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Abstract
The recent rise in Islamist-inspired women’s activism is posing challenges to the longstanding secular women’s movements in post-Ben Ali Tunisia. Starting from the conviction that cohesive, cross-class women’s coalitions are better suited to achieve gender justice for women of all walks of life, this article draws on the concept of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Chantal Mouffe) to understand how Tunisia’s women’s movements can deal with the new, multifaceted conflict in their ranks. Through a discussion of the ‘Dialogue of Tunisian Women’, the grounds for strategic coalition-building and ‘agonistic’ engagement between secular and Islamist women’s rights actors are illustrated.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of Ghent University – Koen Bogaert and Sami Zemni in particular – for their valuable insights.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Anne Emmanuelle Hassairi, member of the Steering Committee of ATFD, personal communication, 9 April 2014.
2. In contrast to the ‘secular’ policies under presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali, which did not necessarily separate religious from state institutions, the longstanding secular women’s movement adopts French secularism (laïcité) as one of its founding principles and advocates a strict separation of religion from politics. For a nuanced understanding of the political use of the term secularism in pre-uprising Tunisia, see McCarthy (Citation2014).
3. Khadidja Ben Hassen, Secretary General of AFTURD, personal communication, 8 April 2014.
4. The basic principles of ATFD can be found on the following link: http://femmesdemocrates.org.tn/nos-principes-atfd/. Although there is slowly emerging a more pragmatic branch of secular feminism in Tunisia - principally led by younger activists who do not necessarily advocate a strict separation between local or religious traditions and their feminist project - it is still the older generation of secular feminists who are the most influential and best organized. Therefore, this article principally focuses on these longstanding secular actors.
5. Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly (ANC), whose main task was to write a new constitution, has been replaced by the Assembly of the Representatives of the People (ARP) since the 2014 parliamentary elections.
6. Since this paper does not have as a goal the assessment or understanding of the feminist character of Tunisian Islamist women’s activism, I refrain from labelling the activism of Islamist women activists as feminist, especially since they generally reject the term themselves. Instead I adopt the more neutral term ‘women’s movements’ throughout the paper, except when an activist explicitely refers to him/herself as feminist. Although women’s movements are most often associated with feminist movements and the promotion of women’s rights, the term can also refer to movements that draw on – and possibly even seek to preserve – more traditional gender roles, like mothers’ movements and right-wing women’s groups (Krook and Childs, Citation2010: 5).
7. To a lesser extent and in less reproachful terms, newly established secular women’s associations also sometimes question their longstanding secular colleagues on this topic.
8. The work of Amina Wadud (Citation1999, 2009), Ziba Mir-Hosseini (Citation2003, 2006) and the later work by Fatima Mernissi (Citation1991), to name only a few, is illustrative of this approach of progressive Quran exegesis.
9. Although there are definitely parallels with Islamist women’s rights activists elsewhere in the region, I specifically focus on the Tunisian variety of Islamist women’s rights activism, given that Islamism can take many shapes (International Crisis Group, Citation2005). Tunisian Islamism, in which Tunisian Islamist-inspired women’s activism is embedded, is shaped by a complex mix of Tunisian post-colonial history and political Islam and is therefore different from, for example, Egyptian branches of Islamism.
10. Ikram Ben Said, Search For Common Ground (SFCG) Senior Programme Manager in charge of the Women’s Dialogue, personal communication, 10 June 2014.
11. Many Tunisians, not just Islamists, want to uphold the unequal inheritance laws that are still in place in the Personal Status Code. For secular women’s rights activists, however, equal inheritance is an important battle.
12. However, international organizations like UN Women, World Bank and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), for example, do fund some Islamist-inspired women’s associations.
13. Anne Emmanuelle Hassairi, member of the Steering Committee of ATFD, personal communication, 9 April 2014 and Faiza Skandrani, president of Egalité Parité, personal communication, 13 October 2014.
14. Ikram Ben Said, SFCG Senior Programme Manager in charge of the Women’s Dialogue, personal communication, 10 June 2014.
15. More generally, women’s political participation remains an area of concern for the women’s movements. Although not subject to the constitution’s parity commitment, Tunisia’s new government for example, active since February 2015, is far from gender-balanced: only three out of 27 ministers and five out of 14 state secretaries are women.
