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In Brief

In 2016, Islamist political party Ennahda decided to abandon preaching and focus on politics, precipitating an identity crisis within the party. It faced new challenges, including rethinking the role of Islam, addressing its own neutralization as a driver of socioeconomic change, and managing its core supporters while appealing to a broader electorate. Ennahda’s shift to politics has forced it to rethink its ideological framework and rebuild its legitimacy based on arguments other than religion.

Key Points

• Ennahda’s landmark decision to become a purely political party—rather than a movement also engaged in religious proselytizing—marked a radical change of strategy and redefined its identity.
• The end of Ennahda’s Islamist project was a consequence of internal and external pressures, born out of pragmatism and transactional politics. Ennahda had to make concessions, notably during the 2013–2014 National Dialogue, to guarantee and consolidate its participation in Tunisia’s transition to democracy.
• Since its decision in 2016, Ennahda has been struggling to find the appropriate place for Islam in its political project.
• Despite good electoral results since 2011, Ennahda’s attempts to further develop a support base on grounds other than religion will likely be contingent on in its ability to position itself as an effective governing force and propose viable policy solutions to Tunisia’s social and economic challenges.

Key Findings

• Moving away from an Islamist ideology means rethinking the party’s relationship with Tunisia’s religious sphere, its current constituency, and the wider conservative electorate. Managing the party’s core constituency will be a particular challenge, given that the 2014 constitution did not end politically driven battles over identity.
• Prioritizing consensus seeking has weakened the party’s image as a driver of socioeconomic change. By governing in a coalition with old regime members and acquiescing to neoliberal economic policies, Ennahda has lost its ability to activate socioeconomic reform and anticorruption arguments to rebuild its legitimacy and support base.
• Although Ennahda initiated a strategy in 2018 to diversify its representatives and membership, this revealed divisions between older members and new careerists. Ennahda’s success moving forward is dependent on the leadership’s capacity to manage this divide and rebuild a new identity that satisfies the old guard and appeals to new members and voters.

Introduction

When Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, made the landmark decision in 2016 to turn away from its religious roots and focus exclusively on politics, it marked a sea change in the movement’s strategy.¹ The determination to cease proselytizing activities and “specialize” in politics was officially affirmed during the party’s Tenth General Congress in May 2016. Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s president and longtime leader while the movement was underground, explained that this transformation was not just a means of exiting political Islam to enter “Muslim democracy,”² but also the natural outcome of the party’s full participation in a democratic society. “We would like to promote a new Ennahda, to renew our movement and to put it into the political sphere, outside any involvement with religion. Before the revolution we were hiding in mosques, trade unions, [and] charities, because real political activity was forbidden. But now we can be political actors openly,” he said.³

Specialization (takhassus) denotes the complete separation of political action from preaching (dawa). Focusing exclusively on electoral politics means Ennahda has to set aside its historical mission as a revivalist movement inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, which sought the Islamization of society through preaching and cultural activities.⁴ From these Islamist origins, Ennahda today aims to project itself as a conservative political force capable of managing public affairs and achieving compromise and consensus with Tunisia’s secularist parties. With this change has come a deemphasis on its religious foundation, a shift away from the ideology of political Islam, and the dedication of human and financial resources to electoral politics. In other words, specialization is an attempt to redefine the relationship between religion and politics. It is meant to release political activity from religious considerations on the one hand and free religious stances and activities from political manipulation on the other.

Ennahda’s leadership insisted that Tunisia’s transition to democracy, along with the complex domestic and regional political environments, required the party to adapt. However, the 2016 decision to redirect exclusively toward electoral politics, though approved by most delegates to the party congress, remains problematic. Diluting the emphasis on Islam in Ennahda’s ideology has led to an identity crisis, which will continue to create considerable challenges for the party as it reevaluates Islam as a frame of reference, grapples with the party’s neutralization as a driver of social change, and manages its core supporters at a time when it must also appeal to a broader electorate.

While the specialization decision implied a total restructuring—in which all Ennahda activities related to proselytizing would be detached from the party and either dissolved or assigned to independent civil society and religious organizations—that complete separation has yet to occur. This reveals the ambivalence that prevails more than three years after Ennahda’s landmark decision about its identity. Exiting political Islam, in all its aspects, is hardly a foregone conclusion.

