The political integration of the Tunisian Ennahdha party in the light of the notions of civil state and civil party

Abstract

French

This article investigates the notions of ‘civil state’ and ‘civil party’ as constructed by the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahdha through its process of ‘specialization’ in partisan action and its interactions with both ‘secular’ forces and the different groups composing – or are associated with it. The various conceptualizations of these notions reveal a multilayered political group, seeking to adapt to the new political environment by recombining the links between religious and political activities. Analyzing the debates that led in 2014 to the constitutionalization of the civil nature of the state and the controversies surrounding religiously inspired bills, as well as interviews with the various actors involved, we show how the reconfiguration of the Islamist movement into two components, a civil party specialized in politics and a faith-based civil society, does not imply a clear separation of state and religion, but rather the affirmation of a civil state inspired by Islamic values.

Keywords

civil party civil society civil state Ennahdha Islamism secularism

Introduction

Most of the academic works emphasized the idea of the Tunisian exception by referring to the ‘mutual accommodation’ between secular and Islamist forces (Stepan, 2018) after the fall of Ben Ali’s regime (Cavatorta and Merone, 2015). The latter was defined by some scholars as a discursive construction of the syncretic character of the Tunisian people that was meant to help bridge the gap between opposing views (Zemni, 2016). The politics of consensus (McCarthy, 2019) served as the main explanation of the post-authoritarian pathway, which, according to the theory of consolidation (Linz and Stepan, 1996; Schedler, 1998), culminated with the adoption of the Constitution in January 2014. Several authors have also hailed the Ennahdha party for its pragmatism, capacity to ‘moderate’ by putting aside religious politics, and hence its commitment to democracy (Marks, 2017; Wolf, 2017). These analyses draw largely on the theory of inclusion-moderation, according to which the inclusion of Islamist parties in the institutional political field leads them to develop ‘pragmatic’ behavior and a ‘moderate’ ideology, thus distancing themselves from radical religious commitments at the margins of the institutions (Browers, 2009; Brown et al., 2006; Schwedler, 2006, 2007; Wickham, 2004). Moderation thus appears to be fundamentally part of the process of institutional political inclusion and refers to the relationship between Islamists and the state (Ranko, 2014). Proponents of the inclusion-moderation theory – based on an institutional approach – tend to overlook the role of ideology and the complex interactions between Islamist parties and other political forces. Consequently, they fail to acknowledge the relational nature of these dynamics and the contentious nature of the process through which Islamist parties integrate into the political landscape (Gana and Aït-Aoudia, 2020).

Instead, this article argues that Ennahdha’s conceptualization of the notions of ‘civil state’ and ‘civil party’ is the result of its conflictual interactions with both secular and Islamic forces. In particular, its interpretation of the civil state differs from that of its ‘secular’ opponents in that it does not necessarily imply a clear separation between the political and religious spheres.

In fact, as we will see, the long process of drafting the post-revolution constitution (2011–2014) was marked by clashes between the Islamist party Ennahdha, winner of the 2011 post-revolution elections, and the ‘secular’ opposition parties. While Ennahdha’s initial project was to introduce the Sharia¹ as the source of law, resistance from secularist² civil society and MPs, whose objective was to guarantee a separation between state and religion, eventually led to a compromise between the two sides (Bras, 2016).This is reflected in Articles 1 and 2 of the 2014 Constitution. The first recognizes Islam as part of the Tunisian identity, while the second provides that: ‘Tunisia is a civil state, based on citizenship, the will of the people and the rule of law…’. However, the notion of civil state has not ceased to be subject to divergent interpretations. While for secularists, the establishment of the civil state would guarantee the rule of law by separating politics and religion, for the Islamist party, the civil state would appear in the first place to be a state led by civilians, nor by the military, nor by clerics (Bras, 2016).

Yet after its 10th Congress, in May 2016, Ennahdha officially announced its specialization (takhasus) in politics and proclaimed its transformation from an Islamist to a Muslim Democratic Party (Ghannouchi, 2016). The main ‘ideological’ change claimed by the party’s leadership, there is the acceptance of the notion of civil state (Dell’Aguzzo and Sigillò, 2017), a decision that has provoked hostile reactions from some groups within the party itself (Meddeb, 2019) and which its leaders will have to take into account when conceptualizing the notion of civil state.

Against this background, our article aims to examine how the notion of civil state is conceived and implemented by the Ennahdha party, and what is at stake in the elaboration and appropriation of this notion with regard to the Islamist party’s process of integration into institutional politics. Taking into account the relational dynamics in which Ennahdha engages with both secular actors and with the different groups that make up (or have a close relationship with) the party, we will show how the Tunisian case provides an interesting illustration of the contested nature of the notions of the civil state and civil party and highlights some of the limits of the ‘inclusion moderation theory’ and of the ‘politics of consensus’ hypothesis. The interest of the Tunisian case study also lies in the fact that it offers the possibility to analyze the political integration strategies of an Islamist party in power and its vision of the civil state.

