Tunisia

History

• Pre History

  The coastal regions of Tunisia shared in an early Neolithic culture that was common to the whole Mediterranean littoral. Artifacts left by hunters and fishermen who excelled in making stone blades and tools are plentiful, and evidence points to the early domestication of cattle and the cultivation of crops in the area. South of the Atlas range, nomadic hunters and herders roamed a vast savanna, well watered and abounding in game, that 8,000 years ago stretched across what is now the vast desert known as the Sahara. Their culture flourished until the region began to desiccate after 4000 B.C. Scattering before the encroaching desert and invading horsemen, some of the savanna people migrated northward, where they were subsequently absorbed by the Berbers.

  Linguistic evidence suggests southwestern Asia as the point from which the ancestors of the Berbers began their migration into North Africa early in the third millennium B.C. Over succeeding centuries they extended their range from Siwa in Egypt to the Niger Basin. The Berbers present a broad range of physical types, and the affinity of various groups seems based almost entirely on linguistic grounds. Berber tradition told that they were descended from two unrelated families, and modern scholars believe that the Berbers did indeed cross North Africa in two simultaneous waves—one that entered the region from the southeast after a long sojourn in Black Africa and another that took a northerly route. The Berbers were well known to classical writers. Sallust, a Roman historian, and politician living in the first century B.C. described their way of life, elements of which still exist in the twentieth century.

  Carthage

  Minoan seamen from Crete may have set up depots on the coast of present-day Tunisia before 2000 B.C., but it was only with the arrival of Phoenician traders, who penetrated the western Mediterranean before the twelfth century B.C., that the region entered into recorded history. Safe harbors on the African coast, equipped to service, supply, and shelter their ships, were the links in a maritime chain that reached to Spain. Tunis, Bizerte, Sousse, Monastir, and Sfax originated as Punic (see Glossary) trading posts where the merchants of Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) developed commercial relations with the Berber tribes of the interior and paid them tribute to ensure their cooperation in securing raw materials. The greatest of the Punic colonies, Carthage (Qart Hadasht, the New Town), was founded, according to tradition, in 814 B.C. by a Phoenician princess whose name has come down to Western readers through Virgil’s Aeneid as Dido. Carthage was governed by a mercantile oligarchy that exercised power through a senate, composed of elder statesmen, under a constitution praised by Aristotle for providing a perfect blend of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

• Berber Kingdoms

  The basic unit of social and political organization among the Berbers was the extended family, usually identified with a particular village or with traditional grazing grounds. Families, in turn, were bound together in the clan. An alliance of clans, often tracing their origins to a common ancestor as a symbol of unity, formed a tribe. Courts and representative assemblies guided by customs peculiar to the group functioned at each level of organization. Berber folk law and government, like Berber folk religion, were highly personalized and therefore most effective at the lowest levels of their application. Ultimately, each household or tent was its own republic.

  For mutual defense, kindred tribes joined in confederations, which, because the war was a permanent feature of tribal life, were in time institutionalized. Some chieftains, successful in battle, established rudimentary territorial states by imposing their rule on defeated tribes and allies alike, but their kingdoms were easily fragmented, and the dynasties that they sought to found rarely survived more than a generation. By the third century B.C., however, several large, although loosely administered, Berber kingdoms had emerged behind the coastal areas controlled by Carthage. These monarchies were supported by the sedentary farmers who looked to the kings to protect them from the raids of the nomadic pastoralists.

  The Berber kings adapted Punic and Greek ceremonial forms to the usage of their courts, and treaties of friendship with Carth- • age were often sealed by a king’s marriage to a woman from the family of a Carthaginian notable. The Berber kings ruled in the shadow of Carthage and later Rome, sometimes forming alliances with one or another of the great powers. After Carthage was vanquished by Rome, they threw in their lots with factions vying for power in the Roman civil wars of the first century B.C. One of the most illustrious of these tribal monarchs was Masinissa (ca. 240—148 B.C.), who had served with the Carthaginians in Spain. Masinissa shifted his support to Rome in time to be counted among the victor’s allies when Carthage surrendered in 202 B.C.