After decades spent as an underground group in opposition to the authoritarian regimes of Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba and his successor, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Ennahda has had to make consequential choices since its legalization in 2011. It has changed from an illegal opposition movement to a legitimate party that wields power and competes for votes in a pluralistic setting. With its decision to specialize in politics, Ennahda renounced political Islam as its overall guiding framework, but the party is still figuring out how to proceed from there and what place to assign Islam in its new “Muslim democracy” project. How Ennahda chooses to address this identity crisis will not only have an impact on the future of its fragile national and international legitimacy. It will also entail consequences for the entire Tunisian democratic experiment, which Ennahda has taken a lead role in shaping since 2011.

Ennahda’s Journey From Preaching to Politics

Ennahda’s decision to specialize was the end result of internal debates over the relationship between politics and religion that have shaped the movement since the 1970s. The hostile political environment in which Ennahda emerged also influenced this gradual transformation. Under authoritarian and repressive regimes in Tunisia, the movement long prioritized its survival and was unwilling to risk fragmentation by choosing between proselytism and political action. However, after the 2011 revolution, the movement became a legal political actor and participated in government with skeptical secular partners, accelerating the urgency to settle the issue.⁵

The movement that would become Ennahda first emerged among conservative swaths of the population in the 1960s, in reaction to fears of Westernization in postindependence Tunisia. After Tunisia gained independence from France in 1956, its first president, Habib Bourguiba, initiated a modernization process that dismantled traditional religious institutions and marginalized the religious establishment. This modernization program sought not only the confiscation of assets used to fund mosques, Quranic schools, and charities, but also reform of the religious curriculum of Al-Zaytouna Mosque, the premier educational and Islamic institution in Tunisia.⁶ Polygamy was prohibited and a personal-status code that promoted women’s rights was adopted by presidential decree in 1957.⁷

In the late 1960s, a group of young men motivated to defend Tunisia’s Islamic identity founded the Islamic Group (al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya). Led by Rached Ghannouchi, Abdelfatah Mourou, and Hmida Ennaifer, and inspired in part by the Tablighi School—a nonpolitical missionary movement focused on religious education—the Islamic Group was a dawa movement that promoted the teaching and practice of a pure form of Islam. It sought to revive Islam in the public sphere through preaching in mosques and an emphasis on individual piety, morality, and righteousness.⁸ It also rejected both Bourguiba’s modernization project and the country’s traditional religious elites, who were perceived as old-fashioned or co-opted by the dictatorship. Initially operating underground, Islamic Group activists found an unexpected ally to help them expand their outreach in the Islamic wing of the ruling party, the Socialist Destourian Party (PSD).⁹ The Islamic wing of the PSD aimed to counter the far left and advocated for the Islamization and Arabization of Tunisian society by supporting the activism of the young preachers through the Association for the Safeguard of the Quran, an official and legal channel created in 1967.

The Islamic Group’s expansion in the late 1960s and 1970s was not just the result of religious or spiritual demand. Socioeconomic factors also played a crucial role in widening its appeal. The Islamist movement was particularly attractive to members of the “new social periphery” who emerged after independence in rural and semirural areas.¹⁰ This included graduates of religious and classical education institutions who saw their social advancement thwarted by the country’s modernization reforms under Bourguiba, and young people from modest backgrounds who had access to free public education but still could not benefit through social promotion. Both groups were marginalized by the new, Westernized bourgeoisie.¹¹ In addition, Islamic Group activists, many from Tunisia’s marginalized south and interior regions, opposed the sociocultural values championed by secular elites.¹² For these marginalized segments of society, Islam became the foundation for a socioreligious movement and provided a political narrative to mobilize the masses.

In the late 1970s, following the expansion of dawa activities to universities through the opening of faculty mosques, Islamic Group activists increasingly began to advocate for the politicization of the movement. This development was largely due to activists coming into contact with both leftist and PSD students, and their exposure to political ideologies as campuses became grounds for intellectual rivalries.¹³ The 1979 Iranian Revolution also played a crucial role in inspiring the Islamic Group’s decision to engage in political activism.¹⁴ With the university branch of the Islamic Group advocating to politicize the movement in opposition to Bourguiba’s secularization and authoritarian policies, the leadership moved to adapt to the students’ activism and prevent a split. The Islamic Group adopted the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which promotes Islam as a political, economic, and social system that transcends the framework of religion and faith to cover all aspects of people’s lives.

In 1979, the Islamic Group changed its name to the Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique (MTI), or Harakat al-Ittijah al-Islami. This marked the birth of the first Tunisian political Islamist movement that encouraged both preaching and political activism. This period also saw the emergence—and, later, the departure—of a group of intellectuals within the MTI known as the Islamist progressives. This breakaway faction articulated a progressive interpretation of Islamic doctrine and advocated for an explicitly Tunisian identity narrative distinct from Muslim Brotherhood doctrine.¹⁵

The 1980s witnessed two significant developments within the MTI that would play a crucial role in influencing the political trajectory of the Ennahda movement after the 2011 Tunisian revolution. First, the Islamists demonstrated a willingness to engage in pluralist politics and coordinate with other opposition groups. Second, debate began within the movement on the relationship between sociocultural and political activism.

