On the night of 1 May 2012—one year and three months after the revolution that overthrew dictator Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli and triggered the region-wide upheavals that became known as the “Arab Spring”—an unidentified vandal spread black paint over the epitaph on the tombstone of the women's rights advocate Tahar Haddad (al-Tahir al-Haddad) in al-Jallaz Cemetery in Tunis. The perpetrator, likely affiliated with Salafis, who have gained prominence in Tunisia since the revolution,Footnote 1 touched a very sensitive nerve. Many Tunisians admire Haddad and view his work as the inspiration behind their country's renowned family law enshrining women's rights, the Personal Status Code (PSC), passed by secularistFootnote 2 president Habib Bourguiba in 1956, immediately after Tunisia won independence from French colonial rule. Bin ʿAli, Bourguiba's successor and also secularist, upheld the PSC, and his regime made a point of associating Haddad with the state: a book published in 2000 by a government research agency was entitled al-Marʾa fi al-Haraka al-Islahiyya min al-Tahir al-Haddad ila Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli (Women in the Reform Movement from Tahar Haddad to Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli).Footnote 3 After the revolution, however, the Islamist party al-Nahda won the first free elections, held in October 2011, Salafis consolidated their movement, and Haddad's tombstone was vandalized. A group of secular activists responded with a rally at his graveside. Equipped with Tunisian flags, a statement from the national trade union, portraits of Haddad, and copies of his writings, they pledged to defend his legacy. One of the activists spoke into a journalist's microphone: “Tahar Haddad has not died and will not die.”Footnote 4
As Tunisia's transition from Bin ʿAli continues, it is worth returning to Tahar Haddad. In academic literature outside of Tunisia, he has received relatively little attention, usually appearing as a detail or case study in discussions of other topics and, in works on gender and women in Islam, often overshadowed by the better-known turn of the century Egyptian women's rights advocate Qasim Amin.Footnote 5 The few non-Tunisian scholars who have focused on Haddad have acknowledged the lack of interest in him. In their recent English translation of his book on women's rights, Imraʾtuna fi al-Shariʿa wa-l-Mujtamaʿ (lit. Our Woman in the Shariʿa and Society; Husni and Newman use the title, Muslim Women in Law and Society), Ronak Husni and Daniel Newman aim “to introduce Western audiences to [his] ideas.”Footnote 6 Meanwhile, in their 1995 article, Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar develop a theory for his obscurity in the West, arguing that “Orientalism, and its post-1945 offshoot, area studies,” disregarded his radical blend of religious and leftist politics.Footnote 7 Ahmad and Schaar's survey of English-language scholarship leads them to observe, “the memory of Haddad has been suppressed.”Footnote 8
In Tunisia itself, though, an opposite type of historiographical problem has surrounded Haddad—not suppression but proliferation of commemoration. During Bin ʿAli's presidency (1987–2011), over 150 articles on Haddad appeared in Tunisian newspapers, the national radio station broadcasted a twenty-part documentary series about him, and a Tahar Haddad Library was founded with over one thousand primary and secondary sources.Footnote 9 The tragic finale of Haddad's life—his expulsion from the religious establishment after he published his argument for women's rights, and his death five years later at the age of thirty-six—has been the subject of so much attention that one scholar remarked in 2009, “[a]pparently everything seems to have been said on this subject.”Footnote 10 (Her comment was a rhetorical device; she herself wrote a book on Haddad). More than a reflection of Haddad's local popularity, which is noted by Husni and Newman and by Ahmad and Schaar,Footnote 11 the abundance of discourse in a context of censorship (until the 2011 revolution) indicates official sanction. Haddad was often directly linked to Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli's “state feminism,”Footnote 12 as is clear in the title, al-Marʾa fi al-Haraka al-Islahiyya min al-Tahir al-Haddad ila Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli. Official narratives presented Haddad as the “pioneer” of the women's rights that Bourguiba enacted and Bin ʿAli upheld as policy in the PSC, and as the target of “regressive” religious conservatism that Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli prevailed over through “progressive,” secular (though religiously conscious) rule. But the precise relationship between Haddad and the former dictatorships remains to be assessed. At a time when Tunisian historians are encouraging research on the past,Footnote 13 this article tries to replace “old regime”Footnote 14 narratives with a new perspective on Haddad's life and work.
The 1920s and 1930s saw the peak of Haddad's career and the beginning of Habib Bourguiba's rise to the leadership of the Tunisian nationalist movement against the French protectorate, which had been in place since 1881.Footnote 15 Building on the work of historian Claude Liauzu, who questioned whether Haddad and Bourguiba were political allies during the colonial period,Footnote 16 the article explores divergences between the pair. Although after independence Bourguiba celebrated Haddad as a critic of outmoded teaching at the Zaytuna mosque-university, an institution that threw support behind Bourguiba's rival Salih bin Yusuf during the final stages of the nationalist movement,Footnote 17 Haddad's lesser-known writings from the 1920s demonstrate loyalty to the Zaytuna's mission. It is unclear that he intended to break with the Zaytuna over the question of women's rights, as he was later credited with doing. After independence in 1956, Bourguiba's promulgation of the PSC enacted women's rights that Haddad had advocated, but whether the PSC actually depended on Haddad's precedent is questionable. Outside of women's rights, Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli contradicted Haddad's politics, even as they claimed to be safeguarding his ideals. Ultimately, the link between him and the two presidents was a rhetorical construction rather than a genuine affiliation.
