Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

*** Decision against Sharia in Tunisia in line with MB ‘gradualism’.  On 25 March, the Islamist Ennahda Movement in Tunisia, the largest party in the country’s governing coalition, said that it would not support the enshrining of Sharia as the principal source of legislation for Tunisia.  Instead, Ennahda has supported the maintaining of a 1959 law that declares “Tunisia is an independent state and Islam is its religion”.  The movement’s leader Rachid Ghannouchi explained the move by saying “the issue of Sharia has caused a kind of rift in Tunisian society”.

This move is in line with wider Muslim Brotherhood policy.  In Egypt, the deputy head of the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has said that the FJP “would not impose” Sharia.  Syria’s MB has made similar noises.  References to the gradual implementation of Sharia can be found throughout MB literature.  According to the MB’s philosophy, Islamization should come from community-based and social work.  In November 2011, a provincial leader of Egypt’s FJP summed up the policy when he said: “Sharia law cannot be implemented in one go.  It will be implemented over periods of time that could be as long as 15 years, until people can welcome it.”

*** MB in bid for Egyptian presidency.  The move by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to seek the presidency for Khairat al-Shater, despite having originally said it would not, seems to be against its usual cautious approach (see item above).  However, the MB’s hand seems to have been forced by two considerations.  The first was that other Islamist candidates had declared their intention to stand, and the Salafist Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, in particular, had been drawing big crowds.  Secondly, the MB has come to the realization that its big election victory means that it has to deliver results, and without the presidency this will be more difficult.

Mahmoud Ghozlan, a member of the MB’s executive bureau, explains: “The people did not just elect us to parliament to issue legislation and monitor the government but to improve their lives.  People ask us every day: ‘We elected you, what have you done for us?’.”  Another senior MB figure, Saad Emara, made the same point when he said: “If we get the presidency, and we have a majority in parliament and we can name the government, there will be some kind of harmony in implementing the project we want to achieve for Egypt.”  At the moment the army is preventing the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) from forming the government.

Whatever the reason for the move, it has naturally stirred the fears of secularists.  Presidential hopeful Amr Moussa has asked for an explanation of the recent statement by MB Supreme Guide Mohammad Badie in which he said that his position was higher than that of Egypt’s president.  Moussa said: “That means that if Shater is elected president, the supreme guide will be the country’s real leader.”