Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

dismiss the question as a non-issue. Though both secularists and Islamists acknowledge
that women’s rights will not form a large part of the formal debate within institutional
walls as the constitution is written and government is created, liberals express a fear that
women’s rights will be repealed through inaction in the face of conservative elements,
who, they believe, aim to change society slowly but surely.
The questions, then, are: what is causing the discrepancy between the claims of
liberals who insist that women’s rights are at risk and those of conservatives that
women’s rights are solidified and will never be touched? What is causing such anxiety
on the part of the left? In evaluating the historical underpinnings of the debate on
women’s rights and looking at the major issues in which women’s rights play a role—
notably, the debate about the niqab in universities—answers to such questions can be
discerned and recommendations for improvement can be made.
The Importance of History
In most countries’ histories, the path towards greater freedom for women occurred
through grassroots movements spear-headed by women themselves and rooted in the
people as opposed to the state. In Tunisia, the opposite has been the case: forming the
center of the struggle between secular dictators and an Islamist opposition party, women
have relied on the unilateral power of the state to obtain incremental rights. Indeed,
[Bourguiba’s] issuance of the CPS had less to do with feminism than with
the president’s desire to eliminate traditions and practices that he felt
obstructed his modernizing program…At all times Bourguiba saw himself
and himself alone as the liberator of Tunisian women, as the initiator of all
projects in this domain. If women made any additional demands, they
were viewed as ungrateful. (Brand 1998, 180)
Though Ben Ali instituted important legal reforms in the areas of divorce, custody rights,
education and employment, his view was the same; he was famous for his position of
“the code, but nothing but the code”—in other words, reform would not come without his
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