Secularism in Tunisia is an ideological and political movement aiming at defining the relationship between religion and state and the place of religion in society during an ongoing
modernization
Modernization theory or modernisation theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic and rationalist. The "classical" theories ...
. The
Tunisian Constitution of 2014
The Tunisian Constitution of 2014 () was adopted on 26 January 2014 by the Constituent Assembly of Tunisia, Constituent Assembly, elected on 23 October 2011 in the wake of Tunisia's Tunisian Revolution, Jasmine Revolution that overthrew Presiden ...
affirmed Tunisia as a civil state founded on citizenship. It also declared
Islam
Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...
as Tunisia's religion. The following religious festivals are recognized as national holidays: the
Islamic New Year
The Islamic New Year (, '), also called the Hijri New Year, is the day that marks the beginning of a new lunar Hijri year, and is the day on which the year count is incremented. The first day of the Islamic year is observed by most Muslims on ...
, the birth of the Islamic prophet
Muhammad
Muhammad (8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious and political leader and the founder of Islam. Muhammad in Islam, According to Islam, he was a prophet who was divinely inspired to preach and confirm the tawhid, monotheistic teachings of A ...
,
Eid al-Fitr
Eid al-Fitr () is the first of the two main Islamic holidays, festivals in Islam, the other being Eid al-Adha. It falls on the first day of Shawwal, the tenth month of the Islamic calendar. Eid al-Fitr is celebrated by Muslims worldwide becaus ...
, and
Eid al-Adha
Eid al-Adha () is the second of the two main festivals in Islam alongside Eid al-Fitr. It falls on the 10th of Dhu al-Hijja, the twelfth and final month of the Islamic calendar. Celebrations and observances are generally carried forward to the ...
.
History
In 1956, Tunisia achieved formal
independence
Independence is a condition of a nation, country, or state, in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the status of ...
from France. From 1956 to 1987, under the presidency of
Habib Bourguiba
Habib Bourguiba (3 August 19036 April 2000) was a Tunisian politician and statesman who served as the Head of Government of Tunisia, prime minister of the Kingdom of Tunisia from 1956 to 1957, and then as the first president of Tunisia from 1 ...
, the first president, Tunisia's post independence government pursued a program of
secularization
In sociology, secularization () is a multilayered concept that generally denotes "a transition from a religious to a more worldly level." There are many types of secularization and most do not lead to atheism or irreligion, nor are they automatica ...
. Bourguiba, "who has been one of the most avowedly secularist political strategists in the Arab world",
[Nazih N. Ayubi]
''Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World''
Routledge, 1991. modified laws regarding religious endowments (habus), secularized education and unified the legal system so that all Tunisians, regardless of religion, were subject to the state courts. He restricted the influence of the religious
University of Ez-Zitouna
Ez-Zitouna University (, ) is an Ancient higher-learning institutions, ancient public university in Tunis, Tunisia. The university originated in the Al-Zaytuna Mosque, founded at the end of the 7th or in the early 8th century, which developed into ...
and replaced it with a faculty of theology integrated into the University of Tunis, banned the headscarf for women, made members of the religious hierarchy state employees and ordered that the expenses for the upkeep of mosques and the salaries of preachers to be regulated.
Moreover, his best known legal innovation was the
‘Code du Statut Personel’ (CSP), the laws governing issues related to the family: marriage, guardianship of children, inheritance and most importantly the abolishing of polygamy and making divorce subject to judicial review.
Bourguiba sought to undercut the religious establishment's ability to prevent his secularization program, and although he was careful to locate these changes within the framework of a modernist reading of Islam and presented them as the product of ''ijtihad'' (independent interpretation) and not a break with Islam, he became well known for his
secularism
Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion. It is most commonly thought of as the separation of religion from civil affairs and the state and may be broadened ...
.
Following increasing economic problems, Islamist movements came about in 1970 with the revival of religious teaching in Ez-Zitouna University and the influence which came from Arab religious leaders from the Syrian and Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood
The Society of the Muslim Brothers ('' ''), better known as the Muslim Brotherhood ( ', is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar, Imam and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Al-Banna's teachings s ...
s. There was also influence by
Hizb ut-Tahrir
Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT; ) is an international pan-Islamist and Islamic fundamentalist political organization whose stated aim is the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate to unite the Muslim community (called ''ummah'') and implement sharia glo ...
, whose members issued a magazine in Tunis named ''Azeytouna''.
Government-induced secularization triggered the formation of the
Islamic Tendency Movement; the movement and its leader
Rached Ghannouchi
Rached Ghannouchi (; born 22 June 1941), also spelled Rachid al-Ghannouchi or Rached el-Ghannouchi, is a Tunisian politician, the co-founder of the Ennahdha Party and serving as its intellectual leader. He was born Rashad Khriji ().
Ghannou ...
turned into a rallying point for government opponents. In the aftermath, the struggle of Bourguiba and then
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Tunisian Arabic: , ; 3 September 1936 – 19 September 2019), commonly known as Ben Ali or Ezzine, was a Tunisian politician who served as the second President of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011. In that year, during the Tun ...
, who succeeded him, with political Islamists went out of control, and in order to suppress the opposition the Islamist leaders were harassed, tortured, and exiled.
