Last week, my 84-year-old father, Rached Ghannouchi, embarked on a hunger strike.
His body is frail, his health fragile; yet from his narrow cell, he chose hunger – not as escape, but as solidarity. He did it for Jawhar Ben Mbarek, a left-leaning professor of constitutional law, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front and a central figure in the opposition to Tunisian President Kais Saied’s coup.
Ben Mbarek had already been on a wildcat hunger strike for a week, hovering between life and death, when my father joined him. Since then, the strike has spread across Tunisia’s prisons, gathering a growing number of political detainees who refuse to bow to the cruelty of the regime.
It is the last language left to those whom tyranny has silenced: the language of the body, the eloquence of refusal.
Across Tunisia, dozens of political, union and civil-society figures – opposition leaders, judges, journalists, lawyers and bloggers – now languish in Saied’s prisons. Since his July 2021 self-coup, our country has been reduced to a stage with a single actor.
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Institutions have been emptied, laws rewritten – and the dream once born in the streets of revolution has been folded back into the shadows.
And yet, from behind the iron door of his cell, my father sent a message – not of despair, but of unity. He wrote: “A message to all our friends and comrades from every current and tendency: Tunisia urges you to put aside your disputes and mobilise to defend her.”
Even from prison, his words carried the cadence of a man who refuses bitterness. He did not speak of his own plight, nor of the pain of captivity – but of a wounded Tunisia that still calls upon its children not to abandon her.
‘We want freedom’
For decades, my father has remained faithful to one unbroken idea: that Islam and freedom are not opposites, but mirrors.
In his words: “We want freedom for ourselves and for others.”
He sees dictatorship as the most corrosive disease of the Arab world – the ailment that devours dignity and turns citizens into subjects.
Even behind bars, his ideas continue to travel – crossing borders that walls cannot contain
Those convictions were born not of comfort, but of captivity. During his first imprisonment (1981-84), he wrote Public Freedoms in the Islamic State – a book that sought to reconcile revelation with reason, and faith with democracy.
Four decades on, that same work has been translated into English and published by Yale University Press, finding new readers across continents. Even behind bars, his ideas continue to travel – crossing borders that walls cannot contain, reminding the world that thought is freer than those who seek to cage it.
During his long exile in Britain, his philosophy matured through dialogue with thinkers such as Ernest Gellner, John Keane, Jacques Berque, John Esposito, John Voll and Olivier Roy – conversations that helped give shape to a new political language for the Muslim world.
At the heart of that language lies a simple, luminous truth: that freedom is not foreign to Islam, but its beating heart; that democracy is not a western luxury, but a universal necessity – the vessel within which human dignity can live.
Eyes on the horizon
My father’s story begins far from parliaments or prisons – in El Hamma, a small oasis in Gabes, where he was born to a farming family.
He was raised to till the land from dawn beneath the scorching southern sun, his hands in the soil, his eyes on the horizon. That oasis, blessed with its hot springs and stubborn beauty, gave Tunisia many of its brightest sons: Mohammed Ali El Hammi, founder of the first trade union in Africa and the Arab world; the liberal reformer Taher Haddad; and Mohamed Daghbaji, leader of the great revolt against French colonisers, executed a century ago in the village square.
It was from that soil – of farmers, rebels, mystics and thinkers – that my father’s character was forged: the patience of the soil, the fierceness of the sun, and the quiet dignity of those who till the earth and bear its weight with grace.
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Many are astonished that a man in his eighties could still be so bold, so unbending. But they do not know my father.
He has the soft heart of a man easily moved to tears, and the iron will of one shaped by hardship – steadfast as the ground that raised him. All his life, he has refused stillness: a fountain of energy, always reading, writing, praying, exercising, thinking, listening, explaining – never idle.
In prison, it is no different.
He has always turned ordeals into opportunities. He wrote his most monumental works behind bars; he memorised the entire Quran, becoming a hafiz in the 1980s at Bourj el-Roumi, the infamous prison built by the French on the rugged northern coast of Bizerte.
