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niqab
IN THE PERIOD THAT STRETCHED from its independence from France in 1956 to the 2011 revolution, Tunisia was said to be a secular country, but the state’s approach to religion was not so much secular as simply authoritarian.
President Habib Bourguiba, who ruled Tunisia after independence, was enamored with the French model of laïcité—secularism in public affairs, aimed at bringing about a secular society—and,
Like many of the Middle East’s twentieth-century nation-building modernizers, he believed that society needed growth and discipline to modernize and catch up with the West, and that Islam inhibited those qualities.
President Bourguiba had famously called the veil “that miserable rag” and banned it from schools and public offices in 1981. There
Like other modernizers in the region, Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, Bourguiba didn’t explicitly advocate that women abandon Islam, but he made clear that he wanted them to act secularly: to mingle bareheaded in mixed company, to dress in modern Western fashion.
“If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a test then, would it? Allah loves those most whom he tests the hardest.” That was true, according to the Quran, but that line had also become a rose-filtered meme
The Prophet said: “Guard yourself from the Hellfire even with half a date in charity. If he cannot find it, then with a kind word.” Nour could manage half a date, and feeling like she could help others, even when she herself had so little, was heartening. She wasn’t as powerless as she thought. When the imam’s wife invited other women over for a circle of discussion, Nour was often too shy to say very much herself. But she listened avidly and took it all in.
stultifying
“inclusion moderation hypothesis,” which holds that the more a society democratizes and allows radical groups to participate politically, the more such groups are inclined to soften their rhetoric and behavior.
eschatological
Islam carries the concept of ummah, or a global community of Muslims, all of whom share a spiritual bond and a stake in each other’s welfare.
The collapse of the Arab Spring revolts led to an even more extreme regime of repression in countries like Egypt and Bahrain; for the autocrats whose power rested on their choking suppression of politics and civil society, their strict control of the media, it became imperative to ensure other countries did not provoke their populations by example.
considered democracy to be shirk, or idolatry; God had provided all the laws necessary, and overriding them was sinful.
“The problem is that political Islam believes in Caliphate.”
Islamic law, under all universal interpretations, holds that a woman must wait four months before remarriage, after widowhood or divorce. This is mainly to establish the paternity of any child that might have been conceived, and the period, called idaa, is not only required of every Muslim woman, but is also her right, to allow her to grieve.
The very beginning of that first year was special. Everyone agrees on this, even those who later renounced the caliphate for its wanton brutality, its devotion to earthly power and indifference to Islamic procedure and values.
