Do Islamists Embrace Political Secularism? Evidence from Tunisia

It has been argued that the “politics of secularism” were an important power mechanism of the authoritarian state pre-Arabellion in many Arab countries, notably in Egypt and Tunisia. It contributed to the regimes’ stability through the repression of certain and co-optation of other “religious” groups and actors as well as through the legitimation of the regime by creating the “Islamist” Other as a terrorist threat. In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, however, these “Islamist” actors themselves came to power, at least for a short while. As it has been argued for the case of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, having been subjected to the “politics of secularism” for decades, surprisingly adopted the discourse and practice of political secularism, that it is the state that defines and manages as well as determines the “proper” place of religion in society. In my Paper, I would like to trace the development of Tunisian en-Nahda since the revolution in 2011 under the perspective of the “politics of secularism”. The guiding question of my paper will be whether en-Nahda also embraced “political secularism”, how it discursively reproduced or reframed the secular/religious divide and what consequences this has for Tunisian (democratic) politics. The Paper proceeds in four steps. (1) In a first step, I will introduce the concept of the “politics of secularism” and connect it to the literature on “Islamism” and “political Islam”. (2) In the second section of my Paper, I will briefly reconstruct the “politics of secularism” in Tunisia pre-Arab uprising. (3) The third part will empirically look at the constitution-making process in Tunisia and en-Nahda’s discourse that accompanied this process. (4) In the final part, I will draw some conceptual conclusions from the results of my analysis, in particular with regard to the notions of “Islamism” and “politics of secularism”.