Top Quotes: “Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly” — Safwan M. Masri

Introduction

“Tunisia inaugurated the upheavals that came to be known as the Arab Spring, and it is the only country in the region that seems to be weathering the winter that followed — the periods of violence and counterrevolution that have convulsed Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen.”

“Freedom of conscience is a fundamental right, constitutionally protected, limiting religious and state hegemony over personal lives — private and public.”

“The uprisings that took place in Tunisia during December 2010 and January 2011 and culminated in the toppling of autocratic president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali yielded a democracy that is unique in an Arab context. By 2015, less than four years after the Jasmine Revolution, the country had adopted a progressive constitution, held fair parliamentary elections, and ushered in the country’s first-ever democratically elected president. For the first time in an Arab country, an Islamist party, Ennahda, dropped its Islamist label and redefined itself, in May 2016, as a party of Muslim democrats — shifting its political focus to the country’s economy and banning party leadership from participating in religious and charitable organizations or preaching in mosques.

Two peaceful transitions of power bode well for Tunisia’s prospects as an inveterate democracy. Following elections in 2011, a troika of divergent parties and ideologies was formed and provided transitional leadership until it was disbanded in 2013, making way for a technocratic government that oversaw the 2014 elections. The formation of a coalition government in 2015–including the choice of prime minister — depended upon close consultation and agreement between the dominant secularist party, Nidaa Tounes, and its main rival, the then-Islamist Ennahda. Such instances of cooperation underscore the consensus building and political compromise that have been characteristic of the country’s Realpolitik since the revolution.

Several factors may account for the qualified success of the Tunisian experience. In contrast to the many failed states of the Middle East and North Africa, Tunisia has a small and relatively homogeneous population; sectarian tensions are nonexistent. There is a robust tradition of civil society engagement rooted in strong labor union movements that date back to the 1920s. Tunisia is also the only nation in the Arab world — with the exception of Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Morocco and Oman — whose boundaries have historical legitimacy predating the colonial era. Moreover, Tunisia has been largely spared from international interference, not having the geopolitical importance and consequential military buildup of a country like Egypt.

Yet perhaps no ingredient has been as decisive as Tunisia’s remarkable culture of reform, which dates back to the nineteenth century and is rooted in a progressive and adaptive brand of Islam. Reformism has been critical to the nation’s evolution into a progressive and tolerant society. It has made it possible for Tunisia to embrace a globalized version of the world, rather than retreat into the past in self-preservation like so many Arab countries. Tunisian reformism is a way of thinking — evident in the way Tunisians interpret their history — that facilitates a sense of social cohesion and national unity. Reformism and “tunisianité” are inextricable, jointly embodying Tunisian specificity or exceptionalism.

Tunisia’s history of reformism has led to a distinctly Tunisian sense of “modernity,” which combines Western modernity with a unique national identity and a shared heritage with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Especially revealing in understanding this Tunisian modernity is the relationship between religion, on the one hand, and society, constitutionalism, politics, and education on the other. There is a visibly respectful and tolerant coexistence of religiosity and secularism that is remarkable. This is despite extremist acts of terror — often committed in the name of religion — that have not spared any corner of the world. Religion appears to not have been politicized nor thrust upon the public sphere, as has been the case in the rest of the Arab world since the 1970s.”

Origins of Modern Tunisia

“Tunisia as a modern Westphalian nation-state, which took shape in 1956 when it gained independence from the French, had its roots in nineteenth-century reformist political thought. The progressive reforms introduced by Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000), who ruled for three decades — from independence until he was ousted by Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in 1987–were embedded in contemporaneous and earlier reformist thinking. Bourguiba, like other autocrats, held onto power through party nepotism and a concentration of executive power in the presidency. His firm grip on the affairs of the country often meant abuses of human rights that ran the gamut from suppression of freedoms to a tyrannical police and security apparatus. But despite his abuses and authoritarian ways, Bourguiba is hailed as the father of Tunisia who led the country to independence and ushered in the emancipation of women and a more secular and moderate Tunisian society. Bourguiba was also responsible for massive reforms that he introduced into Tunisia’s education system and which have had a lasting impact on generations of Tunisians. Bourguiba’s reforms have had the effect of equipping generations of Tunisians with the skills of critical and analytical thinking that have been deliberately absent in the rest of the Arab world, where students were, and are, victims of regimes’ acquiescence with political Islam. This alliance helped to produce obedient, unquestioning, and ultrareligious graduates who, at least until recently, toed the party line.

Bourguiba’s reforms benefited immensely from intellectual influences that argued from within Islam and sanctioned his emancipation of women and his education policies.”

“The interior region has always been more closely connected with neighboring Algeria and Libya culturally, tribally, and economically. Growth of informal trade across the borders has meant not only stronger, if illegal, economic ties but an infiltration of certain Islamic ideologies as well as a stronger affinity with an Arab identity than in the political and commercial centers on the coast. Tensions between the coast and the interior region carry the potential of threatening the country’s efforts to consolidate its democracy.”

“Immediately following independence, Bourguiba introduced a controversial family code, Code du statut personnel, or Majallat alahwal al-shakhsiyya, which he cast within Islamic justification. The code abolished polygamy, required the consent of both parties prior to marriage, extended the minimum age of marriage to seventeen years for women and twenty years for men, and introduced reforms to divorce and custody laws, banning the possibility of repudiation. The code advanced women’s rights beyond where they stand today — decades later — in any other Arab country.

Tunisian women got access to birth control in 1961 with the abolishment of a French law dating back to 1920 that prohibited the sale of birth control pills. It would take another six years for the same law to be abrogated in France. Abortion became legal in 1965 for Tunisian women who already had five children, and in 1973–the same year as Roe v. Wade — it became fully legalized, two years before France.

In terms of women’s political rights, they are far more advanced in Tunisia than anywhere else in the Arab world. Bourguiba granted women the right to vote and to run in elections in 1957, before any other Arab country. Women in Saudi Arabia were permitted to vote in 2015, but only in municipal elections.

President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s authoritarian government carried on Bourguiba’s legacy and the protection of women’s rights from the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism. Ben Ali introduced electoral gender quotas, and by 2010 women comprised 28 percent of parliamentary deputies, more than any other Arab country and more than many Western nations.

The emancipation of women meant their education and active participation in society. Tunisian women have a higher enrollment rate than men in secondary schools and universities. Literacy rates among women between fifteen and twenty-four years of age are estimated at 96 percent. Most important is that women have played multiple key roles in civic society and are credited for their mobilization efforts during the Jasmine Revolution. Tunisians insist that it is primarily women who will safeguard the consolidation of the democratic experience and prevent a rolling back of the gains they have made.

The strong education system introduced by Bourguiba in 1958, just two years after independence, stood in sharp contrast to the failed attempts to reform — and, in many cases, introduce — education in the rest of the Arab world. The largest component of the state budget, at times reaching one-third, was dedicated to education and youth development. Bourguiba understood that if he wanted to espouse national unity and enable his people to develop the basic literacy and human capital skills that were required for his country to advance, the state had to commit substantial resources to the effort. The reforms aimed to establish a coherent, unified, and free education system that conformed to French university standards, and to expand education drastically, with the goal of achieving universal primary education by 1968. Vocational training was introduced as a track in secondary school and through terminal intermediate schools.”

“Bourguiba and Messaadi made sure that students were taught subjects in the humanities and the liberal arts. The teaching of Islam in primary schools was brought down to one to two hours a week, and it was almost entirely eliminated in secondary schools. While Islam continues to be the only religion taught in public schools, it is taught in a way that promotes equality, unity, and acceptance. In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, where the education policy remains unchanged from when it was written in 1969, elementary schoolchildren dedicate nine hours per week each to Islam and to Arabic — taught through the Qur’an — with two to three hours for science and five for mathematics.”

“Tunisia did not suffer from the resource curse of Arab Gulf nations nor from a large, poor population, often cited as a major hindrance to Egypt’s prospects for democracy. Taxation as a means for government expenditure meant an avenue of accountability for government actions — unlike in countries such as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates where there is no taxation but also no answerability. In the Gulf region, a resource curse has stalled societal progress and political development. The lack of oil and gas and the country’s limited strategic importance also protected Tunisia from being a target of massive external intervention and of American Cold War foreign policy.

Absent from the scene has also been a strong, large, and political army. This very “weakness” turned out to be one of Tunisia’s greatest strengths. Unlike in Egypt, Tunisia was spared the threat of military intervention or takeover on the heels of Ben Ali’s ouster.

French influence had instilled an apolitical attitude in the Tunisian army, which was reinforced by Bourguiba in post-independence Tunisia. The republican army, which Bourguiba had built with the assistance of former French colonial troops, was limited in size and budget. In 1985, the armed forces numbered a mere 35,000. Bourguiba instead had his own security apparatus, including a national guard under the ministry of the interior. Wary of the frequent military interventions in eastern Arab countries, he purposely kept the army separate from the political realm. Military expenditures rarely exceeded 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) even under Ben Ali, who did expand the army but not as fast as he did the police. Ben Ali continued to view military officers with suspicion and exclude them from the political arena.

In Egypt, by contrast, a strong military presence has been characteristic of the country’s polity since the reign of Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–1848). Every Egyptian president since 1952, with the exception of Mohamed Morsi, has been a military officer.”

“The Stanford historian Joel Keinin asserts that the Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT) is “the single most important reason that Tunisia is a democracy today.” UGTT has been intricately interwoven with, and largely shaped by, Tunisia’s intellectual reform movements, particularly those of the early twentieth century, and by notable intellectuals such as Tahar Haddad.

