Introduction
In 2011, Tunisia experienced major shifts in its political structure during what is widely called the Arab Spring. The Tunisian Islamist party Harakat Ennahdha (Renaissance Movement) was a surprising element in the period following the popular uprising in the country. Its strong return to Tunisiaâs public scene amazed many observers, disoriented a certain number of Tunisians who thought it was dead, and mobilized civil society members opposed to its political positions. After the return from London exile of its leader Rached Ghannouchi on 30 January 2011, the party was elected to the National Constituent Assembly (ANC) by universal vote with 41.0% of the seats (Storm, 2014, 199). Criticism of Ennahdha has continued unabated, even when the party started governing Tunisia by allying itself with two other parties, the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties (Ettakatol) and Congress for the Republic (CPR). The fear that the decade-long civil war in Algeria, a close neighbour, would spill into Tunisia, the emergence of a supposedly spontaneous Islamist generation, together with serious political events in Egypt and Libya, made many see Ennahdha as the party of danger. This forced Ennahdha to create and propagate a renewed image of the party, while crafting a liberal view of Tunisian society.
In this chapter, we seek to provide an interpretation of the ways in which the party and its supporters have used social media to disassemble and give their own vision of being Tunisian, as well as how they bring to the foreground the identity issues at work in Tunisian society. The Ennahdha party has been called into question, has been challenged by its political opponents and has been rejected by a large part of âcivil societyâ, who see it as fatal to freedom. This position, which emerged among Tunisian elites during the Bourguiba and Ben Ali regimes, has created the spectre of an alien party, by its values and practices, which has haunted postrevolutionary Tunisia. Ennahdha raises thus the issue of the place of religion in the political life of a country in the process of establishing the rules of democracy, and this within a regional and global context where there is a mostly combative view of Islam.
We will begin by giving a brief historical context of the Islamist movement in Tunisia, better to establish how articulated the themes of the debate are in defining the political organization of the nation â particularly what legislation will better protect civil liberties, citizen rights and obligations, the place of religion in the public sphere, and the foundations of the values and identities in Tunisian society. Then we will draw a map of media policy in Tunisia, in which to place our analysis of Ennahdha and how the party uses media in relation particularly to stakes and themes such as women, nationality, Islam and the Arabic language.
Ennahdha: a Tunisian party
In her recent book on Tunisian Islamists, Labat (2013) categorically rejects, from the first pages of the introduction, the âmoderationâ that âWestern countriesâ ascribe to the Ennahdha party. Why, she wonders, was the party able to get such a high number of votes even though it is âintrinsically anti-democraticâ (ibid., 10)? Leaving aside the socio-anthropological explanation that could clarify such election results, Labat implicitly reduces it to the manipulation carried out by the Islamists. In fact, like many other authors trying to examine the Islamist presence and the issues it raises in Tunisia, this author subscribes to the idea that (all) Islamists are âintrinsicallyâ anti-democratic, and that they are a product of an elsewhere yet to be named. Although the issue of democracy is at the heart of the theoretical study and description of contemporary Muslim societies, touching upon daily practices, we will treat it here only tangentially. We will explore its general contours, and only in relation to the themes developed in this text. We will also touch on some traits of the Tunisian Islamist movement, while stressing its links and relations with other Tunisian political parties.
Although some authors writing on the Tunisian post-revolution period tend to situate Ennahdha in an antagonistic relationship to other so-called democratic or secular parties, others insist on its influence on and anchoring in Tunisian society. Michel Cameau and Vincent Geisser (2003) have retraced these links, however, without purporting a cause-and-effect relationship to the Muslim wing affiliated with Ben Youcef, one-time comrade-in-arms to Bourguiba and later an opponent, who left in his wake the so-called Islamo-Destourian group. These links were facilitated by the official creation of the Association for the Safeguarding of the Quran (1967), to which many functions were given, including the training of imams (Cameau & Geisser, 2003, 277). The association was short-lived as the Bourguiba regime quickly understood the danger it posed. The Tunisian Islamist Movement (MIT) was created in 1979, but not in isolation in Tunisian political culture. It shared many elements with the Destourian Socialist Party (PSD, 1964â88), the party then in power: social and geographical elitism in recruitment, membership dominated by the educated middle class, and an organizing model requiring monopoly and unanimity (ibid., 184, 295). Furthermore, the movement took its inspiration, in terms of action and training of its members, from left-wing groups (Khiari, 2003, 133; Cameau & Geisser, 2003, 343â344; Cesari, 2013), and, like the latter, drew most of its members from the academic milieu. From within the PSD, the state party, there were insistent calls for the movement leaders to join it and influence its politics. These calls by the âpasseursâ (ibid., 274), who were at the core of the regime, echoed the desire for Islam by the Tunisian people.1
Realizing the popularity of the movement, the powers that be persecuted its militants. Later, the overthrow of Bourguiba in 1987 offered the movement the opportunity to become a party, and it was legalized in 1988, nine years after its creation (Storm, 2014, 95). However, again this was short-lived, as Ben Aliâs regime quickly realized, following the 1988 legislative elections in which Ennahdha members ran as independent candidates, that the party was a real threat due to its growing popularity (FerriĂ© & Santucci, 2006, 15). The party was banned and its militants, leaders and their families became the target of systematic persecution that pushed them either to exile or to prison,2 or else to join other groups such as the Tunisian League of Human Rights. The Ben Ali regime had by then started improving the social fabric, and the civil war in Algeria contributed further to solidify the image of âfundamentalist dangerâ that Western nations willingly and encouragingly accepted (Khiari, 2003, 7).
