26 décembre 2001

about,

They have deprived me from looking Muslim,

They have deprived me from being called a sister,

They have deprived me from walking chaste,

But they will never deprive me of praying in my heart.

In 1930, a young Tunisian Islamic scholar at the Zeitouna mosque university, published a book under the Arabic title, Im’raatouna fi Sharia w’ Almujtamaa– Our Woman In the Islamic Law and society–, in whichhe deplorably laments the miserable conditions in which Arab women have been living for centuries in the name of Islam. Many condemned the book and attempted to stop its publication. However, other young Islamic reformists saw in it an honest attempt to regulate the status of women, as Islam really meant it to be Our woman in Islamic Law and society is a book that examines the conditions of women in Muslim society throughout the three opening decades of the twentieth century. Tahar Haddad comes up with a thorough argumentation, necessary to demonstrate the neglected numerous rights that Islam permits to women, which  society has forbidden. Starting from Islam’s obligation of education to both men and women, Tahar Haddad urged women to struggle for education as a  first step towards their emancipation from the prison   of society. It is ultimately society that suffers if half of its population hides in darkness, ignorance,and neglect.

Tahar Haddad had successfully and convincingly depicted the plight of Tunisian women with a strong potential to change and advance. In all the sectors of life, he expounded with clarity the rights of women that society has deprived them from. His courage to expose the discrepancy between what Islam accords to  women in terms of education, heritage, marriage, and  economy.

In commenting on the place of Tahar Haddad in the history of modern Tunisia, Richard H. Curtisstates: “The roots of Tunisia’s pioneering role in women’s affairs reach back to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was then tat a modernizing Islamic reformer, Tahar Haddad, a scholar of Tunisia’s Great Mosque of the Zeitouna called for freeing women from all of their traditional bonds. He advocated formal education for women and maintained that over many years Islam had been distorted and misinterpreted to such an extent that women no longer were aware of the legitimate advantages they could epact.” (34) In response to Tahar Haddad ‘s call to adjust the status of women to Islamic law, the first Tunisian women association was established by a group of beldi women under the name L’Association Tunisienne Des Femmes Musulmanes. This association helped young Muslim women in education and vocation, encouraged them to learn some professional skills, and established the first ground for Tunisian women’s involvement in the struggle of independence.  The westernized post-independence government into L`Union Nationale des Femmes de Tunisie converted this association.

However, it was not until 1956, when the first Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba introduced what many observers see as the most controversial legal documentation of women rights in the Muslim world, Le Code des Statues Personnel, the code of Personal status in 13 august 1956, just five months after the independence, under the auspice of rewarding Tunisian women who participated in the liberation of the country. Tunisian women had been an important force in the fight for independence. They took advantage of colonial prejudice and miscalculation of the role of Muslim women and their supposed lack of political motivation. The French, who followed a colonial strategic policy toward Muslim Maghrebine women, endeavored to gain Tunisian women’s support through the discursive allure of western liberalism and freedom. The French colonizer did their best to encourage Arab women to unveil and enter French schools. In this context, post-colonial critic Ania Loomba, in her discussion of Franz Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled”, tells us: For the colonizer unveiling the Arab women becomes an obsession. The veil becomes a symbol of colonial frustration for it lets the woman gaze upon the world while shielding her from prying eyes. The colonial struggle becomes a sort of war of the veils because to   the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonizer opposes the cult of the veil. (Colonialism, Postcolonialism, 193)

Tunisian veiled women, however, were significantly, active after the repression of Distour militants in 1938, holding secret meetings in traditional female meeting places, such as hamams (public baths), Zaouias(Islamic shrines). They participated in acts of sabotage and provided enormous logistic help for Fellagas (militants), particularly in the south of the country.

