Comment on the novini.bg of prof. Vladimir Chukov, a famous Arabist, university professor and scholar in the field of Middle East politics and Islam.

Oxford University Press has published a new book by the head of the Tunisian Islamist movement "An Nahda" (Revival) Rashid al-Ghanushi with the title "On Islamic Democracy". In it, the leader of the Tunisian Islamists (Muslim Brotherhood) is co-authored with the English researcher Andrew Marsh, who is a professor of political science at the American University in Yale. This comes almost a year after Oxford Press translated and published al-Ghanoushi's book on public freedoms in the Islamic State.

Rashid al-Ghanushi is a former speaker of the Tunisian parliament and has been detained for months in a Tunisian prison accused of corruption.

The book itself is presented in the form of a dialogue between the Islamist thinker and the American expert.

The latter tries to present al-Ghanoushi's understanding of democracy, pluralism, justice and law, Islamic and Western philosophy.

The book itself is divided into ten chapters entitled "Fundamental Freedoms in Islam", "The Dialectic of Unity, Difference and Political Pluralism in Islam", "When Islam is the Solution?", "Freedom First", "Between Seeed Qutb and Malek Ben Nabi: Ten Points", "Islam and Citizenship", "Problems of Contemporary Islamic Discourse", "Secularism and the Relationship between Religion and State from the Perspective of the Annahda Party", "The Implications and Requirements of the Post-Revolutionary Constitution" and "Human Rights in Islam".

Malek ben Nabi (1905-1979) was presented as a conceptual opponent of Seeed Qutb (1906-1966), the theorist of Islamic violence. This is despite the fact that both are assigned to the modern Islamic mental revival. The first is a modern Algerian thinker who is the author of the thesis of "Islamic civilizational bankruptcy", and the books of the second "Direction Book" and in "In the Shadow of the Qur'an" are perceived as textbooks about the violence that the Islamic State should exert against the "state of ignorance". The ideas of the two are part of the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, as are those of Ghanushi himself.

Rashid al-Ghanoushi, 83, is studying at the Agrarian Faculty of Kahir University.

But in 1964 he was expelled from the country, along with the rest of the group of Tunisian students. Subsequently, he went to Syria, where in 1968 he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Damascus University. He tried to continue his education at the Sorbonne, but did not finish it. In 1981 he founded the Islamic Trend Movement, which in 2011 was registered as the An Nahda (Renaissance) party. That same year, he returned to Tunisia after living in Britain for more than 22 years.

Currently, after the death of Sudanese Hassan al-Turabi (1932-2016) and Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1926-2022), Rashid al-Ghanushi is seen as the leading living ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

Islam

Quran

Prof. Vl.Chukov