The idea of a connection between Haddad and Tunisia's postindependence leaders dovetails with a scholarly argument about the role of late 19th- and early 20th-century “Islamic reformists” (also referred to as “Islamic modernists”) in the emergence of secularism in the Arab world. In his classic Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, for instance, Albert Hourani suggests that reformists, such as Muhammad ʿAbduh, had the effect of “opening the door to” secularism.Footnote 18 From a different theoretical perspective, Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular conceives of reformists in a similar way, linking them to a set of conceptual transformations that in colonial Egypt “helped to make secularism thinkable as a practical proposition.”Footnote 19 But Haddad stands out as a reformist who hardly “opened the door to,” or “made thinkable,” the secularism of Bourguiba's and Bin ʿAli's order. His commitments were to social justice and to what Samira Haj describes as the “Islamic discursive tradition of corrective criticism and renewal.”Footnote 20 When he called for “reform” (iṣlāḥ), it was to improve, rather than circumvent or diminish, religion and the religious establishment.Footnote 21 After independence, his work served not as a basis for the government's secularizing initiatives, but as a reference point that emerged in hindsight of those initiatives. His example, in fact, offered something for everyone: dissidents and nationalists, journalists and politicians, secularists and Islamists.Footnote 22 This will become clear when he is disentangled from the narratives of the Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli eras.
HADDAD IN HIS TIME
Tahar Haddad led a brief but prolific career as an activist, a poet, a religious scholar, and a social commentator. Born in Tunis in 1899 to a family from the southern town of al-Hamma, he was educated first at a kuttāb (Qurʾanic school), and then at the Zaytuna from 1911 to 1920. On graduating, he joined the recently established nationalist party known as the Dustur (short for al-Hizb al-Hurr al-Dusturi al-Tunisi, or Parti Libéral Constitutionnel Tunisien); he was close to the Dustur leader ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Thaʿalbi, who, under pressure from the French authorities, left Tunisia in 1923.Footnote 23 In 1924, concerned by the conditions of Tunisian workers and by the need for grassroots organizing distinct from the Dustur's “high politics” tactics of negotiation and petitioning, Haddad and his leftist friend Mʾhamed (Muhammad) ʿAli al-HammiFootnote 24 founded Tunisia's first non-French-sponsored trade union, the Confédération Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (CGTT, Jamiʿat ʿUmum al-ʿAmala al-Tunisiyya). Quickly repressed by the French police, and abandoned by the Dustur, who viewed it as a liability, the CGTT was nonetheless significant as a precedent for the more successful anticolonial trade union, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT, or al-Ittihad al-ʿAmm al-Tunisi li-l-Shughl), which was established in 1946 and is still influential today.Footnote 25 In addition to cofounding the CGTT, Haddad contributed to the intellectual history of Tunisian labor through his 1927 book, al-ʿUmmal al-Tunisiyyun wa-Zuhur al-Haraka al-Niqabiyya (Tunisian Workers and the Emergence of the Trade Union Movement).Footnote 26
During the late 1920s, his focus shifted from workers’ rights to women's rights, and he began publishing newspaper articles on the topic and preparing a book. Imraʾtuna fi al-Shariʿa wa-l-Mujtamaʿ was written, Hourani says, “[u]nder the impulse of ʿAbduh.”Footnote 27 The work praised Europe for securing women's equality, and then argued that comparable, even superior, women's “rights” (ḥuqūq) could be established in Tunisia through an Islamic framework.Footnote 28 The text comprised a “legislative part” (al-qism al-tashrīʿī) and a “social part” (al-qism al-ijtimāʿī): the former criticized practices such as veiling, polygamy, arranged marriage, and repudiation (ṭalāq) as infringements on women's rights in the shariʿa; the latter called for expanded women's education and described chaotic households of uninformed wives and irresponsible husbands in unhappy marriages. But nuances of the argument were forgotten when, shortly after its publication in 1930, the Zaytuna administration condemned Imraʾtuna as heretical. Haddad's diploma (taṭwīʿ) was confiscated. Five separate ʿulamaʾ published rebuttals of the book.Footnote 29 Journalists and Dustur officials also denounced it.Footnote 30 Discredited, Haddad retreated from public life. His final work, Khawatir (Reflections), a collection of aphorisms and short essays, went unpublished. He died in 1935, partly due, it has been suggested, to stress.Footnote 31 Since he did not live long enough to see his country's independence, we can only speculate about the life he might have led under Bourguiba's and Bin ʿAli's presidencies.
