Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (25 page)

Fragments of Phoenician culture persist in small ways, as well. During the spring and summer, for instance, Tunisian men walking the streets will place jasmine flowers behind their ears, a fashion that was popular even in Hannibal’s time.

The Roman Empire, however, left an even more lasting imprint, one that goes well beyond names and flowers and statues of ancient war heroes. Its legacy is one of urbanism and legitimate government, two things that are still extremely weak—at times dangerously so—in some Arab countries, even in ones like Jordan, which are relatively trouble-free.

Roman Carthage was an extremely important city in early Christianity. The biblical canon was confirmed there. Early Christian theologians Tertullian and Cyprian hailed from the area. The famed Christian philosopher and writer Saint Augustine, a Berber, was also from this part of Roman Africa. His hometown of Hippo is now called Annaba and lies on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast, but it’s barely inside Algeria just on the other side of the Tunisian border. That border is a modern invention. During Rome’s time, Hippo was very much a part of greater Carthage.

Rome’s culture and political system were firmly implanted not only into the cities and soil but also into the cultural DNA of the people who lived there. Tunisia belonged to Western civilization for nearly 1,000 years, more than four times longer than the United States has so far existed. Rome eventually fell, of course, but Tunisia remained part of the West for several more centuries.

In
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 3
, Edward Gibbon describes Tunisia as seen by the conquering Vandals from Germany: “The long and narrow tract of the African coast was filled with frequent monuments of Roman art and magnificence.” Of the Vandal King Genseric he writes, “[he] acquired a rich and fertile territory which stretched along the coast … from Tangier to Tripoli … He cast his eyes toward the sea; he resolved to create a naval power, and his bold enterprise was executed with steady and active perseverance. The woods of Mount Atlas afforded an inexhaustible nursery of timber; his new subjects were skilled in the art of navigation and ship-building.”

So the Vandals ruled Tunisia for a while but lost it again to the Eastern Roman Empire, which had become the Byzantine Empire, in 534 A.D. Not until the 7th century A.D. did Arab armies finally take it for themselves.

The newcomers didn’t impose the culture of the Arabian Peninsula wholesale on the inhabitants. They couldn’t. The people of Carthage were too strong for that. The newcomers met them halfway and adjusted themselves to the advanced civilization that was already there. Conquering Arabs did this everywhere to an extent, as have imperialist peoples everywhere. The same happened when ancient Mongolia conquered China: the Mongols became Chinese. In few places, though, was the indigenous culture as resilient as it was in Tunisia. In few places—the most notable exception being Andalusia in Spain—was the pre-existing culture part of the West.

The Hafsid dynasty ruled from Tunis from the 13th century to the 15th and, at their peak, controlled the parts of Libya and Algeria that even today orient themselves somewhat toward Tunis-Carthage. The Hafsids ramped up trade with Europe dramatically during the time of their rule. Tunis was a culturally and artistically advanced place during this time and produced one of the Arab world’s greatest historians, Ibn Khaldun, whose masterwork, the
Muqaddimah
, is still read today by Western students of the region. One of his arguments in the book is that desert nomads must be brought under the control of an urbanized state to prevent anarchy from overwhelming the realm. Roman statesmen learned this lesson the hard way. At the time of this writing, the Arab governments of Libya and Yemen still haven’t figured out how to do it.

Later, and far more recently, the French ruled Tunisia. They took it from the Turkish Ottomans in 1881 and didn’t entirely leave until 1963, seven years after the country achieved independence.

After all that history, Tunisia has emerged as unique. It doesn’t have tribes as do most Arab countries. Its citizens make up an entirely modern and coherent nation-state. Its culture is cosmopolitan and tolerant, its enthusiasm for religion relatively mild. The whole population even beyond the urban core—including those who live deep in the southern desert—is both fluent and educated in the language of Paris.

It is at an angle to the rest of the Arab world. A serious angle.

“Our future,” said Tunisian diplomat Ahmed Ounaies, who was briefly the foreign minister after Ben Ali was overthrown, “is with Europe.”