By adopting a relational approach to analyze the political integration of the Ennahdha’s party in the light of the concepts of the civil state and civil party, our article draws on a critical perspective of state-Islam relations and secularization processes. While recognizing that state-religion relations in Muslim-majority countries are far from uniform and vary according to the socio-historical and political contexts of each country (Al-Dabbagh, 2013), we take a critical stance toward classical theories of secularization. Indeed, these tend to define secularization as a process of decline in religious beliefs and practices and their relegation to the private sphere, as well as a separation of the political and religious spheres (Stolz, 2020). The main criticisms of these theories have been their linear nature and their reliance on Western historical experience, leading several authors to highlight instead the variety of secularization processes and forms of separation between religious and non-religious spaces (Casanova, 1994; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, 2012). To account for variation in secularization across regions and cultures, Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2012) have proposed the concept of ‘multiple secularities’, which refers to the variety of ‘forms of distinction between religious and non-religious spheres and practices in society’. The notion of multiple secularism echoes that of Islamic secularism, which developed within the feminist current of political Islam as a rejection of the idea of a secularization of Islam, seen as originating in the Western world (Dayan-Herzbrun, 2015). Thus, these two closely related concepts propose to take into account forms of secularity that do not necessarily imply a strict separation between religious and political spheres.

The notions of ‘unsecular politics’ (Kalyvas, 2003) and ‘Muslim politics’ (Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996) also highlight the intertwining of the political and religious dimensions of social mobilizations. Kalyvas defines ‘unsecular politics’ as the use of religious ideas, symbols, and rituals for political mobilization, while Eickelman and Pescatori refer to ‘Muslim politics’ as power struggles between competing actors (non-state and state actors) for control of the symbolic space and the institutions that produce it. These two notions therefore appear relevant to grasp the meaning that the Islamist party Ennahdha attaches to the notion of the civil state.

Finally, our article draws upon an analytical framework that considers ‘modes and spaces of political action beyond the scope of formal politics and the state’ (Soares and Osella, 2009), in particular faith-based organizations and the public sphere. It is based on the hypothesis that the Islamist grassroots mobilize as an alternative socio-political arena to party politics (Soares and Osella, 2009; Sigillò, 2023).

By adopting this relational perspective and a multilevel analysis that goes beyond institutional and state-centered approaches, we will show how the reorganization of the Islamist movement into two poles (a civil party specialized in political affairs and an Islamist civil society) does not lead to a separation of state and religion, but rather to the affirmation of a religion-inspired civil state.

Two lines of investigation are proposed to grasp the relational dynamics and conflictual processes that shape the conceptualization and operationalization of the notions of ‘civil state’ and ‘civil party’. First, we explore the political process that led to the adoption of the concept of the civil state in the 2014 constitution and highlight the elements that made it possible for a compromise to be reached between Ennahdha and the ‘secular’ forces. We argue that the compromise reached relates both to the fuzziness of the notion of ‘civil state’, which allows the actors concerned to make divergent interpretations, and to the national political context. Second, we look at the operationalization of the notion of ‘civil state’ in the elaboration of draft laws and how it allows, beyond the formal consensus, to introduce religious references, thus giving rise to controversies that express divergent conceptions of the civil character of the state. Finally, we examine the practical implications of the Ennahdha party’s adherence to the notion of ‘civil state’ from an organizational point of view. In particular, we investigate how the Ennahdha party framed the notion of civility to implement its policy of separating da’wa activities from professional politics. The purpose is to dig into the process of conceptualization of ‘civility’, ‘civil state’ and ‘civil party’ by taking into account the heterogeneity of the political party and the dynamics underpinning the process of specialization. We argue that the different conceptualizations of the nature of the state and the civility of the party reflect the composite character of a multilayered political group aiming at readjusting in a new political environment through recombining the relation between religious and political activities.

The article is based on long-term field research carried out by the two authors since 2016 in the framework of various projects dealing with post-2011 political and socio-institutional change in Tunisia. More specifically, the relational and multi-level approach adopted in this article involves the articulation of two complementary methodological components: on one hand, a documentary review of the political debates surrounding the issue of state-religion relations that led to the constitutionalization of the civil character of the state in 2014 and of the controversies that arose around draft laws inspired by religious references (Islamic finance law and zakat law); on the other hand, around thirty interviews, conducted between 2016 and 2020, with the protagonists of the draft law on equal inheritance (COLIBE), representatives of religious and secular groups and associations. Moreover, interviews involved high-ranking Ennahdha’s officials and the so-called ‘da’wa-oriented’ party members, mostly first-generation activists of the Islamist movement. Finally, data collection was based on the participant observation of both faith-based and secular feminist demonstrations against or in favor of the COLIBE.

The civil state: a contested notion at the service of a compromise

Much has been written about the relationship between Islam and the state. A large number of authors have emphasized the indivisibility of religion and the state as an essential feature of the political system in the Muslim-Arab world (Lewis, 1988). This non-separation of the two spheres, which gives the state a religious character, would hinder the secularization of institutions and make Islam and democracy incompatible (Lewis, 1996). However, one cannot fail to observe the diversity of state-religion relations characterizing political systems in the Muslim world, especially the degree of intensity and, above all, the nature of these relations. Thus, it is important to distinguish between states that declare themselves to be Islamic, where the entire legal-political order is religious and those where Islam is the official religion, but the political order is generally civil and the legal system is largely secularized, that is, where religious principles are not, or only to a limited extent, a source of law (Al-Dabbagh, 2013).

