The Tunisian Revolution & Governance of Religion Teije Hidde Donker (UiB)* and Kasper Netterstrom (EUI)~ Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Nadia Marzouki, Hamza Beddeb and Olivier Roy at the European University Institute for their critical and very useful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to thank the participants at the Religion, Politics and Ideology in ​ the Contemporary Middle East panel at the BRAIS conference of April 2016 for their valuable ​ input. Finally we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers at Middle East Critique for ​ ​ their valuable critiques. All remaining mistakes are solely our own. The authors did not received any external funding for this research project, nor have they any financial interests in its application. * Corresponding author: Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen; Postboks 7800; 5020 Bergen, Norway. [email protected] ​ ~ Department of Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute; Via dei Roccettini ​ 9, I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy. [email protected] ​ 1 The Tunisian Revolution & Governance of Religion Abstract How has the Tunisian revolution and subsequent political transition influenced the ​ relationship between state power and Islam? The following article aims to provide an in-depth and historically informed analysis of these relations through an exploration of one specific case: The attempts by successive minister of religious affairs to reform state’s management of Tunisian religious institutions after January 2011. The article builds on multiple fieldwork visits to Tunisia by both authors, in addition to an extensive set of primary and secondary sources. We find that relations between state and religious authority have changed considerably throughout the 2011-2015 period, and that a wide variety of actors, interests and political conflicts intersected with the question of state-religion relations. The fact that non-Islamist actors played such a crucial role in shaping governance of the Tunisian religious field underlines the necessity for scholars to give more attention to the role non-Islamist actors play in shaping the institutionalisation public religion in Arab and Muslim Majority countries. Keywords Tunisia, State-society Relations, Formal Islam, Political Islam. ​ Page Count: 32 Word count text (excl. endnotes and references): 7.478 Word count total (incl. abstract): 9981 2 Introduction How has the Tunisian revolution and subsequent political transition influenced the relationship between state power and public Islam? The following article aims to provide an in-depth and historically informed analysis of these relations through an exploration of one specific case: The attempts by successive Ministers of Religious Affairs to reform state’s management of Tunisian religious institutions after January 2011. In doing so, we hope to provide a better understanding of the ways in which political struggles relate to state’s governance of public Islam in Muslim majority countries. For several decades the relationship between Islam and politics has been a dominant topic within Middle East Studies, Political Science, and Sociology. Many of these studies focus on political Islam or Islamism. For good reason: Many relevant political actors–from Al-Qaida to the Muslim Brothers–have been informed by some type of Islam inspired political ideology and define themselves as Islamists. At the same time, though, the focus on political Islam has lead to a neglect of other ways that Islam and politics interact. First, Islamists are not the only political actors whose political actions are informed by religious sentiments. Many Arab nationalists leaders in the post-independence period–such as Gamal Abdel Nasser–have used religion to 1 legitimize their political standpoints. The current Tunisian President Béji Caïd Essebsi, from the nationalist and originally anti-Islamist Nidaa Tounes party, has likewise refused to decriminalise 2 homosexuality because it would be against ‘religion, costumes and Arab traditions’. Islam is a source of political motivation for a multitude of political actors–not exclusively Islamists. Second, and more important for this article, scholars in the social sciences tend to overlook the other direction in which Islam and politics interact: how general political struggles shape practical arrangements between state power and religious institutions in Muslim majority countries. There is an extensive literature on formal management of religion around the globe, 1 M. Zeghal (1999) Religion and Politics in Egypt: the Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the ​ State (1952-94), International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31(3), pp. 371-399. ​ ​ 2 M. Ben Hamadi (2015) Tunisie: Béji Caïd Essebsi s'Oppose Catégoriquement à la Dépénalisation ​ des Pratiques Homosexuelles. Huffington Post Maghreb, October 6, 2015. ​ ​ 3 for instance comparing degrees of state-religion separation between countries. This literature 3 includes scholarship on the governance of institutionalized religion in the Muslim world. But, as they often build on cross-national comparisons, these contributions tend to compare state management of public religion as a relatively static issue and tend to neglect the dynamic nature of these arrangements. They tend to neglect how these relations change and how struggles regarding, for instance, state control over preaching in mosques, curricula of religious education and management of religious appointees interlink with other social, economic and political 4 struggles. There are some exceptions to the above observation. Historians working on the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire explore struggles over the governance of religion, but usually not much 5 further than the mid twentieth century and the Turkish revolution. Another noteworthy 6 exception is Malika Zeghal’s work on state and religious institutions in the Middle East. However, taking into account the quantity of studies produced in sociology and political science on the topic of political Islam, there is remarkably little research on how political struggles interlink with questions of governance of public religion in different Arab states. In this paper we try to make up for this deficiency and show the importance of researching relations between state management of public Islam and political reform. Tunisia constitutes a uniquely interesting case in this regard. It is the first Arab country to experience a genuine transition to democracy and is also one of the countries in the region where relations between state power and Islam became part of a public debate. With this in mind, this article revolves around subsequent attempts by post-revolutionary Ministers of Religious Affairs to reform state 3 Zeghal, Religion and Politics in Egypt: the Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State ​ (1952-94). 4 J. Fox (2008) A World Survey of Religion and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press). ​ ​ 5 One can mention for example J. P. Berkey (2003) The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the ​ ​ Near East, 600-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press). ​ 6 See for example M. Zeghal (2010) Public Institutions of Religious Education in Egypt and Tunisia, in: Osama Abi-Mershed (ed.) Trajectories of Education in the Arab world: Legacies and Challenges (London: ​ ​ Routledge). 4 management of religious institutions in the country. Such an exploration can provide us with an understanding of how political struggles within a democratisation process relate to reforms of state-religion relations that goes beyond the Tunisian case and is applicable to other Arab and Muslim majority countries. The article builds on multiple fieldwork visits to Tunisia by both authors, in addition to an extensive set of primary and secondary sources. Fieldwork visits to Tunisia took place in May and October 2015 including interviews with (aids to) former Ministers of Religious Affairs, representatives of unions, mosque Imams and Islamist groups and parties. In total 25 individuals were interviewed. Secondary sources include French and Arabic local newspapers. Some of these were obtained during fieldwork, but most were collected using a digital archive of Tunisian newspapers.7 Primary documents were collected either digitally or onsite from the relevant (state) organizations. The article is structured as follows. We start with an extensive exploration of the historical development of relations between state power and religious institutions in Tunisia. Subsequently we discuss the post-revolutionary development of these relations, and their related political struggles, through the terms of four Ministers of Religious Affairs between January 2011 and the end of 2015. In the conclusion we outline some of the analytical insights that can be drawn from the Tunisian case. Religion and State before Independence Tunisia was, as most of the Arab world, under formal Ottoman control from the mid sixteenth century until the late nineteenth century. Although the province had a substantial level of independence, the relationship between religious and political authority was very much shaped by Ottoman influences. Religious sharia law (in both a maliki and hanafi versions) was applied alongside the corpus of law based on edicts of Ottoman sultans (kanunname). The beys ​ ​ appointed the scholars at the Zaytuna university-mosque and the grand-mufti. They officially 7 This digital archive can be found at www.turess.com. ​ ​ 5 8 also