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'The Turkish road is not my model because I am critical of the way you are dealing with freedom of expression, of how you are dealing with the treatment of minorities, and your economic vision.’  But at the same time, I say, I’m watching what you are trying to do and I think there are things that are interesting in the Turkish approach, which for the first time in the last decade has started to shift towards the south and the east, opening almost fifty embassies in Africa, and having a new relationship with China.  That is just huge.

Now the problem is that you have two trends that are in fact objective allies in destablising the whole process of this discussion: on the one side the very secularist elite that is doing everything to paint a picture that they are in danger from ‘the other side’ and on the other hand, the Salafis, who are constantly putting Ennahda on the spot by questioning their religious credentials – ‘who are you? What are you doing? You are just compromising everything.’  And the secularists are saying about Ennahda, ‘they are not clear because they want to please us and they want to please them.’

If you read the Rand Corporation on who supported the Salafis in Egypt, what you learn is that up to 80 million dollars’ worth of support was poured into Egypt before the elections by organisations that are not state, they are very precise on this, but Qatari and Saudi organisations.

Remember – the Taliban in Afghanistan were not at all politicised in the beginning. They were just on about education. And then they were pushed by the Saudi and the Americans to be against the Russian colonisation, and as a result they came to be politicised. (They are not exactly like the Salafi because the Salafi think that they need to be re-educated, Islamically-speaking, convinced that they have to follow the prophet in a very literalist way.)

Is the dialogue across national borders also important, between Muslims in Europe and in the Middle East, for example? TR: Yes, there are ongoing discussions about this too.  The problem with what we call the ‘Arab spring’ is that these are very nationalistic experiences.  Tunisians are concerned with Tunisia, Egyptians concerned with Egypt and so on.  But still I have been invited I don’t know how many times to Turkey, where Turkey has been following very quickly in the footsteps of what is sometimes referred to as the movement of cyber-dissidents.

So you can see the connections beginning to form. If in the very near future Anwar Ibrahim succeeds in Malaysia, he is positioned as very close to the Turkish experience, and many in the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda have a similar perspective. So there are important relationships across national boundaries.

Yes, the drafting of the constitutions is interesting and the discussions around them revealing in many ways.  I take it as a discussion of very important symbols revealing many different problems.  My take at the beginning was to warn that Tunisia might be the only successful country, the only one to justify us in talking about the spring, while all the other countries were less successful, if not failing. Now the point is that even in Tunisia it is not going to be easy, and this is where we have a problem.

They were trying to find a way to confront the Turkish army with their own contradictions – “you are talking about a secular state but then you want a secular military state, and we want a secular state which is in tune with the requirements of the EU.”  So they simultaneously use the EU against the army and meanwhile, they shift towards the south and the east. That’s interesting.

But I do think they are trying to find a new space in the multi-polar world, and this is what I am advocating.  I don’t think that Muslims have an alternative model. An ‘Islamic economy’ or ‘Islamic finance’ doesn’t mean anything to me. But I do think that in the multi-polar world, it is time to find new partners, to find a new balance in the economic order.  And this could help you to find an alternative way forward.