Tunisia tunes in to combat extremism

John Thorne, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 10:59PM UAE / November 5. 2009 6:59PM GMT

Latifa Ferchichi in a control booth and broadcaster Nader Abassi at the microphone at Radio Zitouna. John Thorne / The National

CARTHAGE, TUNISIA // Two months after she began working at Radio Zitouna, in Carthage, Latifa Ferchichi began wearing a headscarf.

“Before I came here I had misconceptions about the Quran,” said Ms Ferchichi, 29, who joined the station when it launched in 2007 and helps run a call-in show about Islam’s holy book. “Now I’m learning a lot about religion.”

From a rococo white villa near the presidential palace, Radio Zitouna beams out a tolerant, state-approved brand of Islam that officials are touting as an antidote to extremism. But the government also wants support from a pious generation of young people such as Ms Ferchichi, say analysts, while moderate Islamists warn that religiosity is no substitute for the democratic reform that many Tunisians crave.

Last week, the President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali won his fifth consecutive term, with an official 89.62 per cent of the vote, in elections that opposition leaders said were engineered in his favour.

Sixteen electoral observers from the African Union, plus 26 from Tunisia and 11 from European and Arab countries, said voting, carried out in several thousand polling stations, followed international standards.

Mr Ben Ali came to power in 1987 when, as prime minister, he took over for an ailing president, Habib Bourguiba, who had ruled Tunisia for three decades after it gained independence from France in 1956.

A staunch secularist, Bourguiba enacted a new family code giving women equality with men in most areas, and shut down Islamic schools and courts. While polygamy is outlawed in Tunisia, abortion is legal and contraception widely available.

The result is an unobtrusive faith and a degree of social freedom that many Tunisians value.

“There’s no question that Islam is our religion, but the Islam here is open,” said Mohammed, a computer science student in jeans and a T-shirt and sporting a light beard who stopped by the Hamuda Pacha Mosque, in Tunis’s old city, for the noon prayer.

“There is no contradiction between being modern and preserving our identity,” said Boubaker Khzouri, Tunisia’s religious affairs minister. That balance “is what keeps Tunisia stable and safe”, he said.

Nevertheless, opposition to the authoritarian rule of Mr Bourguiba and Mr Ben Ali has often had an Islamic inflection. When bread riots erupted in the 1980s, cries of “God is great!” rang in the streets.

In 1989, the Islamist opposition movement, Nahda, or “renaissance”, claimed a strong showing in elections won officially by Mr Ben Ali and his Democratic Constitutional Rally party (RCD), leading to the arrest or exile of thousands of Islamist activists and the banning of religious parties.

“They eliminated Nahda, a moderate movement,” said Ziad Doulatli, a senior Nahda member jailed in 1990 and released in 2004. “The result? Young people began listening to the discourse of bin Laden.”

While Tunisia has largely avoided terrorism, it was shaken by a lethal car bombing in 2002 targeting the country’s Jewish community, and shoot-outs between police and Islamist militants in 2007. Tunisian militants have turned up on battlefields in the Middle East, and around 3,000 terrorist suspects are estimated to be in prison.

Meanwhile, the government has sought to channel growing religious feeling among Tunisians into popular support, said Hamadi Redissi, a politics professor at the University of Tunis.

Rules prohibiting the Islamic headscarf in public buildings have been relaxed, alcohol-free zones have been introduced, and the country’s first Islamic bank is under construction in Tunis.

Then there is Radio Zitouna, launched by Mr Ben Ali’s son-in-law, Sakher el Materi, and named after Tunis’s venerable Zitouna Mosque, which itself takes its name from a legendary olive tree in the shade of which the city’s 8th century Muslim conqueror, Hassan Ibn Nooman, is said to have taught the Quran.

Today, “the correct understanding of the Quran is the main subject of Radio Zitouna”, said the station’s deputy director, Mohamed Machfar, an alert man with a neat beard and impish smile. “We’re trying to fight extremism in a civilised way.”

Before joining the station in 2007, Mr Machfar was for 15 years a state treasury accountant by day and in the evenings a keen student of the Quran at Tunis’s prestigious Zitouna University. Now an imam, he and fellow scholars at Radio Zitouna go on-air to broadcast tolerant interpretations of Islam’s holy texts.

Mr Machfar envisions a television station in the next few years, “and more pop music – young people like that”.

“Everything the state has done to respect religion and liberate its practice, we’re for it,” said Mr Doulatli. But such measures “don’t respond to the essential problem: the Tunisian people want change”.

For more than two decades Mr Ben Ali’s political machine has formed the government, which opposition leaders say uses legislative manoeuvres to keep him in power and silences criticism with heavy-handed policing and an arsenal of bureaucratic tools.

The political disillusionment these tactics foster is driving some young people towards the stern Islamist rhetoric pouring into Tunisia via the internet and new satellite TV channels based in the Middle East, said Mr Doulatli. Others, taking the opposite direction, seek jobs and futures abroad, especially Europe.

For now, Mr Machfar, Ms Ferchichi and their colleagues remain bent over their microphones.

jthorne@thenational.ae