TUNISIA. From almost the introduction of Islam in Tunisia, most Tunisians of the Muslim faith, like most other people of the Maghrib, have been Sunn-is of the Maliki rite dating back to the eighth-century scholar Malik ibn `Abbas. However, many of the various dynasties that have ruled Tunisia, both of foreign and of Tunisian origin, have been of different persuasion. A Shill dynasty, the Fatimids, overthrew the Aghlabid state between 905 and 9o9 and ruled Tunisia for most of the tenth century until it moved to Cairo in 1073. However, even then the Shi’is were a small minority, and there is no Shi`i community in Tunisia today. The Hanafis form a small but privileged minority of Tunisians, including the last dynasty of beys. Almost all of them are (or Maim to be) descendants of the Turks who brought the Hanafiyah to Tunisia and who-at first through direct rule and later through a system of suzerainty-exercised substantial influence in the country from the early sixteenth century until the advent of the French protectorate.
During the course of the Ottoman Empire’s influence in Tunisia, the Zaytfinah Mosque gradually became the center of all religious teaching, until it finally secured a virtual monopoly of it. According to rules established by Ahmad Bey in 1842, which lasted well into the twentieth century, half the teachers were to be Maliki and the other half Hanafi.
In much of rural Tunisia, especially in the northwest, popular Islam has been widespread for centuries. It fuses the teachings of the Qur’an with ancient North African rituals such as saint worship and ecstatic cults.
The French Protectorate. While it is impossible to give definite figures about the size of Muslim religious brotherhoods in Tunisia in the early twentieth century, the membership was certainly much greater than the total of 58,143 reported at the time. The four biggest orders were the Qadiriyah, the Rahmaniyah, the `Isawa, and the Tijaniyah; the `Arfisiyah were also quite numerous. However, the political role of these organizations was practically nil, and even their religious influence was gradually declining. This trend has continued and, unlike the situation in Egypt, the recent Islamist revival movement in Tunisia has not taken the form of a brotherhood. The French, in accepting only formal Islam, forced many Krumirs (northwestern Tunisians) to adopt formal Islamic elements in place of their native popular Islam.
When the French protectorate was formally established in 1883 by the Treaty of La Marsa, the Zaytfinah Mosque’s school had long been regarded as one of the leading centers of classical Islamic studies. Under the influence of French culture, both Zaytfinah and Khayr al-Din Pasha’s Sadiki College, founded in 1875 with the intent of introducing modern education to Tunisia, became the heart of the growing nationalist movement in Tunisia, which was rooted in the schools rather than in a popular mass movement. Two early leaders of the movement at Sadiki College, ‘Ali Bash Hambak and Bashir Sfar, who later reconciled and went on to found the Young Tunisians, split over the issue of how much of western rationalism and French culture should be adopted. Sfar then established the revivalist Khaldfin1yah Institute in 1896, named after Ibn Khaldfin, in order to restrict the influence of French culture and restore Arab-Islamic culture in its pure traditional form.
At the beginning of the French protectorate both the Hanafi and the Maliki schools of Islamic law were well established in Tunisia. Throughout the period of the Protectorate the French left matters of personal status, such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and land ownership, to the jurisdiction of shari`ah courts headed by Maliki and Hanafi judges. However, through usage, principles of the French legal code were gradually imposed on Islamic law. There also were rabbinical courts for Jewish residents of Tunisia, as well as a separate, secular legal system staffed by French judges with jurisdiction over all cases involving non-Tunisians, as well as commercial matters and crimes.
The French administration discriminated against Tunisian Muslims in many ways, but it made it especially hard to remain a traditional Muslim and also participate in the advantages of the French sector of society. Often, this meant a choice between traditional Islam and socioeconomic advancement. Throughout the period of the French protectorate, there was a ubiquitous dualism of the traditional Tunisian and the French-assimilated or influenced sectors in Tunisia, which pervaded all aspects of life, including the educational and legal systems and the civil service.
That Islam should play a role in politics is not a new theme in Tunisian history. During the struggle for independence against France, Islam provided the moral, cultural, and ideological symbols needed to formulate popular resistance. Such leading nationalist personalities as Tha’alibi, Sfar, Khidr Husayn, and Tahir Haddad called for the defense of Islamic values. Even Habib Bourguiba, the “father of his country,” insisted in 1929 on the retention of the veil as a symbol of Tunisian identity. But, following World War II, it was Salah ibn Yfisuf-a rival of Bourguiba-who wielded Islamic symbols and allied himself with organizations based around the university mosque of the Zaytfinah in Tunis.