To some degree Haddad resembled Bourguiba, who was born only four years after him, in 1903.Footnote 32 Both were young Dustur members who became impatient with the party and sought more radical vehicles for politics. Haddad quit the Dustur in 1925 when its leadership declined to support his CGTT; Bourguiba, who had joined the party after returning from studies in France in 1927, quit in 1934 to found the Neo-Dustur, which, with its populist discourse and cell structure designed to mobilize masses, took over the nationalist movement from older leaders such as al-Thaʿalbi.Footnote 33 Haddad and Bourguiba were compared to each other after independence. As the newspaper Le Dialogue wrote in 1974, “for Haddad just like for Bourguiba the party must be that of the people and not the gathering ‘of a bourgeois clique with egotistic interests.’”Footnote 34Le Dialogue continued, “without the scandal that produced . . . [Haddad’s] sudden death in 1935, everything indicates to us that he might have returned to the Dustur party, but this time the Neo of 1934 and not the Old of 1922.”Footnote 35
As Claude Liauzu notes, however, Bourguiba did not defend Haddad during the controversy over Imraʾtuna.Footnote 36 The two had different approaches to the colonial situation. Bourguiba argued for guarding Tunisia's “traditional” identity—veiling and family law included; it was only after independence that he referred to the veil as “a miserable rag” and, with the PSC, overhauled family law.Footnote 37 Haddad was less a tactician in Bourguiba's mode than a social justice activist who saw workers’ and women's rights as the prerequisite for national strength.Footnote 38 While he had instrumental goals,Footnote 39 he was also attentive to women's immediate lived struggles: “often her interest in her children is her only consolation in a marriage that she did not want, but was forced into, and in which she has not found the happiness she sought.”Footnote 40 In divorce, he notes, “the woman may celebrate the undoing of her shackle and her release from a prison of pain and embitterment.”Footnote 41 Haddad's advocacy for women took place decades before Bourguiba's “state feminism.” Bourguiba's silence during Haddad's persecution refutes the notion that Bourguiba was one of Haddad's “supporters.”Footnote 42
Another point made by Claude Liauzu is that “Habib Bourguiba and Tahar Haddad did not live the same historical experience.”Footnote 43 Whereas Bourguiba attended the Sadiqi College and the Lycée Carnot,Footnote 44 and went to Paris for “his Law and Political Science” (Liauzu calls this “the classic route of future nationalist leaders”), Haddad studied at the Zayutna, never learned French or any other European language, and supplemented his religious education with public classes at the Arabic-language Khalduniyya education society.Footnote 45 Liauzu's point suggests that Haddad held more in common with the “Arabophone” sections of the Neo-Dustur and with fellow Zaytuna graduates in the party than with Bourguiba and other French-educated leaders who ran the Political Bureau. Where exactly Haddad might have fit into the Neo-Dustur is impossible to know, but the question is worth considering, especially in light of the conflict that emerged in the 1950s between what historian Kenneth Perkins terms “Bourguiba's modernist Francophile wing of the party and its more traditionally oriented components.”Footnote 46
A useful source for addressing this question is Haddad's manuscript about the Zaytuna written after his days there as a student.Footnote 47 Lacking the polish of his better-known books on workers and women, and only published posthumously in 1981, al-Taʿlim al-Islami wa-Harakat al-Islah fi Jamiʿ al-Zaytuna (Islamic Education and the Reform Movement at the Zaytuna Mosque) has usually been referred to in passing, with Haddad's interest in “reform” interpreted as confirmation of his general progressiveness. For instance, in a 2002 work, Ahmed Khaled, one of the major Haddad scholars of the postindependence period, writes, “this important, apparently unfinished [t]ract allows us to discern an authentic educator gifted with a critical spirit who contested outdated structures, dogmatic teaching and programs inadequate for the reality of modern times.”Footnote 48 More significant, however, is not so much Haddad's interest in updating and improving the Zaytuna—a cause taken up before him by other figures in the religious establishmentFootnote 49—but his concern for Zaytuna students themselves.
A recurring theme in al-Taʿlim al-Islami is the intransigence of Zaytuna professors and government officials who oversaw the school and the need for student-led initiatives to revitalize its curriculum, identity, and physical infrastructure. Haddad refers to a 1910 commission on the Zaytuna “composed of professors and administrators under the auspices of the Interior Ministry . . . it concluded with a report that has remained hidden . . . and that is what made students insist on the completion of beneficial reforms.”Footnote 50 He continues,
The students are suffering a lot from the disturbance happening to them in their lessons and their studies. This suffering basically affects them alone, and so they alone have been the ones demanding reform and insisting on it . . . they are also suffering in their day-to-day life, for they are the ones who cook their own meals and tailor their own clothes, and the rooms of their residence lack water and natural light, which muddies the air and ruins the health absorbed in the effort of learning. As for the courtyard of the schools of their residence, waste waters and food scraps may stay spattered on it for two or three days without being removed because the employee charged with cleaning receives from the Awqaf Administration a monthly salary of no more than forty francs—he refuses to work continuously. More and more students have been afflicted by illnesses causing death or loss of vitality . . . and although the students pay their own expenses, the endowed schools of the residence [madāris al-suknā al-muḥabbasa] are too small to improve their lot. . . . neither the Education Administration nor the government has seen to it that anything works in the housing for the benefit of the students and for their rescue from these hazardous circumstances.Footnote 51
Haddad's tone resembles the tone he uses to address the exploitation of workers and the unhappiness of women in arranged marriages. His activism for these two groups became famous under Bourguiba's and Bin ʿAli's presidency. Here, however, he supports a group that Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli rarely acknowledged because of its link with the Islamist opposition: Zaytuna students, whom Haddad clearly regarded—even after his own student days—as an important and threatened constituency.
