Category: Tunisia

Rachid Ghannouchi’s letter from a Tunisian Prison

by Rashad Ali

I recently attended a talk by Andrew March on his book On Muslim Democracy, which describes the journey from what he calls Sovereigntist Islamist Democratic ideas to post-sovereigntist and post-Islamist ideology of Shaykh Rashid Ghannouchi and the Ennahda Party. The evolution of Ghannouchi’s ideas, the struggle for democracy and human rights, and his transformation from Islamist ideologue to Muslim Democrat is arguably one of the most significant developments in contemporary Islamic political thought. 

The event was also attended by Ghannouchi’s close confidante, associate, and student Ahmed Gaaloul. He read out a letter which takes on greater significance in the context of Tunisia’s authoritarian turn and jailing of opposition figures, including Ghannouchi and Saed Ferjani, constraining the judiciary and imprisoning judges such as Bechir Akremi.

Prefacing the letter, Ahmed Gaaloul said that the letter was in response to a question about his advocacy for democracy and consensus, since it did not help him. Rather, he ended up imprisoned and no one stood with him. Doesn’t this mean that the values he calls for have failed, illustrated further by the crime to which the Palestinian people are exposed ?

Here is Ghannouchi’s letter in response:

Friday, February 16, 2024

I am in prison today because I called for the values ​​of national democracy, which is part of universal democracy, and because the conflict in Tunisia is a conflict between democracy and non-democracy. 

Some of the enemies of democracy rely on modernity as a basis to exclude Islamic opponents. We in Tunisia were founded on the values ​​of Islam, and we do not find any justification to exclude those who disagree with us or those who believe in Islam with a different vision, because we do not see that there is an official spokesman for Islam.

I am in prison because a significant portion of the so-called Tunisian modernists are non-democratic. They call for a democracy that is just for them, an exclusionary democracy. Whereas We are in a struggle for a Tunisia for all and for a democracy that includes everyone inside Tunisia and outside Tunisia.

The country today is governed by the dualism of good and evil, right and wrong, patriotism and treason. This is the essence of the coup of July 25, 2021: the monopoly of patriotism, the monopoly of Islam, and the monopoly of righteousness. Therefore, the existing regime is in a relentless war against democracy in all its meanings. This approach cannot bring Tunisians together because God created people different.

The current system sees difference as a curse, but we see it as a mercy.

Palestine exposed the shortcomings of democracy within the framework of the nation state. 

Democracy, as a mechanism, is one of the best mechanisms that the human political mind has produced for consensus and reaching settlements between differences and a way to resolve disputes away from violence.

But when democracy is confined to a particular group and is imprisoned within the trenches of nationalism, race, and color, its mechanisms break down in more than one case, especially in the face of major challenges such as the Palestine question.

The flaw, then, is not in the idea of ​​democracy, but in the idea of ​​the nation-state outside the framework of ethics and the values of equality for all human beings. There is no framework for ethics outside the framework of man as God’s khalifa / vicegerent on earth, the one who is entrusted to look after this world. Therefore, we demand democracy and add it to our understanding of Islam so that it emerges from the confines and the narrowness of the individual and the group to the vastness of humanity.”

The letter in Arabic:

هذه الرسالة جاءت ردا من الشيخ راشد على سؤال وجهته له وهو في سجنه قبل مداخلة مبرمجة في احدى الندوات المخصصة لتقديم الكتاب الاخير “المسلمون الديمقراطيون” مع اندرو مارش.

تمثل السؤال في ان وضعه هو في السجن وهو الداعي للديمقراطية والتوافق، لم يشفع له بل انتهى سجينا ولم يقف معه احد ألا يعني هذا ان القيم التي يدعو إليها فشلت خاصة في ضوء التناقض القيمي الذي يعيشه العالم في ضوء الاجرام الذي يتعرض له الشعب الفلسطيني والاخلال القيمية التي تعرفها المنظومة الغربية ما يشكك في منظومة قيمها وفي الديمقراطية. فكان رده في الرسالة التالية:

 الخميس 15 فيفري 2024

أنا في السجن اليوم لاني دعوت إلى قيم الديمقراطية الوطنية وهي جزء من الديمقراطية الكونية للإنسان ولأن الصراع في تونس هو صراع بين الديمقراطية و اللاديمقراطية .

إن أعداء الديمقراطية يعتمدون الحداثة كقاعدة لإقصاء الخصوم الإسلاميين، ونحن في تونس وجدنا تقريبا بسبب أننا انطلقنا من قيم الإسلام ولا نجد مبررا لإقصاء من يخالفنا أو من يؤمن بالإسلام برؤية أخرى، لأننا لا نرى أن هناك ناطقا رسميا باسم الإسلام . 

أنا في السجن لان قسما كبيرا من الحداثيين غير ديمقراطيين، هم يدعون الى ديمقراطية تخصهم ديمقراطية إقصائية . 

نحن في نضال من أجل تونس للجميع ومن أجل ديمقراطية تسع الجميع داخل تونس وخارج تونس .