  With Roman patronage, he united Numidia and extended his authority from the Moulouya River to Cyrenaica, a territory he governed from his Hellenistic court at Cirta (Constantine in present-day Algeria). Numidia was divided among several heirs after Masinissa’s death. Rome intervened when his grandson, Jugurtha (118—105 B.C.), attempted to revive Masinissa’s Berber kingdom. Betrayed by a rival chieftain at the end of a long and exasperating war in which he pinned down large numbers of Roman troops, Jugurtha was carried away to Rome and was starved to death in the Capitol.

• Roman Africa

  Rome dictated a hard peace to Carthage after the battle of Zama, imposing a stiff indemnity and prohibiting Carthage from making war without Roman consent. When Carthage succeeded in paying the indemnity levied against it, voices were raised in the Roman Senate warning against a revival of Carthaginian might and urging that Carthage is destroyed. Masinissa had in the meantime taken advantage of the restrictions placed on Carthage’s war-making powers to invade its territory. When Carthage chose to defend itself, Rome declared war, charging a breach of the peace agreement. Carthage surrendered to a besieging Roman army in 146 B.C. Its population was dispersed, the city razed to the ground, and its earth sown with salt.

  The Carthaginian territory was annexed by Rome and eventually organized as the province of Proconsular Africa, governed by a civilian official (proconsul) appointed annually by the Senate. Julius Caesar subsequently ordered the rebuilding of Carthage as a Roman city and the capital of the province. The royal house of Masinissa continued to rule Numidia as a Roman protectorate until 46 B.C. when Caesar deposed its king, who had sided with Pompey in the civil wars and attached a part of it to Proconsular Africa.

  The Roman ruins seen in present-day Tunisia attest to the civic vitality of Proconsular Africa, where populous cities and even the smaller towns, their streets laid out in characteristic grid design, enjoyed the amenities of urban life—the forum, markets, public entertainments, baths, and fountains—found in every corner of the Roman Empire. Merchants and craftsmen from many parts of the Roman world established themselves in the cities and towns, while army veterans and migrants from Italy settled in the coastal countryside: but the bulk of the population of Proconsular Africa consisted of publicized Berber farmers. Called the “granary of the empire,” Roman Africa was valued for its agricultural exports, which were Italy’s principal source of food.

  Donatism

  By the beginning of the second century, Christianity had been introduced among the Jewish community and soon gained converts in the towns and among slaves. Carthage became the center of Latin Christianity in Africa and Tertullian. By the end of the fourth century, Rome’s African provinces had been thoroughly Christianized, and inroads had been made in the hinterland among the Berber tribes. Donatism, a heresy within the puritanical tradition, won adherents during periods of severe Roman persecution and flourished again after Christianity was officially recognized in the fourth century by the empire, in opposition to bishops accused of collaborating with the state. The sect became a vehicle for social revolt at a time of political deterioration and economic depression, and it was an example of the religious enthusiasm that would be seen again in the history of the Berbers.

   

• The Byzantine Empire

  It was against the threat of Donatism to the African church that Saint Augustine (354—430), bishop of Hippo Regius (Annaba in present-day Algeria), directed many of the sermons and books, including his autobiographical Confessions, whose influence on Christian thought has continued undiminished through the centuries. Born in Thegaste (Souk Ahras in present-day Algeria), Saint Augustine is recognized as one of the Latin Fathers of the Church. In The City of God, he sought to demonstrate that the future of the church was not dependent on the survival of the Roman state (or, by extension, on any secular authority), as many contemporary Christians feared it was, and thereby to prepare his people for the onslaught of the Vandals.

  Invited to North Africa by a rebellious Roman official, the Vandals, a Germanic tribe, crossed from Spain in 429, seized power, and under their war leader, Gaiseric, established a kingdom that made its capital at Carthage. Although the Roman Empire eventually recognized their overlordship in much of North Africa, the Vandals confined their rule to the most economically profitable areas in Proconsular Africa. There they constituted an isolated warrior caste, concerned with collecting taxes and exploiting the land.

  Civil administration was left in Roman hands, but the Vandals, who were Arian Christians, vigorously attempted to destroy Roman Catholic ecclesiastical influence. From their African base, they conquered Sardinia and Corsica and launched raids on Italy, sacking the city of Rome in 455. In time, however, the Vandals lost much of their warlike spirit, and their kingdom fell to the armies of Belisarius, the Byzantine general who in 533 began the reconquest of North Africa for the Roman Empire. Effective Byzantine control in the old Roman province was restricted to the coastal area, and even there the newly walled towns, strongholds, fortified farms, and watchtowers called attention to its tenuous nature.

