Nouri Gana, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California
Tunisian secularists are concentrating their campaigns on criticism of the Islamists. But it is their own discredited orthodoxy which needs to be challenged
The battle for the future of postrevolutionary Tunisia is being played out in the realm of cultural identity. Some Tunisians – the French-speaking elites, media and financial gurus, and others who are afraid of the resurgence of Islamism - have insisted that Tunisia's future hinges squarely on the continuation of the secularist project initiated by Bourguiba and exhausted by Ben Ali. Others – public figures, party leaders and intellectuals – have cautioned against the irrelevance of such debates.
The latest round in this so-called "culture war" occurred a couple of weeks ago when Nessma TV, a self-proclaimed independent TV channel, aired Marjane Satrapi's animated film Persepolis, dubbed into Tunisian dialect. Like the Danish cartoons, which represented the figure of the prophet Muhammad, the film represented what Muslims deem beyond representation, in this case the figure of God.
Many Tunisians remember the days when a walk to the mosque might get them into prison under Ben Ali, and they are becoming impatient that Islam continues to be attacked in postrevolutionary Tunisia. These attacks masquerade as attacks on salafism or, more often, on the Islamic Party An-Nahda (or Renaissance).
Some secular Tunisians, meanwhile, are panicking at what they perceive as an overnight return to Islam. Under Ben Ali these secularists were calling for the reduction of the volume of the call to prayer, or even a complete ban. Now they are faced with a situation in which the removal of Ben Ali's ban on the hijab has led to the revival and immediate spread of hijab-wearing.
Some see the return to Islam as the return of the repressed, but it is more accurate to say it is the redressing of the unaddressed. Pseudo-secularist media icons, intellectuals, critics, and academics have for decades remained silent on the ban of hijab, and the persecution of Islamists and mosque-goers under Bourguiba and Ben Ali.
They did so in the name of phoney slogans such as women's rights, secularism, and modernity, which masked and licensed the terroristic hold of Bourguiba and Ben Ali's regimes on Islamists and ordinary Muslims. With the ousting of Ben Ali, the crimes of their so-called secularist creed have been exposed; but rather than developing a critique of Bourguiba's and Ben Ali's brands of secularism and distancing themselves from their vicissitudes, they hold on manically to the profoundly flawed projects.
Most of the pseudo-secularists are members of the parties that have come into existence since the dissolution of Ben Ali's party, the RCD. Their search for credibility has involved an all-out campaign against the parties which win credibility from their historical opposition to both Bourguiba and Ben Ali – particularly the Congress for the Republic (CPR), the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party (PCOT) and the Renaissance Party (An-Nahda).
An-Nahda is a major player in the current political scene in Tunisia and is expected to carry a good number of the 217 seats that will form the national constituent assembly to oversee the transition toward democracy. The party's popularity has excited the envy and anger of opponents who claim to stand for modernity, secularism and human rights. The Democratic Modernist Pole (El-Qutb), the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties (Ettakatol) and the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), the Homeland Party (El-Watan), and variations on them, have more or less found their raison d'être in their opposition to An-Nahda.
Perhaps the major problem with the electoral campaign so far, though, is that it has allowed questions of cultural identity, religion and secularism to override all the other important and thorny issues to do with the economy, unemployment, justice and political reconciliation.
Islamists have focused on their past histories of struggle and have insisted on their progressive civic agenda as well as on their preference for parliamentary democracy. Pseudo-secularists have been fixated on criticism of An-Nahda, all the while remaining reticent about, or oblivious to, the ideological underpinning of secularism.
The latest round in this so-called "culture war" occurred a couple of weeks ago when Nessma TV, a self-proclaimed independent TV channel, aired Marjane Satrapi's animated film Persepolis, dubbed into Tunisian dialect. Like the Danish cartoons, which represented the figure of the prophet Muhammad, the film represented what Muslims deem beyond representation, in this case the figure of God.
Many Tunisians remember the days when a walk to the mosque might get them into prison under Ben Ali, and they are becoming impatient that Islam continues to be attacked in postrevolutionary Tunisia. These attacks masquerade as attacks on salafism or, more often, on the Islamic Party An-Nahda (or Renaissance).
Some secular Tunisians, meanwhile, are panicking at what they perceive as an overnight return to Islam. Under Ben Ali these secularists were calling for the reduction of the volume of the call to prayer, or even a complete ban. Now they are faced with a situation in which the removal of Ben Ali's ban on the hijab has led to the revival and immediate spread of hijab-wearing.
Some see the return to Islam as the return of the repressed, but it is more accurate to say it is the redressing of the unaddressed. Pseudo-secularist media icons, intellectuals, critics, and academics have for decades remained silent on the ban of hijab, and the persecution of Islamists and mosque-goers under Bourguiba and Ben Ali.
They did so in the name of phoney slogans such as women's rights, secularism, and modernity, which masked and licensed the terroristic hold of Bourguiba and Ben Ali's regimes on Islamists and ordinary Muslims. With the ousting of Ben Ali, the crimes of their so-called secularist creed have been exposed; but rather than developing a critique of Bourguiba's and Ben Ali's brands of secularism and distancing themselves from their vicissitudes, they hold on manically to the profoundly flawed projects.
Most of the pseudo-secularists are members of the parties that have come into existence since the dissolution of Ben Ali's party, the RCD. Their search for credibility has involved an all-out campaign against the parties which win credibility from their historical opposition to both Bourguiba and Ben Ali – particularly the Congress for the Republic (CPR), the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party (PCOT) and the Renaissance Party (An-Nahda).
An-Nahda is a major player in the current political scene in Tunisia and is expected to carry a good number of the 217 seats that will form the national constituent assembly to oversee the transition toward democracy. The party's popularity has excited the envy and anger of opponents who claim to stand for modernity, secularism and human rights. The Democratic Modernist Pole (El-Qutb), the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties (Ettakatol) and the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), the Homeland Party (El-Watan), and variations on them, have more or less found their raison d'être in their opposition to An-Nahda.
Perhaps the major problem with the electoral campaign so far, though, is that it has allowed questions of cultural identity, religion and secularism to override all the other important and thorny issues to do with the economy, unemployment, justice and political reconciliation.
Islamists have focused on their past histories of struggle and have insisted on their progressive civic agenda as well as on their preference for parliamentary democracy. Pseudo-secularists have been fixated on criticism of An-Nahda, all the while remaining reticent about, or oblivious to, the ideological underpinning of secularism.
A critique of Tunisian secularism itself, however, could not be more timely, as its complicity with the old regime of Ben Ali and French cultural imperialism has become an everyday Tunisian reality.
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