16. Bahri Baccouche, Tunisian lawyer, personal communication, 4 September 2012.
17. Dalenda Largueche, professor in history and former director of the Centre de Recherches, d’Etudes, de Documentation et d’Information (CREDIF), personal communication, 28 October 2014.
18. Molyneux (Citation1985) makes a distinction between associations with strategic gender interests and those with more practical gender interests. Whereas strategic interests deal with long-term efforts to challenge women’s subordination (e.g. legal rights, political empowerment), practical gender interests serve to ameliorate the immediate, material position of women (immediate necessities).
19. Habib Bourguiba prioritized the interests of the capital of Tunis and the coastal areas after his victory over main rival Salah Ben Youssef, who represented the voice of the south. The uprising, which not surprisingly started in Tunisia’s disadvantaged interior regions, sparked the hope for a new elite that would pay more attention to the south.
20. Some hold that Tunisia’s ‘natural’ identity (or la Tunisianité) is Islamic and Arabic, while others believe in a society project that is a continuation of Bourguiba’s legacy, which is rather based on quasi-secularism and French culture.
21. Hiba Ben Haj Khalifa, staff member of the Islamist women’s association Tounissiet, personal communication 20 October 2014 and Moufida Missaoui, staff member of ATFD, personal communication, 29 October 2014.
22. In 2003, the ATFD expressed its deep concern about the rising presence of veils in society and called upon the state to act against this symbol of ‘regression’ (Chouikha, Citation2005: 9).
23. The fact that the political forerunner of the Ennahdha party, the Movement of Islamic Tendency (MTI), also attempted to derail the women’s rights cause in the 1980s, further contributes to this feeling of mistrust. Although Tunisian Islamists accept the progressive Personal Status Code (CSP) today, which was promulgated under former President Bourguiba in 1956, their unconditional support has not always been guaranteed in the past. In 1985, the MTI explicitly called for a revision of the CSP on a press conference. This was the first time in the history of independent Tunisia that the Personal Status Code was under attack by a political movement (Borsali, Citation2012: 20).
24. This paper mainly focuses on the stance of leading and longstanding secular associations such as ATFD and AFTURD. Other, more recently established secular women’s associations sometimes adopt a less antagonistic position towards their Islamist counterparts.
25. When founded in the US in 1982, ‘Search For Common Ground’ originally attempted to facilitate co-operation between the Soviet Union and the US. SFCG is committed to transforming the way the world deals with conflict, through its slogan ‘understanding the differences, acting on commonalities’. The Women’s Dialogue fits well into this logic and was originally an idea of the Tunisian women’s rights activist Ikram Ben Said, who works for the SFCG section in Tunisia and who facilitated the dialogue.
26. Ikram Ben Said, SFCG Senior Programme Manager in charge of the Women’s Dialogue, personal communication, 10 June 2014.
27. For more information and an assessment of the effectiveness of the programme, see ‘The Women Dialogue Program Final Evaluation Report’ of Artur Bala, available at: https://www.sfcg.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Tunisia-The-Women-Dialogue-Program.pdf.
28. Fatma Cherif, staff member of the Islamist-inspired association Nisa Tounsiyat, personal communication, 5 May 2014.
29. This new, more veil-friendly stance has been adopted by ATFD since the popular uprising. Before the revolution, ATFD was generally a staunch opponent of the wearing of the veil. See note 22.
30. Moufida Missaoui, ATFD participant of the Women’s Dialogue, personal communication, 29 October 2014.
31. Anne Emmanuelle Hassairi, member of the Steering Committee of ATFD, personal communication, 9 April 2014.
32. In contrast to ATFD, however, AFTURD decided to stay in the Dialogue until the end.
33. Khadidja Ben Hassen, Secretary General of AFTURD, personal communication, 8 April 2014.
34. Anne Emmanuelle Hassairi, member of the Steering Committee of ATFD, 9 April 2014 and Khadidja Ben Hassen, Secretary General of AFTURD, personal communication, 8 April 2014.
35. Islamist women often perceive secular feminism as a non-authentic western import, while secular feminists criticize the alleged Qatari influence and funding of Tunisian Islamist associations.