Tunisia’s Ennahda: Islamists Turning the Learning Curve of Democracy and Civic Habituation

Abstract

The trajectory for this chapter is formed within three interlocking thematic circles (Islamism, knowledge and democracy). This chapter attempts to interpret the question of democratic learning within Ennahda’s brand of Islamism—or ‘soft Islamism’ (Sadiki in BA 2886: the return of Ghannouchi, 2011). Some writers view Islamism as one type of ideology antithetical to democratic learning and practice. Others, placing high premium on diversity within Islamism, challenge the reduction of Islamism to cultural atavism and incompatibility with democracy. This brand of conventional wisdom largely remains caught within binary representations—democracy and non-democracy, ‘West’ and ‘Islam’, and Islamism and democracy. It is rejected here. This line of reasoning is grounded within a matrix of oppositions that places the ‘West’ as superior to the ‘rest’ and the repository of all democratic knowing. It derives from a hierarchical understanding of all things ‘Islamic’, denying them the potentiality of cohabitation with democracy, much less inventing their own democratic know-how. The gist of the exercise in this chapter is to tentatively draw attention to emerging experiences—such as Ennnahda’s—by examining, be it briefly, an Islamist modus operandi that seems to deny the oft used polarities between Islamism and democracy. In doing so, the chapter thus seeks to highlight new forms of democratic agency and the thought-practice that underpins it, with special reference to the Tunisian Islamist party, Ennahda.