Independence. On 20 March 1956 France formally recognized Tunisia’s independence. In the same year the new president, Habib Bourguiba, pushed through a controversial measure called the Personal Status Code, which replaced Qur’anic law in the areas of marriage, divorce, and child care, not merely challenging some traditional Muslim practices but confronting them head on, in a way the French never did. Tunisia became the first Arab country to outlaw polygamy. A skillful statesman and a hero of the independence movement, Bourguiba even managed to get partial support for the controversial Personal Status Code reform from influential circles in the `ulama’, thus taking a less radical approach to reform than Kemal Ataturk of Turkey.
In September of the same year, shari`ah courts were abolished. By nationalizing the hubus (religiously endowed) lands, Bourguiba deprived the `ulama’, of an important material source of independence, bringing the religious establishment financially further under the control of the government. Bourguiba’s educational reform effectively neutralized Zaytfinah, at least temporarily, by integrating it into the University of Tunis. This was, in fact, part of a broad strategy of weakening independent sources of potential political power within the traditional religious establishment: Islamic officials exercising independent influence through shari`ah courts, schools and hubus lands lost their power base as a result of legal and educational reforms.
The strategy of the government did not end with the weakening or eliminating potential competitors. The religious apparatus became an administrative body and an ideological intermediary of a central power eager constantly to increase its intervention in the religious sphere. Bourguiba actively sought to use the Islamic institutions now controlled by the state as a means to push for modernization and economic development. The reactivation of Islam as a state religion meant the use of religion to further goals determined by the state or, more accurately, the political elite in the ruling NeoDestour Party.
The government actually increased the number of mosques in Tunisia from 810 in 1960 to 2,500 in 1987, and set aside prayer spaces in universities and government ministries. Yet since independence all Tunisian governments, in their quest for modernization, have opposed popular Islam. In the early years after independence permissions for saintly festivals were refused, and a number of shrines were even demolished by the authorities. Certain elements of ritual practice were prohibited, and the orders were severely criticized. Yet, while popular Islam has been weakening in a religious sense, it also has developed into a major symbol of growing peasant consciousness.
After his ascent to power Bourguiba did not openly advocate secular reforms. Rather, his ostensible aim was to reform Islam in Tunisia by putting its activities under the control of his new state apparatus and by correcting decadent practices that no longer accorded with their religious source. Instead of attacking what he believed to be fundamental tenets of Islam, he tried to project himself as a great Muslim reformer in the tradition of Muhammad `Abduh. Whether Bourguiba was seen as opposed to the tenets of Islam depended, of course, on one’s perspective. For some, neither Bourguiba nor Bourguibism have ever been hostile to Islam; rather, Bourguiba merely opposed the insistence of fundamentalists that Islam should comprise the central axis of Tunisian identity. Suppressing the traditional educational system at Zaytfinah and reinterpreting the basic tenets of Islam so as to make them more compatible with modernization was required in order to defend Islam from “western contamination” through a selected borrowing of western values in the context of a modern state system, and merely continued the legacy of earlier reformers such as Khayr al-Din.
On 5 February i960, more than three weeks before Ramadan began that year, Bourguiba launched an attack on the core Muslim practice of fasting observed by most Tunisians. Asserting that it was his fatwa (legal Islamic edict) that economic development was a jihad or holy war-which would have, if accepted as true, permitted the temporary suspension of fasting-the president openly defied the fast and called upon Tunisians to do likewise. The policy proved unacceptable to most Tunisians, who defied the order, and it caused substantial unrest. Bourguiba’s continuing attempts in the following years to eliminate the practice only made things worse, and eventually he capitulated.
Despite controversy and opposition, Bourguiba’s policies had a determinative impact on Islam’s role in modern Tunisia. Islam has been made subservient to a secular state, and its role in society has been progressively circumscribed. Although the constitution declares Islam the state religion, shari `ah courts have been abolished, the state prepares the sermons to be preached in the mosques, the Code of Personal Status is based on a liberal interpretation of Islamic law, and religious education itself has been secularized with the establishment of a faculty of theology to replace the Zaytfinah Mosque as the center of Islamic learning.
Despite the apparent victory of secular policies, three modes of Islamic practice continue to be important in Tunisian state and society: traditional practices including the participation in religious brotherhoods, conduct influenced by the Salafi movement and the ideology of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and rational religious behavior that gives precedence to reason in the interpretation of holy texts.
It appears that until about 1970 the government had reason to believe that it had eliminated all religious opposition through emasculation of the traditional religious establishment and neutralization of conservative fundamentalist forces. Except for a demonstration in Kairouan in 1961, there had not been any serious criticism of a religious nature until 1970.