Time bends around his determination. His vitality disarms the young who meet him – for he speaks to them not as an elder, but as an equal.
And for all his intellectual labour, my father has never been a man of ideas alone. He insists that principles must prove themselves in practice. He has lived nothing he was unwilling to defend, and defended nothing he was unwilling to live.
Roots of democracy
After the 2011 revolution, my father tried to carry that union of principle and practice into a country still weighed down by the shadows of its past – a Tunisia whose institutions bore the scars of dictatorship, and whose region bristled with hostility towards democracy, fearing it like a contagion.
As the leader of Tunisia’s largest political party – the movement that won the first free elections – and later as speaker of parliament, he worked to root democracy into the soil of a wounded republic.
He helped draft a constitution that sought to reconcile Islam with liberty, to build checks against abuse, to establish balances where once only obedience had been demanded, and to plant democratic habits where fear had long reigned.
His deepest ambition was simple and immense: that Tunisia might offer the Arab and Islamic worlds a living example of democracy that grew from within their own civilisation.
He undertook the hard labour of transforming his movement from an underground opposition into a party of governance – a transition he called “Democratic Islam”, requiring deep internal reform and a willingness to compromise for the sake of a shared public good.
And when Tunisia entered its gravest crisis in 2013 – one fuelled by counter-revolutionary forces determined to crush the Arab Spring – he chose a path almost unheard of in our region: he stepped down from power, insisting that the nation outweighed the party, that democracy’s survival mattered more than holding office.
Later, he forged a necessary consensus with former president Beji Caid Essebsi, trying to shield a fragile democracy from the abyss of polarisation.
Cracks emerging
From the moment he entered public life, my father became the subject of tireless distortion.
Dictatorships fashioned him into a phantom, and after the Arab Spring, these campaigns only deepened – sustained by Gulf regimes whose petrodollars financed an industry of fear, anxious that even a hint of democracy might spread.
He was painted as a threat, reduced to a crude caricature of “Islamic extremism”. It was simpler to malign him than to face the arguments he put forward.
Tunisia’s misfortune is that into the space opened by that democratic experiment stepped a populist fanatic who understood democracy only as a ladder. Saied climbed it to reach power – then kicked it away.
He dismantled the system my father and so many others had struggled to build: dissolving parliament, abolishing the constitution, concentrating all authority into his own hands, and turning political life into a sequence of arrests and persecutions.
‘As for my execution – if my blood is shed, I pray to God that it will be the last blood spilled in this country. And I pray that my blood may turn into a rose from which freedom blossoms’
– Rached Ghannouchi
My father endured the dungeons of the Bourguiba and Ben Ali regimes, and lived to see them both fall. Today, under Saied’s despotism, he endures once more – among the oldest political prisoners in the world.
This new counter-revolution, with its deceitful populist mask, will also pass. Even now, the cracks are visible. The regime is hollow, exhausted, without a future. There is a growing conviction that change is inevitable; that the darkness is already thinning at its edges.
This dictatorship will be remembered only as a brief and shameful interlude in Tunisia’s long story. My father’s ideas will outlive it, as they have outlived every prison, every slander, every tyrant.
In 1987, during his trial under Habib Bourguiba’s dictatorship, my father stood before the court – calm, defiant, unafraid – and said: “I am proud that I helped found an Islamic movement that does not rely on violence, but believes in peaceful action. As for this court, it is a first court; it will be followed by two others: the court of history, which will reveal the truth and condemn falsehood, and the court before God, with whom no one is wronged.
“As for my execution – if my blood is shed, I pray to God that it will be the last blood spilled in this country. And I pray that my blood may turn into a rose from which freedom blossoms.”
That prayer, uttered nearly four decades ago, still echoes. Its spirit is uncontainable, unbreakable – and so is my father’s.
No amount of repression, no iron door or high wall, can extinguish either.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
