The New York Review of Books: Is Tunisia Ready for Gender Equality?

And yet to many Tunisians that accomplishment feels scant. Since 2011, Tunisia has held several free elections. It has weathered terrorist attacks, deep polarization between Islamists and secularists, and the evident desire of elements of the old regime to turn back the clock. But its leaders have been unable or unwilling to enact economic reforms that would deliver the greater growth and equality that were among the people’s fundamental demands. “In the last four years, we achieved stability, we protected the state,” Abdelhamid Jelassi, a senior member of the Islamist Ennahda party, which is part of the governing coalition, told me. “But we didn’t turn stability into wealth. People don’t eat stability.” [...]

Inheritance inequality is the “bedrock” of discrimination against women, Bochra Bel Haj Hmida, the head of COLIBE, told me: “It’s at the center of all discrimination: cultural, economic, social—it’s about power.” Hmida is a lawyer, the cofounder of a major feminist association, and a parliamentarian. When the law was proposed, most of Tunisia’s imams preached against it in their Friday sermons. Bel Haj Hmida was targeted personally—the law was often referred to as “Bochra’s law,” and she received insults and death threats on social media. The debate spread beyond the borders of Tunisia. Scholars at the Islamic institute of Al Azhar in Egypt—one of the Arab world’s oldest universities—denounced the idea.

The COLIBE report made a number of other far-reaching recommendations intended to harmonize the country’s laws with the principles of its constitution. It suggested ending capital punishment, decriminalizing homosexuality, and ensuring greater protections for detainees during the garde à vue, the initial period they are held by police before being charged. But President Essebsi has focused almost exclusively on inheritance. On August 13, National Women’s Day in Tunisia, he announced he would be proposing a law to make inheritance equal. The law has now been approved by the cabinet and submitted to the country’s fractious parliament, where it could be discussed and voted on in the following months. Or it could go nowhere, used as a bargaining chip in a much larger political game or stalled and buried, as so many laws and reforms have been in recent years.[...]

Ennahda has decided to vote against the inheritance reform, Labidi told me. “We represent conservative people,” she said. “And when this project was made public a majority of Tunisians rejected it.” The party is willing to introduce an amendment that would allow people to stipulate that they want to divide their inheritance equally, but it insists that the traditional sharia-based division should be the default. The proposed law does the opposite, making equal separation of property automatic unless someone opts out. Both sides know that the default option will be the prevalent one.

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Haaretz: Tunis Elects Its First Female Mayor - From the Islamist Party

Elected Tuesday, Souad Abderrahim, is the manager of a pharmaceutical firm and a militant women’s rights activist. Despite being a member of the moderate Islamist Ennahda party, she does not wear a veil. [...]

She is the only female winner of half a dozen other female Ennahda candidates who ran in the mayoral elections in, and around the Tunis region. [...]

Abderrahim stated in an interview with the Associated Press that her first priority was to clean the city and plant trees. The city of Tunis has been suffering from the degradation of the waste disposable services since the 2011 Arab Spring.

She dedicated her victory to all Tunisian women, and asserted that the Ennahda party would not compromise the advancements made in women’s rights, something which they had safeguarded by promoting female candidates in municipal elections.

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The Atlantic: Arab Democracy Depends on Normalizing Islamist Parties

The perennial question of whether democracy can work in the Middle East isn’t always easy to answer. Generally, it hasn’t worked. But amid civil war in Yemen, Libya, and Syria, authoritarian resurgence in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and economic instability in Jordan, there are at least three cases that challenge the notion that it can’t happen here. Tunisia, which held its first post-revolution municipal elections in May, continues to be a (relative) bright spot. Then there are the more unlikely cases of Iraq as well as Lebanon—probably the world’s most successful failed state. All three share two related features: Largely without controversy, they include Islamist parties in their democratic processes; and, second, they feature some degree of power-sharing. [...]

The very presence of Islamist parties can be inherently polarizing, particularly when they represent large, powerful, and conservative constituencies. Through successive administrations, the United States has regarded too much Islamist representation—or any Islamist representation—as a risky prospect. Yet it was the George W. Bush administration that, despite its discomfort with Islamism, ironically paved the way for Islamists to take power through democratic elections in Lebanon—a first in the Arab world. After its January 2005 elections, Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shia Islamist Dawa party assumed the prime ministership. Interestingly, Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood members served in various cabinet positions, including as ministers of higher education and planning. In Lebanon, Hezbollah—however much the United States and Saudi Arabia oppose it—has become a fixture of coalition governments. The point here isn’t that these groups are good (Hezbollah is a designated terrorist organization as well as an active participant in the Syrian regime’s mass killing of civilians), but rather that Arab democracy, in practice, often coincides with the normalization of Islamist parties. [...]

In the case of Tunisia, the irony is that Islamists’ willingness to play nice—something that would generally seem quite positive—has contributed to a troubling trend of democratic backsliding on things like police reform, an overly securitized counterterrorism strategy, and the lack of accountability for the crimes and corruption of old regime figures. As the largest party in parliament, Ennahda potentially has considerable power to challenge Prime Minister Youssef Chahed and President Beji Caid Essebsi Essebsi’s priorities. Instead, they have emphasized caution, consensus, and stability, fearing that doing otherwise might summon the old days of polarization and repression. Embracing their role as junior partner in the government, they have, in effect, gained protected status. But this also means that Tunisia is deprived of a cohesive bloc that could serve as an effective lobby for strengthening the democratic transition. The desire for compromise, unchecked, can come at a cost.

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Al Jazeera: Analysis: Qatar-Gulf crisis: Who are the 'terrorists'?

Most of the current accusations against Qatar date back to the years leading up to and during the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010. Unlike its neighbours, Qatar lent its support for the removal of authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and generally endorsed the possibilities offered by a new era of political openness for repressed populations around the region.

That support was quite often channelled through Islamist parties poised to take power in democratic elections such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Ennahda Movement in Tunisia. Even amid questions surrounding Qatar's actual motives for pursuing such a policy, or the fact that it stopped short of supporting the uprising in neighbouring Bahrain, Qatar was placed in the anti-establishment camp.  [...]

Along with punishing Qatar for past offences, this battle appears to be more about crushing the last vestiges of hope for any independent political thought in the Middle East.

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