The announcement came a month after President Beji Caid Essebsi called for the government to lift the ban dating back to 1973, arguing that existing practice violates Tunisia's constitution, adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Arab Spring revolution. [...]
Until now a non-Muslim man who wished to marry a Tunisian woman had to convert to Islam and submit a certificate of his conversion as proof while a Tunisian man is allowed to marry a non-Muslim woman. [...]
Daughters are entitled to only half the inheritance given to sons.
Mainstream Muslim clerics almost universally see the inheritance rules as enshrined in the Quran, Islam's holy book, and consider the rules on marriage to be equally unquestionable in Islamic law.
The country's leading imams and theologians have issued a statement denouncing the president's proposals as a "flagrant violation of the precepts" of Islam. [...]
The first president of independent Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba, championed a landmark social code in 1956 that set a standard for the region by banning polygamy and granting new rights to women unheard of in the Arab world at the time. But even he didn't dare push for equal inheritance.
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