البلاد محكومة اليوم بثنائية الخير والشر، الحق والباطل، الوطنية والخيانة، هذا هو جوهر انقلاب 25 جويلية 2021: احتكار الوطنية واحتكار الإسلام واحتكار الصلاح. لذلك النظام القائم هو في حرب لا هوادة فيها ضد الديمقراطية بكل معانيها. ولا يمكن لهذا المنظور ان يجمع التونسيين. لان الله خلق الناس مختلفين، هو نظام يرى الاختلاف نقمة أما نحن فنراه رحمة. 

إن فلسطين فضحت ليس الديمقراطية فقط وإنما الرؤية القومية للديمقراطية: nation state.

الديمقراطية ،كآلية، من أفضل ما أنتج العقل البشري السياسي من آليات للتوافق والوصول الى تسويات بين المختلفين وسبيل الى حسم الخلافات بعيدا عن العنف.

ولكن عندما حشرت وسجنت في خندق القومية والعرق واللون تعطلت آلياتها في أكثر من حالة خاصة أمام الامتحانات الكبيرة مثل امتحان فلسطين. 

الخلل اذا ليس في فكرة الديمقراطية ولكن في فكرة “الدولة القومية خارج اطار الاخلاق”، ولا إطار للأخلاق خارج إطار الانسان خليفة الله في الأرض لذلك نحن نطالب بالديمقراطية ونضيفها لإسلام يخرج من ضيق الإنسان (الفرد) إلى سعة الإنسانية.

Joel Beinin on labor movements in Tunisia and Egypt

Joel Beinin has been a major figure in Middle East studies for several decades. He has been involved with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) since the 1970s and remains a contributing editor to its magazine, Middle East Report. He and Joe Stork assembled the cri de coeur Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Beinin’s MERIP author page reads like a one-man archive of leftist thinking about the Middle East over the last 30 years.

He is Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and series editor of Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Continue reading “Joel Beinin on labor movements in Tunisia and Egypt”

A dizzying abundance of events this coming week

There’s never a shortage of rich cultural programming in a cosmopolis like Chicago, but the coming week presents an absolute frenzy…

 

Monday, April 3 at 6:00 PM

Joel Beinin discusses his book Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — at the Evanston Public Library (in partnership with Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program)

details

 

Wednesday, April 5 at 6:00 PM

Mustafa Akyol discusses his book The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims — at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston

details

 

 

Continue reading “A dizzying abundance of events this coming week”

Tariq Ali on the Arab Revolutions

Over at Not George Sabra, Malik Little criticises Tariq Ali’s orientalist take on the Arab revolutions.

“What is a revolution?” asks Marxist Tariq Ali in a recent article. He answers, “a transfer of power from one social class (or even a layer) to another that leads to fundamental change.”

Ali never gets around to defining what exactly constitutes “fundamental change,” but he knows for sure that whatever “fundamental change” is, there has been none of it in the Arab world since 2011.

Does the end of the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia and the destruction of its secret police count as “fundamental change“? For Ali, no. After decades of a life of comfort and privilege in West, it seems Ali has forgotten what it is like to live under the thumb of a police state and murderous military rule. He has forgotten what a “fundamental change“ it is to be ruled by elected institutions and politicians rather than tyrants and generalissimos.

Since Ben Ali was ousted, there have been two general strikes called by the main union federation.

For Ali, this is no big deal. How do we know? He never mentions Tunisia or its people even once in his half-assed self-serving overview of the Arab Spring’s non-revolutionaryness, a double oversight since Tunisia is why the Arab Spring happened in the first place.

Instead, Ali goes on to ‘analyze’ events in Egypt where the counter-revolution has triumphed. He uses this triumph to deny that a revolution ever happened. Woe to V.I. Lenin who continued to write about the Russian revolution of 1905 even after it was smashed by the Tsar and Karl Marx who continually referred to the lessons he learned in the abortive German revolution of 1848-1849 for failing to match the insightful wisdom of Tariq Ali, a man who knows a revolution is only a revolution when it succeeds!

The next stop on Ali’s “nothing to see here” tour is Libya:

“In Libya, the old state was destroyed by NATO after a six-month bombing spree and armed tribal gangs of one sort or another still roam the country, demanding their share of the loot. Hardly a revolution according to any criteria.”

No mention of course of the General National Congress election of 2012 that went off without a hitch to the immense jubilation of the long-suffering Libyan people. Mentioning inconvenient facts like this might make Westerners sympathetic to the their difficult struggle to build institutions out of the ashes of 42 years of one-man rule by a deranged tyrant. No discussion of what class rules Libya today is necessary. Better to talk up “armed tribal gangs” in true Orientalist fashion. Who better than a brown man to play on the fears peddled by the white man to convince Westerners that there’s no revolution in Libya for them to solidarize with? Ali knows that if there’s anything Westerners love to hate, it’s Muslims.

In tribes.

With guns.

Throwing up gang signs.

Continue reading “Tariq Ali on the Arab Revolutions”

Gilbert Achcar on the Syrian Revolution

In this interview published at Socialist Resistance, the clear-sighted leftist Gilbert Achcar explains the importance of standing in solidarity with Syria’s popular revolution and the need to resist the propaganda of Western, Russian, and Gulf counter-revolutionary forces. Achcar is interviewed by Terry Conway.