With three-quarters of a million dues-paying members, UGTT has been critically involved at every stage of the transition. Because UGTT can mobilize thousands of members through its 150 offices across the country, it can bring the country to an economic standstill. The Sidi Bouzid branch was seen as the driving force behind the initial protests that erupted in Mohamed Bouazizi’s home governorate on the day of his self-immolation. It was the activism of UGTT’s local branches that forced the executive bureau to support anti-Ben Ali protests, and more local branches became involved across the country as the protests spread. The role of UGTT after the revolution should not be underestimated either. The union played a decisive political role — intervening when there were deadlocked political processes — on a number of occasions, including its anchoring of the Quartet du dialogue national in 2013.

A history of political pluralism, sanctioned or not, is another factor that separates Tunisia from most Arab countries. Despite the overwhelming dominance of the ruling party, the Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD), opposition parties were tolerated under Ben Ali, and the parliament had approved a transition to a multiparty system in 1988. The Movement des démocrates socialists, founded by former interior minister Ahmed Mestiri, had called for the establishment of political pluralism and the widening of the democratic arena as far back as 1976.”

“It was not only during the last few years of his presidency that Bourguiba’s legacy was tarnished. His trademark benevolent authoritarianism had become more authoritarian and less benevolent throughout the 1970s.

Freedoms that had been experienced by the press, unions, and the judiciary since independence were gradually revoked. Free speech was curtailed through a defamation law that was reinforced in the penal and press codes, and participation in public demonstrations became punishable by imprisonment.

Detention of political opponents escalated toward the end of Bourguiba’s tenure. Reports of arbitrary arrests, torture, censorship, and harassment were common. Student activists were routinely detained and brutally tortured, and their cases propagated by the state as warnings for student union activists.”

“The genesis of the problems of Bourguiba’s presidency lay with his ineffectiveness in managing the country’s economy and his inability to translate the gains he had made on the education front into economic opportunity for his people. This was happening at a time of unprecedented population growth: the number of Tunisians doubled during Bourguiba’s tenure, from 4.22 million in 1960 to more than 8 million in 1990. His economic failures formed the basis for his clashes with UGTT and his increasingly oppressive methods. They also provided the backdrop for the development of Islamic revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and his suppression thereof.

In the years following independence, university graduates were almost guaranteed employment in Tunisia because the need for skilled manpower was no longer being fulfilled by the French. This changed in the 1970s and 1980s — after nearly twenty years of universal access to education it became difficult for well-educated graduates to find employment opportunities. The promise of modernity and prosperity through education had lost its potency. “Educated or not,” students chanted in the streets of Tunis in 1970, “the future is not ours.”

In efforts to placate growing discontent, the government poured tens of millions of dollars on the public in the form of subsidies — mostly funded by revenue from crude oil. The subsidy program was part of a post-socialist five-year economic development plan after an experiment with a collectivist form of socialism was abandoned in 1969.

But subsidies could not go on indefinitely: by 1983, they amounted to 11 percent of the national budget. In compliance with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the government ended its food subsidies that for fifteen years had left the prices of bread, pasta, and semolina unchanged.”

The Ali Era

“When Islamist extremists within MTI conducted a series of bombings in 1987 targeting the tourism industry, including in Sousse and Bourguiba’s hometown of Monastir, the president ordered mass executions of the perpetrators. The bombings coincided with the official holiday celebrating President Habib Bourguiba’s eighty-fourth birthday, fueling his outrage and what was seen as a hysterical reaction of indiscriminate arrests and calls for bodies. The State Security Court concluded the four-week trial with fifty-six MTI members in jail, including Rached Channouchi, who received a life sentence, and two members sentenced to death. Ben Ali, interior minister at the time, ignored the order for mass executions. Rumors of an impending coup began to circulate around Tunis.

The coup promised much in the way of change. In a state address on the same day that Ben Ali announced he was taking the reins of the presidency from Bourguiba, he declared that the “constitution calls for a revision, which has today become imperative. The age in which we live can no longer permit a presidency for life, nor automatic succession as head of state…. Our people are worthy of a developed and institutionalized political life, founded in reality on a multi-party system and plurality of popular M organizations.” This was specifically in reference to Bourguiba’s having declared himself president for life in 1975, with the support of a vote by the Tunisian National Assembly.

True to his word, at least initially, Ben Ali introduced a constitutional amendment in July 1988 that limited any president to three five-year terms. Ben Ali rebranded the Parti socialiste destourien, which had retained its designation even after dropping its socialist agenda in the early 1970s, as the assemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD). He reduced the size of the political bureau, removing some of Bourguiba’s old cronies, and sought to attract new, younger blood to the party. He also oversaw a transition to a multiparty system, opening the political arena to opposition. The first multiparty parliamentary elections since 1981 were held in April 1989, and 76 percent of eligible voters turned up at the ballot boxes.

Ben Ali’s immediate actions after assuming the presidency seemed to reflect his commitment to the start of a new era. He launched a program of national reconciliation and promised to extend civil liberties, allowing some media criticism and dissent. One of his early steps that demonstrated authenticity was a July 1988 modification to the Press Code that made it less restrictive. In the same month, Tunisia became the first Arab country to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Ben Ali extended the state’s protection of religious minorities, amended the Code du statut personnel in 1993–removing a wife’s duty of obedience — and set up a fund to assist divorced women and their children.

At first, Ben Ali also seemed conciliatory toward Islamists. Although he had never trusted them and had at times acted ruthlessly to crush them, once he became president, Ben Ali believed that they could be better controlled through concessions. In an effort at appeasement, he declared Islam the religion of the state in speeches, allowed radio and television stations to broadcast the call to prayer, legalized an MTI student organization, and made a well-publicized pilgrimage to Mecca just months after taking office. Ben Ali also encouraged political exiles to return to Tunisia on the promise of more open political processes. He freed thousands of political prisoners in 1988, including MTI members and the movement’s cofounder, Rached Ghannouchi.”

“But the short honeymoon period between Ben Ali and MTI was over in no time, Ben Ali never recognized the party, which was renamed Ennahda — meaning renaissance or revival in 1988. Ennahda was thus excluded from the 1989 parliamentary elections. But the party ran independent candidates who won 14 percent of the popular vote, making it in effect the strongest opposition party. When Ennahda’s application for registration was again rejected despite a show of strong popular support, protests broke out and were met by police crackdowns. The regime quickly resorted to the old ways of oppression, including arbitrary arrests and torture. That same year, Channouchi left for Algeria and then the United Kingdom, where he remained in a state of voluntary exile until 2011.

After a deadly arson attack on an RCD office in Tunis in February 1991, Ben Ali, wary of the Islamist violence in neighboring Algeria, ordered another brutal crackdown on Ennahda. Clampdowns that ensued included the arrest, exile, torture, or disappearance of accused Islamists — men and women — and their families. In 1992, almost 300 members of Ennahda stood trial, some on charges of assassination and coup attempts, and its most prominent leaders were sentenced to life in prison, including Ghannouchi, who was sentenced in absentia; forty-eight Ennahda members were condemned to death.

The 1991 attack on the RCD office became the tipping point for Ben Ali, who henceforth treated Islamists as a serious national security threat. In the 1990s, more than 20,000 Ennahda members, at the very least, were tried for their political activities.”

“Over the course of his presidency, Ben Ali broke each and every one of the promises he had made upon his ascension to power. The president paid lip service to gradual democratization and human rights, He allowed secular opposition parties to register and run for elections, but ensured that RCD was in practice the only party with any real power,

The regime used various tactics to ensure CD’s political domination, some Machiavellian and others blatantly suppressive. According to the 1988 multiparty law, political parties could gain recognition if they received approval from the ministry of interior, pledged allegiance to the constitution, and renounced religious, ethnic, or linguistic platforms. In paradoxical effect, political parties were subject to approval by RCD, the same party they were opposing.

The 1988 multiparty law also ensured CD’s monopoly over parliament through its electoral simple majority rule, which meant that the winning party would claim a totality of seats. RCD, having received around 80 percent of votes in the 1989 parliamentary elections, thus won all 141 seats. This domination was matched at all levels of government. The party got all but 6 of 4,090 seats in the municipal council elections of 1995.

With the increase of support for Islamists, the regime gave secular parties more autonomy in the 1990s but never allowed them to gain real strength. RCD, which acted as “a veritable political Goliath,” erected structural barriers to the growth of opposition parties, denying civil service jobs and the distribution of resources to citizens or regions that voted for an opposition party, and discouraging donors from supporting the opposition by keeping close tabs on private contributions and reviewing financial records of all parties. Leadership of the strongest and largest opposition parties — Mouvement des démocrates socialists and Parti démocrate progressiste — were often harassed, tortured, and imprisoned.

Only the domination of Ben Ali as president matched the political domination of RCD. Ben Ali appointed his prime minister and cabinet ministers, as well as each of the provincial governors, and exercised strong influence over the judiciary. He ran unopposed in his first two presidential elections in 1989 and 1994. Although opposition candidates were allowed to run in the 1999 presidential elections, the elections revealed a growing disillusionment with the political system. Only 9.24 percent of voters participated, and Ben Ali received 99.44 percent of votes.

Despite his repeated pledges not to follow in the footsteps of Bourguiba, no one seemed surprised when Ben Ali violated his own amendment to run for a third term and in 2002 introduced a constitutional amendment meant to extend his presidency for life. He abolished term limits on the presidency and extended the maximum age of eligibility from seventy to seventy-five. Ben Ali used the growth of Ennahda and Islamism as justification for his prolonged presidency, warning that Islamists would reverse the gains of secularism. The civil war between the military and Islamists in Algeria helped provide a pretext for Ben Ali’s argument.