Nonetheless, it should also be recognized that in most Muslim-majority Arab countries, states tend to rely on religion to assert their power and legitimacy. This is true even in Tunisia, considered the most secular country in the region, given the dismantling of most traditional religious institutions and the secularization of the legal arsenal (Cesari, 2014; Frégosi, 2003; Zeghal, 1999), but where actually the legal framework for personal status still refers to religious norms in several respects and where the state is heavily involved in the regulation and control of the religious sphere (Frégosi, 2003; Zeghal, 1999). In this respect, Frégosi (2003) has characterized the state-religion relationship in Tunisia as referring to the Gallicanism model, which he defines as

an ideology and an institutional practice aimed at establishing the primacy of the state sphere over the religious sphere through the systematic control of the latter, most often by placing its officials under the tutelage and integrating them into the state personnel, by their financial subordination and by the monopolistic regulation of any activity of production and dissemination of religious symbolism.

Based on this characterization of the model of state-religion relations in Tunisia, and in the light of the constitutional debate on the civil state, we will examine the extent to which this model has been challenged in the post-revolutionary period.

While the popular revolt that shook Tunisia starting in December 2010 was guided by aspirations to social justice and democracy, the institutional processes that followed the fall of Ben Ali and the rise to power of the Islamist party Ennahdha in October 2011 granted a prominent place to identity and religious issues in the political debate. Indeed, the issue of the relationship between state and religion has been at the heart of the process of drafting the post-revolution constitution, which spanned a 3-year period from 2011 to 2013 and was characterized by several crises and interruptions (Netterstrøm, 2015).

The main conflicts have centered on the questions of the nature of the state and the identity of the nation, in particular around the interpretation of Art. 1, stating that ‘Tunisia is a free, independent and sovereign state: its religion is Islam, its language is Arabic, and its regime is the republic’.³ The tension reached its peak when the Ennahdha party circulated a first draft of the constitution in February 2012, which disposed in its Article 10 that Sharia is the ‘main source of law’⁴ and provided for a High Council of fatwa (majlis ‘ala li-l-iftâ) in charge of controlling the conformity of laws with the Sharia (Gobe and Chouikha, 2014). As underlined by Yared (2021: 80), Ennahdha’s objective to enshrine Sharia as a source of law⁵ was motivated by the will ‘to remove the ambiguity of the formulation of Article 1, by affirming that Islam is the religion of Tunisia and not only of its population or of the majority of Tunisians’. In this regard, another proposal put forward by the Islamist party in March 2012 concerned the creation of a higher Islamic council that would be responsible for interpreting Article 1 of the constitution.⁶ The willingness of the Islamist party to include Sharia as the main source of law revealed that this article was open to different interpretations as to the nature of the state (religious-inspired or not).

The provisions of the early draft of the post-revolution constitution provoked confrontations between supporters of the constitutionalization of the Sharia and advocates of a clear separation between politics and religion with regard to the elaboration of law. On 16 March 2012,⁷ a demonstration of 3–4000 people was organized in front of the parliament by Islamic activists, including Salafi groups and deputies from the Ennahdha party, to demand the inclusion of Sharia law in the constitution, claiming that Article 1 was not a sufficient basis to guarantee the Islamic nature of the Tunisian state. This forceful display was followed by a protest movement by many anti-Sharia deputies as well as a strong mobilization of secular civil society organizations that organized demonstrations on 20 March 2012, the day of Tunisian independence.

Under this pressure, Ennahdha decided on 25 March 2012, to abandon its demands, paving the way for a compromise between the two camps. The agreement reached was premised on both the retention of Article 1 of the 1959 Constitution and on the adoption of the notion of a civil state. As discussed by Bras (2016), to overcome their disputes, ‘the constituents resorted to two main procedures: semantic uncertainty, by retaining the ambiguous wording of Article 1 of the 1959 Constitution; conceptual creativity, through the emergence of a new concept, the “civil state”, which the two camps could appropriate’, but with meanings that could sometimes converge and sometimes diverge.

The notion of ‘civil state’ (dawla madaniya) appears in the final text of the constitution promulgated in January 2014, first in the preamble: ‘with a view to building a democratic and participatory republican regime, within the framework of a civil state in which sovereignty belongs to the people’, and then in Article 2: ‘Tunisia is a civil state, based on citizenship, the will of the people and the rule of law’. Affirming that Tunisia is a civil state based on the rule of law obviates in principle any project of Islamization of Tunisian law and any attempt to introduce Sharia as a source of law.

In reality, the adoption of Article 2 does not eliminate the disagreement as regards the relationship between state and religion, as Article 1 can be interpreted in opposing ways (Islam religion of the Tunisian people vs religion of the state), thus opening the possibility of making reference to religious values and norms in the development of the law. In fact, the political debates during the constitutional process reflect the substantive differences between the two camps over the notion of civil state and two opposing conceptions of the nature of the state. According to Hachemaoui (2013),

the various draft constitutions prepared by the national Constituent Assembly are the symptom of two antagonistic visions of Tunisian polity, that of the proponents of a secular conception of the state, where the role of the state is to guarantee rights and freedoms, namely human rights, in their universal sense, and that of Ennahdha and other advocates of Islamic conservatism, for whom the primary vocation of the state is to preserve and defend the ‘authenticity’ of society and serve as the guardian of the Islamic ‘identity’ of the country.

