In the city of Metlaoui in the Governorate of Gafsa, a mining region in the parched south of Tunisia, the streets are dust, filled with ruts, the skin of the men in the cracked lanes leathery brown from the heavy weather.

In Ibn Khaldoun, a neighbourhood on Metlaoui’s fringes, the area seems less of a city and more a chaotic village of one-storey homes of brick and concrete trying to hold fast to sudden rises in the earth.

Behind the flimsy steel gate of one home at the end of an alley in Ibn Khaldoun, locals take me into the courtyard of a home of hollow windowsills and empty doorframes. Used clothes spill out the doorway into the courtyard.“We are in a crisis of trust, between the Islamists on one side and liberals on the other."

Five young Salafists, guilty of nothing more than sporting long beards and praying five times a day, neighbours say, were arrested in a raid by security forces in late October.

“An officer from the security forces said [the Salafists] had weapons. But they didn’t. So the officer said ‘But they will build them!’”

A neighbour points to the earthen floor of the house. “But look; the Salafists were praying in the dust! No one is funding them or supporting them. They’re no threat – they don’t have anything.” Around him, other neighbours of the arrested Salafists loudly condemned the ruling Ennahdha party, who they saw as responsible for the arrests.

Tunisian authorities launched military operations into the Tunisian interior in response to attacks by armed militants in October which rocked a major tourism hub, nearly destroyed the tomb of a former president, and reportedly left six National Guard soldiers dead. Yet, it’s possible that the embattled ruling Ennahdha Party may be using the military operations as a card to appease powerful political adversaries.

According to Fabio Merone, an analyst living in Tunis who specialises in the politics of Salafi groups like those blamed for October’s attacks, the once-outlawed Ennahdha Party “has been refused power so long that they’re desperate to integrate into the elite.” He went on to say that, “Ennhdha is being asked by police forces and the wealthy to take a clear stand with the state against extremists.”

In doing so, he claims, they’re attacking the conservative base that brought them to power in 2011.

After the rise of a small extremist insurgency on Tunisia’s western border and the assassination of two prominent leftist opposition leaders earlier this year, accusations from leftist and liberal political groups against Ennahdha of being tolerant of terrorist groups rose to a crescendo.

Following the last assignation in July, 60 members of the National Constituent Assembly – charged with drafting a constitution and already far behind deadline – walked out, freezing the transitional process completely. This brought the ire of still more Tunisians to bear on the Islamist party, currently at the head of the transitional government.

In its attempts to appease well-off liberals who prefer the old regime of president Zine El Abdine Ben Ali and who feel “suffocated by the Islamists,” Ennahdha is turning its back on its once-thriving Salafist base.

The Salafists, at first wildly successful in channeling the frustration of Tunisia’s poor after the fall of former dictator Ben Ali, are now being publicly rejected by Ennahdha. After Ennahdha cancelled the national conference of ultra-conservative group Ansar Al Charia in May, and in August officially labeled it a ‘terrorist group’, average Tunisian Salafists are facing the heat, like those arrested in Metlaoui.

“Tunisian families are looking at Ennahdha like they once looked at the RCD [Constitutional Democratic Rally, which ruled Tunisia until 2011], because of the arbitrary arrests,” says Selim Kharrat, executive director of Al Bawsala, an NGO which encourages political participation in Tunisia.

Kharrat raised the possibility that arbitrary arrests of Salafists and raids are the work of security forces outside Ennahdha’s control. He notes that sections of the security forces are influenced by supporters of the old regime, who feel threatened by the rise of the Salafists and may be pursuing the crackdown.

“We are in a crisis of trust, between the Islamists on one side and liberals on the other,” Kharrat says plainly. Yet whether it’s the work of secular groups tied to the old regime or Ennahdha politicians trying to please them, the brunt of the war on terror being faced by Tunisians in the impoverished interior is the same.

In a farming village not far from Metlaoui, villagers mill silently around a home in the middle of freshly ploughed fields. My guide tells me that only days after the start of the military operations in October, eight locals were arrested from the house after a reported standoff with the National Guard.

The whole household was rounded up and jailed on suspicion that two of the young men in the home were plotting terrorist acts. However, evidence was reportedly thin, and the six others were simply family of the young men.

Though released soon after their imprisonment, my guide relays to me, the innocent family members are outraged with the security services and the government they see as complicit in the raid. Despite this, they are silent with me – eyes lowered and hands stuffed in their pockets. My guide tells me the family members of the suspected terrorists were given orders from the government not speak to journalists after their arrest.

Seif Eddine Belabed, a media supervisor for Ennahdha in one of its neighbourhood offices in Tunis, seemed unfazed by the story of Tunisians being swept up in raids with little or no evidence. “Maybe I arrest 100 people, and five or six are innocent,” he responds, in an office in downtown Tunis. “A mistake, but at the same time you’ve caught over 90 bad guys. This is what happens in a raid.”

Like the Ennahdha leadership since it began cracking down on the outwardly pious in Tunisia earlier this year, Belabed disowned the Salafists – violent or no. “There’s this idea that Salafis are a branch of Ennahdha. This is wrong.” Waving his hand, he said, “In their methods and ideology, they are something else completely.”