President for Life, or Ben à vie, as he was often sardonically referred to, Ben Ali quickly moved to amputate Bourguiba from the public sphere and erase his dominance of the Tunisian national identity, deconstructing the former president’s nationalist myth. Statues of Bourguiba were toppled, and dozens of streets and parks that had been named after the former president were renamed. On Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the capital’s main thoroughfare, Ben Ali erected a clock tower, representing modern Tunisia, to replace a statue of Bourguiba riding triumphantly on a horse.

Ben Ali’s cult of personality began to permeate the visual space with images of the president cluttering public arenas and large posters hanging on buildings and highway billboards, sometimes stretching over two stories, often retouched to make him look younger and stronger. He usually appeared in these posters in a suit and tie, but sometimes was dressed in traditional Tunisian robes, with his hand over his heart, as if saying “from my heart.” Disenchanted citizens said that what he was really saying was “genuinely, from his heart, screwing the country.”

Dominating the public space were also the number 7, commemorating his ascension to power on November 7, 1987, and the color purple, his favorite. Examples of this strange “cult of 7” included the national airline SevenAir, men’s hair products and cafés branded Seven, and the Stade 7 Novembre soccer stadium.

Streams of small purple flags lined streets and public squares, sometimes with the number 7 or pictures of the dictator, replacing the national color red of the Tunisian flag. Purple light fixtures adorned the streets during the annual anniversary celebration of Ben Ali’s ascension, marked by a lavish party and public rally in the stadium. So reviled did the color purple become among regular Tunisians as a result that when I complimented my driver Mohamed one day on his purple shirt, he sheepishly thanked me and explained that it had taken a while before people started feeling comfortable with the color again.

Public school textbooks were not spared the reach of Ben Ali’s personality cult. History books were rewritten, consistent with state propaganda that shifted away from a strong emphasis on Tunisia’s independence movement and a Bourguibian national identity toward the denial of a collective national memory that Bourguiba had created.”

“Ben Ali recruited ministers on the basis of their technocratic and organizational abilities to follow and dispense orders.

To ensure that he stayed in power, Ben Ali relied heavily on the police, which grew during his tenure as president to a total between 130,000 and 200,0000, or about 2 percent of the population. No one knew exactly how large the security force was; its size may have been exaggerated in order to maintain the perception that the public was constantly being monitored by an omnipresent force that could suppress dissent or “suspicious activity” at any time. The main focus of the security forces was on domestic Islamic extremists — radical and hard-line opponents of the regime. Police monitored the activity of relatives of known extremists who were in jail or living abroad and of political critics and citizens who interacted with foreign visitors, journalists, or human rights monitors. Ben Ali’s agents would always trail foreign reporters.

Ben Ali’s police state suffocated Tunisia’s intellectual and public discourse. Newspaper circulation, having peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s, steadily declined as the state apparatus became more controlling and there was a dearth of real news content; circulation levels in 2000 and 2001 were similar to those in the 1970s, when literacy rates had been much lower.

The police, who were authorized to make arrests without warrants, rounded up thousands, including many whose gravest crime was membership in banned groups such as Ennahda and the Communist Workers’ Party.”

“Under Ben Ali, “trade and students unions, human rights defenders, civil society actors, journalists and political activists were harassed, intimidated, detained, and subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Victims of torture also included ordinary citizens who refused to abide by bans on public displays of piety. Ben Ali’s forced secularization often led to women being particularly targeted for dressing conservatively. Secularization by the state, it should be noted, meant the suppression of oppositional Islamist trends and was not ideologically based for Ben Ali the way it was for Bourguiba.

In blatant disregard for the constitution, courts ignored allegations of torture and accepted confessions obtained under duress. The president acted as the head of the Supreme Council of Judges while regime loyalists controlled the judicial system, despite the constitution’s calling for an independent judiciary.”

“Aided for a number of years by better harvests, a rise in exports, and higher domestic investment, the result was that, on the whole, economic indicators moved in a positive direction. Household income doubled between 1988 and 1998.”

“While Tunisia’s economy seemed to be doing well on a macroeconomic level, economic indicators were masking some grave problems and inequities. Millions of Tunisians, representing a broad spectrum of economic strata, social backgrounds, and regions of the country, were aware — some intuitively — of how the seemingly successful economy had some serious underlying problems.

Whatever economic gains were made under Ben Ali, they were not evenly distributed across classes, regions, or age groups. Those who felt the greatest gains were the upper and upper-middle classes of Tunis and the coastal Sahel region, whose standards of living equaled those in eastern and southern Europe. Business activity in the Sahel dwarfed that of the interior.

The interior towns of Kasserine and Gafsa, considered the epicenter of the revolution, suffered the highest unemployment and poverty rates. Though poverty rates improved somewhat during the second half of Ben Ali’s rule as a result of overall improvements in the economy and a trickle-down effect, they remained over 30 percent in the interior of the country at the time of the revolution.

The legacy of Ben Ali’s crony capitalism further hindered the distribution of resources across the country. Agriculture policies favored crops grown in the coastal regions, and skewed public investment created obvious disparities in the quality of public services and infrastructure in the west and south.”

“While overall unemployment averaged nearly 14 percent, unemployment among the youth hovered above 30 percent in the decade leading up to Ben Ali’s ouster. One-third of the unemployed were university graduates. At the time of the revolution, unemployment rates reached 50 percent for holders of technical and master’s degrees, 68 percent for those with a master’s degree in legal studies, 31 percent for engineers, and 70 percent for technicians.”

“Under Ben Ali’s economic policies of patronage and coercion, 21 percent of private sector profits accrued to companies owned by Ben Ali’s extended family — often confiscated and bestowed on them and generating just 1 percent of jobs. Ben Ali’s second wife, Leila Trabelsi, was despised by Tunisians and seen as behind much of the corruption. Twenty-one years younger than Ben Ali, she was nicknamed La Régente de Carthage as her influence over the regime grew. Her brother Belhassen Trabelsi helped himself to an airline company, a number of hotels, a private radio station, car assembly plants, a Ford distribution center, and a real estate development company.

According to a 2014 World Bank study, Ben Ali and his relatives embezzled assets worth approximately $13 billion — equivalent to more than 25 percent of Tunisia’s GDP in 2011–during his reign. The report also confirmed that public and private monopolies and oligopolies, largely controlled by Ben Ali’s family, dominated most Tunisian industries.

Tunisia was nonetheless, brandished by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF as a middle-class economic miracle and a model of social liberalism and developing-world prosperity.

Biased statistical inferences and data manipulations helped preserve a fictional narrative. Unemployment for university graduates, for example, was manipulated into an official figure of 22.5 percent in 2009–half the actual number, which stood at 45 percent. National assessments of the rate of poverty conducted after the revolution revealed that it stood at 10 percent, considerably higher than the estimated 3.8 percent that had been disclosed by the Ben Ali regime. International donor organizations judged economic performance by often misleading averages, assuming that eventually various strata would converge toward a mean. A 2014 examination of communications between the IMF and the governments of Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia between 2006 and 2013 revealed that inclusiveness was never embedded into growth strategies until after the Arab uprisings. The net effect has been the masking of troubling variances within a population and the worsening of regional disparities.”

The Revolution

“It all started on December 17, 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi drenched himself with paint thinner and set himself on fire. Earlier that day, Bouazizi had been stopped from selling his fruits and vegetables in the interior city of Sidi Bouzid without a license. The police overturned and confiscated his cart and beat him up when he resisted. Publicly humiliated, he filed a complaint, which was rebuffed, and his attempts to see the governor were shunned.

Bouazizi had been pushed to his limits, having been the main breadwinner for his family, and having endured harassment by the police for years — refusing to bribe them, or simply lacking the means to do so. On January 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi died in hospital as a result of his burns.

The self-immolation of Bouazizi sent shock waves throughout Tunisia. There was an immediate and shared sentiment of empathy with his humiliation across the nation.”

“Less than a month before Bouazizi’s self-immolation, on November 28, whistle-blowing Wikileaks had revealed accounts of the authoritarianism and corruption of Ben Ali’s regime. Within hours of the government’s censorship, a local site, TuniLeaks, emerged, and access was just as quickly blocked by the regime. But reports had already found their way to Tunisians, reaffirming their deep sense of inequity and confirming what they had known for years.”

“He called a meeting of all UGTT branches in the governorate of Sidi Bouzid and declared a districtwide general strike. From there, mobilization efforts spread from nearby locales to others farther out, “like a drop of oil in water that starts dispersing.” Jendoubi claims that between December 18 and January 13, he presided over eight regional meetings like the one he held in Sbeitla, proclaimed a general strike in each of these areas, and signed the UGTT order for the general national strike that took place on January 14, the day that Ben Ali fled the country.

Jendoubi’s story may have been somewhat exaggerated, for it was at the local and regional levels and at the secondary echelons of the organization’s hierarchy that most of the active involvement originated. While the union did organize the first solidarity demonstration at its headquarters in Tunis on December 25, local branches played a key role in mobilizing efforts and providing crucial logistical support for protesters.”

“Ironically, it was Ben Ali himself who had pushed for affordable Internet access nationwide and the technical training of Tunisians. Tunisia was the first country in Africa and in the Arab world to connect to the internet in 1996. Ben All’s regime had worked hard to spread connectivity, launching ‘“‘free Internet” programs that charged rates equal to the price of a phone call, and set up Internet cafés, or Publinets, in rural and urban areas across the country. The technologically savvy generation that he created led the charge in his ousting and was often able to outsmart the regime when it tried to quiet dissent and to control Internet access.

But Internet connectivity also meant that the regime could more easily monitor activities and control access when it felt threatened. The regime’s surveillance of people’s electronic communications was helped by the fact that none other than Ben Ali’s daughter, Cyrine Ben Ali, controlled the main Internet service provider in Tunisia (GlobalNet). The sole purpose of the Tunisian Internet regulating body, the Agence tunisienne d’internet, was to control the Internet and Domain Name System services, often supplying fake error pages when access was sought to a banned website.”

