by MESSAOUD ROMDHANI
Tunisia could pride itself on drafting the most advanced code of personal status in the region, forbidding polygamy, legalizing divorce, establishing equality between partners in the choice of the spouse, limiting the age of marriage…that is to say, many important rights have been acquired by Tunisian women since 1956.
Still more impressive is the recent lifting of all government reservation on the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminations against Women). It is, in fact, a landmark decision by the Tunisian government.
Unfortunately, there is still a considerable distance between nice theories and the bitter reality. The oppression of women remains a fundamental feature in everyday life and the more worrying fact is that women are now more than ever exposed to various forms of violence and abuse (verbal, economic, verbal….).
And since remembrance is mostly a memoria futuria, a lesson from the past to the future, let’s just recall that after the 26 October 2011 elections , there was a new regressive political speech; a willingness to curtail women’s acquired rights. Sometimes to question some of them in the name of Islam. For instance, we heard a female minister in the Troika government say, in no uncertain terms, that the customary marriage is “a personal choice.”
Preachers coming from the Gulf region have quickly taken over to spread a reactionary and misogynist speech. The deputies of the Islamist Party were not outdone; they tried desperately to substitute the notion of equality between men and women with “the complementarity” in the first drafts of the new Constitution.
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(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi)