Now Lebanon

Michael Weiss, October 20, 2012

It has been amusing to see Rached Ghannouchi caught in a moment of pure honesty, forgetting the well-tended script he has had has to recite for months now before credulous Western audiences. What a relief it must be to let it all hang out. A secret video was leaked last week, probably recorded in February or March, showing the En-Nahda founder having an informal mentoring session with members of different Tunisian Islamic associations. He outlines his strategy for the slow consolidation of Islamist power, recounting the free advice he’s dispensed to En-Nahda’s supposed extremist rivals, the Salafists, here depicted as overzealous kindred who show a lot of potential. “Do not rush things. I tell the Salafist youth,” he says. “We all went through the same and we suffered. Now you want to have a TV, radio, schools and invite the preachers. Why are you rushing things?” The real threat to the country’s post-Ben Ali future, Ghannouchi explains, is the electoral victory of the secularists.

This should greatly impress the US State Department, which has hailed Tunisia’s “transition” as a model for the Arab Spring, even as En-Nahda has introduced a blasphemy law into the Constituent Assembly and taken to describing women as “complementary” to men in the draft constitution. The same “Salafist youth” Ghannouchi advises have rallied at the Great Mosque of Kairouan in March chanting, “We are all the children of Osama,” “The revolution was made for sharia” and “Jews, Jews, the army of Mohammed is back.” They have firebombed the home of the Tunisian exhibitor of Persopolis, the film based on Marjane Satrapi’s scathing memoir about growing up in Khomeinist Iran (one En-Nahda official described the film as “prostitution”).

Salafists were also responsible for the September 14 attack on the US Embassy in Tunis, in which four locals were killed and dozens more were injured. This raid on sovereign American soil, presented as yet another “protest” about the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims, bears all the hallmarks of a state-sanctioned riot. Eyewitnesses saw a police cordon protecting the five mile route from the Masjid al-Fath mosque, where Salafists have laid their “spiritual headquarters.” The imam of this mosque is only the current Minister for Religious Affairs.

Rached Ghannouchi (R) and Gaza's Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya greet supporters on January 05, 2012 in Tunis. (AFP photo)


As Sarah Chayes at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observed recently, just days after the embassy raid, one of the invited guests to the Masjid al-Fath mosque was Abu Iyadh, a cleric who traded his prior affiliations with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for a leadership role in Ansar al-Sharia, the Tunisian version of the same grim outfit that attacked the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. This is exactly the sort of “preacher” Ghannouchi can have expected Salafisfts to invite, yet now he vows to arrest Abu Iyadh. “These appearances certainly suggest that Tunisia’s ruling party is dallying with hardline extremism,” Chayes concludes.

Except that Ghannouchi has long been a hardline extremist, as Oren Kessler documented in a recent report about En-Nahda. He backed Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991 ("joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two, praise be to God.”). As for the power that kicked Saddam out, Ghannouchi had this to say: “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam.” He reassured the leaderships of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in Tehran in 1990 that “the greatest danger to civilization, religion and world peace is the United States. It is the Great Satan.” He described the Oslo Accords as a “Jewish-American plan encompassing the entire region, which would cleanse it of all resistance and open it to Jewish economic and cultural activity, culminating in complete Jewish hegemony from Marrakesh to Kazakhstan.” From his cushy state of exile in London, Ghannouchi issued a fatwa against secular Tunisian writer Lafif Lakhdar in 2005, accusing a 71-year-old man of authoring a book that was irreverent toward the Prophet Mohammed. (Lakhdar wrote no such book, though fears for his safety prompted Muslim human rights activists to initiate a Rushdie-style defense campaign on his behalf.) As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in a dispatch from Tunis in 2007, Ghannouchi also declared takfir on Mongia Souahi, a feminist author who argued correctly that there was nothing in Islamic scripture indicating that women must be veiled. Now contrast this to what Ghannouchi told Foreign Policy magazine in 2011: “There are no people in al-Nahda who are takfiri...”

In 1998, Ghannouchi published an essay in Oxford University Press’s anthology, Liberal Islam, in which he advocated the kind of patience on display in his YouTube address: “Is there any reason why such groups [as the ones he was addressing on that tape] cannot agree or coordinate with secular groups in order to isolate the existing oppressive power and establish a secular democracy, postponing the long-term objective of establishing an Islamic government until circumstances permit? Certainly, there is nothing against that.” The italics are mine.

The self-satisfaction with which Ghannouchi and En-Nahda have been treated in the international press (“moderate” and “progressive” are familiar bywords) is now being seriously challenged by events on the ground. Human Rights Watch has chronicled six instances in which “individuals or groups who appear to be motivated by an Islamist agenda assaulted people – in most cases, artists, intellectuals, and political activists – because of their ideas or dress.” Victims in most cases have named their attackers and in all cases filed police complaints. To date, not a single case has been investigated or prosecuted, not so much raising the question of whose side the police are on as answering it. More horrifyingly, a Tunisian woman alleged that two policemen raped her while her husband was being extorted for money by a third; yet now it is the couple themselves who have been charged with “intentional indecent behavior.”

In July, the London-based think tank Chatham House bestowed half of its annual prize on Ghannouchi, who “has been praised for his contribution to promoting the idea of compatibility between Islam and democracy and modernity which has been translated into the promotion of a culture of tolerance and bride-building across the political spectrum.”

He has indeed built bridges, especially with people who’d like to blow them up.