The conflict between these two conceptions of the nature and role of the state was also expressed during the debate on the third version of the draft constitution (22 April 2013), whose preamble subordinates the universal principles of human rights ‘to the cultural specificities of the Tunisian people, the fundamentals of Islam and its purposes’. Gobe and Chouikha (2014) report that this formulation has provoked strong criticism by various components of the secularist civil society. Notably, the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law and a group of constitutional experts that assumed the task of scrutinizing the third constitutional draft denounced that subjecting human rights to conditions of compatibility with Tunisian cultural specificities amounted to denying the universality of human rights (Gobe and Chouikha, 2014; Hachemaoui, 2013). The criticism also concerned the failure to mention freedom of conscience in the text and the omission of any reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The pressure exerted by the constitutional experts and human rights associations will bring to the revision of the third draft of the constitution. Thus, in the constitutional draft published on 1 June 2013, the mention ‘constants of Islam’ (thawâbit) was replaced by the ‘teachings of Islam’ (ta’âlîm), a formulation that appeared in the 1959 constitution and had the virtue of being less precise, whereas the ‘cultural specificity of the Tunisian people’, was deleted (Gobe and Chouikha, 2014).

However, these amendments did not remove all the ambiguities of the 1 June 2013, text, which remained flawed by contradictory provisions. This in turn raised the outcry of secularists and the mobilization of constitutional lawyers (Hachemaoui, 2013). The latter targeted in particular the provisions of Article 14, stipulating that no constitutional revision can question ‘Islam as the State religion’, which seems to water down the ‘civil character’ of the state, mentioned in Article 2. The outcry was also directed at Article 6.⁸ In particular, this article raised questions about claims that the state is the ‘guardian of religion’ and that ‘it protects the sacred’. Ben Achour (2014) wondered whether it would not have been more appropriate to assert that the State is the guarantor of all religions: ‘to insist that the state is the guarantor of religion doesn’t it amount to promoting an interpretation of Article 1 establishing Islam as the religion of the state?’.

The tensions surrounding the drafting of the constitution reached a critical point after the assassination on 25 July 2013, of the deputy Mohamed Brahmi and the deadly attacks against the army in Kasserine by Salafi-Jihadist groups. The major political crisis in Tunisia that followed put further pressure on the Ennahdha party. Against this background, changes were brought to Article 6⁹ in the final version of the constitution, eventually enacted on 27 January 2014. Yet, if freedom of conscience was finally introduced, the statement preceding the article, according to which ‘the state is the guardian of religion’, was maintained (Ben Achour, 2014).

As observed, the conflictual process that marked the drafting of the Tunisian post-revolution constitution is rooted in the ambiguity of Article 1 (Islam religion of the Tunisian people vs Islam ‘religion of state’) and in the contradiction that results from this ambiguity between Article 1 and Article 2 characterizing Tunisia as a civil state, based on citizenship and the supremacy of the law.

Under such conditions, the apparent agreement reached between Islamists and ‘secularists’ on the characterization of Tunisia as a civil state seems, above all, a formal compromise between the two camps, as it does not eliminate the divergences of interpretation and, consequently, the different uses that can be made of them.

On one hand, the Tunisian ‘secular’ camp renounces to claim clearly the instauration of the laicity model, based on the strict separation of the state and religious organizations; on the other hand, Ennahdha adopts the notion of ‘civil state’ without however abandoning the possibility that it is inspired by religious norms and values. Thus, the provision added both to Article 1 and to Article 2 stipulating that they may not be subject to any revision appear to be safeguards for the respective sides to interpret and act in the sense they intend. While for the ‘secular’ camp, the civil state and its non-revisable character makes it possible to counter the projects of ‘Islamization of the law and institutions’, for Ennahdha, the constitutional provisions affirming the Islamic identity of Tunisia constitute a means of advancing and legitimizing a state inspired by religious norms. As Ben Achour (2014) points out, although it has been hailed as an important step forward in the rule of law and individual freedoms, ‘the constitution still has significant gray areas and ambiguities, and much will depend on the application and interpretation of the provisions in question’.

In the following section, we show how the adoption of notion of ‘civil state’ allowed the Islamist party to claim the elaboration of draft laws having religious inspiration or the rejection of others not fulfilling the principles of Islam, as the religion of the state.

Enacting the notion of ‘civil state’ beyond consensus

As we have seen, the lack of a clear separation between the political and the religious in most Muslim-majority countries does not preclude the variability of the relationship between these two spheres. In several countries, controlling the religious sphere has become an important factor in legitimizing political power, which leads in several cases to a ‘stateization’ of Islam (Al-Dabbagh, 2013). In the case of Tunisia, the state has managed both to maintain tight control over the religious sphere and to secularize most of the legal arsenal (Mokhefi, 2015). What has happened since the revolution and the coming to power of the Islamist party Ennahdha? To what extent does the Ennahdha party’s interpretation of the concept of the civil state and its action to translate it into the legal framework have the potential to lead to a reconfiguration of state-religion relations?

