For the past few years at school, I've begun the year by giving teams of three kids a small jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. I give them 20 minutes to complete the puzzle.
Invariably, at least one kid from one group complains loudly that they don't have all the pieces. And thank God they do, because the lesson wouldn't work if they didn't!
I then ask them, do you need all of the pieces to get the bigger picture? They generally answer that they can tell what the big picture is. Then we get into the messier part: What are we missing? What details might be missing that would change our impressions of the overall picture? Even if we think we know the big picture, are there things that might be on those missing pieces that would change the meaning of the big picture?
I've been thinking about this quite a bit as it relates to Rashid el-Ghannouchi and the Ennadha Party, because it seems like the 'puzzle' of Tunisian history in the late 1980s and early 1990s gives us most of the edge pieces, and none of the middle.
Tunisia's 'official' history of the time, written by the former Ben Ali regime, was that Ennadha in general, and el-Ghannouchi in particular, were extremists bent on the radical Islamization of Tunisia. Specific plots in this version of history include an assassination scheme against Ben Ali, and the targeting of U.S. owned properties in Tunisia for bombings. After trials of some members in person, and others in absentia, Ennadha was banned from operations because it presented a threat to the single-party, yet socially pluralist, government of Tunisia. And from personal observation I can attest that Ben Ali's Tunisia indeed did protect and promote the social rights of women and religious minorities (and, of course, violated everyone's political rights equally!).
Ennadha's interpretation of history is almost completely the opposite. In their version of events, the party simply wanted to be a moderate, Turkish-style religious party, and was committed to women's rights and religious tolerance. Ennadha claims that religion was simply one of many common strands in their party, and that they had no ties to, nor common cause with, regional actors like the Muslim Brotherhood and the P.L.O., which at about the same time, was based in Tunis.
Most of the known pieces of the puzzle - things that Ben Ali claimed happened, and Ennadha admits; and things that Ghannouchi and his lieutenants have said up until the past seven weeks - lend more credence to the Ben Ali version of the story than the new-and-improved Ennadha version of the story. Even Ennadha spokesmen admit the bomb plots against U.S. targets in the early 1990s - and justify it some 20 years later because of the presence U.S. forces in the Land of the Two Mosques. They, and some academics, make the case that the Ennadha of 2011 is not the Ennadha of 1989.
More important to me are the things my friends are saying. All of my Tunisian friends are college-educated, pluralist, and urbane, but they hail from around the nation; from Bizerte to Tunis to Tataouine. They are all, overwhelmingly and vociferously, as enraged by the rise of Ennadha in the post-Ben Ali era as they were under the previous regime - 'Why trade one oppressor for another?' is what one friend wrote. Their take - from on the ground in Tunisia, with a lifetime of experience - is quite simply more valid and more meaningful to me than anything written by al-Jazeera or the NYT. And it's also a little bit frightening.
It all remains to be seen how this will play out. There are a lot of missing pieces, and if we can't make out the big picture of Ennadha, we'll likely not make out the details, either.
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