Another relevant aspect of al-Taʿlim al-Islami is its defense of the Zaytuna's overall importance to both Arabic and Islamic studies. Even as it lambasts problems in the Zaytuna's curriculum, teaching philosophy, and management, some of the book reads as a tribute: “this institution today is the only institution that allows us to protect our essence from perishing by reviving our language and our authentic literature, and by studying the sciences of life in our own tongue.”Footnote 52 In outlining the usefulness of “secular” subjects such as sociology and economics,Footnote 53 his goal was not simply to replace “outdated” with “modern,” but to revive the Zaytuna as a dynamic and productive center for Islamic education, which—he emphasizes—it had been in the past.Footnote 54Al-Taʿlim al-Islami reveals the extent to which Haddad, usually portrayed as an outlier in the religious establishment, shared the ideals of the Zaytuna student movement. His book partly resembles the “Sixteen Point Charter” produced in February 1950 by Sawt al-Talib al-Zaytuni (The Voice of the Zaytuna Student), a student group that promoted an education system of (in Perkins’ words) “Arab-Islamic inspiration,” and which Bourguiba repressed in 1951 to secure his own vision of the education system.Footnote 55 By no means can Haddad be confirmed as a participant in these stages of Zaytuna activism, or in the more violent subsequent conflict between Bourguiba and Zaytuna-educated Neo-Dustur party secretary Salih bin Yusuf—a conflict that, pitting Bourguiba's supporters against Bin Yusuf's more religious and rural-based supporters, was characterized to some extent by the secular–Islamist dichotomy that emerged in postindependence Tunisia.Footnote 56 Yet as a counterweight to the significant attention that has been devoted to examining Haddad's affinities with Bourguiba, it is worth acknowledging that some of his ideas overlapped with those of Bourguiba's opponents.
A possible objection to any comparison between the ideals of Haddad and those of Sawt al-Talib al-Zaytuni might be that Haddad's support for the cause of Zaytuna students was the product of the early stage of his career, whereas his later years involved rupture with the mosque-university over the Imraʾtuna controversy. Since Tunisia's independence, Haddad's women's rights advocacy has often been portrayed as an intentional break with the religious establishment, and 1930 as the year when he threw off its shackles. “This Zaytunian, revolted against his Zaytuna, appears to have studied at the world's best universities, so modern was his spirit,” wrote one journalist in 1999, suggesting that Haddad acquired his ideas despite rather than through his nine years at the mosque-university.Footnote 57 As with the notion of his affinity with Bourguiba, there are several reasons to question the idea of his “revolt against” the Zaytuna.
To begin, it is not clear that Haddad sought to break from his former school. While Imraʾtuna was at times unquestionably provocative, referring to the niqāb as a “muzzle” (al-kimāma)Footnote 58 and to the “plain ignorance” (al-jahl al-wādiḥ)Footnote 59 that prevented ʿulamaʾ from considering new interpretations, it was also noteworthy for engaging with prominent Zaytuna professors, six of whom Haddad interviewed in a chapter entitled “Araʾ li-ʿUlamaʾina fi al-Marʾa wa-l-Zawaj—Asʾila wa-Ajwiba” (Opinions of Our ʿUlamaʾ on Women and Marriage—Questions and Answers). The interviews reveal divergence among the ʿulamaʾ and some support for Haddad's arguments: for instance, ʿUthman ibn al-Khuja criticizes the idea that the Qurʾan requires women to cover their faces in public,Footnote 60 and Tahir ibn ʿAshur refers to men and women's “shared rights” (ḥuqūq mushtaraka) in marriage.Footnote 61 Haddad's tone in concluding the interview section can hardly be described as one of “revolt”:
I am deeply thankful and grateful to all of the scholars who provided us with their opinions on this subject according to what was asked of them. I recognize that this is a deep and multifaceted topic with which our limited work does not fully deal. Let us hope that we learn a lesson from history and take up the education of women and their investiture with their legitimate rights before the courts, as the Qurʿan stipulates and the religion of Islam intends.Footnote 62
The use of interviews suggests that he intended the book to persuade other ʿulamaʾ of “the reform that must happen in the judiciary,”Footnote 63 rather than to simply shock or condemn them. From this perspective, Imraʾtuna was less a manifesto “against” the religious establishment than a particularly forceful, perhaps self-consciously risky, but also deliberately scholarly, appeal to his Zaytuna colleagues. His proposals for “reform”—such as the creation of “divorce courts”—read as calls to rationalize and extend the jurisdiction of the existing shariʿa court system.Footnote 64
Another reason to question the “revolt” theory is that conjuncture played a role in the backlash against Haddad. Two external factors were present. First, at the moment Haddad's book appeared, prominent Zaytuna ʿulamaʾ were involved in what is sometimes described as “collaboration” with the protectorate; the previous month, they had caused controversy by attending the Eucharistic Congress, a French-sponsored Catholic event that Bourguiba was denouncing as a ninth crusade.Footnote 65Imraʾtuna's publication allowed “collaborating” ʿulamaʾ to distract nationalist critics by accusing Haddad of heresy. Second, the book permitted the Dustur, whose leadership had ties to the Zaytuna, to retaliate against Haddad for his break with the party over the CGTT affair. Ahmad and Schaar emphasize the Dustur's sense of grievance and its role in encouraging the Zaytuna's response:
