Since the fall of the Tunisian authoritarian regime in January 2011 many authors have been called upon to reflect on the greatest challenge for the Islamist party Ennahda after its victory in the first elections: to clear up the wide-spread suspicion about its commitment to democracy. Indeed, several academic works analyzed the notions of post-Islamism (Roy Reference Roy1992; Bayat Reference Bayat1996) and moderation of Islamist parties (Schwedler Reference Schwedler2007) applied to the specific case of the Tunisian Islamist movement, which after 2011 took the stage after four decades of repression. Anne Wolf's book Political Islam In Tunisia: the History of Ennahda represents a relevant contribution to Anglo-Saxon research on the evolution of Tunisian Political Islam, by retracing the process of transformation from Islamist to conservative party.Footnote ¹

From being a movement with a tawihd-based (principle of unity) vision of politics and society determined to impose religious law over democratic electoral decisions in the 1970s, Ennahda moved towards the acceptance of the procedural mechanisms of democracy in the context of a pluralistic vision of society by the late 1980s (Cavatorta and Merone Reference Cavatorta and Merone2013; Netterstrøm Reference Netterstrøm2015). The search for a common ground in the name of national cohesion continued to be the key-concept of Ennahda's public discourse from early 2011, when a process of consensual national decision-making laid down the rules for political transition. At the IX Congress in June 2012 Ennahda's leadership prompted an embryonic debate on the division in the party's activities between preaching (da'wa) and politics (McCarthy Reference McCarthy2015). Following this discussion, Ennahda provided evidence of willingness to undertake a process of consensual national decision-making laying down the rules for political transition with secular forces. Indeed, the party accepted the notion of a civil state, the inclusion of freedom of conscience and that references to sharia would not appear in the Constitution approved in January 2014.

The decision by Ennahda to abandon the traditional pan-Islamic agenda culminated in the X Congress of the party, held in May 2016. On this occasion Ennahda's leadership announced the strategy of specialization (taḫaṣus), aimed at making the political party (hizb) a distinct entity from the broader movement (haraka) so as to make politics an autonomous sphere of power vis-à-vis religion. Consequently, more conservative members participate in civil society independently from party politics (Sigillò Reference Sigillò2018). The acknowledgment of the social functions of religion as a reference and guidance just for social life, seems to reflect a further pragmatic decision of the movement to create a professional political party. As stated by the party leader Rached Ghannouchi ‘Ennahda has moved beyond its origins as an Islamist party and has fully embraced a new identity as a party of Muslim democrats. The organization, which I co-founded in the 1980s, is no longer both a political party and a social movement. It has ended all of its cultural and religious activities and now focuses only on politics’ (Ghannouchi Reference Ghannouchi2016).

While previous academic works mostly focused on the transformation of Ennahda after 2011, Wolf's book provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of Ennahda, by disentangling the complex process of transformation from movement to party, that began in the 1960s as a diffuse socio-cultural trend, into one of the country's most influential political actors. Moreover, while in many academic contributions the analysis of transformation of the Islamist movement remains focused on its doctrinal evolution and internal dynamics, Wolf's book emphasizes the ways in which this transformation has been related to the (conflictual) relationships with secular forces and in particular with the authoritarian regime.Footnote ²

Through the use of hundreds of personal interviews and archival resources Wolf clearly introduces the historical roots of the Islamic movement by showing how religious forces flourished as a reaction to Bourghiba's modernizing efforts to curb the sway of traditional expressions of Islam. Thus she highlights the shift from a loose association Jama'a al-Islamyya (the Islamic group) to the politicized Movement of Islamic Tendency (Harakat al-Ittijāh al- Islāmī (Chapters 1 and 2). Notably, Wolf individuates three factors leading pious Muslims to embrace political Islam: the increasing amount of Egyptian Brotherhood literature reaching Tunisia, starting from the late 1960s (40), the impact of the Iranian Revolution which ‘captured the imagination and inspirations of many Tunisians’ (49), and a strong student religious activism particularly strong within the Faculty of Science and Institute of Technology in Tunis (42).

The analysis is enriched by a multidisciplinary and multi-level approach, where the fields of history, Islamic studies, political science and sociology are the theoretical backdrops of a meso and micro-level analysis taking into account the heterogeneous nature of the Movement. Indeed, in Chapter 3 Wolf emphasizes the gap between Ennahda's leadership – claiming its activism as civil – and a section of its followers who were prepared to use force to overthrow the regime. In Chapter 5 Wolf outlines the diverse trajectories of prisoners and their families, including the ‘plight’ of Ennahda women (83) as well as the exiled community, thus offering a broad perspective of the complexity of the Tunisian Islamist public. In her final chapter the author well describes the key challenge for the party leadership after 2011: to balance its new political pragmatism with the demands of its more conservative grassroots. Indeed, many activists from Ennahda's core continue to call for an increased role for Islam in politics, irrespective of the formal separation between preaching and political activities. Recent mobilizations against the report issued by the Individual Freedoms and Equality Committee (COLIBE) are an emblematic example: in August 2018, a large group of Islamists took to the streets to protest against a proposal for a series of constitutional amendments in the areas of gender equality. The protesters, with a banner reading Quran text before any other text, accused the committee, created by presidential initiative in August 2017, of acting contrary to the teachings of Islam (Sigillò Reference Sigillò2019).

The complex relationship between Ennahda and its more conservative grassroots is recalled in the (short) conclusions, where the author – talking about the potential attraction of Ennahda's frustrated constituency for new Salafi movements – highlights the ‘mounting diversity of the country's evolving religious landscape, especially compared to the 1970s and 1980s, when Ennahda constituted the main outlet for religious activism’ (165). This more plural and diverse environment pushed Ennahda to reinvent itself. The strategy adopted by Ennahda at its X Congress is an attempt by the party to keep its functional relationship on a more dogmatic foundation, which starts to be frustrated and disappointed by the party policy of compromise with secular forces. Indeed, as rightly observed by the author, the decision by Ennahda to divide political activities from religious activities is not a true separation (fasl) but a specialization (takhaṣuṣ) between party leadership and more da'wa oriented activists engaged in the associative field (Sigillò Reference Sigillò2018; Reference Sigillò2019).

As rightly reported by Wolf, some Ennahda's members have compared their ideological evolution with former communist parties in Eastern Europe, which after the dissolution of the Soviet Union joined the political scene through other channels, as associations and unions (161). Indeed, under the specialization process Islamist activists split into different spheres of engagement, and the associative system became an alternative milieu for Islamic activism. However, the author seems to underestimate the study of the new Islamist associative sector. The legitimization of the social sphere of the Islamic movement is actually an important element of the strategy adopted by Ennahda after the Revolution for at least two reasons. First, the party, which did not have access to political power until 2011, positioned itself in a secretive condition within the social fabric, and after 2011 tried to extend its hegemony over civil society in order to broaden its constituency. Secondly, the associative field seems to became complementary to the party within the framework of specialization (Sigillò Reference Sigillò2019). In other words, the Islamic associative sector eventually emerged as a surrogate playground for the diffusion of Islamic political activism which could eventually challenge Ennahda's political pragmatism (Merone, Sigillò and De Facci Reference Merone, Sigillò, De Facci, Akbarzadeh and Conduit2018).