Rachid Ghannouchi

Abstract

Abstract By way of an analytical and critical study of the life and thought of Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the proscribed Ennahda political party in Tunisia, this book seeks to address the obstacles that hinder democratization in the Arab region. Inasmuch as democracy is seen as a set of procedures that serve collectively to empower the people to freely elect governments and make them accountable and to make sure that basic human rights and civil liberties, the rule of law and equality before the law, and the rights of minorities are protected, then democracy is fully compatible with the Islamic value of shura. Islam may have a problem with the philosophical underpinning of liberal democracy because of the notion of secularism. Despite objections to democracy from certain Islamic circles, the formidable problems facing transition to democracy in the Arab Muslim region are neither religious nor cultural. The attempt to impose secularism first by the colonial authorities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and second by postcolonial governments led to undermining civil society and doing away with the minimum protection needed for individuals and groups to be politically involved. The modern Arab territorial state, which is the product of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, has by design been antidemocratic. The world order that brought about the creation of all these artificial territorial states, and that today exerts all it can to preserve the status quo has no interest in the success of democracy anywhere in the region.

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