Saeed wears a gas mask outside a mosque in Cairo in anticipation of a police gas attack. Credit: Sam Kimball/IPS.

By Sam Kimball
CAIRO, Aug 26 2013 (IPS)

With the sun inching closer to the horizon on Friday afternoon in the Mohandiseen neighbourhood of Cairo, the call to prayer from Mostafa Mahmood mosque goes out over a street empty of all but a few soldiers lingering beside their tanks.

Just last week the square and streets around Mostafa Mahmood were the sight of an impromptu sit-in by supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood organisation. The sit-in hastily formed after their violent eviction from two major camps at the hands of the Egyptian military that same day, which left at least 600 dead and thousands wounded.

Since then several hundred Muslim Brotherhood leaders around Egypt have been arrested on charges ranging from vandalism to inciting violence. Yet a call by the Brotherhood to take to the streets on the ‘Friday of martyrs’ (Aug. 23) to protest the military’s violence brought only scattered protests of a few hundred in Cairo and a few governorates.

Last week’s killings and the round-up of the Islamist organisation’s leadership since hasn’t wiped out the Brotherhood, but has dealt it a serious blow and left its political future uncertain.

Standing beside the battered and dusty fence of the Assad Bin Al Furat mosque in Cairo, frequently used as a gathering point for Muslim Brotherhood marches over the last several weeks, middle-aged truck driver Amr Faraghani Numeri and several older men paint a bleak picture of the Muslim Brotherhood in national affairs.“Considering the 30 years of peaceful protest carried out under Mubarak, the Brotherhood will return to that - they have no other choice.”

“The future of the Ikhwan (Brotherhood) is over, done,” Numeri said. He was quick to add, “This doesn’t mean that Islam is over. The Muslim Brotherhood do not represent Muslims. They do not have a political or an organisational future because the people do not want them.”

Numeri and swaths of Egyptian society who share his views represent a new kind of challenge for the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Adel Abdel Ghafar, a scholar at the Centre for Arab & Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, “The Muslim Brotherhood is facing a grave trial. It is a period of serious adversity to be overcome.”

Never before in the Muslim Brotherhood’s 85-year history had it attained such public political influence, only to see it quickly snatched away, says Abdel Ghafar.

Isaam Shahid, a former member of the shura council in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), seemed unfazed at first by the hole the Brotherhood has found itself in. “Despite the unrest that has happened, I am optimistic that this situation will not continue for long,” he said self-assuredly.

The “situation”, he noted, was the violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood by the military-backed government. He saw little difference between the mass of the Egyptian people and committed supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, saying, “The people will always continue their peaceful protest against the military.”

Shahid said that the recent threats to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and send it right back to where it began before the 2011 revolution opened up space for them to participate above ground, were hollow: “There was talk by the legal scholars working to amend the constitution that was approved in 2012 that, based on a clause that prohibits the foundation of parties based on religious identities, the FJP would be banned. But this isn’t going to happen. The FJP is a party for all Egyptians.”

Mohamed, who declined to give his last name, is a Muslim Brotherhood member and a student union representative at Al Azhar University in Cairo. He says that he ran for his post in the student union openly as a Brotherhood member, and faced no criticisms on the basis of his affiliation. He does not, however, think the Muslim Brotherhood can compete in the open as it did until Morsi’s ouster.

“I don’t think the military regime will now allow the Muslim Brotherhood in government,” he said.  But, he added, the organisation will continue to push to participate in public life. “Considering the 30 years of peaceful protest carried out under Mubarak, the Brotherhood will return to that – they have no other choice.”

Yet when pressed regarding the political future of the Muslim Brotherhood in the face of the military-backed government’s overpowering hostility, Shahid didn’t seem so optimistic.

“The forces of the coup have overtaken democracy and created ‘tankocracy’, so I doubt that they will allow The Freedom and Justice Party to participate in the coming elections,” he said. “They [the military-backed government] will soon hold elections that are on their face democratic but on the inside are full of cheating. But who talks about elections in this kind of situation anyway?”

Mohamed Elmasry, assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, said that “The Brotherhood is a deep organisation, with hundreds of thousands of committed members. They have been part and parcel of Egyptian society for more than 80 years. If they are banned and forced underground, they will adjust.”

Giving a nod to much of the organisation’s history from after the Second World War until Mubarak’s overthrow, he added, “They have, after all, operated underground for most of their existence, and functioned as a religious and social service organisation.”

Because of their grassroots base, Elmasry thinks the game is not up for the Muslim Brotherhood. “I think they will fight to get back into politics, and, should Egypt’s political system once again offer the chance at free and fair political competition, I would not be surprised if the Brotherhood is able to achieve significant electoral success.”

“The Muslim Brotherhood will always be part of the political process,” Abdel Ghafar said. “However, the recent disappearance of the leadership will push the rest of the membership underground. The system has just closed up. Now they are waiting for the opportunity to re-enter.”