With the independence, there was a great consensus on the efficiency of Tunisian women in the rally for independence. However, Bourguiba insisted on rewarding them in his radical secular way, through creating a legal document that went beyond the expectations of Islamic reformists like Tahar Haddad. In fact for many Tunisian the code of Personal status was not just daring, but revolutionary in a Muslim country. At a stroke, it abolished polygamy and introduced a formal court procedure for divorce, which, for the first time, could be initiated by a wife as well as a husband, and it set a minimum age for marriage, which from then on required the bride’s consent. No longer could Tunisian men marry up to four wives, nor divorce by simple repudiation. Thus, Tunisia became the first Muslim Arab country to prohibit polygamy, since it was Turkey the first Muslim country to do so.Other radical measures followed Bourguiba’s new law. He encouraged the function of the Union des Femmes de Tunisie (UNFT) to westernize Tunisian women The UNFT’s main achievement was to educate illiterate women in their new rights, set up kindergartens and promote female education and work opportunities. In addition a continuing policy of birth control was introduced in 1965, and abortion was legalized in 1967. Not surprisingly all this took a lot longer to take effect than to implement, particularly among the religious authority. It was even received with contention from a huge number of conservative women in many parts of the country. Such women didn’t seize their new rights with any great fervor. A few years after the introduction of women’s suffrage, statistics showed that the number of women’s registration for elections-which unfortunately were never pluralistic and democratic under the one-party political system and life-long presidency- had declined. For rural and non-coast women, in particular, opportunities of education and work were scarce.

With the 1987’s ‘peaceful’ Coup d`etat, known in Tunisia as Al-A’hd El Jadid (the New Era), Zine el Abidine Ben Ali took power and became the second president of Post-independence Tunisia. From the very beginning of his rule, he made it very clear that he would consolidate the several rights that Tunisian women have procured since the independence, yet in accordance with Islamic law and tradition. Among the prominent decisions he made at the beginning of his term was the creation of an official ministry fully devoted to enhance the status of women. The Ministry Of Women and family became the first Arab and Muslim ministry of women. This ministry has succeeded in creating many associations and centers for women such as L CREDIF (the center for studies, research, documentation, and information on women). This prominent institution has carried out researches and gathered data that helped the evaluation of the social, economic, conditions of Tunisian women and North African women.To endorse women’s rights in the civil domain president Ben Ali ordered new amendments to the constitutions that officially announced the equality of women and men in rights and duties. These amendments were made to the code of nationality, code of labor, and the penal code. To put it in the words of the Tunisian political discourse, Tunisian women do enjoy a legislative equality with men that not only supersedes all other Arab and Muslim countries, but many Western countries, among them, France. As it can be easily discerned Tunisia has been the most progressive Arab, Muslim country in the Post-Colonial era in adopting a policy to boost women’s rights in all the sectors. Many observers have been fascinated by what the two post-independence governments have realized for women. Tunisia has received a huge financial help from international organizations, has become one of the most famous country in organization of conferences on women rights in the Muslim world. This success makes all of us proud and happy for our mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, friends, mates, and daughters. Behind this blue sky, however, lies an excruciating reality that, unfortunately, many international observers have always forgotten- until, fortunately, very recently. Inside the Arab-Muslim country that has been the most progressive in women rights, hundred of thousands of women have been tortured, abused, and excluded, simply because they have refused to identify their ideology with the governmental discourse. In a totalitarian one-party system  “democracy”, women rights cannot go without a democratic space, without human rights, without the freedom of speech, without the freedom of associations, and without the freedom of religious practice.

With Ben Ali’s presidency, women’s rights have turned out into a discourse of the government. It has become an “ideological State Apparatus”, if one quotes Louis Althusser, whose sole goal is the consolidation of the sate inside and outside. Inside, it has become the ideological weapon to exclude the once thriving and popular Islamist opposition. State feminism has become a reality in Tunisia, a very dangerous game that has not only had its negative impact on human rights but also on a great sector of women who either politically identify themselves as Islamists, or, simply as true Muslims.

How decisive Tunisian women have really been in achieving the nationally and internationally advertised status of equality, at least legislatively speaking, is a debatable question. Its answer might lead us to detect the real motifs behind the post-independence governmental rally for women rights. Many political observers have stressed the fact that neither Bourguiba, nor Ben Ali has innocently adopted women emancipation from a personal rush conviction of the equality of women. Bourguiba’s rush to legalize the Code of Personal Status in August 1956 was also a subtle political decision to contain the power of Tunisian post-colonial religious conservatism, which was instrumental in the struggle of independence; the Destour Party and the leadership of Sheikh Abdelaziz Thalbi. By giving women the rights to vote, Bourguiba gained currency among a considerable number of Tunisian women, a strategy he had used to silence the growing opposition of conservatism. Throughout this time, Bourguiba, who used to encourage women to veil during the war of independence, rallied to dissuade them from wearing the veil. He used various unjust methods; including favoring unveiled women and providing them with huge privileges in education, jobs, and some political positions. Unveiled faces were given a modeling example in his westernized aristocratic wife Wassila Bourguiba, to whom he married in 1955 after his first marriage to a French lady ended in a divorce. Wassila presided over the Union National Des femmes Tunisienne and became the government’s model for the westernization of Tunisian women. During her presidency of the Union Nationale Des Femmes de Tunisie, Wassila Bourguiba grappled to endorse the political and cultural discourse of her tyrannical husband. The UNFT became the most important political agency during Bourguiba’s rule. In this context Laurie A. Brand puts it: The UNFT was only one of the constituent structures of Bourguiba’s one-party state, a monolithic entity that attempted, through a series of subordinate institutions, to channel (and control) popular political participation. Most fundamentally, membership in the UNFT required prior membership in the P.S.D (Parti Socialiste Destourin). (Women, the State, and Political Liberalization, 237) However, this process of westernizing Tunisian women took a lot longer to take effect not only among the lower and poorer classes– as the government would contend– but also among highly educated Muslim women, who– although supported many revolutionary decisions in what concerns education and work from a full conviction that all of these rights are accorded to them by Islam– strongly opposed the westernization of Tunisian women and identified themselves with what is known in The Arab and Muslim world as Islamic Feminists.

