Tag: Middle East

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.

Theaters of Coercion: Iran at Home and Abroad

children-of-paradise-coverI have an essay in the new issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in which I review Laura Secor’s excellent new book Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran and also examine Tehran’s role in the changing political landscape of the Middle East—especially in the Syrian catastrophe. You can read the essay here.

“Hands Off Syria” Applies to Russia Too—An International Statement

The following statement was authored by Gail Daneker of Friends for a NonViolent World, Brian Slocock of the Syria Solidarity Movement, UK, and the blogger and activist Clay Claiborne

 

“Hands Off Syria” Applies to Russia Too

As people and groups from many countries, united by a common commitment to peace, justice and human rights, we condemn the military offensive that began with air strikes launched by Russia in Syria on 30 September 2015 and accelerating subsequently.

While the Russian government has said that these operations were directed against the Islamic State (ISIS), most were on areas with no ISIS presence. The focus of the Russian military offensive appears to have been on opposition communities in the northern Homs region, a continuing center of resistance to the Assad Regime.

The victims of the Russian aggression on 30 September were predominantly civilians, including many children. Humanitarian conditions were dire in the area before Russia launched its offensive because it has long been under siege by the regime for its resistance. Continue reading ““Hands Off Syria” Applies to Russia Too—An International Statement”

Toward a People’s History of the Syrian Uprising—A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman

In the increasingly disfigured debate about Syria, it is scarcely even remembered that it all began as a popular uprising—indeed, as a nonviolent and non-sectarian one whose goals were dignity, justice, and freedom from a one-family mafia torture state in power for more than four decades.

Wendy Pearlman is out to set that record straight and explain why the Syrian uprising happened in the first place.

Pearlman, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University in Chicago who serves on the faculty of the university’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, is the author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada and Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement.

For the last two years Pearlman has been working on a book that she conceives as something of a people’s history of the Syrian uprising. She has interviewed more than 150 Syrian refugees in Jordan and Turkey about their experiences in the uprising and war. Along the way, she has published a series of powerful articles, among them “Love in the Syrian Revolution”, “Fathers of Revolution” and “On the Third Anniversary of the Syrian Uprising”.

In September, our Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver had the pleasure of co-hosting Pearlman (along with the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy) for a pair of presentations about her book-in-progress. While she was in Denver, I conducted this interview with her for our Middle East Dialogues video series:

Syria & the Arab Uprisings: An Interview with Gilbert Achcar

Gilbert Achcar has been called “one of the best analysts of the contemporary Arab world” (Le Monde) and “the preeminent Marxist scholar of the region” (CounterPunch). He is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His many books include:

Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror

The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder

Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy (dialogues with Noam Chomsky)

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives

Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism

The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising

We recently had the pleasure of hosting Professor Achcar at the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies for a stimulating series of lectures, forums and panel discussions about his recent work. During his visit, I recorded the following interview with him for our CMES Conversations series.

We took his book The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising as a starting point from which to examine the roots of the Syrian uprising, the nature of the Assad regime, the different shapes of the uprisings across the region, and the fate of Syria. Here it is:

Teaching John Stuart Mill in Iran: A Conversation with Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein is of course best known for his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—his books, lectures and media interviews on the subject over the last three decades—and for the considerable controversy it has generated.
 
Less known is that for many years he also taught political theory. It might come as something of a surprise that among his favorite works is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. This might come as a surprise since Finkelstein is well to the left of most admirers of the iconic nineteenth-century liberal thinker. Of course Mill was also a socialist and a feminist—indeed an early one (see Martha Nussbaum’s comments at the end of this interview). But in postcolonial studies Mill is widely regarded as an imperialist and a racist. An ambiguous and contested legacy, to be sure—which is part of Mill’s enduring hold on us.
 
Finkelstein recently taught a short course on Mill’s On Liberty in Iran. There’s a whole literature devoted to this phenomenon. Norma Moruzzi has written about reading Hannah Arendt in Iran. Ali Paya and Mohammad Amin Ghaneirad have mapped the multiple spheres of influence that Jürgen Habermas enjoys in Iran. The Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo has published a book of conversations with Isaiah Berlin. (I myself have written a short book on Iran’s engagement with liberal thinkers.) When leading political thinkers (of varying persuasions) from Europe or North America—from Habermas and Antonio Negri to Richard Rorty and Immanuel Wallerstein—visit Iran, their lectures are major events and occasion considerable buzz. (For more on this, see Mehran Kamrava’s book Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, Farzin Vahdat’s God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity, and Mehrzad Boroujerdi’s Iranian Intellectuals and the West.)
 
But Finkelstein did something a bit different. His students weren’t the usual liberal-minded suspects—who represent a significant swath of Iran’s educated classes, incidentally (a phenomenon that is underestimated and trivialized by many Western leftists, which I regard as a form of Left Orientalism).  It would have been easy for him to teach the depredations of U.S. and Israeli policy in such a context—but it also would have been incredibly boring. He did something far more interesting. He taught Mill to largely conservative-oriented students in an institution that cranks out apparatchiks for the Islamic Republic.
 
That is just wickedly cool. Here’s our recent conversation about that experience.
 
 
The interview was filmed on April 24, 2014, as part the series of conversations with our guest lecturers that our Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver produces.