Rached Ghannouchi

Rached Ghanouchi

Rached Kheriji, known as Rached Ghannouchi, was born in June 1941 in El Hamma, Gabes, in southern Tunisia. Ghannouchi is a writer, politician, co-founder of the Ennahda Movement and one of the most prominent Islamist figures in Tunisia.

After graduating from Zaytuna University in 1962, Ghannouchi pursued higher education abroad. He first attended Cairo University, in Egypt, to study agriculture. However, as Tunisians got expelled from Egypt due to a row between former presidents Bourguiba and Abdel Nasser, Ghannouchi left to Syria. He went to University of Damascus where he majored in philosophy, and graduated in 1968.

Ghannouchi started forming his political orientations as a university student. Despite the fact that he initially joined a socialist party, his views gradually tended towards religious ideology, specifically Islamist. Ghannouchi then attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne. After studying there for a year, he returned to Tunisia and founded an organization to initiate reforms in the country.

Based on his Islamic convictions, he also initiated the Islamic Tendency Movement in 1981 to fight political pluralism and call for economic reconstruction. This is when Ghannouchi’s history with jails and torture began. Along with his followers, Ghannouchi was sentenced to 11 years in prison where he was tortured. Members of the civic and political community protested against their torture and called the public to support the prisoners. Ghannouchi was released in 1984. After being sent back to prison in 1987 with a life sentence, he was released again in 1988.

Eventually, Ghannouchi was exiled to Algeria, and from there he moved to England  in 1991, where he lived for over twenty years. During his exile, Ghannouchi was a tireless critic of the political regime in Tunisia. January 30th, 2011, was a memorable date for Ghannouchi, as he came back to his home country for the first time in two decades.

His party, Ennahdha, won 89 seats in the Constituent Assembly’s 217 – a plurality neatly three times as much as the runner-up party. In spite of his leadership role in the Ennahdha Movement, Ghannouchi has refused to run for any posts in the interim government so far. Ghannouchi has written a total of 13 books. Some of his important titles include, Women Between the Qur’an and the Reality of Muslims, On the Islamic Movement’s Experience in Tunisia, and Civil Rights in the Islamic State.