“The army often provided cover and was considered an ally while security forces under the auspices of the interior ministry attacked protesters. Demonstrators cheered soldiers and armored vehicles on the streets. Videos and images showed soldiers saluting protesters and being thanked and kissed by them. Members of the armed forces likely supported, or at least sympathized with, the demands of the revolution.

The military’s apolitical stance during the revolution was largely due to Ben Ali’s having purposefully distanced himself in favor of the police and security forces. Resentment had built up among the forces after Ben Ali directed leadership purges in the 1990s, replacing both senior and junior military officers whom he accused of having Islamist leanings and allowing the police to attempt to exert authority over the armed forces. It is not entirely surprising, then, that when Ben Ali called in the army, soldiers deployed across the country fraternized with the protesters they were meant to intimidate.

The police, on the other hand, brutally suppressed protests in a number of locations, and dozens were killed, notably in Kasserine where snipers shot protesters from rooftops.”

Post-Revolution

“The freedom-of-conscience article squarely placed Tunisia well ahead of any other Arab country in terms of its respect for personal freedoms and human rights. It stipulates that the state undertake to disseminate the values of moderation and tolerance, and puts the state in the role of guarantor of the free exercise of religious practices and the neutrality of mosques and places of worship from partisanship. Freedom of religion in the Arab world, by contrast, essentially means the freedom to practice any monotheistic religion. An exception is Saudi Arabia, where the worship in public of any religion other than Islam is outlawed.

In a first for an Arab or Islamic country, Article Six outlaws accusations of apostasy — takfir — and the incitement of violence and hatred. The freedom-of-conscience article fundamentally guarantees the constitutional protection of agnosticism, atheism, and the full range of belief and nonbelief. Denouncing Islam for atheism or conversion to another monotheist religion is punishable across other Arab countries. These rights had been protected in Algeria by virtue of a clause included in the 1963 version of the constitution, but this changed in 1996 when the clause was removed. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the penalty for apostasy, or ridda, is death, while in other countries, such as Jordan and Kuwait, the courts have the power to imprison apostates, annul their marriages, and strip them of child custody and inheritance rights. So constitutionally enshrined is religion in Jordan that the constitution proclaims that the “family is the basis of society, the core of which shall be religion, morals and patriotism.””

“The 2014 constitution defined Tunisia unequivocally as a civil state, granting equal rights for men and women, freedom of speech and conscience, an independent judiciary, citizens’ rights to health care, and progressive resource redistribution. According to Yadh Ben Achour, more than eighty fundamental laws will have to be legislated by the Constituent Assembly to implement the new constitution.”

“This tension was exacerbated by the sentiment that not much changed after the revolution. Political elites chose stability and compromise over deep reforms. They avoided addressing some of the central grievances of Tunisians and potentially divisive concerns — transitional justice and what type of economic reform. Building consensus was credited for Tunisia’s relatively smooth and peaceful transition, but this was at the expense of limited improvement in the lives of ordinary citizens.”

“Shams, one of the two legally recognized LGBT organizations in the Arab world, alongside Helem in Lebanon, had to reapply multiple times before it achieved its legal status in May 2015. With more than 81,000 followers on Facebook and a wide geographic reach, the group aims to provide a safe haven for members of its constituency who have been shunned by society and ostracized by their families. According to the vice president of Shams and one of its founders, Ahmed Ben Amor, the organization has already achieved quite a bit by bringing the issue of homosexuality to the fore, instigating debate among society and in the public sphere. Ahmed pointed to shifting public opinion, citing a poll that showed 67 percent of Tunisians in favor of punishment for homosexual acts — an improvement over the 89 percent reported in 2012.

Shams has popularized the LGBT movement and helped advance it in Tunisia beyond its status in other Arab countries, even those with no penal code that criminalizes homosexuality Jordan and Bahrain — but much social persecution. All other Arab countries either have penal codes that criminalize homosexuality or laws that may not explicitly mention same-sex relations but are used to target them.”

“Openly gay Tunisians receive death threats on a daily basis, and there has been a severe m backlash to the public debate on the issue. On the morning of July 9, 2016, Ahmed Ben Amor, fatigued by death threats and homophobic assaults, took a large quantity of medication in an attempt to end his life. He was taken to hospital in a coma, but came around, only to attempt suicide again unsuccessfully a week later. Ahmed bitterly tasted at a personal level the agony of being rejected by his own family when he came out to them at the age of sixteen. For three days, his father, an imam, and uncle beat him up so badly — as if to exorcize his demon — that Ahmed lost consciousness and was sent to hospital. He escaped from the hospital and has not seen his family since.”

“In Egypt, where there are no gay bars or cafés per se, there was a somewhat tolerant attitude after the revolution. But this was short-lived: “gay-friendly” meeting places have been shutting their doors en masse because of repeated police raids. Even dating applications like Grindr are not safe spaces; police have been creating fake profiles to crack down on homosexuals.

Unlike in other Muslim and Arab countries, the subject of homosexuality is at least debated in the open in Tunisia. As negative as the discourse often (but not always) is, it is not taboo the way it is elsewhere. One member of the LGBT organization Shams sums it up: “The campaign, these attacks, don’t get me wrong, they’re really bad……but it’s happening in the open now. People can’t avoid us anymore. They’re talking m about it on the TV. Whether they like us or hate us doesn’t matter. We exist.”

Still, for a secular country that is more pluralistic and liberal than any other in the region, when it comes to sexual freedom and protection of LGBT rights, Tunisia’s record is inconsistent with its otherwise enlightened and progressive societal outlook.

Although Tunisia ranks better than any Arab country on freedom scores, there are serious limitations to freedom of expression and the media. Journalists, bloggers, artists, and intellectuals are prosecuted for defamation, committing offenses against state agents, and harming public order.”

Ancient History

“The population of Carthage reached 30,000 within a century of its founding, and it grew to one of the largest cities on the Mediterranean Sea. By the third century BCE, the city’s population is estimated to have reached as high as 250,000.

In 264 BC, Carthage’s territory hugged the northern coast of Africa, reaching far into modern Libya and Morocco, the southern coast of Spain, and the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and most of Sicily. Though it later lost the islands, its territories continued to expand into the interior of northern Africa and eventually covered half of the Iberian Peninsula. Carthage became the most prominent Phoenician colony in the central and western Mediterranean, with its economy, military, and population far exceeding those of its closest counterpart. Only Rome and Syracuse in Sicily matched its domination of the Great Sea.”

“When Carthage declared war on the advancing Numidian king Masinissa, the king called on Rome for help. Rome intervened, and this led to the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE). A Roman siege of Carthage lasted for two years and ended with the final destruction of the city in 146 BCE. General Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, sacked and burned down the city, and for six days and nights he sent in killing squads to eliminate any Carthaginians who survived the flames. Only about one-fifth of Carthage’s nearly 250,000 residents remained at the final surrender, and they were enslaved. Very little survived of Carthage’s libraries and archives; much of it was destroyed with the fall of the city. The destruction was so horrible that Scipio himself is said to have shed tears and lamented the fate of Carthage, meditating alone afterwards and reflecting on the fall of cities, empires, and peoples, and perhaps the inevitable fall of his own nation one day.

Thus began six centuries of Roman hegemony over the western Mediterranean.”

“The province of Africa became one of the most prosperous and urbanized regions of the Roman Empire. The economy fully switched from a reliance on trade to agriculture — granting Carthage the title “Granary of Rome.” Annual grain production is estimated to have been more than a million tons, one-quarter of which was exported. By the first century CE, the province produced two-thirds of the grain consumed by the city of Rome. In the second century CE, the cultivation of olives spread such that Carthage produced more olive oil than Italy. By then, Carthage had become the third most important city in the Roman Empire, after Rome and Alexandria.

The Romans embarked on ambitious public works and infrastructural projects. The Antonine Baths in Carthage, commissioned by Emperor Hadrian in 116 CE and completed during the reign of Emperor Antonius Pius in 162 C, spanned nine acres to the sea and were the fourth — or third by some accounts — largest public baths in the Roman Empire and the largest outside of Rome. Construction of the best of Roman infrastructure included a wide network of roads that stretched 12,500 miles — mostly built for military purposes. Aqueducts, dams, bridges, and irrigation systems abounded. The Roman aqueduct and water temple in Djebel Zaghouan, still visible near the town of Zaghouan, took eleven years to build and delivered 8.5 million gallons of water each day to Carthage.

The amphitheater in El Djem, built around 238 CE, is one of the most “accomplished examples of Roman architecture of an amphitheater, almost equal to that of the Coliseum of Rome.” One of the largest coliseums in the world, and the largest still standing in North Africa, it could hold up to 35,000 spectators. Theaters, baths, temples, and statues, as well as public feasts and celebrations, rivaled those in Rome and the rest of the empire.”

“Tunisia was subsequently ruled at different times by a number of Muslim Berber dynasties and Arab caliphates — both Shi’a and Sunni. It is important to note, however, that although Muslims ruled Tunisia almost uninterruptedly until the French declared Tunisia a protectorate in 1881, continuous Arab rule extended only until early in the tenth century and returned only intermittently afterwards. Various Muslim Berber dynasties reigned, longest among them being the Hafsid dynasty (1229–1574), which had Tunis as its capital and whose rule ended with annexation to the Ottoman Empire.”

“Unlike neighboring Algeria and Libya, and farther afield in the Arab world, Tunisia’s boundaries have changed little for more than two millennia, and it has been a cradle of significant civilizations and settlements since ancient times.”

Colonialism

“Tunisia became the most liberal and rights-friendly polity in the Muslim and Arab world over the course of the nineteenth century.