When he published his book on women in 1930, he had already become the ‘[enfant] terrible’ of the Dustur Party. . . . The Party, with the approval of the old guard, and led by Haddad's contemporary, Moheddine Klibi, mounted a ferocious press campaign against his book, [and] marshalled the shaykh-s [sic] of Zaytuna University . . . to destroy Haddad's reputation.Footnote 66
Both of these factors often appear in secondary literature,Footnote 67 but they are rarely taken to their logical conclusion—that the 1930 scandal had origins independent of Imraʾtuna. As Haddad scholars point out, some of his opponents criticized him without having read the book.Footnote 68 Clearly, genuine disagreements and rival claims to interpretive authority within the religious establishment played a role in the backlash.Footnote 69 But the portrayal of the event as nothing more than a battle of ideas is misleading.
A final problem with the “revolt” formulation is that Haddad conceived of himself as defending religion, not diluting or mitigating it, and certainly not replacing it with “secular” insights. Following a similar approach to other reformist figures in the Islamic tradition, he aimed (in Samira Haj's terms) to “reconfigure” orthodoxy by distinguishing essential tenets of Islam from obsolete or incorrect accretions that should be phased out.Footnote 70 Women's equality was essential, in Haddad's reading. Polygamy, a vestige of the pre-Islamic period (al-jāhiliyya), was a “sin” that Islam strove to eliminate through what he described as a “gradualistic policy”: it had initially reduced men's permissible number of wives from a potentially limitless number to four, and with time it sought further reductions.Footnote 71 Frequently citing the Qurʾan, the hadith, and the work of religious scholars, Haddad not only sought to prove the Islamic basis for equality, but also to protect Islam from what he regarded as false interpretations on the part of his colleagues. In several instances he addressed the latter goal: “how distant are the principles of life Islam has prepared for us and the reality of our situation”; “if only Muslims understood the truths of their religion and their duty towards it”; “in most of their attitudes Muslims today are in contradiction to what their shariʿa established.”Footnote 72 Portraying the misogynistic status quo as a version of al-jāhiliyya, he titled the concluding section of the legislative part, “Return to Islam.”Footnote 73
Alongside ijtihād (independent reasoning), which he used to explicate women's rights in the shariʿa, Haddad drew on other strands of the Islamic discursive tradition, such as what Samira Haj refers to as “moral criticism.”Footnote 74 Disrespect for women was far from his only target. He also decried alcohol, idleness, gambling, swearing, and “youth who waver between love and lust.”Footnote 75 His proximity to the religious establishment—and the extent to which his education clearly took place within it—can likewise be seen in his contempt for Sufism, a stance he shared with other reformist ʿulamaʾ, such as his former teacher ʿAbd al-Hamid bin Badis.Footnote 76Imraʾtuna, in sum, was the work of a Zaytuna student. The persecution Haddad suffered by the school was tragic partly because he was not an outside critic, but an ʿālim from its own ranks.Footnote 77
Since independence, a prevalent narrative has been that Haddad died “in total indifference,”Footnote 78 with “a few rare faithful present at the day of his burial.”Footnote 79 The corollary of this account is that the religious establishment completely abandoned him, and only under Bourguiba's and Bin ʿAli's presidency was he properly honored. As an article in the government newspaper stated in 1999, “dead in anonymity . . . he comes back to life in all of his splendor.”Footnote 80 Primary sources provide a different image of Haddad's passing, however. According to journalist Abdelazziz Laroui (ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-ʿArwi), writing in the left-wing French-language newspaper, Le Petit Matin, the day after Haddad's funeral on 8 December 1935,
yesterday a large crowd [une foule nombreuse] accompanied the coffin of the poet Tahar Haddad. . . . His coffin was carried . . . by intellectuals, poets, writers, and journalists. His ideas had spread and united the votes of all of the youth; those who came to accompany him up to his final resting place were numerous [nombreux]: friends, sympathizers, political allies, disciples.Footnote 81
In a second article published one year later, at the time of a reunion on the first anniversary of Haddad's death, Laroui includes details that contradict the idea of a permanent rupture between Haddad and his former school: “one year ago to this day, on a cold Ramadan morning, we carried him to the ground, where, in late but resounding proof that he was no longer considered a heretic, a Zaytuna shaykh made over his body the final prayer, amidst the tears of his friends and admirers.”Footnote 82 Although Laroui had recently joined the Neo-Dustur, the article does not associate Haddad with the party; rather, Laroui compares Haddad to one of his former Zaytuna teachers: “ʿUqbi, Ben Badis, and their friends of ʿUlamaʾ have won over half of Algeria. In Tunisia, Tahar Haddad . . . who studied at the Zaytuna, who was very well read, was an apostle of this type.”Footnote 83
At the time of his death, then, Haddad was described as an Islamic reformist. He promoted an education system that would enshrine freedom of thought, but also Arabic and Islam. He sought to correct what he saw as misconceptions of the shariʿa. He defended causes that were peripheral to the nationalist leadership of his era, and, in that sense, it is fitting that there is no mention of Bourguiba among the mourners.