As a matter of fact, the compromise on the notion of civil state has not put an end to parliamentary debates and confrontations as regards the nature of the state and its relationship to religious institutions and norms. Before and after the launch of the 2014 Constitution, several draft bills have stirred up conflicts around the ‘civility of the state’, revealing in broad daylight the divergent interpretations that ‘secularists’ and Islamists made of it.

First, the proposal of the ‘Islamic Sukuk’ (Islamic bonds) Law of 30 July 2013, and of the ‘Islamic Investment Funds’ Law of 9 December 2013, aimed at establishing Sharia-inspired supervisory committees composed of experts in Islamic law that would have issued ‘fatwa’¹⁰ and conduct audits to ensure that transactions comply with Sharia standards.¹¹ As the decisions of these Sharia supervisory committees would have been binding, laws introducing Sharia-inspired norms were seen by their detractors as heralding a change in the frame of reference and have been decried as contradicting Article 2 of the Constitution stipulating that Tunisia is a civil state.

Moreover, two draft laws sought to restore the Habous institution,¹² abolished in 1957 by Bourghiba, and to enshrine Zakat (alms) in Tunisian law, as well as to create a specific Zakat fund.¹³ The Habous bill, already adopted by the Council of Ministers on 1 March 2013, was submitted to the Tunisian parliament on 11 November 2013, prompting hostile reactions from experts, deputies and associative actors from within the secular camp. For several opponents, the restoration of awqafs and the creation of an independent body for the control and supervision of awqafs, provided for in the draft law, would have involved many risks, such as the duplication of the legal framework and the conflicts involved in the existence of two parallel systems, a weakening of the state’s redistributive social function in favor of religious institutions and a challenge to the civilian character of the state¹⁴ (Kammarti, 2022).

After the entry into force of the 2014 Constitution, it is the draft law on banking and financial institutions (2016) aimed at introducing Islamic finance into the Tunisia legal system, which again raised protests from opposition MPs. In particular, the initial draft proposal for the establishment of a National Sharia Compliance Board, in charge of supervising Islamic finance operations, was the object of major disputes. According to its critics, a National Sharia Compliance Board would have represented a threat to the unity of the Tunisian legal system and a challenge to the civil character of the state. On the initiative of a group of 33 MPs, an appeal was lodged with the Interim Constitutional Review Committee, considering that the Islamic Finance Bill would have carried the risk of establishing Sharia courts, violated Article 2 of the Constitution and threatened the unity of the legal system (Kammarti, 2022). However, the Interim Constitutional Review Board finally ruled ‘the conformity to the Constitution of the bill’, considering that ‘Islamic banking operations (…) are inserted in the regulation of banks and public institutions, which is an integral part of the Tunisian positive law system’. The law was adopted in 2016 without, however, creating a national religious supervisory body, leaving banks free to set up ‘internal Sharia committees’ (Kammarti, 2022). As commented by the left-wing deputy, Ziad Lakhdher,

The Popular Front considers the Islamic banking product as a product subject to the general law governing banks in Tunisia. An independent structure with its own mechanisms and an Iftaa¹⁵ department with a foreign reference¹⁶ threatens the unity of the system.¹⁷

The creation of faith-based funds, such as the Zakat fund, to be managed by a national body, proposed by the Ennahdha party in 2019, also raised protests from opposition MPs and civil society associations considering this move as an attempt to undermine the foundations of the civil state. While this project was finally rejected by the National Assembly in December 2019, the conflict has resurfaced with the decision of the mayor of the city of Kram (governorate of Tunis) to erect a municipal zakat fund on Article 138 of the Code of Local Authorities raised from charitable donations under the religious obligation zakat.

This decision was met by numerous outcries coming from various political and institutional actors. Thus, the governor of Tunis appealed against this decision to the administrative court, recalling that Article 6 of the Constitution provides that ‘the state is the guardian of religion’, meaning that the religious issue is exclusively part of the prerogatives of the state.¹⁸ For its part, the Tunisian League of Human Rights denounced this decision that ‘is akin to a rebellion against the institutions of the state and an attempt to introduce some precepts of the religious state’, stressing that

this project, charitable in appearance, aims to replace the state by a community society that provides social services to poor categories;¹⁹ while the National Observatory for the Defense of State Civility strongly condemned this decision as a ‘serious violation of the constitution

and of the civil character of the state, as ‘an insubordination to the institutions of the state and the legislative power’ and ‘a clear initiative to gradually initiate the creation of a Caliphate, a theocratic state’ (Kammarti, 2022).

These clashes and associated actions illustrate the fundamental disagreements of the actors involved on the meaning to be given to the civil character of the state and even more the inherent conflicts contained in the different provisions of the constitution.