*  *  *

The coastal region of Northern Tunisia—directly across and just a short hop from Italy—is where most people live. The middle is sparsely populated, and the south is Saharan and empty. Whole swaths of the urban architecture are strictly Western—French—and nearly all the ruins are Roman. The Frenchification of the greater Tunis area is startling when seen for the first time. It is much more extensive than in Beirut. Parts of the country almost look and feel as though they’re
in
Europe.

The north has things in common with southern Europe that it does not have with next-door Libya and Algeria. It even has things in common with southern Europe that it does not have with its own hinterlands. The divide between city and countryside forms one of the most controversial sociopolitical issues in the country. The coastal elite feel they have a hybrid identity. They are not entirely Arab or European but a mixture of both. People in the conservative rural areas are more comfortable defining themselves simply as Arabs.

“There is a fine line between the two sections in Tunisia,” said Karim Dassy, a history professor at the University of Manouba. “There is the elite who have this double European-Arab identity and who are proud to be the descendents of Hannibal. For the more poor factions of the society, there is no connection with Hannibal whatsoever.”

The non-elite do have a connection with Hannibal, though—at least their country does—whether they realize it or not and whether they like to think about it or not.

 “They are aware of the fact that they’re made of tidbits,” said Hedi Ben Abbes, the secretary of state to the minister of foreign affairs. “But some of them cannot cope with the contradictions, though these contradictions are absolutely important. This is what French philosopher Edouard Glissant calls the poetics of relations, that tension inside the body made by contradictory influences. It is a positive tension. We are not unicolored. We are made of different flows that make our bodies alive.”

Even the least-educated citizens know their country is at a cultural crossroads smack in the middle of the Mediterranean where East and West, Europe and Africa, and Islam and Christendom have blended for millennia. The elite are just more aware of it. And the coastal inhabitants are more profoundly affected by it.

“For Tunisia,” professor Dassy said, “imperialism means Roman imperialism and Greek imperialism. French imperialism here was similar to both in some ways. It was Roman in the sense that there was a military force here and Greek in that it was partly philosophical. This is why the elite has this dual culture.”

“We’ve had some 20 civilizations pass through,” said Zouheir Touiti, a professor of international relations, “from the Roman and Byzantine empires to the Vandals and Christians. So the output of this long process of history is giving us what you are seeing now.”

Geography is important. Not only has Tunisia’s location made it possible for the likes of the French and Romans to show up in force, but it has also brought certain kinds of non-imperialist immigrants to its shores.

“The Muslims were expelled during the reconquest of Spain,” said Abdelhamid Largueche, a history professor at the University of Tunis, “and the Jews who came to Tunisia to develop commerce and trade are two additional factors in how Tunisia became more cosmopolitan. We deal here with exports and trade. Our proximity to the sea is crucial to the openness of the society.”

There is a third component, too, neither European nor Arab, that should not be discounted. The indigenous population is Berber, or Amazigh. Most Berbers assimilated over the centuries to the culture imposed by Europeans and Arabs, but fragments of their language and culture are part of the mosaic even today.

 “There was not a very strong Arabization of the Tunisian society,” said Khadija Ben Saidane, a Berber activist from the south who learned Arabic and French as second and third languages. “Tunisia has not 3,000 years of civilization, but 15,000 years of civilization. Tunisia is the way it is now because of all the civilizations that came here, not only because of the Arabs.”

*  *  *

Tunisia set itself on a different course from the other 20th century Arab states the instant it achieved independence from France. The country’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, was a dictator in the mold of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic. Like Ataturk, he wanted his country to orient itself toward Europe rather than the East or the south.

“Bourguiba tried to make Tunisia a somewhat Westernized state,” said professor Touiti, “closer to the West than to the African states. Don’t lump us together with the Arab Spring countries. Each state has its own reality. You cannot compare us to Egypt.” He described the country’s liberal tradition as “Tunisianity.” “We have our own Islam,” he said. “We were the first Arab state to abolish slavery. We were the first Arab state to join the Human Rights League. We have a historical progression that’s unlike the other states.”