Rise of the Opposition and Current Configuration. Like most of the region’s Islamic revivalist groups, Tunisia’s Islamic Tendency Movement (known by its French initials MTI) predates the revolution in Iran. Indeed, Iran’s 1979 revolution can be seen as only the most visible example of a trend that can be traced to the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when many Muslims felt that their devastating losses were tied to their abandonment of Islam. MTI members and supporters of other Islamist movements are not drawn from the traditional religious elites whose power and prestige was destroyed in the process of modernization, but rather from the urban petite bourgeoisie and the jobless, who felt that Bourguiba’s secular state had failed to deliver on its promise of sociopolitical advancement and mobility.
The radicalization and politicization in the late 1970s of Rashid al-Ghannoushi and others in the Islamist movement, who had initially been more concerned with religious and moral issues, are attributed to three factors: the exposure of militant Islamic secondary-school students to Marxist thought once they began universitylevel studies, the conflict between the Tunisian government and the labor federation, and the example of the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 Feelings of dislocation and alienation turned an essentially apolitical group into an activist organization. There are a number of interesting parallels between the early nationalist movement and today’s Islamic revivalists. Both started out almost exclusively as student movements; adjusting for socioeconomic development, both appealed essentially to the same strata in society and were strongest in the same regions; and both used the symbolism of Islam as a unifying rallying point against the existing government, which they portrayed as lacking legitimacy largely because of its insufficient commitment to Islam.
As in most other countries that experienced Islamic revivalism, the movement in Tunisia was independent of the established `ulama’, The first attempt to organize an Islamist movement in Tunisia was made during the early 1960s, without much success, by a Pakistan-based movement called Group of the Call and Communication or simply Da`wah. The Islamic groups that emerged in Tunisia had distinctly different focuses. The Da’wah’s focus was on the individual rather than on Islamic society as a whole or on Islamic thought, which were characteristic of the MTI and the later Progressive Islamicists. The eventual goal of the Da`wah was the building of an Islamic society, but its approach was bottom-up: as the building block of society, the individual had to be reformed before society could be. Their key reformist concept is taslih, (restore, fix, make right or righteous), and their goal is to create salih, (righteous, virtuous, godly) individuals as a means to achieve a true Muslim society. The main reason the Da`wah failed to catch on may have been its incongruence with Islamic practice in Tunisia.
In 1971, in one of history’s ironies, the government actually helped the budding fundamentalist movement by giving the educational curriculum a more conservative cast and by supporting the creation of an Islamic group at the University of Tunis, in an effort to capture the growing Islamist sentiment and at the same time contain the influence of leftist university intellectuals. The organization, the Association for the Safeguarding of the Qur’an, succeeded in wresting control of the university campuses from the left and supplanted it as the predominant force among the student body. Soon the association’s publication Al-ma`rifah, founded in 1972, carried a number of articles by Rashid al-Ghannushi, a Tunis University professor, and `Abd al-Fattah Muru, a lawyer, which conveyed a distinctly political message. There was, however not yet any hint of the later politicization of the movement and of Ghannushi’s thought. Ghannushi’s early writings were not very original, often restating the ideas of those he had studied closely in Tunisia and Syria: al-Afghani, Sayyid Qutb, Hasan alBanna’, Mawdudi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. They shared a profound mistrust of Western secular ideologies and an idealized depiction of Islamic societies.
In 1981, in recognition of its greater focus on political and social activism and after two years of developing local and regional structures, the Islamic Group officially renamed itself Movement of the Islamic Way, more popularly known as the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI), mentioned above. The MTI was officially founded in June 1981, with Muru and Ghannushi as its leaders. It once again changed its name in 1988, this time to Hizb al-Nahdah (Renaissance Party), in order to accede to government demands that no political party seeking legal recognition have the word “Islam” in its name. Until Ben Ali’s regime took a hardline, no-nonsense approach to al-Nahdah, it remained not only the most active but by far the largest of the Islamist movements in Tunisia, with a platform calling for the reconstruction of economic life on a more equitable basis, the end of single-party politics, the acceptance of political pluralism and democracy, and a return to conservative moral and religious values. Al-Nahdah did not consider itself the sole representative of Islam in Tunisia, as the government charged; rather, it claimed to represent a religious and political alternative to official Tunisian Islam. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Islamists succeeded in creating a parallel society, highly antisecular and antistate in its orientation.
In an attempt to appease, coopt or integrate the Islamist opposition, or at least to remove Islam as a symbol of opposition, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali ordered various policy changes designed to give Islam a more prominent role in public life and to portray the state as a protector of Islam. The adhan and prayers were broadcast on television, Hijrah dates appeared on official documents, and the Zaytunah was given the status of a university; the president’s pilgrimage to Mecca was also made a part of this strategy. Ben Ali also increased the Higher Islamic Council in both size and budget and announced the revival of the virtually dormant Committee of Reflection on Religious Affairs.