While certain laws adopted since the revolution have made it possible to introduce religious norms into Tunisia’s legal framework, on the basis of a favorable interpretation of Article 1, it is in the name of the same article that draft laws on individual freedoms and equality among citizens have been rejected. The constitutional amendments that were proposed in 2018 by the Tunisian Commission for Individual Liberties and Equality (COLIBE) are an emblematic example. The COLIBE was set up in August 2017 and mandated by President Béji Caïd Essebsi to propose reforms to bring Tunisia’s legal system into line with the 2014 Constitution (Brésillon, 2018; Gana and Sigillò, 2019). Published on 8 June 2018, the report called for gender equality in inheritance, abolition of the death penalty and of the criminalization of homosexuality, gender equality in the granting of nationality and choice of family name, and so on. The publication of the report provoked hostile reactions and led to major mobilizations, organized by religious associations and various groups of the Islamist movement, often linked or close to the Ennahdha party.

Ennahdha’s official position against the COLIBE was announced in late August 2018, following the mobilizations, called ‘civil society’ mobilizations. The Islamist party had so far taken care not to declare its hostility to the report, but nevertheless criticized ‘specific’ issues, such as the one relating to the draft law on equal inheritance. The authors’ surveys of mobilizations against COLIBE in 2018 showed that the discourses deployed by actors opposed to the report, including the Ennahdha party, mostly mobilized the religious and moral reference. The Islamist party’s criticism of the COLIBE focused primarily on the composition of the commission.²⁰ Since it did not include representatives of religious institutions among its members, it was immediately considered illegitimate, for its composition would not allow the religious norm to be taken into account in the reform proposal. Moreover, the whole anti-COLIBE advocacy was based on the idea that the commission’s proposals are contrary to the Koran, constitute an attack on morality and the sacred (Gana and Sigillò, 2019). Even when the advocacy refers to the constitution, the articles invoked are interpreted in a way that emphasizes religious reference and the culture of society. The preamble and Article 1 of the Constitution, which highlight Tunisia’s Muslim identity, are used to promote the idea of a state and a legal system inspired by Islamic values and norms. In addition to Article 1, Ennahdha invokes Article 6, which stipulates: ‘The family is the basic unit of society, it is the state’s responsibility to protect it’.

The strategy put in place by the Islamist party to counter the report was to focus the battle on the issue of equal inheritance, with advocacy centered around the slogan: ‘The Koran and the Constitution are clear!’. The party issued an official statement stating that the COLIBE report ‘threatened the family structure and the unity of society’. Hence, the Islamist party’s argument emphasizes above all the religious and cultural identity of Tunisians. This was evident from the positions expressed by Ennahdha’s leaders. Nourredine Bhiri, leader of the parliamentary group of the Islamist party declared ‘We are against’, the report is ‘refuted from the perspective of the Constitution, Islam, values and morals’. It is therefore, both in the name of Islam and in the name of society that the COLIBE report and, in particular, equality of inheritance, is rejected. More than anything else, what sets the stand taken by the party against equality in inheritance is that it is legitimized by reference to the cultural values of Tunisians and the imperative of preserving social cohesion. In this perspective, it is crucial for the party to point out that its stance only reflects the viewpoint of society. Within this logic, the mobilization of a conservative and religiously oriented civil society becomes a major stake, especially regarding the Ennahdha party’s specialization project in political affairs. In the following section, we specifically explore how Ennahdha’s specialization project is being implemented and its links with the organization of a religiously oriented civil society. In particular, we will see that Ennahdha’s transformation into a civil party does not necessarily imply a clear separation between politics and religion, but rather a reorganization of their relationship. Indeed, the process of Ennahdha’s political integration requires managing the contradictory pressures exerted on the party by both secular political forces and those closer to the Islamist movement, which is far from being homogeneous. In this context, the mobilization of the Islamist public is a key issue for the legitimatization of the new political power, as we will show.

The civility of the state and the Ennahdha party in light of the specialization policy: mobilizing the Islamic civil society

Ennahdha’s 10th congress, held in May 2016, ratified the specialization (takhasus) of the Islamist movement, which implies a distinction (not a separation) between political activities and religious and social activities, and consecrates Ennahdha’s transformation into a civilian political party. According to this policy, religious and social activities were to be carried out by civil society actors independent of the political party. Thus, Ennahdha leaders had to choose between holding leadership positions in the party or in associations, and were no longer allowed to preach in mosques. The question of how to treat preaching as a distinct political activity was highly controversial within the party itself. By abandoning its religious dimension, the party would end up as a professional party that would now be called upon to provide technical solutions for governing the country.²¹ In an interview with Le Monde, Ghannouchi declared: ‘Ennahda would “leave political Islam” and enter “democratic Islam”,²² a phrase that draws an analogy with the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe. We are Muslim democrats who no longer claim to represent political Islam’. There is no point in using the term ‘political Islam’ in post-revolutionary Tunisia because ‘Tunisia is now a democracy’. Thus, following the precepts of the 2014 constitution, he described Ennahdha as ‘a political, democratic and civic party whose point of reference is rooted in the values of Islam and modernity’ (Ghannouchi, 2016).

Against this background, the process of specialization fits with the idea of adapting the Movement to the notion of the civil state. Indeed, in the interview, Ghannouchi (2016) also added: ‘the party can no longer use religion as an argument to justify its political decisions’. In this respect, the process of specialization has made it possible to distinguish the two spheres, so that mobilization for religious affairs is a competence of civil society, a competence of Daʾwa associations. Actually, the idea of specialization was developed by the party’s leadership well before 2016, as part of Ennahdha’s strategy to survive in the political system, and prevailed in a context characterized by the pressure of anti-Islamist socio-political forces.

