From Victim to Hangman? Ennahda, Salafism and the Tunisian Transition

Francesco Cavatorta,Stefano Torelli

doi:10.3390/rel12020076

Francesco Cavatorta, Stefano Torelli

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12020076

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Abstract

The article revisits the notion of post-Islamism that Roy and Bayat put forth to investigate its usefulness in analysing the Tunisian party Ennahda and its role in the Tunisian transition. The article argues that the notion of post-Islamism does not fully capture the ideological and political evolution of Islamist parties, which, despite having abandoned their revolutionary ethos, still compete in the political arena through religious categories that subsume politics to Islam. It is only by taking seriously these religious categories that one can understand how Ennahda dealt with the challenge coming from Salafis.

Highlights

Their electoral success on the political scene demanded that scholars engage again with the concept of post-Islamism to account for post-revolutionary developments
If we look beyond the notion of failure and accept that ideological adaptation does not automatically translate into the dismissal of the whole ideological apparatus of Islamism, the notion of post-Islamism can apply to those movements issued from a Muslim Brotherhood tradition participating in and/or wishing to participate in democratic institutions
The institutional success of the Tunisian transition has benefited from the post-Islamist turn of Ennahda, but one has to be mindful that the concept describes a trajectory that can suffer from deviations

Summary

Introduction

Whether one is inclined to accept or reject the argument of the incompatibility between Islam and democracy, what emerges is that the beliefs and activities of Islamist parties have been studied as “evidence” of the validity—or lack thereof—of the incompatibility argument Connected to this cluster is the one about the ideological developments that Islamist parties have gone through over time, suggesting that they have accepted democratic procedures, individual liberal rights (El-Ghobashy 2005) and, crucially, the idea of a civil state (Gerges 2013). The 2011 Arab uprisings re-energised the literature on Islamism and a raft of new studies reinvigorated the three research clusters following the rise of Islamist parties and movements across the region (Al-Anani 2012; Schwedler 2013; Buehler 2018) Their electoral success on the political scene demanded that scholars engage again with the concept of post-Islamism to account for post-revolutionary developments.

Post-Islamism: A Theoretical Discussion

Post-Islamism and Ennahda

Ennahda and Salafism

Conclusions