Tunisia's transition and the twin tolerations

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 89-103

  Stepan, Alfred ^a  

^a Columbia's Center for the Study of Democracy ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84859990723     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2012.0034     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Alfred Stepan, "Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic Regimes," in Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114-44.
2. John Rawls once went so far as to assert that, in the name of arriving at an "overlapping consensus," religious arguments should be "taken off the public agenda."
3. See his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 151-54.
4. Charles Taylor, in his book A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), has explained the complex historical processes that led the North Atlantic world to embrace the idea that a mostly religion-free "exclusive humanism" is the only ground upon which public policies can be designed and defended. See especially 19-21, 26-28, 642, and 674.
5. See Alfred Stepan, "The World's Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the 'Twin Tolerations,'" in Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213-53.
6. A shorter and less heavily annotated version of this essay appeared as "Religion, Democracy, and the 'Twin Tolerations,'" Journal of Democracy 11 (October 2000): 37-57.
7. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1.
8. The actual outcome of the elections unfortunately did not produce the hoped-for parity. Although all parties ran slates that were 50 percent female, most of them (with the notable exception of Ennahda) failed to place any women's names first. In many constituencies, only a single candidate from the party won, and thus many more men than women won seats. Nevertheless, about a quarter of the members of the Constituent Assembly are women.
9. My use of the "Eighteenth Brumaire"-a term made famous by Karl Marx's 1852 work The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon-is a reference to the date on the French Revolutionary calendar (9 November 1799) when Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup against the Directory and made himself a military dictator. Tensions between different Revolutionary factions had led some of them to make deals with Napoleon (in hopes of using him for their own ends) that created the opening for him to seize power.
10. For reasons of length, this essay focuses on Tunisia, but I present substantial evidence for my assertion about Egypt in my "The Recurrent Temptation to Abdicate to the Military in Egypt," 13 January 2012, at http://blog.freedomhouse.org/weblog/2012/01/two-perspectives-on-egypts-transition.html.
11. Author's interview with Rachid Ghannouchi, Tunis, 26 March 2011.
12. Since about 1980, Ghannouchi (who was born in 1941) has stressed the need for much greater equality of men and women within Islam. See Azzam S. Tamimi, Rachid Ghannouchi: A Democrat Within Islamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
13. Author's interview with Rachid Ghannouchi and Hamadi Jebali, Tunis, 30 May 2011.
14. I received a copy of the "Appel de Tunis de 17 juin 2003," with signers' names and affiliations listed, from several of those who took part in the meetings that produced it. A version in French is now available at www.cprtunisie.net/spip.php?article30. Participants included the current presidents of the CPR, Ettakatol, and the PDP. Ennahda's two top leaders were, respectively, in jail and unable to obtain a French visa, so the Islamist movement was represented by the head of its Political Bureau.
15. Tunisia's family code, widely agreed to be the Arab world's most progressive, was decreed by President Habib Bourguiba in 1956. It abolishes polygamy; requires mutual consent before marriage; entitles women to start divorce proceedings and to enjoy an equal division of goods after divorce; forbids husbands from unilaterally ending their marriages; and raises the minimum marriage age for girls. In 1966, Bourguiba's government launched a family-planning program that included free birth-control pills and legal abortion.
16. I received a copy of this document on 11 November 2011 while visiting the Tunis headquarters of the most secular party in the current ruling coalition, Ettakatol. The person who gave it to me was one of the drafters, Zied Dooulotli. The Arabic-to-English translation is the work of Mostofa Henfy.
17. For example, see Maria Rose Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002).
18. On religious toleration in the Ottoman Empire, see Karen Barkey, An Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
19. For this estimate by Khaldun, see John D. Latham, "Towards a Study of Andalusian Immigration and Its Place in Tunisian History," Les Cahiers de Tunisie (1957): 203-52.
20. For the names of Jewish high officeholders and the posts that they held in Tunisia, see Latham, "Towards a Study of Andalusian Immigration," 216-20.
21. For the religious and secular reasons behind early abolition in Tunisia, see Roger Botte, Esclavages et abolitions en terres d'Islam (Brussels: André Versaille, 2010), 59-92.
22. See Jean-Pierre Filiu, The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprising (London: C. Hurst, 2011), 142.
23. Filiu, Arab Revolution.
24. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65.
25. For a picture of the cover, see Pensées de Tahar Haddad (Tunis: Snipe, 1993), 38. As early as 1904, the influential Sheik Thaalibi argued in his The Liberal Spirit of the Koran that a true reading of the Koran would lead to overdue political and social reforms.
26. Nathan J. Brown, Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 19.
27. These and other similar speeches are cited in Mark A. Tessler, "Political Change and the Religious Revival in Tunisia," Maghreb Review 5 (January-February 1980): 8-19.
28. Also see Lotfi Hajji, Bourguiba et l'lslam: Le politique et le religieux, trans. Shiem Bouzgarou Ben Ghachem (Tunis: Sud Editions, 2011).
29. Tessler, "Political Change and the Religious Revival in Tunisia," 10.
30. Author's interview with Samir Ben Amor, defense lawyer and secretary-general of the Ex-Prisoners' Association, Tunis, 29 May 2011.
31. See also Amnesty International, "Tunisia: Prolonged Incommunicado Detention and Torture," March 1992, MDE 30/004/1992.
32. This regime-orchestrated "double fear" served Ben Ali well. As one account noted: "Many secular democrats have been grudgingly complicit in Ben Ali's authoritarianism. [viewing it] as the lesser of two evils." Christopher Alexander, Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb (London: Routledge, 2010), 66.