Photo of Ennahda Party leader Rachid al- Ghannouchi From www.middleeastmonitor.com
Secular democracies are not native to the cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Some form of Sharia law is. But during and after the colonial period, Western powers installed elites to run these countries and they grew up and were educated with Western ideas and ideals.
The higher level of these elites in the Middle East and North Africa were typically educated in Europe. But a relatively large educated and empowered class also arose who were accustomed to living in a local stylized version of what were European values.
Many such people were- are devout Muslims, but want religion in their societies to be a private matter as it is in the West. They did not want an Islamic state.
The problem was that this educated class were first the servants of the imperialists and later the servants of the elites, who were installed by the imperialists after their countries got their nominal independence. So their power and privileges were and are still linked to the imperial agendas of Western powers, a by product of which has been the repression of the masses of the regions, leaving them ignorant, backward and impoverished.
These dis-empowered people, (the majority in all of the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa) believe that their misery is the result of corrupt, unjust and oppressive governments which are not internal to their countries. They long for a society that would have at its base, what they believe to be the natural justice that they see in the Holy Quran.
The angriest of these repressed Sunnis are recruited by the Empire as Jihadhis. But the vast majority of such people are not centered in violence and are represented by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The Arab Spring represented the awakening of the vast underclasses of the Middle East and North Africa. For the most part however, there has been a counter- revolution as in Egypt where they have been repressed with great savagery and violence.
Besides the fact that there is a large professional, educated and well off class in Egypt who do not want to lose their privileges, many millions of Egyptians who are accustomed to living in what to them is a reasonably free country, do NOT want to live under a governmental version of Sharia law. For them, (as Anwar Sadat was) Islam is a private matter.
While the secular Muslims of the region may be a minority, in many countries they are a large, even very large minority and of course they typically hold all of the power in their countries as well as the support of Empire, (US, Britain, France, Israel etc).
These Muslim secularists fear an Islamic government, fear governmental Sharia law and therefor they fear the will of a majority of their own people. This has led to revolutions- counterrevolutions, repression and war such as is now raging in Libya.
The question remains, is it possible for an Islamist faction, (supported by the majority in a country) to live in harmony with the minority of empowered secularists in support of a greater good? Can there be a country that lives sort of under Islamic law and sort of not?
One might think of Turkey. But that would not be a good example. Better educated Western Turks for the most part do not want to live under governmental Islamic law. Erdogan, (past Prime Minister and now President) does. He has cobbled together a coalition of nationalist and Eastern Turks and has become a virtual one man rule in his country. Erdogan doesn’t share anything voluntarily.
Erdogan wrestles whatever power he can from the old secular- military Kemalist establishment. Exactly how far he wants to go to shape Turkey into an Islamic state remains to be seen. His idea of “democracy” seems to be to win an election, and then do whatever he wants afterwards, using his position to expand his powers including through constitutional changes, so that these powers can be made semi- permanent.
That leaves Turkey as a bitterly divided society with a wannabe autocrat running the show.
Tunisia on the other hand is different. After the 2011 “Jasmine Revolution” that overthrew the tong term dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, (who represented French interests and the Tunisian secularists) the Islamist party Ennahda won the first free and fair election. Many of its leaders had been imprisoned by Ben Ali who was, as was most of the secular- neo colonial regimes of the region savagely repressive of Islamists.
According to the Nida Tounes, (the party of Tunisia’s secularists) Ennahda when in power was “soft” on violent Jihadhis which created a security issue for the nation and after two opposition politicians were killed last year, the “Jasmine Revolution” was at the point of going up in flames Egypt style.
But amazingly both Nida- Tounes and Ennahda stepped back from the brink. Both parties agreed that the country’s economic problems, (lack of development, dependency on Tourism, chronic unemployment and poverty) should be something that both groups should work together to address, and that ideological differences should take a back seat.
So all sides negotiated. A new constitution was written by parliament and Ennahda handed power to an interim government of independents. As a part of this broad agreement Ennahda de facto agreed not to seek the presidency in the coming November elections, (in effect ceding it to the secularists) but would try and win as many seats as it could in the parliamentary elections coming up this month.
This acts as a de facto power sharing agreement, where the majority voluntarily agrees not to take too much power and thus the minority is more ready to give up some of its powers in an inclusive government.
This was in fact the type of deal Mandela brokered in South Africa, although there the empowered minority were white and the dis-empowered majority black. By the white South African De Klerk agreeing to Black majority rule, and Mandela agreeing that that rule could not strip Whites of what they had, South Africa avoided what would have been a devastating civil war that might have killed a million or more and left the country in devastation.
In Tunisia, due to this agreement between Nida- Tounes and Ennahda, popular rule in the country may not be perfect. There is nowhere however that it is. And the ingredients of peace and time may well act to lessen the class differences in the country and make way for governments that will be more and more representative in the future.
If it works and there is nowhere in the region where anything like this has worked, it will be a great model for development in Islamic countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
And interestingly if this Tunisian model were to work, it could be a model for a one state Palestine- Israel solution, that is if both parties to this never ending conflict ever decide that peace is indeed what they want.
I for one will be praying for the people of Tunisia. I wish them peace and prosperity.
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