The first significant social reform was the abolishment of slavery. Ahmad Bey banned the trade and the ownership of slaves in a series of three decrees between 1841 and 1846. Tunisia became the first state in the Muslim world to do so, predating by 116 years the abolishment of slavery in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, both of which officially ended slavery in 1962. Mauritania, another Arab country, abolished slavery only in 1981 and criminalized it as late as 2007.”

“Al-Tahtawi deemed it a good thing that he did not encounter in France love relations between men, telling in that the practice was common enough at home for him to have made note of its absence in Europe.”

“The most hotly contested issues at the turn of the century, pitting Tunisians against the authorities and the colons that they supported, were over land ownership and taxes.

The French had employed a strategy of attracting French citizens to Tunisia through promises of land grants that would create a material attachment to Tunisia among colons. Small parcels were transferred from Tunisians, often displacing peasants, at such a rate that by 1892, French citizens owned 400,000 hectares of land. In just over a decade, the French population, a mere few hundred out of the mostly Italian colon population in 1881, had grown by more than 10,000, much faster than the non-French.

Further confounding the land transfer issue was that significant portions of Tunisian agricultural lands were held as religious habus. In their quest to entice French citizens, protectorate officials forced the local habus council in 1896 to give several thousand acres of its land each year to the newly established French-led Directorate of Agriculture to sell to settlers.

The French did not stop at the acquisition and transfer of land away from Tunisians. To help finance infrastructure projects — including the building of roads, which were used mostly by the colons — the French increased the majba tax on Tunisian citizens in 1903. Tunisians did not take this news quietly, and just as the doubling of majba at the hands of the Husaynid Sadok Bey had led to riots in 1864, the countryside erupted in protest. Matters came to a head in 1906 when an uprising at Thala-Kasserine against land seizures and the onerous tax burden resulted in a massacre, leaving twelve dead and seven injured at the hands of the French.”

“Women were also center stage, as Tunisian feminism started taking shape in the 1920s. There were demonstrations by women for their rights, and female figures who fought for their liberation and against the hijab were emerging onto the scene. Manoubia Ouertani — the first Tunisian woman to take off her hijab in public at her own lecture on feminism in 1924–was one such personality whom others modeled themselves after, including Habiba Menchari in 1928. These women followed the example of Huda al-Sha’rawi, the mother of the Egyptian feminist movement, who in 1923 dramatically cast off her hijab at a train station in Cairo as a show of resistance against the oppression of women.”

“Unlike independence movements elsewhere in North Africa, Tunisia’s was mostly indigenous and largely nonviolent. Libya’s “liberation,” by contrast, required the heavy involvement of the United Nations and European states. The three main regions of Libya — Tripolitania, Fazzan, and Cyrenaica — only united in 1929 as a single colony under the Italians. There was no united, indigenous independence movement. Libya became independent by default after Italy’s defeat in the Second World War, and its new king Iris al-Sanusi (1890–1983), a product of British patronage, had little support outside of his native Cyrenaica.

Algeria was regarded as part of France rather than just a colony, and more than 1 million French men and women had settled there. At the time of Tunisia’s independence, a bloody and costly war was raging, having started in Sétif, a small town in eastern Algeria, on May 8, 1945, where 10,000 Muslims had gathered on the morning after the exuberant celebrations of Victory in Europe. Demonstrations began peacefully with Muslims calling for equality and the end of colonialism, but then turned violent when a young man holding up the Algerian flag was accosted by a French police officer. Scuffles and gunshots followed; the twenty-six-year-old man “staggered out of the parade, dripping with blood, clutching the Algerian flag, and fell to the floor, shot dead.” Fighting lasted five days, during which time more than 100 Europeans were killed in Sétif and neighboring towns, and countless women were raped. Bodies were grotesquely mutilated, and atrocities were committed on both sides — “it was as if the rage of over a hundred years was now being unleashed in this paroxysm of violence.” The immediate reaction was the killing of an officially reported 6,000 Muslims in a few weeks, though what Algerians took as fact was the number 45,000 that was reported by Radio Cairo. By the time a cease-fire was declared and Algeria gained its independence in 1962, two decades of carnage had claimed an estimated 1 million Algerian lives. On the European side, an estimated 18,000 French soldiers and 10,000 French settlers had been killed. A mass exodus of approximately 1.35 million pieds-noirs (colons) back to Europe ensued, representing one of the largest mass migrations in history.

When Morocco achieved independence in 1956, it did so both from the Spaniards, who ruled over the north and southwest provinces, and the French, who had held the rest of the country as a protectorate. Rebellions, violence, and the return of the exiled sultan, Muhammad V, who then became king in 1957, marked the final days of colonization. Tangier — a playground for Westerners and, later, Gulf Arabs — was made into an international zone under French. Spanish and British control.”

“The new constitution additionally insisted on an independent judiciary and a supreme court that could try government officials. In this, as in so much else, Tunisia was way ahead of other Arab countries and, in some respects, ahead of its time.

Western constitutions, particularly the American, were sources of inspiration in that the new constitution defined Tunisia as a democracy and upheld the separation of powers among the executive, judiciary, and legislature.”

“French military presence had been a condition set forth in the independence agreement. France considered it strategically important for it to station its troops in Tunisia, given its war effort in neighboring Algeria. French president Charles de Gaulle agreed in 1958 to withdraw French forces, but insisted on retaining an air base in Bizerte, France’s largest foreign Mediterranean base. De Gaulle wanted to secure the Algerian border and to keep an eye on French oil interests to the south in the loosely defined Sahara region.

Conflict over the presence of French troops in Bizerte escalated to a crisis point in 1961 and eventually led to French evacuation, but only after causing heavy Tunisian casualties — mostly civilian.

On July 4, 1961, on the pretext that the French had illegally expanded the Bizerte air base — apparently by two meters — Bourguiba directed Tunisian volunteers to infiltrate the base and blockade it. The scene became violent when the army opened fire on any French military personnel who tried to move out of the base. De Gaulle, who was losing the war in Algeria and could not afford to appear weak, sent several thousand paratroopers and four warships to the scene.

Tunisian youth organizations, students, women’s unions, labor unions, and even the Children of Bourguiba — an organization for orphans — joined a carefully orchestrated “spontaneous demonstration” toward the Bizerte base. The cynical French troops, hardened by the violence in Algeria, fired on the marching civilians indiscriminately. Fighting went on for three full days. By the time it was over, between 1,300 and 2,000 Tunisians had lost their lives. France evacuated the forces it had sent to Bizerte, but restored the status quo ex ante on September 29, 1961.

Remarkably, Bourguiba was compelled in his acquiescence by his desire to ensure that instruction by French teachers in Tunisian schools, on which he relied heavily, would not be jeopardized, especially with the beginning of the academic year. French instructors, for their part, made demands for their security and safety before resuming work. Bourguiba’s education agenda trumped all else.

Tensions with the French eased after their eventual withdrawal from Algeria in 1962 and their subsequent evacuation from Bizerte in October 1963, and relations ever since have tended to be better than between France and her other former colonies. Tunisia remained a desirable and safe destination for French travelers, and driven by economic opportunity, many Tunisians migrated to France.”

“Charming and charismatic, Nasser played on the romanticism of the notion of a pan-Arabism that would give a consciousness to Arabs — transcending tribal, ethnic, and territorial divides. Nasser adopted an Arab and Islamic identity and wanted to move Egypt to the center of a great Arab nation and away from an ancient Egyptian or Pharaonic ancestral distinctiveness.

The great Arab nation that Nasser was attempting to create was a revival of an idea that had been put to rest decades earlier. Pan-Arabism, whether in the form of Ba’athist ideology or Nasserite rhetoric, had its roots in the time of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and it peaked prior to and during the First World War. Hussein In Ali, the Hashemite emir of Mecca who led the Great Arab Revolt against the Turks in 1916 and whose sons would later rule Iraq and Jordan, called for the establishment of an Arab nation and saw himself as “King of the Arabs.”

Nasser broadcasted his captivating speeches, ripe with fantastical hyperbole, on his radio station Sawt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs). Sawt al-Arab reached living rooms across the entire Arab world, capturing the imagination of Arab publics. Egyptian teachers did their bidding on behalf of Gamal Abdel Nasser as well. In ample supply and sought after throughout an Arab world that had shortages, they became emissaries of Nasserism, with classrooms as their stages.

Nasser’s appeal was so compelling, and viable alternatives were so lacking, that Michel Aflaq and Syria’s Ba’ath government at the time sought a union with Egypt in 1958. The United Arab Republic, which hoped to bring other Arab countries into its fold, lasted for only three years, however. Syrians quickly became suspicious of Egypt, perceiving it as imperialist in its designs and exploitative of their resources in its actions. Nasser’s despotic policies and Cairo’s domination over the union prompted Syria to secede in 1961. Distrust and accusations grew on both sides, a scenario that would quintessentially characterize intraregional politics more broadly for much of the Middle East’s postcolonial history.”

“Nonbelligerent and noncombatant, Tunisia did not need a large army, and Bourguiba never invested in building one — developing it only enough to effectively carry out its basic security goals and meet pressing issues. Bourguiba drew his foreign policy strength from his diplomatic skills, not from a large army, on which countries like Egypt spent heavily. By the end of the 1950s, Bourguiba spent 10 percent of the national budget on the military, compared to 18 percent on education, with spending on the latter eventually reaching almost 35 percent of the government budget. Unwittingly, Bourguiba protected postrevolutionary Tunisia from the imperious and undemocratic reach of a strong army.”

