The rise of religious fundamentalism in post-revolution Tunisia: should we fear for democracy and the supremacy of law?

Yassine Boukhedouni

Back from a trip to Tunisia in January 2012, Robert Fisk, a famous journalist for The Independent, had a stark view of what Tunisians are going through one year after their revolution for dignity and the fall of Ben Ali’s dictatorship. In addition to a high youth unemployment rate (800 000 unemployed on an active population of 3,5 million), inexistent growth, something normal in a country in transition where 80 percent of international firms have left for fairer skies, Fisk discovered a new and worrying face of the country.

Indeed, the election of an Islamist majority in Parliament, with 40 percent of the seats won by the Ennahda movement, and above all the rise of a fundamentalist religious current called Salafism, have allowed for the emergence of social intolerance, leading in various cases to violence and terror, both unknown realities for Tunisian men and women, even during the Ben Ali dictatorship.

Islamists and Salafists undeniably bore the brunt of the repression during the Ben Ali years. Now, after decades of imprisonment, torture and prohibition of political and associative work, both currents find in the new Tunisia a favorable breeding ground for their behaviors, which are out of step with the country’s pluri-secular values and history.

For instance, in early 2012, the northern city of Sejnane was transformed into a Salafi Emirate where its adherents spread terror and imposed their law, according to El Maghreb, a newspaper. For the Salafis, who disagree vehemently with the Ennahda movement, since Tunisia is now free and has gone back to Islamism, it falls unto them to apply religion, even if it implies spreading fear and anarchy and intimidating people because of a sin or another.

That’s how it’s turned out in that northern Tunisian town, where the absence of the State and of the security forces has allowed a few Salafis to apply religious laws to sinners. Some of them, you see, had drunk alcohol.

Far from Sejnane, 160 km west of Tunis, in Jandouba, the Salafis went too far in defiance of the Tunisian authorities. Indeed, for them, the modern nation-state doesn’t exist. They’d rather have an Islamic Caliphate with a strictly interpreted shari’a as the law of the land. On Thursday February 23rd of 2012, they set a police station on fire after the arrest of one of their members.

Here’s what the general information daily 20 minutes reported: “Security forces are chasing after some 200 Salafis armed with swords and sticks after an exchange of Molotov cocktails and tear gas grenades”, said Omar Inoubli, an inhabitant of Jandouba. “Those groups set fire to a police station. Mosque speakers are blaring forth calls to Jihad (holy war)”, he adds.

In Jandouba, Sejnane and elsewhere, Salafis have no purpose but to create new social and political tensions Tunisia hardly needs, above all in the crucial historical step the country’s going through. Imposing a stern lifestyle, with male and female clothing imported straight from the Arabian Peninsula or the Persian Gulf, won’t help Tunisia at all go beyond the crisis it’s living, nor will it help further the cause of Islam and its message Salafis pretend to serve.

Along with the economic crisis, the rise of religious fundamentalism in Tunisia must be understood as the worst threat to the supremacy of law for which Tunisians fought their revolution, and to their newly acquired liberties.