  The region’s prosperity had diminished under Vandal domination. Unpopular Byzantine governors imposed burdensome taxation, while towns and public services—including the water system—were left in decay. The old Roman political and social order, disrupted by the Vandals, could not be restored, but the Byzantine rule in Africa did prolong the Roman ideal of imperial unity there for another century and a half and prevented the ascendancy of the Berber nomads in the coastal region. In outlying areas neglected by the Vandals, the inhabitants had sought the protection of tribal chieftains and, having grown accustomed to their autonomy, resisted re assimilation into the imperial system, but no coherent form of political organization evolved there to take the place of Roman authority.

• Introduction of Islam

  By the time of his death in A.D. 632, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers had brought most of the tribes and towns of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of the new monotheistic religion of Islam (literally, submission), which was conceived of as uniting the individual believer, the state, and the society under the omnipotent will of God. Islamic rulers, therefore, exercised both temporal and religious authority. Adherents of Islam were called Muslims (“those who submit” to the will of God). Within a generation, Arab armies had carried Islam north and east from Arabia in the wake of their rapid conquests and westward across North Africa as far as Tripoli.

  In 670 the Arabs surged into the Roman province of Africa (transliterated as Ifriquiya in Arabic), where their commander, Uqba ben Nafi, founded the city of Kairouan as a military base about 150 kilometers south of Byzantine-held Carthage. The selection of this encampment in the midst of a plain, separated from both the Roman cities on the coast and the mountains in Numidia, where the Berber tribes continued their stubborn resistance, was a deliberate act of policy by Uqba, who reportedly announced that he was founding a city that would serve “as a strong point for Islam until the end of time.” The name was chosen for the new Arab capital, derived from the Persian word caravan.

  In 712 they mounted an invasion of Spain and in three years had subdued all but the mountainous regions in the extreme north. Muslim Spain (called Andalusia) and the Maghrib, which had been conquered within 50 years of the founding of Kairouan, were organized under the political and religious leaders of the Umayyad caliph of Damascus. Arab rule in Ifriquiya—as elsewhere in the Islamic world in the eighth century—had as its ideal the establishment of political and religious unity under a caliphate (the office of the Prophet’s successor as supreme earthly leader of Islam) governed in accord with a legal system (sharia) administered by qadis (religious judges), to which all other considerations, including tribal loyalties, were subordinated.

  The rise of the Kharidjites in the Maghrib coincided with a period of turmoil in the Arab world during which the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads and relocated the caliphate in Baghdad. The marabouts were mystics and seers, miracle workers endowed with a charisma (bara/ca), whose tradition antedated Islam in the Maghrib and was as old as religion itself among the Berbers. They were incorporated into intensely local cults of saints whose domed tombs dotted the countryside and who was venerated by Muslims and Jews alike. The marabouts had traditionally acted as arbiters in tribal disputes, and, whenever the authority of government waned in a particular locale, the people turned to them for political leadership as well as for spiritual guidance. Thus, Ifriquiya came more directly under the orthodox influence of the mosques and schools of Tunis and Kairouan, and, second, it is larger urban and sedentary population had been more thoroughly Arabized than was the case elsewhere in the Maghrib.

• The Ottoman Empire

  Piracy lured adventurers from around the Mediterranean to the Maghribi coastal cities and islands. Among them were two brothers, Aruj and Khair al-Din, the latter known as Barbarossa (Redbeard) to Europeans. Muslims from the Greek island of Lesbos, they reached Tunisia in 1504 and sailed from Jerba Island under Hafsid patronage. In 1510, however, the brothers were invited by the maritime republic of Algiers to defend it against the Spaniards. Instead, they seized Algiers and used it as a base of operations not only for piracy but also for conquests in the interior.

  In 1587 the Ottoman Maghrib was divided into three regencies—at Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. In Tunisia, the authority of the beylerbey as regent gave way to that of a pasha (governor) appointed by the sultan for a one-year term. The regency was provided with a corps of janissaries, recruited from Anatolian peasants who were committed to a lifetime of service in Tunisia. It formed a self-governing military guild, subject to its own laws, whose interests were protected by the Divan, a council of senior officers. Real power came to rest with the army, and the pasha’s role was reduced to that of ceremonial head of state and figurehead representative of Ottoman suzerainty.