Having won the largest number of Constituent Assembly seats in the October 2011 election, Ennahdha led a governing coalition for 2 years before being pressured to hand over power to a caretaker government in January 2014 amid growing tension, expressed most notably during Bardo sit-in.²³ The Ennahdha-led movement was in particular accused of having a soft stance toward jihadi-Salafist groups that carried out two political assassinations in 2013 (leftist leader Chokri Belaid and Constituent Assembly member Mohamed Brahmi).

Following the assassinations in 2013 and the growing tensions in the country, the party’s leadership recognized the need to reposition itself and consolidate its image as a moderate political force. In light of this, the party officially declared to have cut its relationship with the Jihadi-Salafi movement Ansar al-Sharia, which was declared a terrorist organization in August 2013. After Ennahdha’s decision of specializing as a civil political party in 2016, the relationship between the party and Salafi actors involved in grassroots associations underwent a further separation.

In October 2014 legislative elections, Ennahdha was defeated by the secular party Nidaa Tounes. The latter formed a coalition government with the Islamist party. The coalition’s government approved the country’s 2014 constitution, recognizing the Tunisian state as civil and making no mention of Sharia as the basis of law. However, as already examined, the notion of civil state has been differently interpreted by political actors at stake (Bras, 2016). According to party’s members interviewed, Ennahdha would be in favor of the secularization of the state rather than the laicization ‘as wanted by its adversaries’.²⁴

Baubérot defined ‘secularization’ as ‘the transition from a socially encompassing religious culture’ to ‘religious belie’, where religion has been transformed into a cultural subsystem left to private and existential choice. Thus, the process of secularization is, above all, about the place and social role of religion in the institutional field, the diversification and mutations of this field in relation to the state and politics (and with civil society, citizenship and now gender issues). It induces a dissociation between the political field as an instance of power (with its aspect of obligation and coercion) and the religious field as an instance of authority among others (Baubérot, 2014).

In 2016, despite internal conflicts, the party’s leadership envisaged a separation between the ‘Islamist’ activists and the ‘politicians’. However, the former, mostly ancient activists of the Tunisian Islamist movement, tried to re-imagine da’wa activism under the new circumstances. Old party’s preaching leaders, such as Habib Ellouz and Sadok Chourou tried to steer the party toward its Islamist roots by remaining in parliament at the same time while several party members chose to engage in civil society.²⁵ In particular, da’wa activists mainly carried out teaching and charitable work aimed at ‘calling’ people to live more piously and denouncing secular lifestyles.

This social mobilization is not disconnected from a political understanding of the state and society’s transformation. As a matter of fact, despite this decision, relations between the party and religious associations did not disappear, even if there were no longer organizational links between them (Gana and Sigillò, 2019). According to Ennahdha’s leaders, the distinction between political activities and preaching does not mean the movement has been divided into two independent entities. Indeed, changes evolved toward specializing in two fields (political and social activities, mostly inspired to religious principles) in conformity with civilian law. This transformation is not a novelty within Islamist movements. The distinction between political activities and preaching is an idea that has already been put forward by the Justice and Development Party in Morocco (Munteanu, 2020). The separation between political and religious activities is thus perceived by the party’s leaders as technical rather than ideological.

Many activists interviewed have also justified the party’s specialization process, according to the principle of subsidiarity (Gana and Sigillò, 2019). From this perspective, they consider Daʿwa associations as the best vectors of Islamic principles, which have been progressively neglected by the party’s agenda. This position is confirmed by some party officials, who see mobilizations for Islam as a mandate of religious affairs to civil society actors.

In this regard, Islamist activists and former party members of the Mejless Al-Choura (the party deliberative council) have continued to mobilize for the defense of Islamic values within the framework of a religious-oriented civil society. The mobilizations organized against the COLIBE report represent an exemplary case (Gana and Sigillò, 2019). They illustrate the complementarities that the process of specialization allows between Ennahdha’s actions in institutional politics and the mobilization of Islamic public opinion.²⁶

In August 2018, members of Islamic associations took to the streets to protest against the proposals of legislative reforms relating to individual freedoms in the country, which were supposed to be at odds with the Quran’s norms and principles. However, this mobilization was far from spontaneous; it was organized by a network of da’wa associations. The demonstrators marched with banners bearing the inscription ‘The Quran before any other text’ to affirm the primacy of the sacred text over civil law. They accused the Commission of having acted against the teachings of Islam. This mobilization echoed the demonstrations organized by the Front of Islamic Associations in 2012–2013 but with one significant difference: the initiative was qualified by its promoters as a ‘civil society mobilization’ and not as a political action. This shifting narrative seems to reflect the Ennahdha’s specialization strategy from the civil society perspective, and in turn, it prevents the party from being accused by secular forces of pursuing an Islamist agenda at the political level. According to a former Ennahdha member and secretary general of the association DWI: ‘We mobilize because Ennahda cannot overexpose itself; it must compromise with the country’s secular forces in light of the constitution of a civil state’.²⁷

Interestingly, the analysis of the mobilizations against COLIBE reveals a process of reconfiguration from below of a socio-political network with Islamic references that was split following the Ennahdha’s pragmatic turn. This network includes also Salafist actors that have been at odds with Ennahdha since 2013 but that have subsequently become involved in the associative field. The latter is formally distinguished from party politics, yet it constitutes a public force that politically defends the religious norms originally displayed by the Islamist party (Gana and Sigillò, 2019; Sigillò, 2020).

