Code of Personal Status (Tunisia) - Historical Context

Historical Context

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."

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.