The feast, Sudan, Tunisia and Ghannouchi

We have left another Ramadan behind. It came, and with its own manner of speaking, its own language and atmosphere, it gave all of humanity the keys that open onto all the secrets of existence. Like a rain of mercy it washed away the dirt of our world, lit up our darkness, reminded us of what we had forgotten, woke us, and set again the compass we will follow for all the time that remains, and then departed. How beautifully our teacher Hayreddin Karaman approached it. Its going is not an abandonment, neither its abandoning us, nor, consequently, our abandoning it.

Every year, in its own appointed time, without asking whether we are available, without regard to it, whatever state we are in, it comes, settles into our lives and envelops our being. Within that time it clothes us in the garment of servanthood and God-consciousness that suits our existence best, and only then departs. Keeping it on us is of course up to us, but it shows us, proposes to us, what suits us best, and has us live it for a month. When it leaves, it entrusts the Qur'an to us, the Qur'an that was sent down, or began to be sent down, in Ramadan. But every year, coming again in its own time, it loads that trust upon our hearts once more and offers it to our lives once more. May our Lord make us among those who hear that blessed offer of Ramadan, and who benefit in the best way from its school.

Just as Ramadan reminds us of our connection with past peoples, it also connects us with other people living in the same age and makes us attentive to their needs. The month of Ramadan does not always unfold in the romantic atmosphere peculiar to what is told in literature books. Unfortunately the condition of Muslims is heartbreaking. There is no improvement in the situations in Palestine, Kashmir, Myanmar, Yemen, Syria.

SUDAN

On top of these, things in Sudan are becoming thoroughly tangled, and unfortunately, it is not because of interventions from outside the Muslim world, but interventions made within the Islamic world itself, in pursuit of lust for power and the struggle to seize positions, that have for years given Sudan no peace. The forces intervening in Sudan have no demands or promises whatsoever for a country that would be better for the people of Sudan, that would bring its people welfare, peace and happiness, justice, human dignity, progress and development. There is only a struggle, in the most savage way possible, to seize the apparatus of power, whatever the outcome. Unfortunately those who hold the political or economic resources of the Islamic world have no concern for something called the Islamic world, and have no worry whatsoever for human dignity or human rights. In fact, all that is at stake is one side of the main conflict, which has become a model in the Arab-Islamic world, consolidating its positions at any cost.

As is known, there are currently two styles of politics, two axes of politics, valid in the Islamic world. The first is a style of politics favoring democratization, bringing the will of peoples to the fore. The other is a style of politics based on autocratic regimes, one that especially tries to strangle democratic processes with counter-revolutions and coups. In Sudan, every time a chance somehow arises for the democratic style of politics, we have lately faced a move to strangle it, just as in other places. These cannot be seen as the people of a country simply being unable to agree, falling out with one another through their own internal dynamics, or mere power contests. Those who say the Islamic world just won't shape up, can't govern itself, or can only be governed like this, and those who stir things up, are the very same quarters. Unfortunately these fires are fanned from outside, financed, sheltered, tended and incited.

TUNISIA AND RASHID GHANNOUCHI

The incident that took place in Tunisia in the last days of Ramadan is again the manifestation in Tunisia of the same struggle. On Laylat al-Qadr, just before the iftar hour, the home of Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda movement and former Speaker of Parliament, was raided by 50 police officers and searched for two hours; Ghannouchi was then taken into custody and brought to the center. Ghannouchi, 82 years old, who was not even allowed to meet with his lawyers, was, after a two-day detention period, arrested and put in prison.

Before Ghannouchi, in fact, many other members of the Ennahda movement had also been arrested. The elected President Kais Saied, with the soft coup he put into effect step by step shortly after being elected, acts like the collector of a penalty imposed on Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab Revolutions.

The turnout of under 10 percent in the latest general elections clearly shows the people's reaction against this administration. The failure of the coup to obtain, through democracy, the legitimacy it hoped to gain at the ballot box has produced an anger. This anger is directed especially at revenge arrests against the Ennahda movement.

Yet it is not only the Ennahda movement that does not approve of the administration. Kais Saied dissolved Parliament with no reasonable justification, and none of the practices he subsequently introduced is rejected only by the Ennahda movement led by Ghannouchi, but by very broad segments of the people. But the autocratic rage against this opposition is vented specifically on the Ennahda movement. Because everyone knows that Ennahda is the name of the possibility of compatibility between Islam and democracy in the Islamic world, and this possibility is precisely the nightmare of the counter-revolutionary axis.

That Ghannouchi, known throughout his life for his distance from every kind of violent movement and for his very strong intellectual personality, is subjected to this treatment in fact exposes the hollowness of all the conceptions of Islam and the Islamic world held both by Westerners and by the Islamic countries that sympathize with them.

Yet in 2012-13 the path recommended to the Egyptian Brotherhood was to behave moderately and conciliatorily like Ghannouchi. The truth is that the Egyptian Brotherhood too suffered a coup, although there was no excess and no autocratic practice on its part. And so it was also seen how far those who recommended the Ghannouchi path to them could tolerate Ghannouchi himself.

With his intellectual depth, his horizon, his political and spiritual personality and his leadership, Ghannouchi is a great stroke of fortune not only for Tunisia but essentially for the whole Islamic world. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his style of politics and the way he has furnished it with an intellectual and jurisprudential foundation constitute a path of ijtihad from the standpoint of the Islamic science of politics.

That such a great value (and likewise other Muslim scholars held in the dungeons of other Muslim countries) is forced, in an extremely shallow and foolish political debate environment, to defend himself at a level that is in no way his equal is a great disgrace not only for Tunisia but for the whole Islamic world.