The project of specialization of the Ennahdha party in political affairs, which allows it to assert its civil character, appears thus to be linked to the dynamics of organization and mobilization of a civil society claiming a project of defense of Islamic values. This religiously inspired grassroots mobilization has demonstrated on several occasions its capacity for action and influence on the post-revolutionary political processes in Tunisia, by supporting the adoption of draft laws referring to religious principles or, on the contrary, by mobilizing against reforms considered to violate them.

Conclusion

This article explored the process of political integration of the Islamist party Ennahdha after its accession to power in October 2011, in light of the political debates around the notion of the civil state and the relationship between state and religion in the wake of the revolution.

We have shown that the Ennahdha party leadership’s adherence to the civil character of the state allowed for a pragmatic compromise with secular forces. Unlike most academic work that has focused on the relatively consensual political path leading to the adoption of the 2014 Tunisian constitution, our analysis has highlighted how Ennahdha’s framing of the notion of a ‘civil party’ within a ‘civil state’ was embedded in a conflictual dynamic between the Islamist party and secular forces, as well as within the party itself. By unveiling the divergent interpretations of the notion of the civil state by the actors involved – despite the constitutional compromise – we have shown how the meaning Ennahdha attributed to this notion was reflected in the reforms of the legal arsenal proposed (or rejected) by the party. While the process of specialization in political affairs allows Ennahdha to claim the party’s civil character, the emphasis on the Arab-Muslim identity of Tunisians also enables it to justify its conception of a civil state with religious reference. Thus, the consolidation of a civil society that claims to defend the values of Islam appears to be a major stake, particularly because it allows the party to reject on behalf of society the ‘laicity model’.

In this regard, the 2014 constitutional compromise enshrining the civil character of the state does not seem to be able to reconcile in substance the advocates of a clear separation between the state and religion, particularly in the formulation of the law, and those for whom, even within the framework of a civil state, the law could be inspired by Islamic principles. Far from reflecting a consensus between Islamist and secular forces, the notion of the civil state embodies a conceptual ambiguity that allows Ennahdha to interpret it differently from its political opponents and to emphasize the party’s claimed commitment to both democratic principles and Islamic values.

Interestingly, the ambiguity surrounding the constitutional status of Islam reverberated in the political era of Kais Saied. While Article 1 of the new constitution, promulgated on 25 July 2022, no longer refers to Islam as the religion of Tunisia or of the state, the notion of the civil state, which allowed a compromise between Ennahdha and its political opponents, disappears from the entire constitutional text. But these changes are far from representing a secular turn. While rejecting the principle of an official religion, the Tunisian president has in fact specified several times that the State has the task of realizing the objectives of the religion of the umma: an ambiguous term, referring both to the universal community of believers and to the nation, in this case, the Tunisian nation.²⁸ Article 5 of the 2022 constitution, which states that ‘Tunisia is part of the Islamic Ummah and it is the sole responsibility of the State to work to achieve the objectives of Islam by preserving the soul, honor, property, religion and freedom’, has provoked hostile reactions from numerous constitutional experts, who denounce the risk of opening the door to the Islamization of the law. As Bras (2022) points out,

while the State was freed from its Islamic identity by the deletion of the former article 1, it is brought back to this identity by Tunisia’s membership in the umma islamiyya, which confers on it a set of obligations of a religious nature, including those related to the maqasid.²⁹

Thus, recalling a constitutional model inspired by Gallicanism, the new constitution seems ultimately to strengthen the role of the state in regulating the religious sphere. This not only eliminates the prospect of separating the religious and political dimensions, but above all delegitimizes the claim of religiously inspired civil society to act in defense of Islamic values.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people who kindly gave us their time for interviews. The authors are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which helped improve the article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article received partial funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 695674).

ORCID iD

Alia GANA

Notes

Author biographies

Alia GANA, PhD, in Development Sociology from Cornell University, is a CNRS Research Professor at UMR (7533) LADYSS-Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. As Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded TARICA project (), her most recent work has examined political and socio-institutional change in North Africa in the wake of the 2011 Arab uprisings through several themes: conflict and collective mobilization for access to resources, political Islam, electoral processes and voting patterns.

Address: Campus Condorcet, UMR LADYSS, Bâtiment recherche sud, 5 cours des Humanités, 93322 Aubervilliers Cedex, France.

Email: Alia.Gana@univ-Paris1.fr

Ester SIGILLÒ is an assistant professor at the University of Bologna, Department of Political and Social Sciences. After receiving a Ph.D. in Political Science from Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, she served as Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies. Her research interests include the nexus between religion and politics and Islamic activism in the Maghreb.

Address: Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Strada Maggiore 45, Bologna, Italy.

Email: ester.sigillo@unibo.it

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