  In Tunisia until 1591, the corps of janissaries was considered to be under the control of the local Ottoman Pasha. In 1591 janissary junior officers (deys) overthrew their senior officers; they then forced the Pasha to acknowledge the authority of one of their own men. This new leader was called the Dey, elected by his fellow deys. The Dey took charge of law and order in the capital and of military affairs, thus becoming “the virtual ruler of the country”. The change defied the Ottoman Empire, although from the Tunisian perspective political power still remained under the control of foreigners. The existing state diwan (council) was dismissed, but to placate local opinion some Tunisian Maliki jurists were appointed to some key positions.

  As holders of the office of Bey the Husaynid Dynasty effectively ruled Tunisia as sovereigns from 1705 to 1881; thereafter they continued to merely reign until 1957. In Ottoman theory perhaps until 1881 the Bey of Tunis remained a vassal of the Ottoman Empire (the Friday prayer was pronounced in the name of the Ottoman Sultan, money was coined in his honor, and an annual ambassador once brought gifts to Constantinople) but for centuries the Ottomans were not able to depend on, or exact, the obedience of the Tunisian Bey. In 1881 the French created their protectorate which lasted until 1956. During this period the Beylical institution was retained; the Husaynid Bey served as titular head of state but it was the French who actually ruled the country.

• Tunisia Under different Amirs

  Aghiabids

  Aghiabids After the Arab conquest, Ifriquiya was governed by a succession of amirs (commanders) who were subordinate to the caliph in Damascus and, after 750, in Baghdad. In 800 the caliph appointed as Amir Ibrahim ibn Aghlab, who established a hereditary dynasty and ruled Ifriquiya as an autonomous state that was subject to the caliph’s spiritual jurisdiction and nominally recognized him as its political suzerain. The ninth century has been described as the region’s “golden age,” from which it developed as a politically and culturally distinct entity within the Islamic world.

  During the golden age, Aghiabid patronage transformed Kairouan into the center of Maghribi religious and intellectual life. Kairouan was a great market for books in Arabic and Hebrew that had been copied by scribes.

  Fatimid

  Merchants of the coastal towns were the backbone of the Fatimid state that had been founded by religious enthusiasts and imposed by Berber tribesmen. The slow but steady economic revival of Europe created a demand for goods from the East for which the ports of Ifriquiya and Fatimid Sicily were the ideal distribution centers. Trading houses in Ifriquiya opened branches in Egypt, and their merchants, some of whom ventured as far as India in search o trade goods, won a reputation for their daring.

  The Fatimid rule was harsh and intolerant, persecuting the Sunni ulama of Kairouan and the Kharidjite sectarians alike. The Fatimids completed the conquest of Egypt from the Abbasids by 18 Historical Setting 969 and moved their capital to the new city that they founded at Cairo, where they established a Shia caliphate to rival that of the Sunni caliph at Baghdad. The Fatimids left the Maghrib to their Berber vassals, the Zirids, but the Shia regime had already begun to crumble outside Ifriquiya as factions struggled indecisively for regional supremacy.

  Hafsids

  The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the rise in Morocco of two rival Berber tribal dynasties—the Almoravids and Almohads, both founded by religious reformers—that dominated the Maghrib and Muslim Spain for more than 200 years. The Hafsids’ political support and Tunisia’s economy were rooted in the coastal towns, while the hinterland was effectively given up to the tribes that had made their nominal submission to Tunis. The Hafsid sultans encouraged trade with Europe, forged close links with Aragon and the Italian maritime states, and dispatched embassies as far afield as the court of King Haakon of Norway. The Maghrib and Spain, linked under the Almohads, shared a common culture—called Moorish—that transcended dynastic lines and political boundaries in creating new and unique forms of art, literature, and architecture.

• Colonial France

  At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Britain agreed to allow France a “free hand” in Tunisia in exchange for French acquiescence to the leasehold on Cyprus that the British had acquired from Turkey. It was accepted among the European powers that France planned to occupy Tunisia, but no excuse for French intervention presented itself until April 1881, when a punitive expedition was launched into Tunisian territory, ostensibly in pursuit of 30 Historical Setting Khumiri tribesmen who had raided across the border into Algeria. The considerable force of more than 40,000 men—which the French explained was necessary to avoid undue bloodshed—was more effectively used in overawing the Tunisian government, however, than it was in hunting down nomadic tribesmen. French cavalry advanced on Tunis while seaborne units landed in Bizerte and occupied the port, considered potentially the best naval base in North Africa but far from Khumiri country.