During the last decade of Bourguiba’s rule, MTI activists increasingly aligned the movement’s socioeconomic and political positions with those of other opposition groups opposed to the regime. This was spurred mainly by the government’s confrontations with Tunisia’s labor movement, which resulted in hundreds of deaths during the general strikes of 1978 and 1984. In 1981, MTI publicly declared its acceptance of multiparty politics and requested official recognition. This was rejected by the Bourguiba regime, which cracked down on the MTI and forced the movement underground. Despite the MTI’s lack of legal status, Islamist activists still managed to coordinate with secular opposition parties, and many joined civil society organizations, such as the Tunisian League for Human Rights, and labor movements. By 1989, Islamists made up nearly 20 percent of the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT).¹⁶ This period reflected the Islamists’ growing acceptance of pluralist politics and the need for coexistence with non-Islamist actors.

In the 1980s, foreshadowing the future debate over specialization, the MTI began to examine the relationship between sociocultural activism and political activism within the movement. Sociocultural activism aimed to champion Islamic values and transform Tunisian society through preaching, education, and cultural activities. Political activism aimed at building a strong opposition movement to Bourguiba’s decadent regime. This reflected a sort of Islamization from below, whereas political activism implied Islamization from above. Because of the constrained political environment, this debate remained unresolved. However, the ambivalence about combining features of both the sociocultural movement (haraka) and the political party (hizb) continued to shape the trajectory of Tunisian Islamism.¹⁷

When Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali became president in 1987, MTI leaders hoped for better relations with the new regime. In 1988, MTI decided to take its political project a step further and changed its name to the Ennahda movement (Harakat Ennahda, or the Renaissance Movement), conforming to the Political Parties Law of 1988, which prohibited the creation of parties on religious or ethnic grounds. Despite not being granted official recognition, the movement participated in the 1989 parliamentary elections through independent lists. The electoral success of the Islamist lists, estimated to be 15 percent of the national vote and reaching 30 percent in some urban areas, threatened Ben Ali’s regime, which began to see the Islamist movement as its primary opponent. In response, the government falsified the results and announced a victory for the new ruling party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD).¹⁸

This brief political opening precipitated a crackdown on Ennahda networks. In 1990, thousands of the movement’s activists were imprisoned, tortured, or subjected to other human rights violations. In response, many fled the country and went into exile, mostly in Europe. In the absence of any space for preaching under Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime, investing in politics became almost the only option left for the leaders in exile to ensure the movement’s survival. Ennahda also sought to counter the regime’s attempts to isolate it from the rest of the opposition during this period by negotiating a rapprochement with secular opposition parties, by claiming allegiance to human rights and democratic politics.¹⁹

With the fall of the Ben Ali dictatorship in January 2011, Ennahda leaders’ first priority was reactivating grassroots networks and rebuilding the movement’s organizational structures in preparation for another foray into politics. Thirty years after its first request for legal recognition, Ennahda received an official license in March 2011 under the name “The Party of the Ennahda Movement.”²⁰ More than 2,000 party offices were opened across the country in the lead up to the October 2011 elections to the Constituent Assembly.²¹ Activists returning from exile—most notably Ghannouchi—met with traumatized grassroots members who had remained in Tunisia and suffered fierce repression. Some Ennahda officials characterized these encounters as reconnecting the exiled or imprisoned “head” with the persecuted and besieged “body.”²² The reconstruction or rebuilding of the movement was not without its challenges, however, especially in the highly political context of Tunisia’s transition to democracy.

Ennahda managed to win first place in the 2011 elections with 37 percent of the vote. It allied with two secularist parties, Ettakatol and the Congress for the Republic (CPR), to lead what became known as the Troika government between 2011 and 2013. Ennahda’s internal debate over politics versus preaching was also reopened in 2011. Specialization in partisan politics had been first broached as a topic of discussion in the 2000s, but the heavy hand of the Ben Ali dictatorship and divisions within the movement between those in exile and those in Tunisia prohibited examining such a critical issue.

