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Steps toward equality are being made in the realm of employment and wages. In Europe, a man is still paid more than a woman for the same work. Maybe Tunisia will set an example by upsetting the norm and by getting rid of prejudices and archaism.

Equal rights between men and women are precisely what the Islamists cannot accept. It’s because in politics what lies behind the use of religion is the fear of women, fear of the liberated woman’s sexuality, fear that the man may lose the supremacy that some [Koranic] verses attribute to him. Religious fundamentalism is obsessed with sex. This is why a man seeks to veil a woman whether she is his wife, sister, or mother. He must hide her, make her invisible. He must suffocate her desire because all the problems of society arise, according to the fundamentalists, from women’s liberation. Fundamentalists criticize the West where they believe liberalization of morals has caused the disintegration of the family.

The struggle for the liberation of the Tunisian man and woman doesn’t date from yesterday. Admittedly, it was the former President Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) who launched in the sixties the program for the liberation of Tunisian society. He was the first in the Arab world to implement a progressive family code. The Tunisian personal status code [equality between women and men], which dates from August 13, 1956, was an essential step toward modernity. Then came an attempted secularization of society. Bourguiba had the courage to appear on television one day during Ramadan and say, while drinking a glass of orange juice, that “Tunisia is fighting for its economic development. Ramadan gets in the way of this fight. During war, soldiers are allowed to eat and drink. Consider that we are at war for development.” Those who refused to renounce their religious beliefs were free to practice their faith. The others were free to eat and drink publicly. It was a historic decision. Today, such a decision would cause violent demonstrations. Religion has become too important in people’s lives because of frustration and political deception. This is why the new Tunisian Constitution marks an important date in the history of a spring that almost turned into a winter nightmare. But everything hasn’t played out yet. It is also necessary that the legislative and presidential elections confirm this progress at the polls. The game is not over yet. The forces of regression are not disarmed. Salafis have not disappeared from the Tunisian landscape, and, occasionally, they reappear and attack the police or citizens who live freely. Their movement, “Ansar al Sharia” (“Defenders of Sharia”), led by a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, the Tunisian Abu Iyade, was classified by the government as a “terrorist organization.”

If Tunisia consolidates the changes in the constitution and manages to put them into practice, the entire Arab world will condemn the country — especially its neighbor Algeria, which has the most retrograde family code in the Maghreb. As for Morocco, although it amended its personal status code, it did not dare touch the Sharia inheritance law.

Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, follow the Wahhabi belief, which is a rigid and retrograde dogma dating from the eighteenth century. Today, Saudi women fight for the right to drive a car; their country continues to apply the Sharia law. The hypocritical West likes to sign lucrative contracts with these countries and pretends not to know that it deals with champions of retrograde practices. We will see in the near future how these countries react to the historical turning point of Tunisia, an exceptional nation that has embraced the path of secularism. Tunisia’s reforms do not reject religion, but separate the public and private spheres where people are free to believe or not to believe. The new Tunisian Constitution also prohibits charges of apostasy. In Egypt, for example, citizens who had an unorthodox reading of the Koran could be sentenced to death. These citizens were condemned as apostates whose crime was unpardonable from the Islamic point of view.

This was the case for the Egyptian historian Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2000), whom the Egyptian court pursued for proposing a critical reading of Islamic texts. He was declared an apostate by the court, which annulled his marriage to a Muslim woman. (An apostate is considered someone who leaves the house of Islam; thus, a Muslim woman cannot be the wife of a non-Muslim.) Abu Zayd and his wife exiled themselves and settled in the Netherlands, where he died in 2000. He is often cited as an example of an intellectual who dared promote modern and critical thinking in Islam. Any critical interpretation of religion is severely punished, at least by the University of Al Azhar in Cairo.

Paris, 2015

By Fire 1

Returning home from the cemetery where he just buried his father, Mohamed felt as though the burden he carried had become heavier. He was bent, aged, and walked slowly. He had just turned thirty. Never celebrated his birthday. The years went by and they were all alike. Poverty, deprivation, and a vague resignation imbued his life with a sadness that had, over time, come to seem natural. Like his father, he never complained. He was not a fatalist, or even religious.

His father’s death turned his life upside down. He was the eldest, and was thus responsible now for the family. Three brothers and two sisters. A diabetic mother, but not yet an invalid. Mohamed’s latest job hunt, like many before, had yielded nothing. Now he was nervous. It wasn’t a question of being lucky or unlucky. It was more, he said, a problem of injustice, linked to the misfortune of being born poor. He was not going to sit in front of the Finance Ministry’s headquarters to protest unemployment any longer. Some formerly unemployed graduates had found work, but he wasn’t one of them. His degree in history didn’t interest anyone. He could have taught, but the Ministry of National Education wasn’t hiring anymore.

He dug out his old schoolbag, hidden in the linen closet, emptied it of all its papers and documents, including his diploma, made a small pile in the sink, and burned everything. He watched the flames consume the words, and by chance they burned everything but his name and his date of birth. With a piece of wood, he rekindled the fire until all had turned to ash. His mother, alerted by the smell, rushed in:

“You’ve gone crazy! How will burning your diploma help anything? Now how are you going to apply for a teaching position? Three years gone up in smoke!”

Without a word, he collected the ashes, threw them into the trash, cleaned the sink, washed his hands, and then left. He was calm. He had no desire to speak about or to justify his action. What was the use of hanging on to a piece of paper that wasn’t going to get him anywhere? His face remained inscrutable. His mother reminded him to pick up her medicine. The pharmacist would give it to him on credit, she said.

Later, he sat on a bench and stared at a trail of ants on the ground. He asked a boy who sold loose cigarettes for one, lit it, and smoked slowly. The ants had deposited their loads and now headed back to where they had come from.

2

His mind was made up: he would take over his father’s cart. It was in bad shape. He would have to repair the wheels, replace a rotten plank, have the weighing scale recalibrated, and get in touch with Bouchaïb, the fruit and vegetable supplier.

Where would he find the money? His mother had sold all her jewelry when his father became ill, and she had nothing left. Mohamed had heard about “microcredit.” He looked into it, and was given a thick stack of forms to fill out. He was quickly discouraged by all the paperwork. He began to regret having burned his diploma.