Political Islam in Tunisia: The History of Ennahda.

• Author: Evirgen, Yusuf
• Position: Book review

By Anne Wolf

London: C. Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd., 2017, 256 Pages, $38.09, ISBN: 9781849048262

The Middle East is a region of far-reaching importance due to past and current events in global politics. Of the many different dynamics and factors that affect the situation of the Middle East, Islam is especially crucial. Many scholars have recently focused on Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and how they affect the Middle East and beyond. Other movements, arguably of equal importance, have received less academic attention. In Political Islam in Tunisia, Anne Wolf, a doctoral student at Oxford University, brings timely critical attention to the history of Tunisia's primary Islamist movement, al-Nahda.

Political Islam in Tunisia: The History of Ennahda is a valuable asset to anyone studying political Islam, North Africa and Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In this ambitious study, Anne Wolf shows the fluctuations of the al-Nahda movement, which has played a significant political and socio-cultural role in Tunisia and in the regional leadership of the Middle East.

One strength of this study is its use of multi-method data collection. Wolf conducted around 400 interviews and informal meetings with three different groups of people: (i) current and former members of al-Nahda and other religious groups, with whom about half of the interviews took place; (ii) civil society activists, bloggers, and journalists; and (iii) current and former politicians of more secular trends, including many adversaries of the Islamist movement. Wolf also conducted archival research in the Tunisian National Archives and Zaytouna University, and studied the British Foreign Office files available at the National Archives and the Confidential Print at the Library of the University of Cambridge. Secondary academic materials, Tunisian and international media sources, as well as Wikileaks documents from March 1973 to February 2010 were also used.

Political Islam in Tunisia offers some helpful explanatory tools as appendixes, such as the al-Nahda Electoral Programme of 2011; the Statute of the al-Nahda Movement, July 2012; the Final Declaration of the Eight Congress of al-Nahda, May 2007; the Final Declaration of the Seventh Congress of al-Nahda, April 3, 2001; an Account of an al-Nahda Campaign Event in the Electoral District of Tunis 1; and Selected Interviews. All of these appendixes provide deep information about how al-Nahda...