Ghannouchi and his style of politics

The detention of Rashid al-Ghannouchi, the 82-year-old leader of Tunisia's Ennahda movement, who is distinguished by his moderate, reasonable and conciliatory politics, is not an event to be passed over lightly. We can say that this incident gives us all the data we need to diagnose the present condition, the problems and the ailments of the Islamic world.

Ghannouchi is a Tunisian politician, but not only a Tunisian, and not only a politician. He is a thinker, an intellectual, capable of offering very important openings for the entire Islamic world and, were his worth properly appreciated, for the entire contemporary world. He is a philosopher whose horizon of thought and history was nourished by the land that raised Ibn Khaldun, perhaps a sage-politician in the fullest sense of the word.

His intellectual depth, his horizon, his political and spiritual personality and his leadership, all immediately apparent in his books and speeches, together with the style of politics he has put into practice and the way he has furnished it with an intellectual and jurisprudential foundation, constitute, from the standpoint of the Islamic science of politics, a path of ijtihad in the fullest sense of the word. Of course, like every ijtihad, it is a path that has a chance of hitting the mark as well as a chance of erring.

Ghannouchi is a door that those seeking ideas, intellectual standing, depth or horizon in the Islamic world should knock on first. When we say intellectual, we certainly do not mean an ivory-tower intellectual. For him, intellectualism is a culture lived in the field, putting one's hand under the stone, being intertwined with people, enduring hardship, paying the price and constantly confronting realities, yet without abandoning one's claims. That is why he did not walk his road alone; he always had companions on the way. With those companions he walked, honoring the claims of friendship, in mutual aid and solidarity, sharing the hardship together.

It was no small thing: the oppression he suffered together with his friends was a pressure and an injustice that struck not only him but the whole Islamic world. After the direct form of colonialism, he waged a genuine struggle for liberation from colonialism on behalf of his people, against the most hypocritical and despotic proxy dictators, the indirect form of colonialism that has been deemed fit for the entire Islamic world.

He never inclined toward violence in this struggle; he spoke of democracy, of human rights, of freedom and human dignity. He was thrown into dungeons. His party was banned. Together with all his comrades he spent long stretches of his life either in dungeons or in exile.

The Arab revolutions, the explosion of a century of anger accumulated among the Arab peoples against direct or indirect colonial dictatorship, began in Tunisia. As a result of this revolution he returned to Tunisia as the leader of the Ennahda movement together with all his comrades. He became one of the most important actors of the post-revolutionary process, but at the same time he took a distinct stance against the revolution forming an ancien regime of its own and deviating into a revanchist vise of vengeance.

Tunisia is for all Tunisians, he said. Without excluding any element, he made great efforts to prepare a constitution based on human rights and democracy that could embrace Tunisia in all its diversity: the religious and the secular, the socialist, the city dweller and the villager, the worker and the farmer. The political performance he displayed in this period is a performance that can readily be taken as "deliberative democracy"

as the thesis is called, an important experience that can readily be recorded in its support.

Ghannouchi has a discourse that is extremely sound and consistent within itself. When he spoke of democracy, he never meant a tool to be used only until the bridge is crossed. Nor did he mean an anachronistic application of the classical Islamic practice of shura.

Of course, shura offered him a way forward, as it does every Muslim, as a value and a principle. Everyone knows that its applications over time have varied greatly, but Ghannouchi tried to persuade the Islamic circles too that the ideal of shura can very well be realized within the form of democracy.

In the first elections held after the constitution was prepared, although he could easily have been elected Prime Minister, or even President, he held back, showing that he had no eye on office and wanted everything for a better Tunisia. This conciliatory stance was held up as a positive example against the politics of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt, which had preferred to field a candidate in the same situation. The Ghannouchi example was used to try to prove that had Morsi not run in Egypt either, perhaps things would not have gone as far as a coup.

Truth be told, Ghannouchi behaved more conciliatorily than one would expect from the nature of political struggle, because facing him was a propaganda apparatus pumped up by French and former-regime remnant forces, and they had begun accusing him of becoming a dictator before he had even come to any office. Just like Morsi, who was accused of not sharing power and of dictatorship from the very first months after his election. By the time it becomes clear what real desire for dictatorship such accusations conceal, unfortunately it is already too late: dictatorship is done not like this but like that.

Indeed, Ennahda chose to form a broad coalition even though it had no need to, and made as many concessions as possible. Ghannouchi, the wise leader of Ennahda, although he could easily have become president himself, renounced this and, with his own support, backed the election of Moncef Marzouki, a human rights activist, as president. He himself stayed away from government, yet this distance did not prevent him from being influential over the formation and the actions of the government. Although he held no official post, Ghannouchi continued to be decisive at the center of all the debates concerning the formation or dissolution of governments, the election of the president and the drafting of the constitution.

While counter-revolutions and coups were taking place in the other countries where the Arab Revolutions occurred, Tunisia was a source of complete unease as the first and bad example. The numerous coup attempts, backed by those very countries, ran each time into his wise stance. His answer to them was passed from tongue to tongue: "We exported revolution to you; we have no intention whatsoever of importing a coup from you."

Recently, however, the coup has unfortunately begun to seep in through the very doors that democracy passes through and to seize Tunisia's fortress of democracy and revolution as well.

That this latest attempt targets Ghannouchi, the symbol of the Tunisian revolution, is normal; but it is not at all normal for a country to deem fit such treatment of its own global treasure.

Ghannouchi is one of the greatest assets a country can produce. He has ideas, ideas that can be debated and that, the more they are debated, can deepen a country's intellectual, spiritual, political and moral level and broaden its horizon. Ideas that draw their inspiration from the universal, that have been tested in the field, have faced realities and have been kneaded in dialogue with people.

A country, or an entire Islamic world, that deems fit such treatment of its own sages, or stays silent while it is meted out, should not expect an even greater calamity.

Of course, let our words go also to the other Islamic countries that keep their own wise scholars in dungeons.