AFTERLIVES
Bourguiba announced the Personal Status Code in August 1956, months after independence and just before he became president of the Tunisian Republic. Framed as an example of ijtihād rather than as a departure from Islam in the line of Atatürk in Turkey, but dismissed on religious grounds by Bourguiba's rival Salih bin Yusuf (from his exile in Cairo), the PSC abolished polygamy and repudiation, required divorce to take place in court, and stipulated marriage contracts requiring mutual consent.Footnote 84 According to the 2000 government publication, al-Marʾa fi al-Haraka al-Islahiyya min al-Tahir al-Haddad ila Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli, the PSC “was in its text and its spirit a response to what Haddad called for . . . a result of a creative meeting between the thought of the intellectual who . . . resisted stagnant and erroneous ideas, and the will of the leader who converted thought into law.”Footnote 85
But while the PSC did codify women's rights that Imraʾtuna promoted, Bourguiba did not mention Haddad in either of his speeches introducing the code, although he did praise other historical figures in the nationalist movement.Footnote 86 Haddad's name was also absent from the text of the code itself.Footnote 87 Given these omissions, it is worth asking how important Haddad actually was to the formulation of the law. According to Mounira Charrad's comparative sociology of family law in the postindependence Maghrib, the PSC was facilitated by the exceptional autonomy and power of the Tunisian state at independence, Bourguiba's high degree of personal control over the state, and his and his colleagues’ ambition to transform Tunisian society.Footnote 88 Haddad's precedent may have been relevant symbolically, but, in the event, it was incidental. The PSC achieved “reform” not through Haddad's model of rationalizing the existing personal status courts, but by absorbing these into the state judiciary, giving the legislation its “secular” quality. As if to further question Haddad's importance to Bourguiba, the president made two significant breaks with Haddad's other positions: first, he co-opted the UGTT, the national trade union, which, Perkins notes, did not secure the right to strike in Tunisia's new constitution;Footnote 89 second, in another example of secularism—or, more precisely, state control of religionFootnote 90—he reconstituted the Zaytuna as the Faculty of Theology at the new University of Tunis, effectively placing it under state authority.Footnote 91
Although the government was contradicting many of Haddad's ideals, the promulgation of a bold women's rights law prompted nationalist intellectuals to link Bourguiba to Haddad. In 1957, in what he described as “the first book published on Tahar Haddad,” literature professor Abu al-Qasim Muhammad Karru interpreted Imraʾtuna from the vantage point of the PSC. Footnote 92 He lauded Bourguiba for having realized Haddad's project, and he called Haddad “the forgotten pioneer” and “the first martyr for the sake of intellectual liberty and liberation of women in our country.”Footnote 93 Karru's book influenced subsequent writers. A February 1961 article in the first issue of a nationalist literary magazine called Tajdid used Karru's language in its title, “al-Taʿrif bi-Raʾid Maghbun” (Introduction to a Wronged Pioneer); the author, Mongi Chemli (al-Munji al-Shamli), had discovered Haddad in Karru's book.Footnote 94 Not every admirer of Haddad was a government supporter, though. February 1961 also saw accolades for him in La Tribune du Progrès, a French-language communist journal whose first editorial a few months earlier had stated, “the Tunisian people . . . feels frustrated when independence is not accompanied by democracy.”Footnote 95 Two years later, La Tribune du Progrès was banned for criticizing Bourguiba's accumulation of personal power.Footnote 96 That this short-lived publication had acclaimed Haddad demonstrated how easily he could be pulled into the symbolic universe of the left.
