More importantly, An-Nahda positioned itself as the party that would restore traditional values and that would bring Islam and Arabism back to the heart of Tunisian society. In doing so it was careful to make it clear that it wanted to build a modern society, but also stressed that this society should be rooted in the country’s ‘authentic’ identity. To this end, rather than raise controversial issues such as polygamy, party members focused on how to deal with social phenomena such as people being forced to marry late due to financial hardship and high divorce rates.57 While such messages may not have appealed to all of the urban middle class, they certainly attracted enough Tunisians who felt alienated and troubled by the overt secularism of previous regimes.
Although An-Nahda was not the only party promising to shift the country back to its traditional Islamic and Arab identity (other parties, including those of an Islamist bent, promoted a similar message), it had a major advantage over its competitors: it was a known entity whose leaders had a special moral authority on account of the years they had spent imprisoned or in exile. Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi in particular was a prominent and respected historical figure whose personal sacrifices were well known. As such he, and by extension the party, were held up as untainted by corruption and for many, as being synonymous with Islam. Thus An-Nahda entered the elections with a symbolic capital that far outstripped that of its rivals.
An-Nahda was therefore able to appeal to a cross section of Tunisian society. Not only did it receive the largest share of the vote in the poorer areas of the interior, especially in al-Ghannouchi’s home area of Gabès, it managed to do well in the capital and notably in the more affluent areas of the coast, such as Sousse and Monastir, cities that had always been associated with the former regime. The key to much of An-Nahda’s success was that it was able to connect with the masses. Whilst the liberal and leftist parties struggled to reach out beyond the urban elite, An-Nahda’s message resonated with ordinary Tunisians, or at least with a large percentage of those who turned out to vote. The party was helped in this by the fact that it was able to use the country’s mosques for political mobilisation. In so doing, it had the ear of the masses and, as it turned out, the masses proved receptive to the party and its message.
Meanwhile, political Islam was also coming out into the open in Libya. Although the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood was not to achieve the same kind of electoral success as its counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia, it still succeeded in turning itself from an outlawed and brutally repressed organisation into a credible political force and key shaper of post-Qadhafi Libya. This was an achievement given that of all the reformist political Islamist forces operating in the region, the Libyan Brotherhood was starting from the lowest base. Colonel Qadhafi’s utter intolerance of any kind of political activism outside of the framework of his unique Jamahiriyah state, as well as his personal hatred for Islamists whom he referred to as zinadaq (heretics), had meant that the Brotherhood had not had any space to operate at all. The movement was largely wiped out inside the country in 1998 when, after having discovered the presence of some Brotherhood cells, the regime launched a mass arrest campaign. Over one hundred members of the movement were detained, including most of its leadership, and the rest forced to flee. Although the regime released over one hundred members of the movement in April 2006, as part of its bid to reform and rehabilitate Islamist prisoners, and although there were some contacts between the regime and the Brotherhood in the UK, the movement remained banned and its members closely monitored. Thus, like An-Nahda, by the time of the uprisings, the Libyan Brotherhood was little more than a movement in exile.
However, the Libyan Ikhwan rushed to play its part in the transition to the post-Qadhafi era. In November 2011, it held its first public conference inside the country, during which it elected Bashir al-Kebti as its new General Guide. Following in the footsteps of its Egyptian counterpart, it also moved to establish a political party. In March 2012, the Brotherhood launched its Justice and Construction Party in a high profile event in Tripoli at which Mohamed Sawan, from Misarata, was elected as party leader. Like the Egyptians, the Libyan Ikhwan maintained that the party was to be separate from the movement in order that the latter could operate in the fields of preaching, Islamic education and welfare provision.