During Ennahda’s Ninth General Congress in 2012—the first one organized in Tunisia since 1990—strategic and ideological differences of opinion publicly emerged among members. The movement split into two camps: hard-liners, who wanted sharia, or Islamic law, to be the basis of lawmaking in Tunisia’s yet-to-be-written constitution; and pragmatists, who argued for a more flexible approach.²³ However, amid the divide, the grassroots constituency’s high expectations for meeting the 2011 uprising’s objectives—namely to fight corruption and purge the political scene—preoccupied both the hard-liners and the pragmatists. With the leadership concerned about ending the congress with a show of unity, no major decisions were made on either specialization or the party’s position on the role of sharia in the constitution.²⁴

Participation in electoral politics not only influenced the movement’s ideology but also had an impact on the party’s political positioning. When Ennahda became a governing party in Tunisia in 2011, it was forced to manage national affairs as part of a ruling coalition. This meant that the party had to negotiate contentious issues on the nature of the country’s emerging democracy with its secular coalition partners and endorse compromise policy choices.

Political polarization inside Ennahda, and in Tunisia as a whole, increased during 2013, precipitating a crisis for the country’s emerging democratic experiment. In July, Tunisia’s secular opposition took to the streets and threatened to withdraw from the National Constituent Assembly and interrupt the writing of the constitution. The protests came in reaction to the political assassination of two leftist leaders, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, in February and July 2013, respectively, and a growing number of attacks against security forces and state institutions by hard-line Salafists. Meanwhile, on July 3, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–led government was toppled in a coup d’état that ended the country’s democratic moment.²⁵ In response, Ennahda recognized that it had to yield some ideological ground to preserve Tunisia’s democracy and protect itself against a fate similar to its fellow Islamists in Egypt. The party began to forge compromises with secularists later that year during an unprecedented Tunisian national dialogue.

The National Dialogue: A Moment of Pragmatism and Transactional Politics

For Ennahda leaders, the decision to distance the movement from its ideological principles was guided by pragmatism and transactional political calculations. Both secularists and Islamists had to make concessions to guarantee and consolidate their participation in Tunisian democracy. The consensus around the 2014 constitution came as the result of a national dialogue between Islamists and secularists, including representatives of the former regime. Four civil society organizations known collectively as the Quartet (the UGTT; the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade, and Handcrafts [UTICA]; the Tunisian Order of Lawyers; and the Tunisian Human Rights League) were instrumental in bringing the parties together and mediating among them.

The national dialogue contained three interdependent tracks, and the outcome of each was fundamental to the success of the entire process of national reconciliation and crisis management. The constitutional track sought to work out compromises on issues such as blasphemy, the role of sharia as a source of legislation, equality between men and women, and freedom of belief and conscience. Concessions from Islamists on these issues were fundamental to finalizing the constitution in January 2014 and moving on to the government track. The government track negotiated the composition of a new cabinet charged with governing the country until parliamentary and presidential elections could be held in October and November 2014, respectively. This track concluded with the agreed-upon resignation of the Ennahda-led government of Ali Laarayedh, which was replaced by an independent technocratic government. The electoral track was responsible for developing mechanisms for electing members to the National Independent Electoral Commission, which was to organize the upcoming elections.

The new Tunisian constitution adopted in January 2014 settled disputes between secularists and Islamists as to the nature of the state. The constitution recognized Islam as a key identity marker for the Tunisian people. However, Ennahda abandoned its proposal to use sharia as a source of legislation in response to massive protests organized by secular forces and representatives of civil society. Calls for the criminalization of religious offenses such as blasphemy were also watered down, and the state’s obligation to “protect the sacred” only warranted a cursory mention.²⁶ Making these concessions was not easy—Ennahda’s leadership had to organize workshops and meetings with the party’s more militant members to convince them that their doctrinal demands were untenable in the existing national and regional context.

Political pressure, both domestic and international, was a key driver in strengthening the influence of Ennahda’s more pragmatic leaders who advocated for compromise. For instance, while hard-liners in Ennahda had argued to exclude former regime representatives from politics, the leadership core around Ghannouchi called for a practical form of national reconciliation, most notably with Nidaa Tounes, a newly created party built from a coalition of Bourguibists, secularists, and leftists.²⁷ The rapidly deteriorating regional environment following the Egyptian coup of July 2013 only reinforced the pragmatists’ view that it was necessary to make peace with former regime officials and prevent Tunisia’s destabilization.²⁸

The argument for accommodation eventually won out, and Ennahda made a major political concession by voting against the exclusion of Ben Ali’s officials and representatives.²⁹ This compromise and others helped define the national dialogue as a fundamental moment of pragmatic politics. Ennahda’s leadership believes its concessions were and still are indispensable to preserving Tunisia’s democratic experiment. In the end, the constitution guaranteed “a neutral state that is neither Islamist nor secular, but instead the champion of freedom of thought, belief, and religion.”³⁰

