Human Trustees

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese became a Jesuit priest in 1964 after earning a PhD political science at UC Berkeley, but he has mostly served as a journalist and academic. I find his pieces in Religious News Service consistently informing and thought provoking—including this one from a couple of months ago, “Amos, a prophet for social justice, is a prophet for today.” I quote,

“Anyone who thinks the Scriptures are not political has never read the Prophet Amos hurling invectives at the rich and powerful of his time.

Amos was not a professional prophet, but an uneducated shepherd who preached social justice and denounced exploitation of the poor by the rich. He was especially harsh on the rulers, priests and upper classes. His words sound like a political activist ranting on MSNBC.”

Amos blasted the rich who used their power to grind the poor into the ground, while stealing from them to enrich themselves even more. “They trample the heads of the destitute into the dust of the earth, and force the lowly out of the way,” he declared. Judgment will come because they live in luxury while turning away from the suffering of the destitute and oppressed in the land.

Religion won’t save them. Only repentance and a commitment to practicing justice will:

“‘Take away from me your noisy songs,’ Amos had God saying. ‘The melodies of your harps, I will not listen to them.’

‘Rather let justice surge like waters, and righteousness like an unfailing stream,’ he said.”

Rached Ghannouchi’s post-exilic political trajectory

Tunisian cleric, writer and politician Rached Ghannouchi would agree with Amos. Religion properly understood—Islam in this case—cares about good governance, which is about distributing power justly so as to alleviate poverty and finding ways for all to thrive.

I mentioned him in my last post, while exploring some of the common theological resources in Judaism, Islam and Christianity for making this world a more peaceful and just one. I cited Ghannouchi, whose classic book, Public Freedoms in the Islamic State, I was privileged to translate. Since then, I ran across an article by one of his daughters, Soumaya Ghannoushi, an accomplished British journalist. This piece was published a couple of weeks ago in Middle East Eye with the title, “My father’s ideas will outlive this shameful era in Tunisia.” But first, a bit of background will help.

Ghannouchi, whose only crime was to have co-founded a religious party that did so well at the polls that it posed a threat to Tunisia’s autocratic ruler, spent most of the 1980s in prison. He was fortunate to escape his death sentence but was exiled for twenty years in the UK. From there he was invited to speak to Muslim audiences around the world advocating democratic governance based on human rights and the dignity of the human person as taught by the Qur’an and modeled by the Prophet Muhammad’s rule in Medina (622-632). In essence, Ghannouchi is an Islamic religious leader (he is referred to by many as “Shaykh Ghannouchi”) who has specialized in political theology. But he was more than an academic.

As the “Arab Spring” swept through Tunisia in December of 2010 and the daily mass protests literally ousting dictator Ben Ali the next month, Ghannouchi returned to his country to a hero’s welcome, and his party, Ennahda (“The Renaissance”), became the ruling party in the parliamentary elections that fall. At a time when neighboring Libya was falling into chaos and civil war, some of that violence spread to Tunisa and his party was blamed for two high-profile assassinations.

That is when Tunisia’s three largest trade unions and its League for Human Rights came together (the so-called "Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet”) to call the political elites to the drawing board in order to draft a new constitution that would enshrine the recent democratic gains and point the way forward in that time of crisis. Ghannouchi, the leader of the ruling party, led the way by leaving the government and joining the process of rewriting the constitution. When that new constitution emerged, Ennahda agreed to ratify it, despite its little mention of Islam and the absence of the word “shari’a” (a key word relative to Islamic law).

The following year (2015), the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to the “Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet.” Here was my commentary shortly after it was announced:

“That said, the Quartet’s work could not have succeeded had their advocacy with Ennahda, the ruling party, not borne fruit. Ennahda did what rarely any party has done anywhere else, by stepping down from power before their mandate had come to an end. True, the country had been shaken by the assassinations of two secular opposition politicians that year. Still, the fact that Ghannouchi’s Ennahda willingly gave up power to join the other political forces in the country in drawing up a new constitution and reconvene a new set of parliamentary elections in the next year is nothing short of phenomenal.

Ennahda, among all other political currents, was justified in taking some credit for this honor [the Nobel Peace prize]. Thanks to all the political factions, the so-called Arab Spring would continue to live on – with all its ups and downs – in the land where it was born.”

Then, in his opening speech at Ennahda’s Tenth Congress in 2016, Ghannouchi declared that Tunisia no longer needed “political Islam.” Democratic institutions, if well-crafted and guarded, will always ensure that the people will elect those who embody their values. The Tunisian nation is overwhelmingly Muslim and if the majority prefers a more secular interpretation of what that means politically, then Ennahda will cooperate with secular parties to forward the common good for all Tunisians. It thereby was relinquishing any promotion of its own interpretation of Islam in the public sphere and was announcing it would function just like any other political party vying for support for its public policies.

At that stage, Ghannouchi himself decided to run for election. He easily won a seat in the Tunisian parliament and in 2019 was elected by his peers as speaker of parliament. But then the specter of dictatorship reared its ugly head once again. As his daughter puts it in her article, “Tunisia’s misfortune is that into the space opened by that democratic experiment stepped a populist fanatic who understood democracy only as a ladder. [President Kais] Saied climbed it to reach power - then kicked it away.”