“He did not believe that Tunisians could demonstrate sound judgment — it had not occurred to him that, with time, they would start to question his own judgment — or that they were ripe for a full-fledged democracy. “How can we trust the decision-making capacity of the multitude?” he quibbled in a 1970 speech. Bourguiba was singularly responsible for Tunisia’s successes and failures — he alone ran what he termed a “controlled democracy.” Bourguiba thought that he was the nation and that the nation was he. He perceived himself as being above the law — indeed, he thought of himself as the law. When asked about Tunisia’s political system, he famously answered: “The system? What system? I am the system!”

Bourguiba saw himself as the nation’s savior and educator, projecting a persona of a moral being who was rational and capable of self-sacrifice and, therefore, had the aptitude to lead the nation.”

“His wife Mathilde was fourteen years his senior and mother to his son. Habib Jr., Bourguiba spoke of how he chose to bring her back to Tunisia with him from Paris, despite his friends’ discouragement. The more his authoritarianism set in and the more advanced his irrationality and erraticism grew, the more bizarre some of Bourguiba’s self-narratives became. In a society that did not openly discuss personal issues, Bourguiba shocked his audience when he revealed in a television interview that he had only one testicle, most likely bragging that while other leaders needed two, he built a nation with only one — making him twice as great.”

“The worse Bourguiba’s condition got, the greater that palace intrigue lurked. Corruption, manipulation, and arrests were rampant. Freedoms that had been afforded the press, unions, and the judiciary following independence were curtailed. Mechanisms of normalization gave way to methods of exclusion and the muzzing of any dissent by those deemed dangerous to the regime. Bourguiba never had much tolerance for political opposition or for threats to his rule; the reliance on the French army to suppress Youssefist resistance and the subsequent assassination of Salah Ben Youssef served as telling examples and dark points in the first years of independence.

Throughout his presidency, Bourguiba made sure he surrounded himself with trusted associates, recruiting disproportionately from the Sahel and his hometown of Monastir for his party and his bureaucracy. Bourguiba chose his own ministers and made sure to place people from his party in positions of power.

The vast executive authority granted to the presidency by the constitution gave him much latitude to center the political system around himself. Bourguiba established himself as “the maker and breaker of political careers,” installing and removing politicians as he pleased. The government and Neo-Destour formed a symbiotic relationship and had intersecting functions and staff, with Bourguiba at the helm of both. He allowed political parties, but did not legalize any besides his own until 1981; he formulated policies unilaterally and considered any form of discord as sedition.

Ideologies that threatened the nationalist narrative or did not toe the party line were not tolerated. The government under Bourguiba cracked down on students returning from Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad with Arab nationalist ideals — making arrests en masse as early as 1963. Detainees were tortured in an attempt to extract intelligence that would help the regime thwart the dissemnation of pan-Arabist ideology.

Abuses under Bourguiba also included prolonged detentions incommunicado, surveillance and phone tapping, and police violence. His creation of the Arab world’s first independent human rights organization in response to President Carter’s human rights campaign was seen as a charade.”

“He thought it imperative that he put religion under state control and strip religious authorities of their monopoly over moral guidance.

The civilization mission that Bourguiba envisioned for his people extended to improving the state of public health and providing access to health services for the entire population. Bourguiba saw to it that public health care services and facilities were widely expanded. The state improved access to clean water and tackled endemic health issues such as tuberculosis, trachoma, and malaria. Community clinics were set up across the country to help mitigate overcrowding in hospitals.

Prioritizing public health conditions and medical care paid off. Between the late 1940s and 2004, life expectancy increased from 37 to 73 years.”

“It was, in fact, men who liberated Tunisian women. No feminist grassroots movement had demanded the changes brought about by the code. Women who were active in the national struggle had not yet begun to speak on women’s issues. Women’s organizations collaborated with Neo-Destour during the fight for independence, but their advocacy for rights was focused mostly on economic participation and financial emancipation. Ultimately, it was men who came up with the code, and they imposed it from the top. The “women’s revolution” was neither a revolution nor led by women; it was a carefully planned and executed decision of Habib Bourguiba.

The code acted as a state power-consolidating move at the expense of more conservative and tribal social structures. It had been customary, for instance, for individuals, especially females, to marry at a very young age. But the Code du statut personnel mandated a minimum age for marriage of fifteen for females and eighteen for males. When this proved insufficient, the code was amended in 1964 to raise the minimum legal age for marriage to seventeen for a woman and twenty for a man. A subsequent amendment, this time in 2007, established the minimum age as eighteen for both sexes.

Progress has been slower, or entirely absent, in other parts of the Arab world. In Egypt, the minimum age for marriage is sixteen. The legal age for marriage in Jordan was raised from fifteen to eighteen only in 2002. There continues to be no minimum age for marriage in places like Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Acting as a further deterrent to early marriage, the code discouraged arranged marriages, advocating instead that decisions regarding marriage be left to those entering into it. The code stipulated that both parties must be present at a marriage, thus ensuring that a wife’s consent is explicitly given. It became compulsory that a marriage be registered with the state so that the woman’s legal age and agreement to the marriage could be validated. The removal of a father’s or guardian’s power to give a woman away in marriage, with or without her consent, represented a revolutionary departure from accepted norms. It continues to be the case in a number of Arab countries that a woman needs her male guardian’s permission to get married.

But where the Code du statut personnel was perhaps most revolutionary was in its abolishment of the age-old practice of polgamy, which is still legal throughout the rest of the Arab world. Bourguiba’s code even introduced punishment for an offending male: a year’s imprisonment and a fine equaling approximately $500–a year’s income for the average Tunisian at the time.

A century after the Husaynid Ahmad Bey outlawed slavery, Bourguiba used the same religious argument against polygamy: although sanctioned by Islam, the condition set forth of fair treatment of all wives was impossible to fulfill. Bourguiba went so far as to suggest that in the spirit of equity, should polygamy be allowed, a woman ought to be permitted to become polyandrous in the event her husband turned out to be sterile.

Bourguiba’s code also formalized the matter of divorce, requiring that it be carried out in court. The new laws stipulated that either husband or wife could apply for a divorce, and that both had to mutually consent to it.

Even though the Prophet denounced divorce, and all four schools of jurisprudence agreed that divorce is only permitted when it is “essential” and there is no chance of reconciliation, divorce could not be easier in Islam if a husband desires it. Talaq, or divorce, occurs when a husband simply pronounces that the marriage is dissolved, followed by a three-month period, iddah. This waiting period, during which the wife is not allowed contact with any male except unmarriageable kin, or mahram, allows for reconsideration and confirmation that the wife is not pregnant. In general, the default legal position on a woman’s right to initiate divorce is that she has none; women are granted the right to divorce only in very specific and restricted circumstances.

The advancement of women’s family rights included the granting of child custody to a mother in the case of divorce or death of the father, with her relatives favored in the event of her death. Although the father maintained the right to request custody of his children once they reached a certain age — seven for a male and nine for a female — an amendment in 1993 granted courts the power to determine custody based on what they deemed the best interest of the child.

But a patriarchal hierarchy continued to dominate in certain respects. If a woman remarries, for example, she loses custody of her children. Also, as is the case elsewhere in the Arab world, even when custody is in the hands of the mother, the father, or an agnate in the case of the father’s death or inability, remains the legal guardian. In a major breakthrough in November 2015, however, a law was passed allowing Tunisian women to travel with their minor children without the father’s permission. Bucking another male chauvinistic trend that continues to be the norm in Arab countries, the code extended Tunisian nationality to all children born in the country to a Tunisian mother and a foreign father, reversing a previous decree from 1914 that made Tunisian nationality nearly an exclusive right of the father.

A 2010 amendment to the nationality law gave Tunisian women married to noncitizens the right to pass on their nationality to their child even if the child was born abroad.”

“Interfaith marriages are also the exclusive domain of men, according to Islamic norms that permit only men to take non-Muslims as spouses. In another major breakthrough that granted equal rights to women and defied revered Islamic tradition, the Code du statut personnel allowed a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man. A memorandum that went into circulation in 1973 banned judges and civil officials from performing wedding ceremonies between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man, but the law preserved a loophole: if an interfaith couple got married outside the country, their marriage would become legal in Tunisia.

In yet another significant departure from Islamic teachings, Tunisia allowed adoption by virtue of a 1958 amendment to the code. As long as a prospective adoptive parent had the physical, mental, and financial capacity to adopt, she or he could do so. Going a step further, a condition set forth in the code that an adoptive parent had to be married was subsequently relaxed in a 1959 amendment so that a widowed or divorced person could be exempted from the requirement. Bourguiba set an example when he and his second wife, Wassila Ben Ammar, adopted a young girl, Hejar.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, compliance with Sharia allows for the system of kafala, or guardianship, whereby a family can raise a child that is genetically not its own, but cannot pass on either the family name or inheritance rights. The only exceptions, besides Tunisia, are Somalia — to the extent that it can be considered an Arab country — and Lebanon, where adoption is legal but only for Christian citizens.

The one area in which Bourguiba acquiesced to ulama and failed to grant women equal rights was in the domain of inheritance, where he allowed for Shari’a to dictate the principal tenets of the code. The code was faithful to the Maliki madhab and to practices elsewhere in that regard. It granted predetermined shares to a deceased’s kin, giving preference to patrilineal relatives according to a two-to-one ratio between males and females. Tunisia did, however, grant a woman’s testimony in court the same weight as a man’s, making it, along with Oman, the only Arab country in which a woman’s testimony is not valued at half of a man’s.

Bourguiba’s attempts to change inheritance in favor of equality were resisted, then and later, by ulama on the premise that the text of the Quran was incontrovertibly clear on the subject. According to Yadh Ben Achour, when Bourguiba tried to introduce the notion of equality in inheritance between the sexes in 1973, the respected sheikh Mohamed Salah Ennaifer (1902–1993) drew a red line, reminding Bourguiba that it had already been a major concession for him and other ulama to go along with the code. Attempts at extending equality to inheritance have continued — including during the summer of 2016, when a proposed change in the law was discussed in parliament — but all such efforts have failed.