TC: Could you assess the present state of the Arab uprising in general before we focus more specifically on Syria?

GA: What is happening now is a confirmation of what could be said from the start; the fact that what began in December 2010 in Tunisia, was not a ‘Spring’ as the media called it, a brief period of political change during which one despot or another is overthrown, opening the way for a nice parliamentary democracy, and that’s it. The uprisings were portrayed as a ‘Facebook revolution’, another one of these ‘colour revolutions’.  I, for one, insisted from the beginning that this was a misrepresentation of reality. What started unfolding in 2011 was a long-term revolutionary process, which would develop over many, many years if not decades, especially if we take into account its geographic extension.

From that perspective, what we have had so far is just the opening phase of the process. In some countries they have managed to go beyond the initial stage of overthrowing existing governments; this was the case in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya – the three countries where the regimes were overthrown by the uprising. And you can see that these countries are still in a state of turmoil, instability, which is usual in revolutionary periods.

Those eager to believe that the Arab uprising has ended or was stillborn focused on the initial victory of Islamic forces in elections in Tunisia and Egypt. Against such doomsayers, I stressed the fact that this was actually unavoidable since elections held shortly after the overthrow of the despotic regime could only reflect the balance of organised forces that existed in these countries. I argued that the Islamic fundamentalists’ period in power would not last long, if we consider the real roots of the revolutionary process.

This long-term revolutionary process is rooted in the social reality of the region, characterised by many decades of stalled development – a higher rate of unemployment, especially youth unemployment, than in any other region in the world over several decades.  These were the real basic causes of the explosion, and as long as these causes are not addressed, the process will continue. Any new government which has no solutions to these root problems will fail. It was predictable that the Muslim Brotherhood would fail: in my book The People Want, which was of course written before Morsi’s overthrow in Egypt, I argued that the Muslim Brotherhood would fail inevitably. I wrote the same about Ennahda in Tunisia, which is now faced with a very strong protest movement that puts the future of the government in question.

So there is an ongoing process throughout the region, which, like any revolutionary process in history, has ups and downs, periods of advances and periods of setbacks – and sometimes ambiguous periods. The most ambiguous event in the whole process until now has been the recent experience in Egypt where we saw this huge mass mobilisation against Morsi on 30 June, which was a very advanced experience in democracy by a mass movement asking for the recall of an elected president who had betrayed the promises he made to the people. But at the same time, and here lies the ambiguity of course, you had the military coup and widespread illusions that the army could play a progressive role, including amongst dominant sections of the broad left as well as amongst liberals.

Continue reading “Gilbert Achcar on the Syrian Revolution”

All Things Considered

I was a guest on BBC Wales’s All Things Considered, a religious programme, talking about Christians in the Arab world in the light of the Arab revolutions. Also talking are the Right Reverend Bill Musk, based in Tunisia, Bishop Angelos, who serves the Coptic community in London, and the Reverend Christopher Gillam, who admires the Syrian regime and overemphasises Syrian Christian opposition to the uprising. Apologies for my voice, which was heavy with cold.

Gillam’s problem may be that he only speaks to ‘official’ Christians. Here‘s an article on Christian opposition to the regime. I like this quote: “The Christian churches have been bought, and have allowed themselves to be bought,” criticizes Otmar Oehring, a human rights expert with the Aachen-based Catholic aid organization Missio. “They’re ignoring the fact that so many people are dying.”

Bouazizi family’s message to Libya

I had missed this. Menobia Bouazizi, the mother of Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old martyr whose death triggered the Arab revolt, sent the following message to Libya’s freedom fighters.

The family of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian from Sidi Bouzid whose act of self-immolation triggered the Tunisian Uprising, has a message for the families in Libya who have lost their loved ones to the violent repression of the protests.

Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor, set himself on fire on December 17 after police abused and humiliated him. He died of his burns on January 4.

The protest movement that began in Sidi Bouzid swelled to become a nationwide phenomenon, and spread to other countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Most recently, it reached Libya.

Continue reading “Bouazizi family’s message to Libya”

Absolute Power

Part of Al Jazeera’s The Arab Awakening series.

As revolution shakes the Arab world, a series of films explore the roots of the uprisings and ask ‘what next’? Those in a position to know reveal the ‘tricks of the trade’ of Arab dictatorship.

A Perfect Storm in the Arab World?

Middle East scholar Prof. Fawaz Gerges on the Arab revolt.

Regardless of the outcome of events in Egypt, for Arabs, psychologically and symbolically, this is their Berlin Wall moment. They are on the brink of a democratic wave similar to the one that swept through Eastern Europe more than 20 years ago, hastening the Soviet Union’s collapse. The Arab intifada has put to rest the claim that Islam and Muslims are incompatible with democracy. The democratic virus is mutating and will probably give birth to a new language – and a new era – of politics in the Arab world. Fawaz A. Gerges is a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This event was recorded on 24 February 2011 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building. It was chaired by Dr Maha Azzam.

Available as: mp3 (41 MB; approx 87 minutes)
Event Posting: A Perfect Storm in the Arab World?