy will serve as a tool for Islamists to deliver another brand of intolerance.
‘We will not be lenient with those who try to manipulate Tunisians,’ said Najib Chebbi, the chairman of the largest secular faction, the Progressive Democratic Party.
But Mr. Ghannouchi, long a seminal figure in the Arab and Muslim world, believes that the Arab revolts have allowed the region to imagine a different future. At 70, he walks slower these days and pauses before he answers, aware, it seems, of what this moment represents in the old conflict between political Islam and secular authoritarianism.
‘The situation today is different,’ he said recently.
As if struck by the idea, he repeated the phrase three times.
Tunisia ‘is going to be a democratic society, a model in the Arab world,’ he said, after a recent conference in Istanbul, where some of Turkey’s conservative leaders look to him as an inspiration and an ally. ‘The direction of Tunisia’s future is that it will be open to the entire world.’
The elections Sunday represent the end of an arc for Mr. Ghannouchi, whose beard has long since turned gray. He began as a follower of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former Egyptian president and a hero to a generation in the Middle East, and he has an intimate feel for the rest of the Arab world not always shared by his fellow Tunisians. He studied in Egypt and Syria before returning to Tunisia. In 1981, the year Anwar el-Sadat was killed in Egypt, he founded the Islamic Tendency Movement, which denounced violence and endorsed pluralism and democracy.
‘Rulers benefit from violence more than their opponents do,’ he said…