Also in line with the Egyptians and with An-Nahda, the Libyan Brotherhood did its best to stress its moderate credentials. It extended membership of the Justice and Construction Party beyond the movement and was keen to emphasise its vision of Libya as a democratic civil state with an Islamic frame of reference. The Libyan Brotherhood was vague about exactly what it meant by such a frame of reference. However, it tried to impress upon the Libyans that it was inclusive and that it was nothing to be afraid of. As the movement’s outgoing General Guide, Suleiman Abdelkader explained, ‘We don’t want to replace one tyranny with another. All together, we want to build a civil society that uses moderate Islam in its daily life … our shared task is to protect Libya, to talk to each other instead of fighting.’58
When it came to the country’s first national elections in over four decades, the Justice and Construction Party did not score the success it had hoped for. Although it was the second party, it only took 17 out of the 200 seats in the new National General Congress. There were many reasons for this failure, including the way the election law had been structured. Fearful that the Brotherhood would sweep the board given the choices electorates had made in both Tunisia and Egypt, and the fact that Libya is one of the most conservative and traditional societies in the region, the more liberal elements within the National Transitional Council, the interim ruling body established after the uprisings began, structured the law so that only 80 seats would go to political parties. The remaining 120 seats were reserved for individual candidates. Thus, whilst it did field some members as individuals, the Justice and Construction Party was only able to contest less than half the available seats.
However, the Brotherhood still fared considerably worse than the frontrunner, a broad based coalition led by former Planning Minister, Mahmoud Jibril, which took 39 seats. It is perhaps not surprising that the Brotherhood did not do better: the movement was little known inside Libya, its networks almost non-existent, given that it had never been able to get a real foothold inside the country. The movement was so emasculated that it was never able to produce any leader of particular note, or anyone with the stature of an al-Ghannouchi. As such it had no symbolic presence inside the country. In fact, the symbolic presence it did have was largely negative. Qadhafi had spent forty years railing against the Brotherhood, repeatedly warning of their plots to subvert the country and lumping them together in his discourse with more militant elements, tarring all Islamists with the same brush. Although the regime may have gone, some of its anti-Islamist sentiment seemed to have outlived it. A poll carried out by a Libyan research centre found that 40 per cent of respondents who did not vote for the Islamists chose not to do so because they were frightened of them; 45 per cent because they didn’t know them; and only 8 per cent because they weren’t convinced by their election programmes.59 Given that the Brotherhood, like the other parties contesting the elections, had just eighteen days to campaign, it clearly came across as a movement that was neither known nor to be trusted.
The Brotherhood was also faced with the problem of how to distinguish itself from the myriad of parties that had entered the political arena. Given that Libya has no real secular currents and that even the liberal parties advocated Sharias being cited as the primary source of legislation in the new constitution, the Brotherhood struggled to differentiate itself as being the party that could make a real break with the past and return the country to its authentic Islamic identity. In addition, the Brotherhood was up against another important factor in Libyan society: tribalism. The Ikhwan were not able to supersede the country’s powerful tribal forces who made their presence felt in the political arena primarily through those seats that were reserved for individual candidates.
Despite these challenges, however, the Justice and Construction Party still came out of the elections as a player and ended up with a number of portfolios in the country’s first democratically elected government in decades, including that of Deputy Prime Minister. This achievement has less significance in the Libyan context than it would have elsewhere, given that the central authorities in Libya are so lacking in authority. One of the consequences of the Libyan revolution has been that the centre has given way to the periphery and the country is now home to a plethora of local power brokers, from tribes, regions and militias that all outweigh the power of the legitimately elected ruling bodies.
Compared to these elements, the Libyan Brotherhood is not a powerful force. But it is a force nonetheless and has successfully made the transition from clandestine opposition movement to mainstream political actor. Furthermore, the movement is already focusing its efforts on doing what the Brotherhood has always done best, namely making its presence felt on the ground. After years of being barred from such activities, the Libyan brothers are finally free to preach and to invest their resources into the movement’s trademark charitable work. The movement is building a database of Libya’s poor to help co-ordinate its welfare programmes and is also engaged in establishing youth training and employment projects.60 As such, the Brotherhood and its political arm look set to be part of Libya’s political and social landscape for the foreseeable future and are likely to grow in importance.
