Exile Over, Tunisian Sets Task: Building a Democracy
The epiphany of Said Ferjani, a 57-year-old self-taught Islamist intellectual, came after his poor childhood in the pious town of Kairouan in Tunisia, after a religious renaissance a generation ago awakened his intellect, after he plotted a coup and a torturer broke his back, and after he fled to Britain to join other Islamists seeking asylum on a passport he had borrowed from a friend.
Twenty-two years later, when Mr. Ferjani returned home, he understood the task at hand: building a democracy, led by Islamists, that would be a model for the Arab world.
“This is our test,” he said.
Text by Anthony Shadid
Client
The New York Times
Year
2011
On the road returning to Kairouan for the first time after Said Ferjani’s exile to Britain. Some Muslims regard Kairouan as Islam’s fourth holiest city. Mr. Ferjani returned to Tunisia shaped by debates on reconciling democracy and Islam that played out across the Arab world from the 1990s on, though often ignored by the West.
Mr. Ferjani, second from right, with friends at the Negra Mosque in Kairouan. He became active in Islamist circles as a teenager, after attending Arabic classes by Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who went on to found Ennahda.
Mr. Ferjani prayed at the Great Mosque in Kairouan, his hometown. He is a senior member of Ennahda, the Islamist party that won 40 percent of the vote and 89 of the 217 assembly seats in parliamentary elections in October.
A man cooking breakfast in Kairouan
Said Ferjani at the Negra mosque, where he started his activism when he was 16 years old
Said Ferjani opens the door of his father’s abandoned house in Kairouan. His father died in 2006, while Said was in exile in the UK since 1989.
Mr. Ferjani embraced a friend he has not seen since before he secretly left for Britain, on a friend’s passport, to seek asylum. Nearly a year has passed since his return to Tunisia, this time on his own passport, draped in the red national flag and with about 200 people greeting him at the airport.
Mr. Ferjani (center) in Kairouan. He joined Mr. Ghannouchi’s group in Tunis in the 1980s, but after being imprisoned and tortured he eventually fled to Britain. In exile in London, Mr. Ferjani broadened his horizons, taking classes on European history, democracy, the environment and social change.
Mr. Ferjani with his former high school teacher, who was also jailed under the government of President Zine El-Abedine Ben Ali, who seized power in 1987.
Now that Ennahda has come to power, Mr. Ferjani is on guard against the corruption that sometimes comes with power. “Everybody has to be careful not to be dragged into a dictatorial instinct, no matter what happens,” he said. “We can’t lose the soul of our revolution.”