Although, it seems clear that Bourguiba manipulated the status of women to consolidate his thirty-year rule, many Tunisians consider him a key figure in Tunisian women’s emancipation. However, it is with Ben Ali’s presidency that the concept of state feminism has become amore and more controversial. State feminism in the Tunisian context might be defined as the full control of the discourse of women’s rights by the political agency, particularly through the governing party Le Rassemblement constitutionel Democratique. This latter, monopolizes the discourse of women emancipation in through fully controlling all women’s associations, whose members must be members of the party. It is controversial since, on one hand, women, according to the political discourse of the government, are enjoying a status that no other Arab or Muslim women dream of. On the other hand, the reality shows us that thousands of women are the victims of the totalitarianism and oppressions of the government. This oppression has led to the torture of thousands of Tunisian women, who are caught in the conflict between the government and the opposition. The case is both equally suggestive of thousands of Tunisian women who are the wives, sisters, mothers, relatives, of members and political sympathizers of Islamist party, Annahda (The Renaissance) in Tunisia and more thousands of practicing Muslim women. Post-1987 state feminism, under the full ideological control of the government, has claimed women’s rights as the State’s affair, a party affair. The government through the R.C.D has completely excluded any other movement, be it political, or, social, from including women’s rights in their agendas. With the systematic oppression of the Islamic and Islamist opposition since the early nineties, hundred of thousands of Tunisian women have become the victims of the government’s oppression. Tunisian police has been targeting, not only Islamist activists and militants, but also their wives, sisters, mothers, and relatives, as a political weapon to subdue them, and contain their opposition. In this context Louisa Toscane and Olfa Lamloum write:

It is difficult to evaluate the exact number of Tunisian women suffering from repression, living in terror; many of them are afraid, or ashamed, of testifying. Amnesty International estimates that there are several thousands of such women. What they nearly have in common is that they are Islamists and related to Islamists, and considered, by that token, to hold valuable in formations and to be useful means of putting pressures on the prisoners and exiles. Sometimes they are persecuted simply for having contributed certain humanitarian groups to inform them the arrest or detention of friends or relatives. (Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1998) To exclude women identified as either Islamist, or wives to Islamists from the public life, Ben Ali passed an official, article that prohibited women from wearing Hijab (scarf) the traditional Islamic wearing. As a result, thousands of women and young girls were expelled from jobs and schools. The military cleansing of Islamists has culminated in thousands of compulsory divorces, where women were obliged, by the ‘judicial’ authorities to divorce their exiled husbands. The systematic persecution against Islamist women has terrified many international women’s and human rights movements. Indeed, many of them with cooperation of Amnesty international have published in their webs many horrible cases of torture against Tunisian women. For instance, one of the wives of a famous Islamist Tunisian leader narrates: They took me to the ministry of Interior, they told me to take off my headscarf. Then, they said” Take off your dress” as I refused, they tore it off and tore off my underwear except my underpants, they throw me on a mattress, took off a stick and beat and insulted me. I was kept for four days. The following day, they also brought my brother and I was only wearing my under pants. I screamed and shouted. They threw a bucket of water over me…(Amnesty International) Oppressed Tunisian women and the struggle for Islam is, unfortunately, a forgotten narrative in the overall narratives of oppression in our beloved Al-Khadra.

Ahlam. B

Sousse, Tunisia