MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Aidan Clay – “TUNIS, TUNISIA (ANS) — Widely seen as the most secular country that recently deposed long-standing leaders, many believed that Tunisia had the greatest opportunity to elect a moderate government concerned with democratic principles and human rights. However, the hopes of secularists, Christians, and other minorities were crippled in October when the Islamist Ennahda party won 41 percent of the votes for a national constitutional assembly, a one-year body charged with writing a constitution.

Along with other Islamist movements, Ennahda – at the time called the Movement of the Islamic Tendency – had been outlawed under former President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali. Robin Wright, an American foreign affairs analyst and author of Sacred Rage, described the Islamic Tendency as ‘the single most threatening opposition force [to Ben Ali’s regime] in Tunis.’

Ennahda’s founder and chairman is Rashid Ghannouchi. He considers himself a pupil of Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, defended the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990. In a speech given in Khartoum just before the Gulf War erupted, Ghannouchi said, ‘We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world,’ The Brussels Journal reported.” Read more.

Tunisia, Egypt Islamists Signal Bigger Religion Role – “After months of reassuring secularist critics, Islamist politicians in Tunisia and Egypt have begun to lay down markers about how Muslim their states should be — and first signs show they want more religion than previously admitted. Islamist parties swept the first free elections in both countries in recent months after campaigns that stressed their readiness to work with the secularists they struggled with in the Arab Spring revolts against decades-long dictatorships.” Read more.

Flashback: Tunisia: Concerns Grow Over ‘Morality Police’ as Islamists Roam Streets Terrifying Women and Youth – “Bearded men roam the streets and batter with their batons those whom they perceive different from their sect, terrifying women and youths. Tunisian woman Monia Jawadi emphatically described what the country would look if it were to institutionalise its first morality police. Reports that Tunisia may establish a committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice have sent waves of anxiety among citizens, especially as the country struggles to preserve its social gains.” Read more.

Flashback: ‘A New Cycle of Civilization’: Tunisia’s Islamists Hail Arrival of the ‘Sixth Caliphate’ – “The Islamist politician likely to become Tunisia’s first democratically elected prime minister has alarmed liberals and secularists by claiming the arrival of the ‘sixth caliphate’, a controversial term for a Muslim empire. Hamadi Jebeli, secretary-general of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party which romped to victory in last month’s elections, told a rally in the city of Sousse: ‘My brothers, you are at a historic moment in a new cycle of civilisation, God willing. We are in sixth caliphate…” Read more.