In light of the recent proposal in the Tunisian parliament demanding that France offer reparations or at least apologize for its colonial abuses in Tunisia, my paper revisits Abdelaziz Tha'albi 's La Tunisie Martyre (1920) with its portrayal and denunciation of the colonial era. My paper begins with a close contextualized reading and reinterpretation of the text which has too often been dismissed as a "pamphlet" by its supporters, and a racially divisive and melodramatic bit of religious propaganda by its detractors. My paper will engage with and situate the outrage inside the text, looking for parallels and continuities in the struggle for dignity of the 1920s and of the present--especially the text's connection with the nascent labor movement. La Tunisie Martyre documents the abuses of an era with statistics, data, anecdotes and examples of colonial humiliation, tracing the shifting powers of local players and their connection to the larger struggle in the post-war Muslim world, a world disappointed with the broken promises of the Paris Peace conference. The text documents the dispossession of tribes from their land, their impoverishment and racialized marginalization. Tracking Tha'albi's anti colonial activism beyond Tunisia's borders, my paper will interrogate accepted understandings of his differences with Bourguiba.

In this paper, I revisit the first case of direct French intervention into Tunisian policy in the years preceding the establishment of the protectorate: the passage of the ʿahd al-amān (Security Pact). This law is intimately tied to the Bathou Sfez affair, in which a Jew by that name was executed after being convicted of blasphemy in June 1857. Previous scholars have generally stayed close to the interpretation of events advanced by minister and chronicler Ibn Abī al-Ḍiyāf, who asserts that the Muḥammad Bey influenced the composition of the court and pressured it to pass a capital sentence for his own political ends. Based on recently uncovered archival material, I argue that these claims are not supported by contemporary documentation. Rather, the documentation surrounding the trial shows a court that strictly adhered to both procedural and jurisprudential norms. No independent evidence indicates either that the bey intervened as alleged, nor even that such an intervention would have affected the outcome had it happened. This cause célèbre, despite being used as pretext for fundamental legal reform, represents a functional legal system that respected the norms of the sharīʿa. If there existed a need for reform, it was not because the system was broken, but because the system satisfied autochthonous needs rather than those of the Second French Empire. Ibn Abī al-Ḍiyāf’s depiction, I argue, does not represent a disinterested account of the events but rather a retrospective and self-justifying narrative of his own role in the crafting of the new legislation that served European imperial and commercial interests no less than it defended the rights of Tunisian subjects. Ibn Abī al-Ḍiyāf remains a major source for the historiography of this period; I call for a deeper skepticism of his chronicle in interpreting the history of nineteenth-century Tunisia.

Debates about and laws related to women’s rights in Tunisia have long been a key site for the production of the binary between the secular and the religious. In this paper, I examine the polemic around equal inheritance to shed light on the way conceptions of women’s rights and gender equality have been transformed through their articulation with the legacy of the revolution and a long history of socio-legal reforms. Although the question of equal inheritance speaks to the issue of socioeconomic inequality by calling for a more egalitarian distribution of patrimony and wealth, it has been enfolded into debates about modernity, secularity, and religious reform. I look at the way feminist religious scholars understand religious reform in relation to the question of inheritance and their efforts to align a divine text revealed in the premodern times with modern global human rights. Excavating an essence (al-jawhar), they reconcile two seemingly conflicting value systems through an act of re-interpretation and moral, ethical, political, and sociological engagement with the text as a living body of knowledge rather than as a rigid ossified remnant of the past, which is the view that both staunch secularists and Islamists on either size of the polarized divide take. This paper ultimately calls for a rethinking of the facile distinction between the secular and the religious that has for long framed analysis of the Tunisian revolution.

In this paper, I examine the revisiting of Tunisian nationalist figure Abdelaziz al-Thaalbi’s legacy in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Specifically, I compare attempts by Tunisian “Islamists” and “progressives” - and those sympathetic to their causes - to claim Thaalbi as their forefather. Relying on documentaries, political speeches and books, all released post-January 2011, this paper argues that Tunisian Islamists have attempted to recast Thaalbi as a more religiously conservative forefather of the Tunisian nation, in the place of Habib Bourguiba, by focusing on Thaalbi’s later years. Conversely, Tunisian progressives have focused on some of the lesser-known aspects of Thaalbi’s young adult life, including his 1904 blasphemy trial, to claim him as a free-thinker, skeptical of the religious establishment. The paper concludes with my own evaluation of Thaalbi’s legacy, based on some private archives newly available to researchers. I point out that, in both of these retellings of the the emergence of the Tunisian nation, Tunisian Islamists and progressives have ignored Thaalbi’s shifting, and sometimes favorable, attitudes towards the French protectorate in favor of a firmer anti-French position.

This presentation deals with the birth of a national art in Tunisia after the independence of the country in 1956, and its political use by the first President of the Republic, Habib Bourguiba. This presentation focuses on a fundamental and yet overlooked period in the art history of the Maghreb, during the phase of formation of one of the most important schools of painting of the Arab World, the School of Tunis. Specifically, it investigates the understanding of art and nation-building in modern Tunisia by bringing to light the often-ignored relationship between Tunisian artists and political power, including the way artists contributed to Bourguiba’s growing cult of personality after the Independence of the country. This presentation examines how Tunisian artists enriched the myth of the az-Zaïm (the Leader Bourguiba), whose image has come to represent, for many, the modern, independent nation state of Tunisia. This paper will attempt to define the primary representations employed by artists in their depictions of Bourguiba and how the construction of new modernist government buildings created opportunities for artists and helped to develop a new relationship between art and power. Several members of the School of Tunis were hired to produce art to fill the new halls of power, working directly for az-Zaïm and contributing to his political propaganda. Creating artworks for administrative buildings and presidential palaces gave artists the chance to shape the new nation’s urban space, create works on a monumental scale, and ultimately to be the most important national artists of their time.