For the party’s leadership, the affirmation of religious freedom and Muslim identity in Tunisia accomplished Ennahda’s historical mission of rebuilding society according to principles inspired by Islam. With the Islamization of society no longer pertinent, Ennahda used its Tenth General Congress in 2016 to adapt its identity to the realities of the new constitution. During the congress, members finally settled the long-running internal debate over preaching versus politics with the decision to specialize exclusively in the political area. In justifying the momentous decision, Ennahda’s leadership framed the move to forsake proselytism as a natural consequence of its commitment to the new constitution’s principles and Tunisian democracy.³¹

The question of whether Ennahda’s ideological shift was purely tactical or also a strategic move is a legitimate one. Ennahda demonstrated pragmatism and an ability to maneuver opportunistically, as it was forced to adapt to constraints and public pressure from secularist counterparts and the international community during 2013. However, the party’s leadership adjusted to the new rules of a game that it helped establish. And by doing so, it transformed an external constraint into a driver of change for the party’s ideology and identity. Thus, specialization is a strategic decision because of its implications for Ennahda’s ideology moving forward, for the recruitment of future members, and for the party’s goal of domestic and international recognition.

The choice of specialization—as opposed to simply separating into political and preaching branches, as Islamist movements in Morocco and Jordan have done—reflects Ennahda’s commitment to a political path at the expense of religious activism.³² Indeed, Islamist movements that combine proselytism and political activities in one organizational structure are often tempted to take ambiguous stances for fear of undermining their credibility with either their religious followers or their political constituents.³³ Conscious of the danger of pursuing two conflicting agendas simultaneously, Ennahda has engaged in a transformational process that aims to evolve in a more liberal direction and end the ambiguity over whether its decisions are motivated by politics or religion.

By strategically adopting specialization, Ennahda also targeted another reluctant audience: Tunisia’s international partners. Many debates about political Islam among Western policy circles focus on whether Islamist movements are committed to democracy.³⁴ In a statement acknowledging international partners’ apparent preference for secular groups, an Ennahda party official said, “Ennahda is not a good geopolitical actor. Tunisia is an extrovert country while Ennahda is an introverted political actor.”³⁵ There is also little doubt that the turbulent regional environment and some Gulf states’ extreme aversion to political Islam also contributed to Ennahda’s decision to become a “normal” political actor. However, while the decision to abandon political Islam and focus on electoral politics helped Ennahda cope with various domestic and international pressures, specialization also forced the party to reckon with a new set of questions on its future nature and direction.

Specialization’s Risky Outcomes

Specialization has created several challenges for Ennahda. The first is the need to reevaluate Islam as a basis for the party’s political legitimacy and as a primary frame of reference. The second is that the decision neutralized the party as a driver of social change. The third is the need to develop a strategy for retaining Ennahda’s core supporters while also appealing to a wider electorate. These challenges imply not only an ideological recasting but also a rethinking of the party’s relations with the religious sphere and the wider conservative electorate. Such a reassessment is crucial, as Ennahda has been losing a segment of its more devout followers (mainly Islamists) while also struggling to attract non-Islamist conservative voters. The discrepancy between Ennahda’s current voter base and its desired electorate suggests that the party must move out of the strictly religious sphere and expand into other domains.

The strategy of specialization was a vital and logical step toward fulfilling Ennahda’s decades-long quest for recognition and acceptance. As a party leader said, “Since the creation of the Islamist movement in 1981, we have been waiting for legal recognition. We only achieved legalization of the movement after the revolution of 2011. For thirty years, we were second-class citizens, and this created barriers between society and us.”³⁶ However, Ennahda’s origins in political Islam have made the party an outlier in Tunisian society, and many people find it difficult to accept the party as a so-called normal political actor.³⁷

Even as Ennahda has officially moved from being in the opposition to governing and renounced preaching for politics, its strategic transformation has been cautious. The leadership decided not to change the name of the party during the 2016 General Congress, keeping the official moniker Party of the Ennahda Movement (or, more simply, the Ennahda movement). Interestingly, the statement announcing the decision to specialize, titled “Management of the Project: Specialization As a Strategic Choice,” didn’t define exactly what Ennahda’s new project was.³⁸ Rather, Ennahda’s current focus on electoral competition and the exercise of power imply the professionalization of the party as a goal in itself. This potentially risks deactivating some of its core support base, ending the sociocultural m