Bourguiba decreed that education should be in French rather than in Arabic. He admitted, at least privately, that his brief experiment with socialist economics failed, so he shifted to a market economy. Today, as a result, the majority of Tunisia’s citizens are middle class—unlike any other Arab state without oil. Bourguiba implemented the Arab world’s first progressive personal status code that granted equal rights to women and men. He referred to the veil as “that odious rag” and banished it from schools and government offices. I saw vastly fewer women than in other Arab countries wearing headscarves and veils even on the streets, where they’re free to wear what they want.

“No other Arab country has tried the same policy we tried,” said former Foreign Minister Ahmed Ounaies, “to free ourselves from the religious legacy and make religion merely a cultural reference rather than a way of ruling the country.”

Ben Ali replaced Bourguiba in a bloodless coup in 1987. He didn’t alter the state’s ideology, but nor did he govern with vision as had Bourguiba. He just crookedly ran the place as if it were his own private property and smashed anyone who got in his way. Whatever enlightened ideals the state had under Bourguiba were lost to torpor and time.

Ben Ali’s Tunisia was an authoritarian police state, but a relatively mild one by regional standards. He was no mass murderer like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, nor was his system totalitarian like Muammar Qaddafi’s. It was more like the authoritarian regimes that Portugal and Spain suffered under in the 1970s before they joined the Western European democratic mainstream.

When I visited for the first time in 2004, I sensed that the country was predemocratic, that if the autocracy could be cleared out of the way, Tunisia might have a real shot at advancing to the next level. Most citizens seemed to share at least some of Bourguiba’s views of the modern progressive society. They were relatively liberal and tolerant on their own initiative, not because the president ordered them to be. Ben Ali could hardly be bothered with ideological Bourguibism anyway. By the time Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisian political life had been stagnant, oppressive, vision-free and corrupt for a whole generation. The relative liberalism of Tunisia’s street-level culture was hardly being forced on the citizenry by the palace.

Christopher Hitchens visited in 2007 and came away with the same impression. “I could not shake the feeling,” he wrote in
Vanity Fair
, “that its system of government is fractionally less intelligent and risktaking than the majority of its citizens.” His local friend Hamid compared Tunisians with their neighbors in Libya. “We are the same people as them,” he said, “but they are so much
en retard
.”

So neither Hitchens nor I were surprised to see a mostly nonviolent democratic revolution break out. (There was never any chance of that happening in Libya or Syria.) It makes perfect sense that the Arab Spring began here, that it did not lead to civil war, that an orderly election was held on time, that the majority of Tunisians voted against the Islamist party and that even the Islamists were compelled to say that they don’t want an Islamic state.

My optimism doesn’t come naturally, not in this part of the world. I witnessed firsthand how the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005 was smashed by the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis and wrote a book about it,
The Road to Fatima Gate
. I never thought Egypt had much of a chance. The country is too poor, too Islamist and too authoritarian for political liberalism to take hold anytime soon. Qaddafi turned Libya into a vast prison. His total-surveillance state is still the most terrifying system of government I’ve ever seen up close and in person.

Tunisia is exceptional. It is not yet, however, the Italy or France of North Africa. There are still grounds for pessimism. The biggest hitch is Ennahda, the party of the Islamists. They’re described in the Western press far too often as moderate. They’re moderate compared with the totalitarian Salafists, sure, and they’re moderate compared with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, but they’re extreme by the standards of Tunis.

Party leader Rached Ghannouchi has praised suicide bombers who murder Israeli civilians. “Gaza,” he said of the Palestinian territory ruled by totalitarian Hamas, “like Hanoi in the ’60s and Cuba and Algeria, is the model of freedom today.” He declared war on the United States during the run-up to the first Persian Gulf War. “There must be no doubt that we will strike anywhere against whoever strikes Iraq,” he said. “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.”