Still, the code granted Tunisian women fairer treatment in matters of inheritance than their counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world. A 1959 amendment undermined agnate privileges by granting a larger share of inheritance to a female spouse and advancing some female relatives over agates; daughters and granddaughters were favored over uncles and brothers of the deceased, for example. By favoring descendants of both sexes over collateral relatives, and a spouse over other descendants, the code in that regard was revolutionary. The lot of women when it came to inheritance was further enhanced by the eradication of religious endowments. Males had often donated property to habus, a permitted practice, as a means of excluding female heirs. With religious endowments closed down, that loophole was securely shut.

As progressive as the code was, it nonetheless maintained a conservative tone. While it called on both spouses to treat each other with kindness and respect, the husband was positioned as the head of the household.

In these respects, and in congruence with Tahar Haddad’s stances, Bourguiba’s emancipation of women was still confined within traditional gender norms. Women remained subordinate to men, and a woman’s primary duties were to her husband and family. The code also failed to address the status of single mothers and did not recognize children born out of wedlock.

Bourguiba knew well that his code was nonetheless ahead of its time, and he presented it to Tunisians as an aspirational scenario, conceding that the law “may precede the ability of citizens to apply it.” Bourguiba called upon public institutions to educate the populace and elucidate the application of new laws through conferences and workshops.”

“While Tunisia’s Code du statut personnel purged conservative social structures of kinship and tribalism, Morocco’s postcolonial personal status code, Mudawwanat al-ahwal al-shakhsiyya, reinforced them — not surprisingly, as King Mohammed V (1909. 1961, r. 1956–1961) had come into power through a number of tribal alliances. The Mudawwana, which was drafted in 1957 and 1958, essentially codified existing Maliki family laws and institutionalized patrilineal ties. It did not require a woman’s explicit consent to marriage, and her presence was not required for the marriage contract, which was signed by her guardian. Marriage thus remained a matter between male representatives of the two families. The right of a guardian to marry off a woman against her will — in cases of “bad conduct, such as loss of virginity — was removed, however, and the age of marriage was set at eighteen for both men and women in 2004.”

“Iraq served as an exception for a while, introducing in 1959 a family status code that outlawed polygamy, revised inheritance laws, and set the minimum age of marriage at eighteen. But the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted through the 1980s and resulted in grave loss of life among men, served as a pretext for allowing men to take on widows as additional wives.”

“Bourguiba was also motivated by economic considerations; in the 1960s, the fertility rate was seven children per Tunisian woman. Birth control to curb population growth became a priority for the state.

Family planning measures, including awareness building and instructional courses, were introduced, and women were encouraged to use contraceptives, the distribution of which was facilitated by the state. The Union nationale de la femme tunisienne, which by 1960 had 14,000 members in more than 115 branches, played a key role in raising awareness in the field. The Association tunisienne pour le planning familial, established in 1968, and the Office national de la famille et de la population, set up in 1973 and funded by the government and the World Bank, contributed to the efforts and oversaw family planning centers throughout the country.

Religious leaders, research institutions, and the media also lent their support. Unlike in other Muslim countries, where family planning is considered sacrilegious and birth control is a taboo subject, some Tunisian ulama supported the new policies on the grounds that they did not conflict with the teachings of Islam.

Opposition came instead from the left. According to Selma Hajri, who runs the women’s health organization named for Tawhida Ben Cheikh (1909–2010) — one of the first female physicians in the Arab world — liberals objected to the infringement on freedom caused by family planning policies. Of particular concern was the practice of forced tubal ligations for women who had had more than four children.

Aided by the legalization of abortion in 1973, Tunisian women’s fertility rate dropped to 4.7 by 1984, 2.9 by 1994, and 2.02 by 2004. As fertility rates went down, so did infant mortality rates, which have seen an improvement by a factor of ten since independence.

Another important change in social attitudes was that it became acceptable for a woman to work before marriage — typically in an administrative government job or as a teacher. The Code du statut personnel and Bourguiba’s overall advocacy for the liberation of women led more women to take jobs that had previously been reserved for men. A nouvelle bourgeoisie that was receptive to the notion of working women emerged. Urban attitudes concerning women in the workplace eventually trickled down to rural areas as girls started attending school and going on to university in Tunis. It also became increasingly acceptable for rural females to get jobs in urban centers, away from home but typically living with relatives. In the countryside, women took many of the new job opportunities that were created for industrial and clerical workers.”

“A new directorate for religious affairs was subsequently established in 1967 with the prerogative of looking after both religious buildings and leaders. The directorate would appoint, train, and remunerate imams and preachers, who became public servants completely under the purview of the state. The directorate developed the curricula for religious education and controlled all manners in which religion was publicly practiced and promulgated.

By pulling the rug from under religious institutions — educational, charitable, and judicial — Bourguiba secured a trajectory for Tunisia that protected it from the hegemonic role of religion that would regulate other Arab and Muslim societies.”

“The 100,000 Tunisian Jews who lived in Tunisia at the end of the 1940s were quite heterogeneous, socioeconomically and otherwise. Many had French or Italian roots, but it tended to be the more affluent Jews who were particularly Francophone and Western in their outlook. This group feared for itself after the departure of the French, and many of its members emigrated — primarily to France. Around 20,000 Tunisians left the country shortly after the founding of the state of Israel.

In an attempt to assuage the concerns of Tunisian Jews who were nostalgic for the colonial period, Bourguiba promoted dialogue with members of the Jewish community. He paid visits to important Jewish sites in Tunisia and engaged with Jewish residents. He called on the Hara neighborhood in Tunis in 1957 and paid homage to al-Ghriba Synagogue in Djerba in 1966. The Jewish nationalist Albert Bessis (1885–1972) was put in charge of urban planning and housing for the state at the time of independence, and he served as a member of parliament until 1969. Sophie Bessis, the granddaughter of Albert

Bessis, tells me that many families like hers chose to stay in Tunisia because they felt that the environment continued to be inclusive under Bourguiba. They felt protected by legislation such as the 1968 law that rendered illegal any discrimination on the basis of religion in the recruitment and promotion of public servants.”

“While Bourguiba respected personal freedoms and allowed for the practice of religion and its expression in the private sphere, he outspokenly campaigned against what he took to be backward traditions and, on occasion, curtailed freedoms to make his point and to counter currents of religiosity. The hijab served as a quintessential illustration of Bourguiba’s distaste for religious symbolism. He emphatically discouraged all forms of traditional dress, claiming that “old-fashioned clothing encouraged old-fashioned modes of thinking and acting.” Borrowing from arguments put forth by Abdelaziz Thaalbi and Tahar Haddad, Bourguiba contended that Islamic standards of modesty did not require the wearing of a hijab. He presented the hijab as a foreign “custom” that resulted from “a misunderstanding of Qur’anic verses.” Bourguiba insisted that shedding the hijab was a Tunisian truism, evoking, as he often did, the Phoenician legacy when promoting his unveiling policies.

Bourguiba placed the burden of morality on both sexes, suggesting that “by the knot around the woman’s neck, we pretend that we are avoiding shamelessness: however, for shamelessness to exist, there must be two people; but we refrain (ourselves] from applying the same principles to the man, the second partner.”

Bourguiba also put the onus on parents to help rid society of the hijab. “If we understand,” Bourguiba said, “that the middle-aged women are reticent about abandoning an old habit we can only deplore the stubbornness of parents who continue to oblige their children to wear a [hijab] in school. We even see civil servants going to work in that odious rag. It has nothing to do with religion.”

Bourguiba fell short of banning the hijab altogether, but he did forbid women to wear it to school. Monia Bouali, a middle-aged Tunis lawyer, later recounted that in 1986, when she was fifteen years old, she was jailed for two weeks for wearing a headscarf to school. With the resurgence of Islamism in the 1970s, and more specifically in 1981 when the Movement de la tendance islamique was officially constituted as an Islamist organization, the state campaign against the hijab intensified. Curbs on wearing the hijab in public spaces were imposed through government circulars in 1981; these were expanded in 1985 and reiterated under Ben Ali in 1987 and 1991.

Bourguiba also tried to restrain fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He declared in 1956 that the observance of Ramadan should be suspended because it impeded the economic development of the country. In a 1960 speech, Bourguiba said: “During Ramadan, work stops. At this moment when we are doing the impossible in order to increase production, how can we resign ourselves to seeing it slump to a value near zero?” In identifying poverty as an enemy that needed to be conquered, he used a hadith in which the Prophet is claimed to have said to his companions: “Eat! You will be stronger to tackle the enemy.” To drive his point home, Bourguiba drank a glass of orange juice during a television broadcast in Ramadan.

Although Bourguiba was careful to suggest that he did not outright reject fasting but proposed that it be observed only during holidays, his stance on the matter led many to view him as antireligious and brought about fierce opposition from ulama.”

Education

“Bourguiba’s aversion to Arabization was primaríly a practical matter. Arabization would have required two conditions that could not be easily met: the replacement of French textbooks with suitable Arabic texts and of French teachers with qualified Tunisians. Bourguiba also saw in French, as a linguistic vehicle, the opportunity to expose Tunisians to modern subjects and Western thought, and to mitigate Arab Muslim influences in curricula.

But bilingualism produced some negative effects. Reliance on French as a language of instruction would later contribute to high dropout rates from primary schools, which reached 46 percent in the 1960s — also often the result of economic necessity and a strict school age policy. Integration into the education system was made difficult for children who did not speak French at home — many of them rural or seminomadic. Bilingualism produced the unintended negative consequence of disadvantaging poorer sectors of society, at least during the early phases of implementation.

