Neo-Orientalizing the Tunisian Woman: The Geopolitics of Women's Rights in Post-2011 Tunisia

Abstract

Neo-Orientalizing the Tunisian Woman:The Geopolitics of Women's Rights in Post-2011 Tunisia Hajer ben Hadj Salem (bio) Introduction Since independence, Tunisia has been considered by international observers and scholars as a flagship for women's rights in the Muslim world. This image was enhanced during the popular uprisings of 2011 by the glittering public presence of predominantly uncovered Tunisian women who invaded the public space and occupied the frontlines to support nation-wide gender-blind demands for freedom, dignity, and for putting an end to socioeconomic and regional discrimination, of which they had been longstanding victims. As such, they took the world by storm, challenging Western received wisdoms about the status of women in Muslim societies and forced Western news sources and scholars to discuss the unprecedented role Tunisian women played in the protests, highlighting post-independence gender policies that vindicate Tunisia's uniqueness in the Muslim world. [End Page 40] However, this sense of celebrated exceptionalism was short-lived. Soon after the uprisings, Tunisian women, women's rights advocates, and scholars became weary of the political transition. Their worries became more acute as news stories of the Salafists intimidating unveiled women on the streets and attacking women's gatherings spread across the country, and as the power vacuum became infiltrated by returning political Islamist expats. Following the fall of the Ben Ali regime, the 1959 Constitution, which was born in the throes of the revolutionary Code of Personal Status (1956), was suspended. Capitalizing on this legal hiatus, these Islamist expats, defined by the West as "moderate Muslims,"1 unabashedly resumed their suspended war on women's rights and the CPS they had fought in the 1980s. The gloominess of that era was still engraved in the memories of women's rights activists and ordinary Tunisian women. It became more acute as these Islamists, unexpectedly, won the 2011 elections and dominated the National Constitutional Assembly. Helped by foreign media and decision makers, and an intricate network of sprawling foreign-funded NGOs, they marketed themselves as the "legitimate" political elite, upon whom fell the historical mission of writing a new constitution that would spell out the rights of all Tunisian citizens and set the institutional foundations of a promised "democratic republic." Since January 2011, a growing number of Western scholars and observers have fallen under the spell of the American centers of strategic studies and Western and Qatari media-marketed claims that the new Islamist "power elite" have mutated into custodians of women's rights and imbibed the tenets of democracy. They lost no opportunity to cast an Islamist halo on every political reform, which was fought for desperately by the non-Islamist political actors, including the Tunisian women's rights advocates, and grudgingly accepted by the Islamist leadership under Western pressure. Contrary to these claims and proceeding from a deep understanding of the Tunisian socio-cultural context, this article demonstrates the failure of the [End Page 41] so-called "electorally legitimate moderate Islamists" to set up the legal and institutional foundations of a societal project that builds on the historical assets of the postcolonial modernist state, including women's rights. It studies patterns of public activism channeled by Tunisian women's rights advocates to abort the multifaceted attempts of the so-called 'moderate Islamists' and their Islamist orbit to curtail bedrock birthrights of Tunisian women under the guise of reclaiming the lost-found Islamic identity of Tunisia. By delving into the way the Islamists concretely handled the women's rights issue and by unveiling the anti-women's rights stance of their celebrated female NCA representatives, this article demonstrates how the "moderate Islamists" used democratic processes to move toward theocratic rule, brandishing religion as a discursive and legal tool to justify the marginalization of women. It also argues that any move that has been made in the direction of democratization and enhancing women's rights has been the outcome of a protracted conflict between a culturally grounded and time-honored reformist flow, that has historically set Tunisia ahead of the countries of the MENA region in terms of Human Development Indicators, including women's rights, and a regressive transnational Islamist ebb that has historically dragged the country...