Does Tunisia’s Ennahda Movement belong to”Muslim Brotherhood?”

Maher Farghali

The Muslim Brotherhood has been widely impacted by a multitude of changes that hit the entire Islamist community in the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions. This fact has been emphasized by a host of researches, one of them by Kamal Habib, a former Jihad leader, who demonstrated that the Tunisian Ennahda Movement does not belong to the “Muslim Brotherhood” group.

Habib’s study states that the religious and ideological nature of the Muslim Brotherhood has prompted it to view itself as the “group of all Muslims,” and the one on the right track. This implied that all Muslims have to be loyal and pledge allegiance to the group, though the Brotherhood has not announced it frankly.

This was explained by Said Hawwa, a late leading member and prominent ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, in his books “The Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwanul Musilmoon): Objective, Stages, Method”, and “Lessons in the Islamic Work.” Hawwa identified the seven main characteristics of the Brotherhood, which he saw as the most suitable to be the “group of all Muslims” and that Muslims have only the thoughts of Hassan Al-Banna, founder and first leader of  the Brotherhood, if they really want a “proper start-up.”

He also wondered: “Has anyone in this (Muslim) nation seen one like Al-Banna? Has the present generation seen a more stronger man than Hassan Al-Hudaibi (second leader of the Brotherhood)”? Then he urges Muslims to pledge allegiance to the “successor of both”, Omar al-Tilmisani.

But the matter is completely different for Ennahda

In a book analyzing the “Islamic phenomenon in Tunisia,” Ennahda leader, Rachid Ghannouchi said that the movement was the outcome of the three factors blending and interacting together. The mix and the interaction led to the formation of the phenomenon “with different shares and degrees.” The impact of each was not always equal, and the center of gravity changed among the three at different stages. The conflict, either visible or hidden, among the factors always existed, consciously or unconsciously.

Ghannouchi explained that the factors pointed to a host of matters, the first of which was the traditional Tunisian religiosity, which included the Maliki doctrine, Ash’arism and the Sufi education. The second was the Brotherhood-Salafi religiosity coming from the Arab Mashreq, and the rational Mashreq religiosity. The latter was swept by the overwhelming the Brotherhood-Salafi wave forcing it to go its way for a while. Then it came to a stop and began to find its own way.

This rational religiosity practised radical criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood as the chief obstacle for “Islam advancement”, besides rehabilitation of the West and  leftist thinking. It refrained from endorsing the Brotherhood criteria of classifying people on political or social basis; a patriotic, a traitor, a revolutionary, a peasant, a regressive or a feudal. It stressed respect to the reformist school in Tunisia (of Khair Eddin Al-Tunsi and Al-Taher Al-Haddad) and finally defended Mu’tazila approach for dealing with Islam and the currents that opposed the Salafi and Sunni schools through history.

However, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood were similar in the concept of “overt and covert” action . The Brotherhood burden was not in the “constituent texts”, but in the historical one of the group since Al-Banna established a “secret service” in 1940, with a special concept of Bay’aa (oath of allegiance). Thus, the Brotherhood came to have a dual system, with two bodies, one is public and the other covert.

This duality of the “overt and the covert” was also established in Ennahda, a matter that prompted some senior  founder members to suspend membership, such as Abdelfattah Mourou, the second man of the movement.

One striking difference between Ennahda and Muslim Brotherhood was that the idea of the “Sharia” (Islamic law) was never present on the Tunisian movement’s election manifesto. The movement also accepted the First Chapter of the Tunisian Constitution of 1959, providing that “Tunisia is a free, independent and sovereign state, its religion is Islam, its language is Arabic”.

Ghannouchi realized the consensus among the Tunisian people on this part of the Constitution, while raising the Sharia issues was likely to cause divisions. Also, the application of Sharia in some Arab countries was misused against rights, freedoms, women, arts and non-Muslims.

For Ghannouchi, the goals of the Sharia, people’s freedoms, embodied the call of his party. He did not see Sharia as “penalties.”

Mourou, for his part, was of the view that building a state was a priority preceding application of the Sharia. He criticized the Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan of “Islam is the solution” that was promoted with no tangible programs to translate it into a reality.

Neither Ghannouchi, nor Mourou, spoke about an “Islamic State” but rather about a “democratic state” where people have the power and can choose their representatives.

Ghannouchi accepted “partial secularism” where the entire state would act as one body, neutral towards all citizens. In other words, he wanted to liberate the religion from the state, and differentiate between what is religious and political.

In conclusion, neither the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, nor Ennahda in Tunisia played an active role in the eruption of the revolutions of the two countries. But each established a political party, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice and Ennahda’s Ennhada Party, and they sought to be the center of gravity on the political arena. However, each has gone a different path to achieve the goal.

The transfers in Ennahda do not imply a breakup from the Muslim Brotherhood but rather signal “changes in the current” and the failure of the “Political Islam” project. It was the “failure of the ‘Islam is the solution’ project,” citing Mourou’s own words.