  Under the protectorate, Tunisia was governed according to a system of dual sovereignties in which the de facto sovereignty of France was superimposed on the de jure sovereignty of the beylicate. Tunisia remained what it had been for 300 years, the “Regency of Tunis.” The preexisting form of beylical government was maintained intact, and the established political elite continued to function within it. Although the elite readily assimilated French values, Tunisian society retained its own social standards and a tradition of higher culture that was the core of the country’s sense of nationhood. The demographic impact of the protectorate was not severe in Tunisia, where European corporate development of the land rather than European settlement remained the rule.

  By 1892 more than one-fifth of Tunisia’s arable land, concentrated in the north, was French owned, but 90 percent of it was in the hands of only 16 landowners and companies engaged in the cap. ital-intensive agriculture. Less than 10 percent of the French residents were engaged in farming. In 1897 a fund was established to pay the cost of settling French colons (colonists), and the next year the beylicate allowed habus land to be put on the market. But, despite inducements offered by the French government and by private colonization societies in France, there was no rush of colons to Tunisia as there had been to Algeria.

  Traditional education in Tunisia was highly developed before 1881, and the school of the Zituna Mosque in Tunis was recognized as one of the leading centers of classical Islamic studies. Under the protectorate the French residency continued to emphasize education, patronizing the Zituna Mosque school and the Muslim schools as well as Kherredin’s Sadiki College. The latter was accredited as a lycée and set the standard for a bilingual, bicultural school system, offering instruction to a mixed student body, that was extended throughout the country. Many Tunisian graduates of these schools went on to complete their education in France.

• The Rise of Nationalism

  In 1908 the Hambak and Sfar factions reunited to form a nationalist political organization, the Young Tunisians. They were a small group, interested in efficiency rather than the representative government, whose newspaper, Le Tunisien, was aimed at convincing liberal French readers that the Tunisian elite was capable of taking over a greater share of responsibility for the country’s management. Nationalist activists gravitated toward the Destour (literally, Constitution) Party, founded in 1920 by Abdelaziz al Thalibi, a graduate of the Zituna Mosque school who had been one of the leaders of the Young Tunisians exiled in 1912.

  Support for the Neo-Destour Party came from artisans, shopkeepers, and peasant proprietors, who in the midst of the depression of the 1930s were more interested in maintaining their standard of living than in expelling French, as well as from students and members of the professional class who had backed the old Destourians In 1946 an autonomous trade union, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (Union General des Travailleurs Tunisiens—UGTT), backed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), broke away from the communist-dominated French labor organization. Led by a onetime trolley driver, Ferhat Hached, the UGTT cooperated closely with the Neo-Destour Party in efforts to redefine Tunisia’s relationship with France.

  By 1930s, Leadership of the nationalist movement was already passing to a new generation of French-educated Tunisians, more at ease in French than in Arabic, who crystallized ideas of national identity and populism, which the old leadership had been unable and unwilling to do, and who adopted tactics that emphasized constant activism and violent resistance to the protectorate. Younger members of the Destour Party had argued that nationalism, to be effective against the French, had to break loose from its traditional power base among the urban elite and mobilize mass support. Among the more impatient of the party activists were Mahmoud Materi, Tahar Sfar, and a lawyer named Habib Bourguiba.

  In 1950 Prime Minister Mohamed Shanniq formed a new government, one that for the first time since the Al Marsa Convention had a Tunisian majority in the cabinet. Salah Ben Youssef, the Neo-Destour secretary general, joined the government as minister of justice, but it was Bourguiba who went to Paris to lay before the French government a program for independence that included provisions to create a national legislature and emphasized demands for civil rights. The Tunisian proposal also insisted on maintaining cultural, economic, and military ties with France. The French government refused out of hand to give up direct participation by French officials in the Tunisian government, but Foreign Minister Maurice Schuman confirmed that a newly appointed resident general “had been given the task of leading Tunisia to independence.”

• Independent Tunisia

  Early in 1954, Bourguiba was released from prison to negotiate with French premier Pierre Mends-France. The nationalists and the French government were still deadlocked between Tunisian demands for full independence and the French plan, which called for internal autonomy despite vigorous objections from the colons. But Bourguiba showed a willingness to accept what France was prepared to offer while pressing for further concessions. In July Mends-France, who had just concluded the dismantling of the French colonial empire in Indochina, flew to Tunis and issued the dramatic Declaration of Carthage, which recognized Tunisia’s internal autonomy.

