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Rachid Ghannouchi:A Democrat WithinIslamism
By Tamimi, Azzam S.
Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster
Contents
Chapter One: From Qabis to ParisChapter Two: The Journey to DemocracyChapter Three: The Question of DemocracyChapter Four: SecularismChapter Five: Civil SocietyChapter Six: The Territorial State and the New World OrderChapter Seven: Islamist Obstacles to DemocracyChapter Eight: Ghannouchi's DetractorsConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex
 
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Preface
It was by virtue of my involvement in Liberty for the Muslim World, a London-basedorganization concerned with monitoring human rights and democratization in Muslimcountries that I developed an interest in pursuing academically the issue of Islam anddemocracy. Like many Muslims, I had been greatly disappointed with the forcibletermination of the democratic process in Algeria and was dismayed by the attempt insome circles to justify the January 1992 military coup as having been inevitable inorder to protect democracy from its enemies, the Islamists. I embarked on this work believing democracy to be compatible with Islam and hoping to establish thiscompatibility by means of academic research.The idea was to refute the conclusions by some renowned Muslim political writersthat Islam and democracy did not work. I also was motivated to pursue this line of research by the democratic experiment in Jordan, where, despite a fully-fledgedIslamist participation in the political process, there was still a debate within Islamicmovement circles as to whether democracy did, or did not, contradict Islam. Thisdebate had actually been going on in much of the Arab world since the mid-1980swhen the breeze of democratization seemed to blow across the region. The mostsignificant development accompanying this trend had been the emergence withinpolitical Islam of groups willing to take part in the democratic process and pledging torespect the results of the elections and to play by the rules of the game.Researching this topic necessitated an exploration of the concept of democracy inWestern literature, followed by an investigation of the position of various Islamicschools of thought on the subject. It is no secret that contemporary Islamic revivalmovements generally dislike ideas that originate in the West, in reaction to Westerncolonization of much of the Muslim world and out of fear of loss of identity under thehammer of modernization. Writers affiliated with the Sayyid Qutb school, which hadthe greatest influence on Arab Islamic movements from the mid-1960s through the1970s to the mid-1980s, had insisted that democracy was an ideology alien to Islam.By the mid- 1980s this school started losing ground to another school of thought thatmaintained that democracy was not an ideology but a set of tools and mechanismsdesigned to control government power, which they considered to be perfectlycompatible with the Islamic concepts of 
bay'ah
and
shura.
To be fair, these ideas werenot entirely new; they were espoused before by Afghani, Abduh, Kawakibi, Rida, and
Malik Bennabi long before the ―incompatibility‖ school took hold.
 The focus of my interest shifted slightly in the wake of the international symposiumon Power-Sharing Islam, which was organized in London by the Centre for the Studyof Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster and Liberty for the MuslimWorld on 20 February 1993. The symposium hosted a number of intellectuals andrepresentatives of Islamic movements. Papers on Islam and democracy, the concept of power-sharing and pluralism, and the experiences of the Islamic movements in Egypt,Jordan, Algeria, Malaysia, Yemen, and Kuwait were submitted.Drawing on the symposium, I developed an interest in exploring the problems thatfaced Islamic movements as they participated in the process of democratization. I felt
 
3that investigating the attitude of Islamists vis-à-vis such problems would make a moreinteresting, and at the same time more challenging, topic of research. The idea was toshow that recent democratization experiences in countries such as Jordan, Egypt,Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen prove that serious obstacles confront the transition todemocracy in these countries. As far as I could see, most of these obstacles emanatedfrom outside the Islamic camp, mainly from local authoritarian governments and fromglobal powers seeking to preserve the status quo. There are, however, obstaclesemanating from within the Islamic camp itself caused by the emergence of radicaltrends within the phenomenon of Islamic revival that reject democracy and consider ita heresy imported from the West.In the meantime I had been in contact with Rachid Ghannouchi, one of the mostprominent thinkers in the realm of contemporary Islamic thought and the exiled leaderof the Tunisian Islamic movement Ennahda. I developed an interest in Ghannouchiwhen I met him in London in February 1992, during which time I was asked totranslate a paper submitted by him to a conference on Islam and Democracy in NorthAfrica organized at the London School of Economics by its Islamic Society.Thereafter, whenever Ghannouchi was invited to give a talk or present a paper I wasasked to interpret his talk or translate his paper. The talks and papers covered issuessuch as democracy, secularism, civil society, human rights, the nation-state, civilliberties, Islam and the West, the role and future of Islamic movements, Islamicminorities, and the political situation in Tunisia and North Africa.Rachid Ghannouchi leads a school in modern Islamic political thought that advocatesdemocracy and pluralism. He believes democracy to be a set of mechanisms forguaranteeing the sovereignty of the people and for supplying safety valves againstcorruption and the hegemonic monopoly of power. While insisting on thecompatibility of democracy with Islam, he believes that because of their secularfoundations, contemporary forms of liberal democracy may not suit Muslim societies.Ghannouchi's last and most important book,
 Al-Hurriyyat al-'Ammah Fid-Dawlah al- Islamiyyah
(Public liberties in the Islamic state), has been an important contribution tothe current debate within Islamic circles on the nature, duties, and restraints of government in Islam. Yet, although he has authored ten important books, very little of his thought has so far been made available to readers of English. Little has beenwritten about Ghannouchi in English, and most of what has been written about him byacademics
 
happens to be part of a discussion of either the Tunisian Islamic movementor the question of Islam and democracy. Because I have translated many of the talkshe has given and the papers he has written for English audiences since he settled inLondon, I therefore feel something of an authority on his political perspectives. I feelwell placed to research the genealogy of his political thought and the way heperceives the process of democratization and the obstacles facing it in the Arab world,especially in the North African region.This book, which is a treatise in the field of political theory, begins with a biographyof the first twenty-five or so years of Ghannouchi's life, depicting his childhood andmaturation from the time he was a young boy frequenting school in a remote Tunisianvillage until he interrupted his postgraduate studies in Paris and returned home. Thegenealogy of Rachid Ghannouchi's political thought finds its roots in his youth whenhe was first attracted to Nassirism, then abandoned it for an Ikhwan-Salafi style of religiosity, and finally progressed to an Islamic activism of Tunisian specificity.
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