Ensuring a stable supply of high-quality teachers was critical for Bourguiba’s timetable for school enrollment of all six-year-olds by 1966. French teachers had acquired pedagogic methods based on best teaching practices that fostered active learning. A dearth of qualified Tunisian teachers at the time of independence was due to structural inequalities as well as the elite nature of education under the protectorate. Most teachers were French, and Tunisians did not have access to the same training opportunities, i Tunisia or abroad, as their French counterparts. Bourguiba chose to retain the French teaching force until a new cadre of Tunisian teachers could be trained — something that he knew could not be rushed, even with proper investment.

The Tunisification of the teaching force occurred gradually and was not fully completed until the late 1970s. The pragmatic and incremental approach, aided by a bilingual education policy, alleviated pressure on the state and ensured that the hiring and training of Tunisian teachers was not hasty. In the meantime, French aid workers, or coopérants, taught in Tunisian schools as part of a foreign aid deal between France and Tunisia. Bourguiba’s gradual approach ensured that Tunisia could eventually rely on its own well-educated, and primarily French-trained, teaching staff.

The education of girls so that they could take their place in society and contribute to economic development was paramount on Bourguiba’s agenda. While education would not necessarily yield expected employment results, at least not immediately or explicitly, it was essential for girls to engage with their identities and be empowered to define their social positions. Bourguiba legislated calls for girls’ education that had been made by Rifa’a Badawi Rafial-Tahtawi more than a century before and by Qasim Amin, Abdelaziz Thaalbi, and Tahar Haddad in the preceding decades.

Of primary concern to policymakers was the low enrollment rate for girls. In 1960, 57 percent of school-age boys attended primary school while only 27 percent of girls did; only 32 percent of Tunisian primary school students were girls. It took decades for enrollment figures for girls to equal those of boys in Tunisian schools and universities.

In what has endured as an essentially exceptional policy in the Arab world, schools in Tunisia — primary as well as secondary — are mixed. Girls and boys sit side by side at classroom desks and learn to respect one another as equals. Girls grow up to become women who are even partners with men who grew up accustomed to equity.”

“Religion, to the extent that it comprised part of the curriculum, was taught in a very different way than it was in other Arab countries. Religion courses in both primary and secondary school explicitly focused on the history of Islamic thought, some of it even taught in French. Special emphasis was given to ensuring that subjects were discussed within historical and sociological contexts and that students were encouraged to form their own opinions and not simply accept absolute truths. Humanist values of universal solidarity and of religious diversity were included.”

“Women, while restricted from entering the realm of politics, were encouraged to pursue schooling. In the 1980s, Iraqi women made up 46 percent of teachers, 29 percent of physicians, 46 percent of dentists, and 70 percent of pharmacists. Literacy rates for women became the highest among Muslim-majority countries.”

“Private schools and French cultural mission schools continued to be French in their orientation. Elite families — including, ironically, members of the pro-Arabization Istiqlal party — preferred to enroll their children in French schools. This dual track of French and Arabic education created inequities as public school students faced obstacles in gaining access to universities, where instruction was in French. This scenario was similar to Tunisia’s during its Arabization phase in that access to university was limited for many who did not grow up in urban elite, bilingual households. But, unlike in Tunisia where public education continued to be superior, private schools were creating a parallel, preferred education track for Moroccans who could afford it.

The debate that took place in Morocco over Arabization was not very different from the one that emerged in Tunisia. But in Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba insisted on bilingualism, whereas his Moroccan counterpart urged for the opposite.”

“Gaddafi recruited teachers from his revolutionary council to help mold jeel al-ghadab, or generation of anger, predicated on anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, and committed to pan-Arabism and the liberation of Palestine. School in Libya also meant mandated instruction during holidays at “ideological camps designed to further proselytize students.” Gaddafi militarized schools and required army training for both male and female students, who wore army uniforms to school and participated in daily military exercises.

To reinforce a sense of national identity among students, it was common in countries from Turkey and Pakistan to Iraq and Egypt to promote a militaristic notion of unity against enemies — historically and at present. A narrative of victimization and values of exclusion and intolerance were propagated, whether by projecting past enemies at the time of the birth of Islam as infidels, or recent and present enemies in the form of the West and Zionism often bringing into the discourse the relevance of jihad.

Critical historical analysis has been absent, and accepted narratives, always pitting Arab or Muslim against an oppressor, usually a Western one, have been beyond reproach. Criticism of Arab and Muslim historic figures is considered sacrilegious, fostering among students beliefs that harbor a blanket absolution of responsibility and a privation of self-criticism. Students grow up to be conspiracy theorists; a sense of victimization and blame renders the most mundane of developments as couched in a Western conspiracy.”

“In science textbooks in much of the Arab world, for example, Qur’anic verses are presented at the beginning of lessons to provide a religious context for even the most empirical of subjects.”

“A major gap also persists when it comes to women’s participation in the workforce. While 75 percent of eligible men between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four seek and are able to find job opportunities, only 22 percent of women do.

While pressure has been mounting on Saudi Arabia to reverse the hegemony of religion in the public sphere, Turkey has been moving in the opposite direction, witnessing a deterioration of the laicist education system that Ataturk introduced as an integral and defining factor of his new nation.

At the time of Turkey’s founding in 1923, Ataturk declared the purpose of education as the cultivation of nationalist, republican, and secularist citizens. Ataturk firmly believed that the most important pillars of a nation were its military and the education of its people. The two often overlapped, with mandatory military courses beginning in the second year of high school for both males and females.

While newly sovereign Arab countries rushed toward Arabization and often Islamization of their newly established education systems, Ataturk took Turkey in a diametrically opposite direction. The founder of modern Turkey retreated entirely from the Arab world and Islam, changing the alphabet from Arabic to Latin and restricting accessibility to religious texts, including the Qur’an.

An education unification law introduced in 1924 removed all religious teachings from Turkish public schools and resulted in the closing of 479 kuttab schools.”

“As successive military coups and coalition governments sought stability and the appeasement of Islamists, religion re-entered schools in 1953, taking hold through a series of reforms that began in the 1950s and picked up speed in the 1970s and 1980s. Imam-hatip schools were turned into secondary schools in 1970, enabling their graduates to enter university. When girls were admitted in 1976 and all academic disciplines within universities became open to graduates in 1980, imam-hatip schools essentially became an alternative track within the standard education system. By 1997, 13 percent of Turkish high school students were enrolled in imam-hatip schools, which were now viewed as the “backyard” of the emergent Islamist party.

The number of students enrolled in imam-hatip schools has increased by 90 percent since Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a graduate of one himself, and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. It is estimated that more than 1 million students between the ages of ten and eighteen are enrolled, and the schools have been opening at twice the rate of standard public schools. In pushing its religious agenda, AKP integrated the ministry of religious affairs, or diyanet, into the national education system and gradually introduced policies that mandated more Islamic education — including the teaching of children as young as five years old morals and ethics drawn solely from the Qur’an and Hadith.

Erdogan has publicly stated that his dedication to expanding imam-hatip schools is part of his effort to nurture a “devout generation” of Turkish citizens. His government has brought under its control some 174 of the country’s best schools, and it has taken over the appointment of principals and replaced thousands of long-standing teachers with a younger, government-approved cadre. Extracurricular student activities have also been affected, many replaced with religiously themed events.

AKP plans call for the introduction of curricula that teach Turkey’s history from a stronger national perspective, emphasizing “moral values” and presenting Sunni Islam as inseparable from Turkish identity. The growing role of religion in society, governance, and education under AKP has intensified nationalist ideals that sought to create an exclusionary identity at the time of Turkey’s founding

The removal of religion from public schools by Ataturk was accompanied by campaigns to homogenize the population and to erase the cultures, languages, and histories of minority populations. The goal was to create a distinct people who spoke a single mother tongue and held standard beliefs.”

“Rising enrollment and decreasing spending brought about the dwindling of university quality standards. The situation deteriorated further when, in 2002, a reform that made it easier to gain access to university was introduced. In what has been referred to as the “25 percent rule,” a cataclysmic change meant to enable more students to pass the baccalauréat exam and gain access to higher education was introduced. The reform translated into basing 25 percent of a student’s baccalauréat score on the average score of three less challenging exams that were administered during the final year of secondary school. Ostensibly, the move was directed by Ben Ali so that his daughter, who was due to sit for the baccalauréat exam in two years, could have a chance of obtaining her diplôme. An entire one-fifth of students who sat for the baccalauréat in 2010 would not have passed and would not have qualified for admission to university had it not been for the 25 percent rule. It became possible for almost any Tunisian to seek a university education, whether qualified or not.

The purpose of higher education, which was highly selective under Bourguiba, had been to produce well-qualified leaders. But with these reforms, universities were accepting secondary school graduates who were not adequately prepared and who might have been better able to contribute to their own well-being and to society and the economy by having pursued a vocational path. Little to no planning went into steering students toward fields of study that matched market demand. Universities were turned into factories of unemployment. They became suppliers of degrees that no longer signified the accomplishment they once had.”

“At the pre-tertiary level of education almost anywhere in the Arab world, one would have to attend a private school — mostly nonprofit — in order to receive a good education. Parents who can afford a private school would not give any consideration to enrolling their children in public schools — known for their lesser quality. The complete opposite is true in Tunisia, where, regardless of socioeconomic status, parents want to enroll their children in public schools. For the most part, private schools cater to students who are forced out of the government system.”

“Since the revolution, standards of quality in education have improved. The 25 percent rule has been obliterated, and there has been a push for bringing back the selectivity and academic standards that had long defined Tunisia’s education system. Democratic governance has reached into universities, where presidents, deans, and department heads are elected to their positions by faculty.”