ANALYSIS: Islam and democracy: Bedfellows in the new Tunisia

By Clare Byrne Oct 27, 2011, 10:19 GMT

Paris - They were first to the barricades in January, when they ousted their longtime dictator, and first to the ballot box last weekend, where they participated massively in the country's first free and fair elections.

But Tunisia's democratic exercise sat uneasily with many in the West.

Why, many wonder, did a people that have enjoyed over half a century of secular rule queue up to give their vote to Ennahda, an Islamist party which says it has won more than 40 per cent of seats in a new constituent assembly?

Answering that question requires debunking the idea, widespread in the West, that Tunisians approved the separation of state and Islam introduced by ex-president Habib Bourguiba following independence from France in the 1950s.

On the contrary, many Tunisians recall with shock how Bourguiba whipped a headscarf off a woman at a rally, and how police, acting on the instructions of his ousted successor Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, chased headscarf wearers through the streets of Tunis.

'Bourguiba and Ben Ali tried to divorce a whole generation of Tunisians from their religion,' Mokhtar, a teacher in Sidi Bouzid who was jailed by Ben Ali's regime for a year and a half for membership of Ennahda, told dpa.

'People should be allowed to wear what they want,' he says. 'But we also need to respect the religious beliefs of the majority.'

For Mathieu Guidere, a specialist on North Africa at the University of Toulouse, the success of Ennahda represents a normalization of Tunisian politics.

Writing in Wednesday's edition of France's Le Figaro daily, he compared Tunisia and Libya.

'They were led by nationalist secular regimes which practised a supposedly progressive modernism inherited from contact with the West. But during that time their people remained faithful to a Muslim ideology and an Arab culture,' Guidere argued.

In Tunisia's Ennahda, which says it is inspired by Islam, and Libya's National Transitional Council, which says Islamic law should guide new legislation, the people of Tunisia and Libya have found leaders 'in their image,' he wrote.

Jourchi Salah, editor-in-chief of the Almouharrer Arabic daily in Tunisia, agrees that 'Islam plays an important role in the life of Tunisians' - including amongst non-practising Muslims.

But, he says, 'most Tunisians are for a moderate Islam. They don't want any group imposing their lifestyle on others, in the name of religion.'

Ennahda's leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has assured his party has no such agenda and is committed to a multi-party democracy.

It is a position that many in the West and in Tunisia's liberal establishment view with scepticism, given what they see as the incompatibility between Islamism and democracy.

But, according to Guidere, all Sunni Islamist movements have jumped aboard the democracy train over the past 20 years.

The pressures of the US-led war against terrorism and growing domestic resistance to theocracies had convinced them that 'an Islamist regime cannot be imposed by force.'

Before Tunisia, Islamists won elections in Algeria in 1991, but the army annulled the result, triggering a civil war. The Islamist party Hamas also won democratic elections in Gaza in 2006.

'They (Islamist parties) are creating a Muslim or Islamic democracy,' says Guidere.

Ghannouchi, who lists Germany's Christian Democrats as an inspiration, assures his party is committed to a multi-party democracy.

Analysts say the party is unlikely to try to impose its agenda on the constituent assembly that will write a new constitution and aim for a bottom-up Islamization of Tunisian society instead, through successive ballots.

Parties representing the around 60 per cent of Tunisians who voted against the Islamist party Sunday have vowed to keep the party in check.

France, the former colonial power and biggest investor in Tunisia, is also closely watching developments.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said aid to Tunisia would be contingent on democratic 'red lines not being crossed'.