Code of Personal Status (Tunisia) - Policy of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

Policy of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

At the end of 1987, Zine el Abidine inherited a society shared between conservatives, who urged modification of the Code in a regressive sense, and modernists who wished its continuance to symbolize Tunisia's anchorage in modernity. The new president provided proof of an extreme prudence, seeing that this is the connection that a good part of public opinion based itself in forming its judgment on the new president. During his first months in power, he put into place interruptions of television and radio broadcasts to broadcast the call to the five daily prayers and reopened Zitouma University, all while criticizing Bourguiba's secular "drift. and while glorifying Tunisia's "Arab-Islamic" identity. At the beginning of March 1988, the daily Assabah announced that an amendment of the Code aiming at the prohibition of the adoption of children was under consideration, and this provoked the reaction of forty academics of all political orientations who circulated a petition calling for, "the necessary separation of Islam and politics." On the morrow, March 19, Ben Ali, during a televised address, publicly asserted his support for the Code.

"There will be no challenge and no abandonment of that which Tunisia realized to the benefit of women and the family".

Nevertheless, the feminine condition was not then among his priorities and one finds in his actions the same political ambiguity as that which existed with Bourguiba.