The moderate leader some Tunisians see as too radical

Tunisian Islamist leader Rachid Ghannouchi is seen by many secularists as a dangerous radical, but for some conservative clerics who see themselves as the benchmark of orthodox Islam, he is so liberal that they call him an unbeliever.

Mr Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party this week won Tunisia’s first free elections, ten months after an uprising brought down Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had banned the group and imprisoned Mr Ghannouchi before he took up home as an exile in London.

The party said it had won more than 40 per cent of seats in Sunday’s election, pledging to continue democracy, after the first vote that resulted from the Arab Spring revolts.

“There will be no rupture. There will be continuity because we came to power via democracy, not with tanks,” campaign manager Abdelhamid Jlazzi said.

Mr Ghannouchi’s moderate brand of Islamist thought, which matured during 22 years in London, led in part to him once being deported from Saudi Arabia when he tried to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

He stands out in the Islamist spectrum – which ranges from the political ideologues of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to puritanical Salafists in Saudi Arabia – for his view that there should be no bar on women or non-Muslims as head of state, since citizenship must take priority over Islam.

“Salafis, Wahhabis and even some Brotherhood don’t like him, some might even say he’s a ‘kafir’ (apostate),” said an Egyptian friend of Mr Ghannouchi’s from his years in London, who did not want to be named.

Acquaintances describe Mr Ghannouchi as a formerly left-leaning Arab nationalist who, like many intellectuals, shifted towards political Islam in the 1960s and 1970s during study in Cairo, Damascus and Paris.

As with most leaders in the political Islam movement, Mr Ghannouchi is not a cleric by training, though he is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, headed by cleric Yousef al-Qaradawi.

Many Tunisian intellectuals and secularists think Mr Ghannouchi’s is dissembling about his true opinions. They also suspect that his movement is receiving funding from the international network of the Muslim Brotherhood and Gulf Arab supporters.

But the party ran an unveiled woman as an election candidate and vowed not to touch laws banning polygamy and ensuring equal rights in divorce and inheritance that some say are at odds with Islamic Sharia.

Yet Tunisian commentator Rachid Khechana said many in Ennahda give different messages in their own communities.

“They use different rhetoric in the rural areas where it’s more conservative: rhetoric about stopping culture from outside, corruption of youth and defending Islam,” he said. “In the mosque, they tell their believers they should not fear what they hear them saying on TV.”