For all its non-ideological beginnings, therefore, the Arab Spring breathed new life into political Islamist movements, and into the Brotherhood in particular. This was all the more surprising, given that there was a growing sense among commentators in the years running up to the revolutions that political Islam had had its day. By the late 2000s, the Brotherhood, and what it stood for, was looking somehow outmoded and most definitely on the wane. The Egyptian Ikhwan in particular, ravaged by factionalism and in-fighting, seemed to be almost turning in on itself, resigned to its fate as the power that never was.
However, the Arab Spring provided a new opportunity that seemed to shake the lumbering movement out of the stasis it had become so bogged down in. The fact that the Arab Spring was not about ideas, that it was essentially a protest against the old regimes and the status quo rather than a protest for any specific alternative played straight into the Brotherhood’s hands. It enabled the Brotherhood and An-Nahda to use their experience and superior organisational skills to move straight into the power vacuums that opened up with the toppling of the former regimes. In the absence of any new alternative, it was the Brotherhood and its reformist style of political Islam, rather than its more progressive competitors, that proved to be what the people wanted.
Conclusion
The Challenges Ahead
When the first edition of this book was published in 2010 it was unthinkable to imagine that after so many miserable decades of oppression, the Brotherhood and its affiliate An-Nahda would be catapulted to power in Egypt and Tunisia, that they would be part of the elected government in Libya, and that they would change the dynamics of the Middle East so profoundly. The Brotherhood has shifted from semi-clandestine opponent to legitimate political power almost overnight. For all that the transition has been fraught with difficulties, the movement has risen to the challenge, displaying no small degree of aplomb. Relying upon its traditional pragmatism and opportunism, it has played the transition period with skill and maturity and has proved a master at manoeuvring itself into power. Indeed, for all the talk that it was not seeking to rule, once it felt it had the people behind it, the Brotherhood moved quickly and strategically to gain power, elbowing out anyone who got in its way. Thus, for all that the Brotherhood had traditionally shunned revolution, the upheaval of the Arab Spring turned out to be its moment par excellence.
Yet getting to power, or becoming a mainstream political actor, was one thing. The Brotherhood in its various guises is now faced with the even more difficult business of operating out in the open and in some cases of governing. Indeed, the post-revolutionary reality is throwing up a series of trials that will seriously test the Brotherhood’s mettle. How the Brotherhood and its counterparts will manage these challenges will be crucial to whether the movement is able to hold itself together and prove that it has the capacity to be part of the future.
One of the most important of these challenges is how the movement will reconcile its commitment to Sharia with its commitment to modern democracy. Whilst the Brotherhood has never aspired to an Islamic state ruled by theologians, it has always advocated a civil state that is run along strict Islamic principles and that is based upon Islamic Sharia. As Sayyid Qutb explains in his famous work, Milestones, ‘The way to establish God’s rule on earth is not that some religious men be given the authority to rule, as was the case with the rule of the Church, nor that men speak in the name of God, as is the case in a “theocracy” … To establish God’s rule means that His laws be enforced and that the final decision in all affairs be according to these laws.’1 Indeed, respected Kuwaiti scholar Sheikh Abdullah Nafisi has remarked, ‘Whoever thinks the Egyptian Ikhwan have any other goal than applying Sharia is mistaken.’2 Even Rashid al-Ghannouchi, who is considered to be among the most progressive of Islamists, still refers to Sharia as the basis of his concept of Islamic democracy because ‘no political theory can be considered Islamic if formulated outside the domain of Sharia. It would simply be illegitimate from an Islamic point of view.’3
