Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion

[FarCenter]

The challenges before Tunisia’s year-old revolution are immense — righting an ailing economy, drafting a new constitution and recovering from decades of dictatorship that cauterized civic life. But in the first months of a coalition government led by the Ennahda Party, seen as one of the most pragmatic of the region’s Islamist movements, the most emotional of struggles has surged to the forefront: a fight over the identity of an Arab and Muslim society that its authoritarian leaders had always cast as adamantly secular.

The popular revolts that began to sweep across the Middle East one year ago have forced societies like Tunisia’s, removed from the grip of authoritarian leaders and celebrating an imagined unity, to confront their own complexity. The aftermath has brought elections in Egypt and Tunisia as well as more decisive Islamist influence in Morocco, Libya and, perhaps, Syria. The upheaval has given competing Islamist movements a chance to exert influence and define themselves locally and on the world stage. It has also given rise to fears, where people in places like Tunis, a seaside metropolis proud of its cosmopolitanism, worry about what a revolution they embraced might unleash.

An opposition newspaper has warned darkly of puritanical Islamists declaring their own fief in some backwater town. Protests convulsed a university in Tunis over its refusal to let female students take examinations while wearing veils that concealed their faces. Then there is the trial Mr. Redissi attended on Jan. 23, of a television director who faces as many as five years in prison for broadcasting the French animated movie “Persepolis,” which contains a brief scene depicting God that many here have deemed blasphemous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/world/africa/tunisia-navigates-a-democratic-path-tinged-with-religion.html

[pampango]

1. As Juan Cole said the Arab Spring has not created "Swedens" in the Arab world, BUT

it has created transitions to what can be a better and freer life.

http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/sharp-elbowed-politics-in-the-new-arab-world.html

The new Arab world created by the people power movements of 2011 is not suddenly Sweden. No one should have expected it to be. The Arab world had been stuck in a stagnating rut, of dictatorship, family cartels, embezzlement, corruption, and stagnation. Where economic growth of 5% a year began being reported, as in Tunisia or Egypt, it was either a lie or was mostly captured by a small economic elite, the Arab 1%.

What began in some of these countries in 2011 was a transition, a transition that activists hoped would be toward regular, free and fair parliamentary elections and ways for students, workers, office workers, women, religious activists, and religious minorities to have an impact on policy. None of these things would have been possible in the least under the old regimes. There was no hope. Now there is hope but no certitude.

The transitions may fail. They involve politics, the working of social conflict among large social groups into political speeches, elections and policies. Sometimes a democratic transition begins and stalls out. Sometimes it is incomplete (one thinks of Russia). Sometimes it remains incomplete for a long time. Sometimes dictatorship returns (Ukraine?).

Those who throw up their hands over the rise of Muslim religious parties in Egypt or the continued instability in Libya are not looking at what has happened as a set of processes. If anything good came out of the uprisings of 2011 it is precisely this flux, this opening toward possibilities, this politics. Because in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt or Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya there was no politics of an ordinary sort, only secret police and massive embezzlement and arbitrary arrest and torture.

[tabatha]

2. Well, we have our own backwater conservatives, e.g. Mike Lee, and the list goes on.