  An agreement between France and Morocco early in 1956 indicated that Morocco, which had been a French protectorate since 1912, would soon gain complete independence, and it was hoped that the forthcoming election of the Constituent Assembly would provide a means for pressing Tunisia’s case for independence. On March 20, 1956, the patience of the Neo-Destour Party leaders was rewarded by the signing of a protocol that abrogated the Bardo Treaty of 1881 and recognized Tunisia as an independent state. The portfolios of the two ministries vacated by French officials foreign affairs and defense were taken by Bourguiba.

  With independence, the Neo-Destour Party, which had been jarred by the dissent from Ben Youssef’s faction, faced the problem of consolidating its leadership and replacing the struggle for national independence with the building of national consensus as for the party’s primary goal. Expelled from the party for his opposition to Bourguiba, Ben Youssef organized a leftist opposition party that continued the guerrilla war against the Neo-Destour government. The crisis ended only when a French military operation forced the Youssefists to lay down their arms in June, three months after independence. Ben Youssef, who had earlier been condemned to death in absentia for having plotted against Bourguiba’s life, was assassinated in Frankfurt in 1961.

  On March 25, 1956, some 84 percent of the registered voters went to the poils to elect candidates of the National Front, who were for the most part members of the Neo-Destour Party, to the Constituent Assembly. Bourguiba was elected president of the assembly by acclamation at its first session held two weeks later, and Ahmed Ben Salah was elected vice president. The assembly then divided its 98 members into a number of committees, each charged with drafting a part of the new constitution. Within a week Article, I had been unanimously adopted. It declared Tunisia to be a free, independent, sovereign state, with Islam its official religion and Arabic its official language.

   

• The current state of Tunisia

  In the 1980s the economy performed poorly. In 1983 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forced the government to raise the price of bread and semolina, causing severe hardship and protest riots. In this situation, the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI) under Cheikh Rached El-Ghannouchi provided popular leadership. Civil disturbances, including those by the Islamists, were repressed by government security forces under General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The government persisted in following its program; Ben Ali was named the prime minister.

  In 2004, Ben Ali was re-elected President for a five-year term, with a reported 94.5% of the vote. Also elected were 189 members of the Majlis al-Nuwaab or Chamber of Deputies, with a five-year term. In addition, there was a Chamber of Advisors composed of 126 members with six-year terms, of whom 85 were elected by government subdivisions. A widely supported human rights movement emerged, which included not only Islamists but also trade unionists, lawyers, and journalists. Tunisia’s political institutions, however, remained fixed in the authoritarian past. As of 2001, the government’s response to calls for reform Included house arrests and prison.

  The Ben Ali regime came to an end following nationwide demonstrations precipitated by high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, a lack of political freedoms like freedom of speech and poor living conditions. The protests were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010, and led to the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali 28 days later on 14 January 2011, when he officially resigned after fleeing to Saudi Arabia, ending 23 years in power. Following the overthrow of Ben Ali, Tunisians elected a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution, and an interim government is known as the Troika because it was a coalition of three parties; the Islamist Ennahda Movement in the lead, with the center-left Congress for the Republic and the left-leaning Ettakatol as minority partners.

  In March 2012, Ennahda declared it will not support making sharia the main source of legislation in the new constitution, maintaining the secular nature of the state. Ennahda’s stance on the issue was criticized by hardline Islamists, who wanted strict sharia but was welcomed by secular parties. On 6 February 2013, Chokri Belaid, the leader of the leftist opposition and prominent critic of Ennahda, was assassinated. In 2014, President Moncef Marzouki established Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, as a key part of creating a national reconciliation.

• Sources:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tunisia

  https://www.planetware.com/tourist-attractions-/tunis-tun-tc-t.htm

  https://www.export.gov/article?id=Tunisia-Financial-Sector

  https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/overview/variety-and-diversity-investors-have-wide-range-options-across-manufacturing-field-diverse-line

  https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/Tunisia%20Study_1.pdf

  https://www.encyclopedia.com/places/africa/tunisia-political-geography/tunisia#HISTORY

  https://www.britannica.com/place/Tunisia/History

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisia#Ottoman_Tunisia

  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/er.html