As such, whilst it has long been content to participate in the electoral process and has jumped at the opportunity to contest elections following the Arab Spring, the Brotherhood has always demonstrated an ambivalent attitude towards modern multiparty democracy. Former Murshid Mustafa Mashour, for example, once commented, ‘For now we accept the principle of party plurality, but when we will have Islamic rule we will either accept or reject this principle.’4 Although Mashour was a renowned hardliner and was speaking in a previous era, his comments certainly raise questions about the Ikhwan’s true intentions in the longer term. There is certainly misgiving in some quarters that the Brotherhood’s willingness to work within the party system is little more than a stepping stone to power and that it will move to change the rules once it has the chance. While such suspicions are probably overplayed, not least because of the fact that the Brotherhood is not and can never be the only actor in the political arena in each of the countries where it has moved into the political mainstream, the movement and its affiliates have not always helped themselves in this respect. In November 2011, for example, Tunisian Prime Minister and senior An-Nahda member Hamdi Jibali caused uproar when, following his party’s election victory, he told a group of An-Nahda supporters, ‘My brothers, you are at a historic moment … in a new cycle of civilization … We are in the sixth caliphate, God willing.’5 More strikingly, in November 2012, President Morsi, provoked outrage when he issued a series of decrees awarding himself far-reaching powers and preventing the courts from challenging any laws or decrees passed since he assumed office. Morsi was later forced to rescind the measures after widespread popular protests against the move. However, his actions raised serious questions about his commitment to the democratic process.
Even those members of the Brotherhood labelled as reformist and who had pushed hardest for political participation have expressed their doubts about ‘Western’ democratic models. Former Deputy General Guide Mohamed Habib once asserted, for example, Europe represents a model of democracy that is ‘particular to European societies only’.6 Similarly while still a member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Office, Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh declared that while democracy is positive for ‘its own citizens in their respective countries. As for us and for our Arab and Islamic causes, it does not represent a reference; their model has no democracy or justice for us.’7 In any case, both Habib and Aboul Fotouh, as well as other more reformist-minded members of the movement, have moved out from the Brotherhood finding its inflexibility too stifling.
Yet one of the problems that the Brotherhood has is that it has never been able to articulate a precise definition of the kind of democracy that it sees as appropriate to Muslim societies. In the years prior to the revolution, the movement issued a series of reform initiatives aimed at presenting a more progressive image in which it sought to tackle this thorny issue. However, despite its best intentions, the pronouncements on democracy in these initiatives remained vague. The 2004 reform programme of the Egyptian Brotherhood states, ‘We, Muslim Brotherhood, stress our commitment to the regime as a democratic, constitutional, parliamentarian, presidential one, in the framework of Islamic principles.’8 Yet the movement fails to spell out how this framework of ‘Islamic principles’ will work. In the same document, the Brotherhood also declares its support for, ‘People representation through a freely elected parliament for a certain period following which elections are held again.’9 However, later in the text under the section on legal reform the initiative stresses the Ikhwan’s commitment to ‘Changing the laws and purifying them to be in conformity with the principles of Islamic Sharia.’10
This lack of clarity about how the Ikhwan envisages the relationship between Sharia and the democratic political process has done little to assist it in its bid to be seen as a truly progressive and democratic movement. Rather, one is left with the impression that the Brotherhood is dealing with the issue by trial and error, something that is perhaps unsurprising given that the movement has always been primarily reactive. Furthermore, the Brotherhood has hardly been a bastion of democracy itself. Whilst members of the movement regularly assert that they have their own kind of democracy through the use of shura (consultation), some Islamic scholars have complained that the Ikhwan’s talk of shura has become more propaganda than reality, and more mechanical than functional, given that the leaders do not allow any space for criticism or evaluation.11 Indeed, what has characterised the movement over the years is that it has often been led, or at least controlled behind the scenes, by the same few faces who have remained in influential positions for lengthy periods.12 Even the choosing of successive Murshids has seen the movement’s own internal rules go out of the window, something that has frustrated many Ikhwani, especially from the younger generations. Likewise, Sheikh al-Ghannouchi has led An-Nahda since its inception despite complaints from some party members during his last years in exile in the UK that it was time for him to step aside.13
The Muslim Brotherhood Page 25