After independence, nearly two decades passed before the president himself devoted a speech to Haddad. By this time, Haddad was the subject of numerous academic studiesFootnote 97; his final book, Khawatir, the collection of essays and aphorisms, had been published; his most famous books, al-ʿUmmal al-Tunisiyyun wa-Zuhur al-Haraka al-Niqabiyya and Imraʾtuna fi al-Shariʿa wa-l-Mujtamaʿ, had been reissued; and the makhzan of a large house in the Tunis medina had been converted to a cultural programming office and public lecture hall called the Tahar Haddad Club, which was overseen by the Ministry of Culture. Bourguiba's intervention, a 1975 speech during an event at the club recognizing the fortieth anniversary of Haddad's death, has been described as a “eulogical tract,”Footnote 98 but it was also a political claim on the increasingly popular Haddad story. Although the president referred to Haddad as a “scapegoat,” he presented 1930 as an inevitable conflict against incorrigibly conservative ʿulamaʾ, whom he collectively referred to as “the turbaned” (les enturbanés). He omitted to mention his lack of support for Haddad in 1930; instead, he noted Haddad's failure to support his nationalist campaigns. He concluded on a rather critical note: “I do not know why Tahar El Haddad did not talk about these events. Maybe the poor man was already sick. For my part, I avenged him from the old Dusturians and from critics of women.”Footnote 99 Bourguiba's first discourse on Haddad was self-serving, concerned less with honoring him than with adding him to presidential mythology.Footnote 100
One sign of the tenuousness of Bourguiba's claim on Haddad is that the opposition during the mid-1970s can also be said to have been “avenging” the reformist. This was clearly true of the UGTT, which organized a general strike in 1978,Footnote 101 but it was also true in some ways of the opposite side of the political spectrum, the nascent Tunisian Islamist movement. Islamist leader Rashid al-Ghannushi was an Arabophone Zaytuna graduate who, like Haddad, criticized conditions at the mosque-university.Footnote 102 When the Islamist movement first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it resembled Haddad's project in that it forsook party politics for grassroots activism, arguing that the only way forward was to revive Islamic values with which Tunisia had lost touch—and that had been torn away by a state the Islamists presented as an extension of French rule.Footnote 103 Although opposed to the PSC during this period, and in that sense in conflict with Haddad, the Islamist movement—with its Zaytuna connections, call for “return” to religion, and “moral criticism”—should accurately be viewed not as the antithesis of Haddad, but as a late 20th-century iteration of his own brand of politics.Footnote 104 Indeed, in subsequent years, one of the critics of Bourguiba's claim on Haddad was Rashid al-Ghannushi.Footnote 105
The fiftieth anniversary of Haddad's death in 1985 saw commemoration from a group distinct from both the government and the Islamists. During the late 1970s, an independent women's movement emerged comprising activists who supported the PSC—many having grown up with its provisions—but contested Bourguiba's monopoly on women's rights and his paternalistic boast to have “liberated” women. Holding meetings at the Tahar Haddad Club, these activists founded women's organizations that remain active, such as the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates (AFTD). They also started a self-funded, bilingual French-Arabic magazine called Nisaʾ (Women), whose fourth issue,Footnote 106 in November 1985, ran Haddad's portrait on its Arabic-language cover.Footnote 107Nisaʾ memorialized Haddad without Bourguiba's triumphalism. One article, for example, celebrated Haddad's role in the women's movement but noted persistent discrimination against women.Footnote 108 Reflecting Nisaʾ's secular outlook, the article also deplored the Islamist movement, which, reconstituted since 1981 as a political party, the Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique (MTI, or Harakat al-Ittijah al-Islami), was mobilizing against the PSC.Footnote 109 The appendage of this anti-Islamist statement to an article on Haddad indicated a symbolic shift through which Haddad's story had become a parable for today's politics: it was as if the ʿulamaʾ of the 1930 backlash had reincarnated themselves as the MTI. Against Tunisia's Islamic Revival, Haddad was emerging as a “secular” icon. The secular women's rights activists of Nisaʾ sometimes referred to themselves as “the daughters of Tahar Haddad.”Footnote 110
Bin ʿAli's displacement of the aging Bourguiba on 9 November 1987 changed the politics surrounding Haddad commemoration. As Bin ʿAli took power, uncertainty over the future of the PSC, which had come under significant pressure from the MTI, forced the independent women's movement to shift its critique of the status quo to defense of existing women's rights; as one observer later summarized, “between November 1987 and November 1989 . . . the feminist discourse was largely absorbed into the dominant discourse.”Footnote 111 After pledging support for the PSC, Bin ʿAli co-opted independent women's activists, founding a women's research agency known as the Centre de Recherche, d’Études, de Documentation et d’Information sur la Femme (CREDIF) in 1990. A former Nisaʾ contributor was appointed CREDIF's first director.Footnote 112 AFTD, having operated independently, received official recognition.Footnote 113 Meanwhile, after briefly legalizing the MTI and returning autonomy to the Zaytuna as part of an effort to frame his presidency as more sympathetic to Islam than Bourguiba’s,Footnote 114 Bin ʿAli cracked down on the Islamist party, despite its leadership having reversed its opposition to the PSC and retitled the party “al-Nahda” in compliance with a ban on religious references in the names of political parties.Footnote 115
Having co-opted independent women's rights activists and repressed the Islamists, the Bin ʿAli regime monopolized Haddad commemoration in attempt to sell its “progressive” image. Bin ʿAli's reign saw celebrations not only in 1995 for the sixtieth anniversary of Haddad's death, but also in 1999 for the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The government sponsored and organized many of the proceedings. Ministers gave speeches on Haddad, the Tunisian post office released a Haddad stamp, and events were held at the headquarters of the ruling party, the former Neo-Dustur, now called the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD), as well as at the Tahar Haddad Club and CREDIF. At the latter, the Tahar Haddad Library was founded in 1999.Footnote 116 The anniversaries received unprecedented media coverage—32 newspaper articles in 1995 and 122 in 1999—much of it reiterating narratives about Haddad's link to Bin ʿAli. Lines were drawn from Imraʾtuna to the PSC to Bin ʿAli's support for women's rights. Haddad was opposed to the religious establishment; he was described as “a thinker who was the bête noir of the enturbanés in the beginning of the century and died in total indifference.”Footnote 117 He was labeled “the apostle of modernity even though educated in the citadel of conservatism.”Footnote 118 Support for Haddad was equated with support for the regime. One 1999 article celebrated him while also taking care to remind readers of the upcoming elections (which neither the banned and heavily policed Islamists nor any other opposition party had any chance of contesting).Footnote 119 Haddad was termed “a precursor”Footnote 120 and “a man ahead of his era,”Footnote 121 while Bin ʿAli was called “the upholder of Haddad”Footnote 122 and said to be working in “continuity”Footnote 123 with his ideas.
