In his account of a ‘genuine intellectual revolution in modern Islamic thought’, Andrew March (2019, x) outlines how popular sovereignty entered Sunni Islamic political philosophy. Although some of the most important Islamist thinkers in the twentieth century, Abul Aʿla Maududi and Sayyid Qutb, are usually associated with rather strict concepts of divine sovereignty, March argues that they also paved the way for the notion of popular sovereignty to develop and culminate in ideas of Islamic democracy. One of today’s foremost intellectuals is also the president of the Tunisian Ennahda party, Rached al-Ghannouchi. Not least due to his dual role as a modern political thinker and politician, his ‘influence historically and in the present is undeniable’ (March 2019, 153) and reaches far beyond the Tunisian context. Ghannouchi’s intellectual work has been analysed from the perspective of the history of ideas and political philosophy (Tamimi 2001, March 2019), and it is remarkable that even when Ennahda was part of the Tunisian government, Ghannouchi still published academic works and essays, as he had done during his years in exile (see, for example, Ghannouchi 1993a, 1993b, 2013, 2016).