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Religious and Secular Divide in Tunisia Post-2011
Abstract
The opening of the public space after Ben Ali has made it possible to gain visibility a plurality of lifestyles and practices. With the Tunisian revolution of 2011, public and political space is indeed opening up to the diversity of cultural orientations and models of norms and practices. The (new) protagonists try to orient, to define the dominant social norms post Ben Ali. Public space becomes a ‘battlefield’ in which conflicts and confrontations highlight competing models of society – Islamic and secular – in the manifestation of a plural Islam and a plurality of secularisms. Absent from the revolutionary snapshot, Islam made its entry in the public space with the Momentbild of the return of Rached Ghannouchi in January 2011, the leader of the Ennahdha party. Since, the religious problem will gradually occupy the Tunisian public and political scene to the detriment of the social problems linked to regional, economic and social inequalities, corruption, police repression and the deficit of individual and collective freedoms which had occupied the public attention during the revolutionary snapshot. From the controversies around art, feminism and practices issued from the Islamic economy, I propose to analyze the Islamic and secular divide in Tunisia after 2011.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
Cultural Studies