The Ideological Evolution of the Tunisian Islamist Movement Ḥarakat al-Nahḍa

Abstract

Abstract This essay reconstructs and analyses the ideological evolution of Ennahda, from its beginnings in the mid-1960s to 1987, when the movement adopted an official document about its “Ideological vision” (al-Ruʾya al-fikriyya), confirmed in 2012 as the movement’s main religious, creedal and methodological text. The history of Ennahda’s ideological evolution and the analysis of its doctrinal platform shows how the movement had rich, articulated and often conflicting ideological components, which evolved over time through a continuous internal debate and in mutual interaction with the tradition of Islamic modernism and the domestic and international cultural and political context.