FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Out of Tunis...Hannibal!

Rant Number 426 25 January 2011

The Tunisian-Carthaginian general Hannibal was one of the greatest military strategists who ever lived. He once besieged Rome and came close to conquering Carthage’s deadly rival. What was his secret? Roman historian Livy tells us: at crucial times in a campaign Hannibal would do the unpredictable, unexpected thing. Something novel and brilliant – a move the enemy would never expect. So he caught everybody by surprise and achieved some of the most brilliant victories in history.

Has Hannibal risen again, I wonder? This time in female shape? Implausible but, perhaps, true. Young Soumaya Ghannouchi. A Tunisian opposition personality. The spirit of Hannibal she definitely possesses, methinks.

After popular fury swept away the corrupt, vain (the 70-year-old’s black-dyed hair says it all), West-backed dictator Ben Ali, the old regime still stands. A so-called unity government is just a mask for more of the same. The people have already sussed it out and keep agitating. What the country needs is for the real opposition people to come in. And one of them is exiled Rashid Ghannouchi, Soumaya’s father. Fled Tunisia in 1989. Rashid, however, is leader of An-Nahda, a movement described, horribile dictu, as...Islamist! Does it not make your flesh creep? Never mind the man advocates a respectable type of Islam, similar to the Turkish AKP. Western media are busy evoking the dreadful shades of the Taleban, Bin Laden, Khomeini, all that awful lot. To try and frighten people about An-Nahda. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

Now, in Guardian article Soumaya has come up with a truly Hannibal-like stroke of genius. She argues for genuine change. For a broad coalition, including An-Nahda, Republicans and...Communists! God and godless, devil and holy water in power together. For the good of the Tunisian masses and of healthy political pluralism. Who’d ever imagined it? The priest thinks it is brilliant. A diverse new government. Communists would never stand for a religious state. In a way, they would be the best guarantors of Tunisian laicisme, no?

But isn’t that unnatural? And wrong? Communism and its crimes dwarf Hitler’s. However, if Churchill could coolly ally himself with a mega-mass murderer like Stalin to defeat Adolf, why could not moderate Ghannouchi strike a deal with Tunisian communists? Besides, under the eagle eye of the EU, they could hardly emulate monstrous Uncle Joe, could they?

Ben Ali was in a way a dream dictator for the West. Under him Tunisia has dutifully done the IMF’s bidding. Large chunks of the nation’s economy have succumbed to privatisation. The President kept Islam well-muzzled and subdued. I know a little about it - two weeks’ cheap package holydays in sunny Sousse, South of Tunis surely qualify me as an expert, no? A lounging youth called Imad chatted to me outside my hotel. ‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked him. (What else do you expect a priest to talk about?) ‘Yes!’ he almost shouted. After a while the call to prayer echoed from a nearby mosque. Imad disappeared. ‘Was the mosque all right?’ I casually inquired when he got back. ‘I did not go there. I prayed with friends in their house. There is no point in going to the mosque. It is shut. The government wants it that way.’

Imad was right. The secularist dictator had ordered the mosques to be shut most of the time. Like being summoned to church by bells and then founding God’s house barred. Not on, would it?

Moreover, Tunisia is one of only two Muslim countries in the world – the other being Ataturk’s Turkey - which has made polygamy illegal. The reason why that is significant is not that most Tunisians are hankering after plural beds, but because shariah, Islamic law, makes polygamy permissible. Tunisian secularism was sending a reassuring message to the liberal West: ‘We are on your side’.

‘I am afraid of the bearded ones’, a young female student announced in an interview. She meant the Islamists. A case of rabid ‘beardophobia’, surely. Quite irrational. (I only wore a beard for a few months once – but it was because of amorous Sturm und Drang, not religion.) However, after watching plenty of scenes showing the huge demonstrations that toppled the tin-pot tyrant, the priest must declare that he recalls seeing very little facial hair. They were overwhelmingly clean-shaven blokes and unveiled women. And I remember not a single ‘Allahu Akbar! Some feminists may still choose to be alarmed but...too bad.

Of course it could be, it could just be that in Tunisia we see the potential beginning of ‘a return of the Sacred’. Something philosopher Roger Scruton wrote about in his book, Sexual Desire. Roger raised the spectre of the Sacred as Karl Marx in 1848 waved the spectre of Communism haunting of the powers of the old Europe, from French republicans to British liberals, from Tsar to Sultan. The fear is that the restoration of religion at the heart of public life, of politics, would involve tremendous upheavals. Trying to bring back the sacred into politics is ‘to risk the most violent cataclysm and the collapse of liberal political institutions’, Scruton claimed. Call the priest perverse, the idea appeals. Why shouldn’t it? First, he loathes the unethical institutions in question. Second, he rues the way a secularised religion exemplified by the decadent Anglican Church has resulted in something pliant, inoffensive and bromide – a slavish imitation of secular culture and the very caricature of Christianity. Third, he must be, as a follower of Jesus, a troublemaker. So, yes! Let us restore the Sacred, why not? But, I warn you, it must be in the way of Jesus – the way of love!

Soumaya Ghannouchi is a bright and beautiful person. In fact, she is on the Rant list, though she never comments. I had the pleasure of meeting her once after some Islamic event. We dined at the same table. She struck me as absolutely charming. After her interview, I do believe we have a potential new fab politician for the new Tunisia. Lady power – well, why not? Hannibal, a proto-Tunisian, may be back...

Revd Frank Julian Gelli