Post-Arab Spring developments
The
Arab Spring
The Arab Spring () was a series of Nonviolent resistance, anti-government protests, Rebellion, uprisings, and Insurgency, armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began Tunisian revolution, in Tunisia ...
changed government in Tunisia and resulted in adoption of the
Tunisian Constitution of 2014
The Tunisian Constitution of 2014 () was adopted on 26 January 2014 by the Constituent Assembly of Tunisia, Constituent Assembly, elected on 23 October 2011 in the wake of Tunisia's Tunisian Revolution, Jasmine Revolution that overthrew Presiden ...
following a considerable debate between Islamic and secular political groups and movements. On 1 March 2011, after the secularist dictatorship of
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Tunisian Arabic: , ; 3 September 1936 – 19 September 2019), commonly known as Ben Ali or Ezzine, was a Tunisian politician who served as the second President of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011. In that year, during the Tun ...
collapsed in the wake of the 2011
Tunisian revolution, Tunisia's interim government granted the
''Ennahda'', a moderate Islamist movement in
Tunisia
Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares m ...
, permission to form a political party.
Since then, the Ennahda Islamic Party has become the biggest and most well-organized party in Tunisia, so far outdistancing its more secular competitors. In the
Tunisian Constituent Assembly election, 2011
An election for a constituent assembly in Tunisia was announced on 3 March 2011 and held on 23 October 2011, following the Tunisian revolution. The Assembly had 217 members. It was the first free election held in Tunisia since the country's ind ...
, the first free election in the country's history with a turn out of 51.1% of all eligible voters, the party won 37.04% of the popular vote and 89 (41%) of the 217 assembly seats, far more than any other party.
[Tunisia's New al-Nahda]
Marc Lynch 29 June 2011 In 2016, ''Ennahda'' rebranded itself as the post-Islamist political party of Muslim Democrats drawing a line between religion and politics.
Women’s rights
In July 2017, the Tunisian parliament passed the Law on Eliminating Violence Against Women, before there had been no specific law on domestic violence. The new law also includes provisions on harassment in public spaces and economic discrimination. It also abolished “
marry-your-rapist law
A marry-your-rapist law, marry-the-rapist law, or rape-marriage law is a rule of rape law in a jurisdiction under which a man who commits rape, sexual assault, statutory rape, abduction or other similar act is exonerated if he marries his fe ...
”.
Since September 2017, Tunisian Muslim women are allowed to marry non-Muslim men. The ban has been in place since 1973. Tunisian president
Beji Caid Essebsi
Beji Caid Essebsi (or es-Sebsi; , ; 29 November 1926 – 25 July 2019) was a Tunisian politician who served as the fourth president of Tunisia from 31 December 2014 until his death on 25 July 2019. Previously, he served as minister of foreign af ...
argued that the ban “violated Tunisia's constitution”, and that he wants to create "total, actual equality between men and women citizens in a progressive way". Under Islamic law, as per Quran, a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry outside the Islamic faith (a non-Muslim).
In addition to the afromentioned, Tunisian parliament is working on changing inheritance rights to make them equal for men and women. In addition to codifying equal inheritance, the Parliament advocates abolishing the death penalty,
decriminalizing homosexuality and annulling
dowries
A dowry is a payment such as land, property, money, livestock, or a commercial asset that is paid by the bride's (woman's) family to the groom (man) or his family at the time of marriage.
Dowry contrasts with the related concepts of bride price ...
. Such rapid changes provoked a backlash from Islamists, conservatives and even some moderates who view it as “an unwelcome departure from Islamic values.”
Civil state
A compromising notion of a ''Civil state'' that merges concepts of a ''
Secular state
is an idea pertaining to secularity, whereby a state is or purports to be officially neutral in matters of religion, supporting neither religion nor irreligion. A secular state claims to treat all its citizens equally regardless of relig ...
'' and an ''
Islamic state
The Islamic State (IS), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Daesh, is a transnational Salafi jihadism, Salafi jihadist organization and unrecognized quasi-state. IS ...
'' was suggested by
Rached Ghannouchi
Rached Ghannouchi (; born 22 June 1941), also spelled Rachid al-Ghannouchi or Rached el-Ghannouchi, is a Tunisian politician, the co-founder of the Ennahdha Party and serving as its intellectual leader. He was born Rashad Khriji ().
Ghannou ...
. Interviewed in Turkey in 2011, he said, "We need democracy and development in Tunisia and we strongly believe in the compatibility between Islam and democracy, between Islam and modernity. So we do not need secularism in Tunisia."
[İpek Yezdani]
No need for secularism in Tunisia: Ghannouchi
''Hürriyet Daily News'', December 24, 2011.
See also
*
Secularity
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin , or or ), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. The origins of secularity can be traced to the Bible itself. The concept was fleshed out through Christian hi ...
*
Secular state
is an idea pertaining to secularity, whereby a state is or purports to be officially neutral in matters of religion, supporting neither religion nor irreligion. A secular state claims to treat all its citizens equally regardless of relig ...
*
Islam and secularism
Secularism—that is, the separation of religion from civic affairs and the state—has been a controversial concept in Islamic political thought, owing in part to historical factors and in part to the ambiguity of the concept itself. In the Musli ...
*
Separation of church and state
The separation of church and state is a philosophical and Jurisprudence, jurisprudential concept for defining political distance in the relationship between religious organizations and the State (polity), state. Conceptually, the term refers to ...
References
{{reflist
External links
Islamism and secularism in Tunisia ''openDemocracy''
*
Tunisia
Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares m ...
Tunisia
Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares m ...