Women in Tunisia are Taking Action!

The Code of Personal Status (CPS) (Arabic: مجلة الأحوال الشخصية‎) is a series of progressive Tunisian laws aiming at the institution of equality between women and men in a number of areas. It was promulgated by beylical decree on August 13, 1956 and came into effect on January 1, 1957. This Code is one of the best known deeds of Habib Bourguiba, who was Prime Minister and later President.

He gave women a unique place in Tunisian society, notably abolishing polygamy, creating a judicial procedure for divorce and requiring marriage to be performed only in the event of the mutual consent of both parties. Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, did not challenge the Code and himself introduced modifications that reinforced it, in particular with the July 1993 amendment.

The feminist question is a recurring theme in Tunisia, more than in all the other countries of the Maghrib, and the country is from that point of view “atypical” of the region. It seems to affirm a distinctiveness which it has followed since the beylical period which, “on the eve of the institution of the French protectorate was going to engage in a process of reforms establishing its connection to society in a modern national perspective.”

Tahar Haddad – As early as 1868, Kheirridine Pasha wrote “The Surest Way to an Understanding of the State of Nations” in Arabic. This explained that the future of Islamic civilization depends on its modernization. In 1897 Shayk Muhammad Snoussi published “The Flower’s Blooming or a Study of Woman in Islam” in which he advocated the education of girls. Fifteen years later, Abdelaziz Thaalbi, Cesar Ben Attar and Haydi Sabai published “The Koran’s Liberal Spirit” which urges the education of girls and the removal of the veil. In 1930, Tahar Haddad, himself influenced by the reformist current begun in the Nineteenth Century by Kheirredine Pasha, Ibn Abi Dhiaf, Muhammad Snoussi, Salem Bouhageb, Mohamed Bayram V and other thinkers who all defended the concept of modernism, published “Our Women in Sharia and Society.” He demonstrated there the possibility of compatibility between Islam and modernity. The arguments he presented there were subsequently adopted by Bourguiba in his speeches.

Radhia Haddad, Tahar Haddad’s niece, wrote in her autobiography “Woman’s Talk” :
“On the eve of independence, the most ancient and the most blatant injustice was the condition of women.”

Although Haddad’s proposals were condemned in his time by conservatives, nearly all of his proposals were included in the drawing up of the Code, including obligatory consent for marriage, the establishment of a procedure for divorce and the abolishment of polygamy.

The failure of Haddad to bring into effect his wishes while alive is registered in Habib Bourguiba’s later success:

“He (Haddad) occupies an important place in the history of social and political ideas in Tunisia.”

In the same period Shayk Muhammad Fadl Ben Achour, who was mufti of Tunisia and rector of the University of Ez-Zitouna, issued a fatwa, result of a personal ijtihad. At the same time the reformist newspaper Ennahda published the poems of Aboul-Qacem Echebbi, who participated to a lesser extent than Haddad in the defence of the rights of women. In 1947, Muhammad Abdu’l Aziz Jait, former justice minister who was later opposed to the Code and author of a majallah codifying personal status and estate law, undertook an initial and timid effort to harmonize the doctrines of the Maliki and the Hanafi, majority in Tunisia, that ultimately had no result.

In November 1940, Muhammad Zarrouk founded the first francophone feminist magazine, Layla, which however ceased publication in July 1941, but whose name was taken up symbolically by Bashir Ben Ahmed who, on May 23, 1955, started a magazine “Layla Speaks to You”—later “Feminine Action”—in the fifth issue of his weekly “Action” (later “Africa Action” and finally “Young Action“).

Lacking women, absent from Tunisian press of the period, the magazine folded, but Ben Yahmed had made the acquaintance of Dorra Bouzid, then a student in Paris, and recruited her to relaunch the magazine. On June 13, 1955, Bouzid, then the magazine’s only woman, edited in its eighth issue an article signed with the pseudonym of Layla and entitled “Call For Emancipation Law.”

On the occasion of the promulgation of the Code, she wrote, on September 3, 1956 in a special double page of the 56th issue an article titled “Tunisian Women are Adults” with an editorial recalling the collaboration in its production of the two shayks Muhammad Abdu’l Aziz Jait and Muhammad Fadl Ben Achour.

In 1959, Safia Farhat and Bouzid co-founded the magazine Faiza, which, although it ceased publication in December 1969, remained famous in the Maghrib and more generally in Africa, as the first Arab-African feminine francophone magazine.

In 1985 he went further and ratified law 108 extending this ban to educational establishments.

Bourguiba retained much attention by calling the Hijab an “odious rag“.

These policies were further emphasized during ben Ali’s regime where crackdowns on females wearing the hijab was introduced. “Police outside schools and universities regularly forced students to remove headscarves before entering” stated one article.

In 2008, Amnesty International reported that women were forced to remove their hijab before being allowed into Schools, Universities, workplaces and some were even forced to remove it on the street.

The report goes further stating that scarfed women were denied entry to the Tunis International Book Fair and at times were taken to Police stations and made to sign a written commitment to stop wearing the Hijab.

The Association of Tunisian Democratic Women or ATFD, with funding from the United Nations Democracy Fund, has set up a monitoring centre to identify the kind of discrimination women in Tunisia suffered during uprisings in 2010.

Since the January 2011 revolution in Tunisia and protests across North Africa and the Middle East region (MENA) began, many Western news sources have published articles discussing the unprecedented role that Tunisian women played in the protests. Many of these articles highlight some of the secular freedoms instituted by Habib Bourguiba in 1956, such as access to higher education, the right to file for divorce, and certain job opportunities. In fact, he made these reforms while still declaring that Tunisia was an Islamic State. It is true that women in Tunisia have enjoyed these freedoms and rights, rights that are often denied to women in neighboring countries. However, Women in Tunisia live within an oscillating society that at times encourages strict abidance to Islamic law.

Prior to the 2011 revolution, Tunisia was notorious for anti-Hijab policies, although its population is 98% Muslim. The governments of both Ben Ali and Habib Bourguiba have pursued the eradication of public Islamic traditions, hence denying not only a basic Human Right of freedom of expression, but an essential Muslim practice. This debate reached its flux in 1981 when Habib Bourguiba ratified law no. 108, effectively banning Tunisian women from wearing hijab in state offices.

TUNIS, Tunisia —

Some 200 Tunisian women have demonstrated in downtown Tunis in defense of their rights, following the election victory of an Islamist party. Read more

“Some of those who refused were assaulted by police officers”

This may not be the way to protest >>> or do Women need to Take Action at all costs to achieve CHANGE?

Three topless European women were arrested for protesting outside the Palace of Justice in Tunis against the arrest of one of their fellow activists.

The two French woman and one German are members of the protest group Femen. Slogans such as “breasts feed revolution” were daubed across their naked chests. The women were demonstrating against the arrest of Amina Tyler, a Tunisian Femen activist who is due to stand trial today for illegal possessing pepper spray, for which she could be jailed for six months.

Ms Tyler caused controversy in March when she posed topless with the message “f*** your morals” on her chest and posted the photo on a Tunisian Femen Facebook page. Many Muslims in the relatively liberal Arab-speaking country were scandalized by the act.

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