For us, it seems important to highlight not so much the electoral moments as the sociological structure within which Ennahdha operated, and which let us better explore how it played in the Tunisian political landscape, how it was anchored in Tunisiaâs society and how it constructed identities. Many authors restrict their study to the transactions and functions of political structures and ignore the threads between political players, the cultural dynamics that inspire them, as well as the continuity and affiliations that make up the âsocial substratumâ (François & Neveu, 1999, 21) of Tunisian political culture. This does not mean that Ennahdha does not have its own specificities â on the contrary â but we must study it as a product of Tunisian society where it coexists on anthropological grounds with other political movements and groups. We must also abandon âmethodological spontaneismâ, which might look at this party without taking the long-term view, and also might ignore all the degrees of complexity of its place in Tunisian society. Khiari (2003),3 who has a perceptive reading of Ennahdha, shows that the party revisited its central themes to adapt to political modernity, that it committed to secularization out of necessity, and that it always preferred to choose a legalistic position that allowed it at the end of the day to avoid the label of âIslamic terrorismâ.
One of the elements that highlighted its association with conservative and reactionary movements, and made it appear divorced from the values of Tunisian society at large, was the partyâs adoption of an âambivalentâ posture positioning it as both a political party and a social movement working to bring morality to society (Allal & Geisser, 2011; Cameau & Geisser, 2003, 309). As we will see later, this ambivalence sometimes caused conflicts between different arguments put forth by the party. By giving predominance to the second element to the detriment of the first, it gave adversaries opportunities to criticize it and to reveal its âdouble-speakâ. However, it seems that the Islamization4 of society remained vague and went beyond the party itself, inasmuch as thousands of its supporters and sympathizers acted with and without it. Finally, the Islamization of the state seems now to be off the table, not only because the party has renounced imposing Shariâa law in the new Tunisian Constitution (January 2014) but also it has taken firm positions, albeit not promptly enough according to its adversaries, vis-Ă -vis the Salafists and the jihadists, which it sees as destabilizing factors.
After this brief presentation, let us now return to the question asked at the beginning of the present chapter by Labat, and others, regarding the apparent contradiction between the success of Ennahdha in the 2011 elections and its acknowledged lack of democratic convictions. This question is quite interesting, as it draws out the dividing line between the so-called secular people and the Islamists,5 while simultaneously identifying democracy with womenâs rights and other major themes of the political debate. Quite often, the accusation of a lack of democracy flung at the party was associated with womenâs rights violations. Ennahdha was unable to convince its adversaries, despite focusing on equality between men and women or insisting on the inalienable gains made by women. To quell all scepticism and criticism regarding its purported wish to take power, it withdrew after finishing its task of bringing to term the new constitution, then took up the causes of youth and womenâs issues for its second public party convention in Rabat in 2013. As we will see later in the analysis section, this is emphasized by the party. During the 2011 election, it enabled 48 women to be elected (out of a total of 89 members of parliament), becoming thus the party with the highest female representation. Although it targets the political arena in its work to persuade voters of its importance and modernity, Ennahdha has turned to others, its alter, and the world outside.
The media: censorship and freedom
Our second contextualization, which will situate better and render clearer the arguments put forth by Ennahdha concerning Tunisianess, comes from the media. A lot has been written on the role of the media in the revolution, and we do not want to add an umpteenth interpretation, when in-depth ground research on audience, public and usage is still to be done. Our contextualization will briefly describe the period preceding the revolution and will provide a cursory look at media practices by Ennahdha, and then will show how the party situated itself in the post-revolutionary period in relation to major identity themes.
The Tunisian media, as in other Maghreb countries, have been in a straitjacket since independence despite a façade of some openness allowing some breaches in this sphere. From independence (1956), the Tunisian authorities have ruled with an iron fist the print media (Rugh, 2004) and television. In Tunisia, audio-visual policies and regulatory agencies seem to have, at first blush, the public interest at heart. However, upon reading the provisions of the policies, and looking at the organizations created to apply them, as Mostefaoui (1995) and Chouikha (2005â 06) point out, th...
