Causing factors of the political secularism tendencies within the Tunisian Islamism: with focus on Al-Nahda movement

Islamism has been seen in various forms and manifestations in different countries. This means it has come along with a full spectrum of reformative, revolutionary, secular, socialistic features mixed with various political beliefs. Tunisia is one of the most important Muslim countries in which analyzing the Islamism could provide explanative points due to different experiences and changes that happened there. On this basis, the present paper aims to examine the causing factors of Tunisian Islamism starting to go in the direction of political secularism while focusing on the Al-Nahda movement. The question is that What are the most important reasons of the transition of the Al-Nahda movement as a representative of Tunisian Islamism into a political secularism? The proposed hypothesis is that existence of the roots of secularism, the revolutionary identity of Al-Nahda movement, dialectic opposition and lack of dialectic dominance by Islamists in Tunisia, as well as the access to a secular democracy as an available model have been amongst the reasons the Tunisian Islamism started to progress in direction of political secularism through the Al-Nahda. The results of this study suggest that the characteristics of Islam culture within the Tunisian society as the bedrock of political and social changes on one hand and the availability of an efficient secular and democratic argument within the society on the other hand caused the Tunisian Islamism to move in direction of forming a political party instead of continuing towards a revolutionary and ideological procedure. The present paper is a descriptive analysis using the documentary and library resources. We have benefitted from Manheim’s sociology of knowledge framework and Laclau-Mouffe dialectic in a blended method.