In reality, “continuity” was limited. While the PSC did continue to enshrine women's rights defended in Imraʾtuna, the regime thwarted Haddad's other goals by co-opting the UGTT,Footnote 124 intervening in the Zaytuna curriculum,Footnote 125 and harassing Zaytuna students suspected of Islamist sympathies.Footnote 126 “Women's rights” often did not apply to women in the opposition or associated with it.Footnote 127 CREDIF's publication in 2000 of a book entitled al-Marʾa fi al-Haraka al-Islahiyya min al-Tahir al-Haddad ila Zin al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli signaled not the fulfillment of Haddad's reformist ideals, but the extent to which his name had become a state propaganda tool.Footnote 128
CONCLUSION
Bin ʿAli's overthrow by a popular revolution in January 2011 once again altered the context of Haddad's memorialization. Al-Nahda, back from prison and exile, entered the National Constituent Assembly after winning a plurality in the October 2011 elections. Secular women's rights activists, monitoring drafts of the new constitution for infringements on equality, assumed an opposition role of a more direct type than the one they had played under Bourguiba during the 1980s.Footnote 129 And after decades of tributes and anniversary celebrations for Haddad, in May 2012 his epitaph at al-Jallaz Cemetery in Tunis was covered in black paint. Salafis were probably responsible, although the perpetrator remained anonymous.
Prompting a counterdemonstration by secular activists, the incident exemplified “secular versus Islamist” polarization, which analysts since the revolution have portrayed as the essential fact of politics in Tunisia.Footnote 130 As this article has suggested, however, Haddad's reputation as a secular icon who confronted religious conservatives is in many ways the product of “old regime” narratives. These narratives exaggerated his connection to the former presidents, ignored his ties to the Zaytuna student movement, overstated his break with the mosque-university, and overlooked the Zaytuna shaykh at his funeral. His writings on the Zaytuna and women in fact took place within the religious establishment, which he sought not to subvert or destroy, but to renew and revitalize. His afterlives, however, unfolded in the divergent registers of the postindependence landscape. His trade union and women's rights commitments resonated with secularists—nationalist intellectuals who linked him to the PSC, and leftists and women's rights activists who admired his critical energy. His Zaytuna ties and religious values resonated with Islamists—al-Nahda members who applauded his example,Footnote 131 and Salafis who regarded his ideas as misinterpretations.Footnote 132 “Old regime” discourses tried to monopolize his legacy, but it became a site of surprising consensus. Everyone invoked him, albeit in completely different ways.
Haddad's case challenges the idea that 19th- and early 20th-century Islamic reformists served to “open the door to” secularism in the Arab world. The extent to which Haddad influenced Bourguiba is unclear. The PSC, often said to have originated with Imraʾtuna, was ultimately Bourguiba's initiative, facilitated by political factors at the time of independence. If Haddad's book played a role, it was largely symbolic. Indeed, his reputation as the “precursor” to or “pioneer” for the PSC only emerged after its promulgation, becoming a truism through decades of anniversary celebrations, such as Bourguiba's 1975 speech and Bin ʿAli's events during the 1990s. Haddad's most enduring impact has therefore been not as a “precursor” for policy—much of which has actually contradicted his ideals—but as a malleable symbol to celebrate, commemorate, or vandalize for the sake of myriad identities in the postindependence period. As in every country, political narratives in Tunisia are constructed, and Haddad is likely to remain all of the things he has come to be: hero for secular women's rights activists, object of disdain for Salafis,Footnote 133 reference point for al-Nahda, and ally of Bourguiba for nationalists. Yet he also embodies another narrative, significant for today's context, of a reformist who defies the secular–Islamist binary.