When his attempts proved unsuccessful in withdrawing the base of support from the Islamist opposition, Ben Ali’s stance hardened. The army and police were purged of Islamic sympathizers, and hundreds of people were arrested. After the 1989 local elections, al-Nahdah was again refused recognition; Ghannushi went into voluntary exile in Paris, and his deputy `Abd al-Fattah Muru assumed leadership of the party. Although alNahdah was permitted to publish a weekly journal, Alfajr, their journal Mustaqbal was closed down. Tensions between the government and the Islamic opposition continued to escalate, culminating in an all-out “war” that had effectively destroyed all public vestiges of al-Nahdah by early 1993.
[See also Destour; Hizb al-Nahdah; Zaytunah; and the biography of Ghannushi.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Anderson, Lisa. The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980. Princeton, 1986. Well-grounded historical analysis explaining the differing developmental pathways taken by Tunisia and Libya, using the state as the instrument of change. Binsbergen, Wim van. “The Cult of Saints in North-Western Tunisia: An Analysis of Contemporary Pilgrimage Structures.” In Islamic Dilemmas: Reformers, Nationalists, and Industrialization; The Southern Shore of the Mediterranean, edited by Ernest Gellner, pp. 199239. Amsterdam, 1985. Clear presentation of the principles and practices of saintly worship in Northwest Tunisia.
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Entelis, John P. “Reformist Ideology in the Arab World: The Cases of Tunisia and Lebanon.” Review of Politics 37.4 (October 1975): 513-546
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Micaud, Charles, et al. Tunisia: The Politics of Modernization. New York, 1964. Overly optimistic portrayal of Tunisian modernization along the Bourguibist model by three of America’s leading scholars of the subject, Micaud, Brown, and Moore.
Moore, Clement Henry. Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965. The best single study of Tunisian political development, although overly optimistic in its conclusions.
Moore, Clement Henry. Politics in North Africa: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Boston, 1970. Although out of print for years, this remains the single best study of the comparative politics of North Africa. Treatment of Islamic politics, however, is virtually absent.
Munson, Henry, Jr. “Islamic Revivalism in Morocco and Tunisia.” Muslim World 76.3-4 (July-October 1986): 203-218. Provides useful empirical details about the leadership, organization, and political orientation of Tunisia’s Islamic tendency movement.
Rudebeck, Lars. Party and People: A Study of Political Change in Tunisia. New York, 1969. Although poorly organized and written, numerous important factual details of Tunisian political party life are presented.
Stone, Russell A. “Religious Ethic and Capitalism in Tunisia.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5.3 (June 1974): 260-273. Stone, Russell A. “Tunisia: A Single Party System Holds Change in Abeyance.” In Political Elites in Arab North Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, edited by I. William Zartman et al., pp. 144-176. New York, 1982. Evenhanded presentation of Tunisian political development through a survey of the relevant literature on the subject.
Tessler, Mark A. “Political Change and the Islamic Revival in Tunisia.” Maghrib Review 5.1 (January-February 198o): 8-i9. Carefully argued and persuasively defended presentation of the relationship between political change and the rise of Islamism, by a longtime student of Tunisia.
Tessler, Mark A., William O’Barr, and David Spain. Tradition and Identity in Changing Africa. New York, 1973.
Waltz, Susan. “The Islamist Challenge in Tunisia.” Journal of Arab Affairs 3.1 (Spring 1984): 99-114. Useful complement to article below.
Waltz, Susan. “The Islamist Appeal in Tunisia.” Middle East Journal 40.4 (Autumn 1986): 651-671. Sensitive and perceptive analysis of the socioeconomic and cultural forces explaining the rise of Islamist movements in Tunisia. Very useful.
Zghal, Abdelkader. “The Reactivation of Tradition in a Post-Traditional Society.” Daedalus 102.1 (Winter 1973): 225-237. Original assessment by Tunisia’s leading sociologist on the importance of traditional beliefs, symbols, and practices for an otherwise “modernizing” polity.
Zghal, Abdelkader. “The New Strategy of the Movement of the Islamic Way: Manipulation or Expression of Political Culture?” In Tunisia: The Political Economy of Reform, edited by I. William Zartman, pp. 205-217. Boulder, 1991. Objectively presented evaluation of Islam’s competing images, grounded in a thorough understanding of Tunisian culture, society, and polity.
Ziadeh, Nicola A. Origins of Nationalism in Tunisia. Beirut, 1969. Remains the most thorough historical presentation on the rise of modern Tunisian nationalism.
JOHN P. ENTELIS
