by URSULA LINDSEY
Several hundred Tunisian Salafi students gathered at the U. of Manouba to demand a stop to mixed-gender classes and for females to have the right to wear full face veils. PHOTO/Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images
The Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Manouba, in northeastern Tunisia, has been closed for almost two weeks, paralyzed by a standoff between Islamist protesters who say the university is violating their religious rights, and administrators and professors who say academic freedom is under attack.
In recent months, the university has become the epicenter of a showdown between religious and secular elements in the country, a cultural clash that some fear could be repeated in other Arab nations, like Egypt, where conservative Muslim groups are pushing for a broader role in society and government.
At Manouba, Habib Kazdaghli, dean of the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities, hasn’t been able to enter his office since December 6, when, he says, a crowd of Islamist students and their supporters from outside the university blocked his way. “They were playing the Koran on loudspeakers,” says Mr. Kazdaghli. “They formed a human chain outside my office, they closed the door, they pushed me.” They also knocked down a colleague who came to his defense, he says.
After that, faculty members decided to suspend classes, he says, “until the sit-in is lifted and people who are not part of the university are evacuated from campus.”
The protesters belong to the Salafi movement, an ultra-orthodox Islamist movement that advocates gender segregation and a strict adherence to Islamic law. They are demanding a prayer room on campus and for women to be allowed to wear the niqab, the full-face veil. Their leader, according to Tunisian media reports, is Wissam Othmani, a Salafi preacher and the head of the Association for the Defense of Veiled Women.
Under former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Islamists suffered severe repression. Wearing a headscarf was forbidden by law and sporting a beard was enough to attract the unwanted attention of the dictator’s secret police, who monitored universities closely.
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