A political outsider, Kais Saied was elected president in 2019 but then suspended the Ennahda-led parliament in 2021 and ruled strictly by decree from then on. He imprisoned several opposition leaders, but as his rule was facing fiercer resistance in February 2023, Saied launched a harsher campaign of repression, arresting two dozen opposition leaders, activists, journalists and judges. Finally, he arrested 82-year-old Ghannouchi himself in April. And two years later, Ghannouchi still sits in a small cell behind an iron door, one of the oldest political prisoners in the world.

Ghannouchi’s current hunger strike

Soumaya, his daughter writes,

“Last week, my 84-year-old father, Rached Ghannouchi, embarked on a hunger strike.

His body is frail, his health fragile; yet from his narrow cell, he chose hunger - not as escape, but as solidarity. He did it for Jawhar Ben Mbarek, a left-leaning professor of constitutional law, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front and a central figure in the opposition to Tunisian President Kais Saied’s coup.

Ben Mbarek had already been on a wildcat hunger strike for a week, hovering between life and death, when my father joined him. Since then, the strike has spread across Tunisia’s prisons, gathering a growing number of political detainees who refuse to bow to the cruelty of the regime.

It is the last language left to those whom tyranny has silenced: the language of the body, the eloquence of refusal.”

This costly act of solidarity for the sake of his country is Ghannouchi’s clarion call for unity in opposition to the man who chose to monopolize political power in his own person. Will Ben Mbarek—or will he himself—survive this ordeal? They may not, but as his daughter notes, “Even now, the cracks are visible.” She adds, “The regime is hollow, exhausted, without a future. There is a growing conviction that change is inevitable; that the darkness is already thinning at its edges.” This “shameful interlude in Tunisia’s long story” will soon end, and no matter what happens in the weeks and months to come, “My father’s ideas will outlive it, as they have outlived every prison, every slander, every tyrant.”

Upon receiving his death sentence in 1987, Ghannouchi said, “As for my execution - if my blood is shed, I pray to God that it will be the last blood spilled in this country. And I pray that my blood may turn into a rose from which freedom blossoms.” This remains his prayer, 38 years later, once again in prison and now engaging in a hunger strike.

Good governance, from Amos to Ghannouchi

Political theology, simply put, is to think about what makes good governance using the resources of our sacred texts, whether we be Jews, Christians and Muslims. Amos, as we saw, castigated Israel’s rulers, religious leaders and the rich for trampling on the rights of the poor. In the book I just wrote (see this), political theology is one of three main themes. I will simply quote here from the only psalm attributed to Solomon, which is very much about political theology. Solomon is plainly expressing the views of his father, King David:

“Give your love of justice to the king, O God, and righteousness to the king’s son.

Help him judge your people in the right way; let the poor always be treated fairly . . .

He will rescue the poor when they cry to him; he will help the oppressed, who have no one to defend them.

He feels pity for the weak and the needy, and he will rescue them.

He will redeem them from oppression and violence, for their lives are precious to him” (Psalm 72: 1-2, 12-14, NLT).

Importantly, political theology is also applying the principles of just rulership to one’s specific historical context. Solomon, like his father, was a king with nearly absolute power. This psalm is actually a prayer, asking God to grant the king his own love for justice and compassion for the poor and oppressed. To what end? To ensure that all might prosper as much as possible—in the name of equity and equality. But without this commitment to ruling according to God’s commands, kingship tends toward despotism. And in fact, the Israelite monarchy did devolve into despotism politically, and, despite a few good kings along the way, Israel’s kings became more and more corrupt, rebelling against the law of Moses and thus leading the people into the idolatry of the nations around them. And so, God’s warning to the prophets came to pass: Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the people were taken into exile.

Ghannouchi’s political theology, by contrast, starts with God’s love of justice as taught in the Qur’an and modeled by Muhammad, the prophet and ruler of Medina, but then takes stock of the world as it is today. The principles of democratic rule, along with the development of international law based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are the result of the world’s nations coming together after two cataclysmic world wars and declaring that peace is only possible on the basis of strong institutions. Only a stable democratic polity can guarantee freedom and justice for one and all, and thereby ensure a peaceful society. This is why Ghannouchi fought despotism all his life in his beloved Tunisia, convinced that this was the teaching of Islam.

I’ve been to several “No Kings!” rallies this year in Washington, DC, Wilmington, Delaware, and locally as well. The dramatic rise in authoritarian rule and intentional erosion of democratic institutions in the United States is certainly concerning. But we still have the freedom to publicly air our views and protest! That is not an option in Tunisia and many other nations. Let us take inspiration from Shaykh Ghannouchi’s lifelong integrity and courage, and ask God to preserve his life, cause this despotic regime to fall, thus freeing all political prisoners and embarking Tunisia once again on the path of freedom and democracy.

And may his life also inspire us to keep freedom and justice for all burning bright in our own nation!