Tunisia's Bardo National Museum showcases history of diversity and tolerance

Tunisia's ancient Roman, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other heritages sit side by side at the Bardo National Museum, as controversy rages outside its walls.

Outside the thick walls of the fine museum, Tunisia is sweating through a Ramadan marked by a tough struggle with itself to create a new national identity, after an uprising last year overthrew president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
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TUNIS // Aziza Mraihi, a guide at Tunisia's newly re-opened Bardo National Museum, bounces between exhibits as they empty out after a long, quiet Ramadan day.

"See here," says the slight, unveiled young woman, stopping at a Roman-era mosaic with bare-breasted women with horses' bodies.

"These are the only depictions of female centaurs in the world," she says gleefully. "We had a feminist country in the past! The Roman emperors were not allowed four wives."

She skitters on, leaning in with a conspiratorial whisper as she points out a mosaic featuring gambling. "Look at their feet, they are cheating! See, this is part of our heritage," she says, and moves to a sculpted frieze from the earlier Numidian empire with a regal female figure. As we behold a Bacchic mural, she explains that Romans believed wine was good for you.

Her implications are not hard to understand. Outside the thick walls of the fine museum, Tunisia is sweating through a Ramadan marked by a tough struggle with itself to create a new national identity, after an uprising last year overthrew president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Islamist movements, suppressed for decades, have now come to the fore, with the moderate Ennahda party winning the most seats in the election last year of a body to write the constitution. People who want religion to play a greater role in Tunisian life have clashed, sometimes violently, with those who are more secular.

There has been much debate over what is acceptable in the fields of art and culture. In June, controversial artworks that touched on Islam (a painting with the Arabic for "God is glorious" spelt out in ants, for example) were displayed in a gallery in Tunis's smart La Marsa suburb.

After a few hyper-religious people alerted the imam of a local mosque and their Facebook friends to this, a demonstration outside the gallery became a confrontation that spread into riots across the country.

There have been other incidents: the head of the Nessma television station fined for screening the film Persepolis, which includes a drawing of God; Nasreddine Ben Saida, the general director of the daily newspaper Ettounissia, briefly jailed after printing a picture of a footballer with his naked girlfriend.

In short, Tunisia is in a heightened state of sensitivity when it comes to religion, morals, and the role and behaviour of women. Were it not for the fact that the museum's exhibits are so ancient, the opening of a grand public project featuring sensuous nude women, flasks of wine and even a Torah would be unthinkable.

But this building, fresh from a three-year refurbishment and reopened last month, serves as a reminder that the country has a storied, sometimes bloody, history, in which religion and morals have changed greatly.

Once a palace of the beys or Ottoman rulers who ruled the country for three centuries, it was converted into a museum late in the 19thcentury and made more accessible to the public under president Habib Bourguiba after independence from France in 1956.

It contains artefacts from the past 3,000 years, as civilisations and empires rose and crumbled along the rim of the Mediterranean and the region was a strategic port, close to Italy and Sicily, a gateway to Africa, fiercely fought over by successive dominant powers.

According to legend, seafaring Phoenicians founded Carthage more than 2,000 years ago - its ruins lie covered in creepers just outside Tunis and its wild-eyed sculptures have a section in the museum.

Then, the country fell into the hands of the Romans, who imposed their brutal brand of peace, along with the curvy nudes who frolic on mosaics in the museum, hips and breasts lovingly outlined in tiny tiles of pink porphyry brought from Egypt.

Jews settled, building synagogues on the island of Djerba. Churches followed when the emperor Constantine converted the Roman empire to Christianity. Islamic rulers of all stripes came and went. Colonial control endured under the Ottomans, whose tiles and lavish ceilings are preserved in the museum, and then the French.

Like many national treasures, it is neglected by the heirs of its riches; there are few local visitors. But if Tunisians cared to see it, said Ms Mraihi, their history would remind them that this has long been a crossroads of cultures and peoples.

"They would learn about tolerance, the rich history - especially about religious tolerance," she said, adding that different ways of interpreting Islam and its culture would not create a problem in Tunisia if people realised how diverse their heritage was.

"The biggest revolution we need," she says, "is one of mentality."

foreign.desk@thenational.ae