Inside Tunisia's al-Nahda

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, al-Nahda voted to transform itself into a political party that would for the first time withdraw from a preaching project built around religious, social, and cultural activism. This turn to the political was not a Tunisian exception but reflects an urgent debate within Islamist movements as they struggle to adjust to a rapidly changing political environment. This book re-orientates how we think about Islamist movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with grassroots activists of Tunisia’s al-Nahda, Rory McCarthy focuses on the lived experience of activism to offer a challenging new perspective on one of the Middle East’s most successful Islamist projects. Original evidence explains how al-Nahda survived two decades of brutal repression in prison and in social exclusion, and reveals what price the movement paid for a new strategy of pragmatism and reform during the Tunisian transition away from authoritarianism.

Author Biography

Rory McCarthy is a fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where he works on social movements, contentious politics, and Islamism in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq (2006) and co-editor of Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (2016). He spent a decade as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian, with postings in Islamabad, Baghdad, Beirut, and Jerusalem. He has a B.A. in History from the University of Cambridge and an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.