Twelve years after the Arab Spring, while still dealing with the claim for social justice, economic redistribution, and political freedom, post-revolutionary Tunisia has been embroiled in a hard debate about national identity. This is testified by several ongoing moral controversies over the last few years: the revision of the heritage system,1 references to Islam as the national religion in the 2014 Constitution, and the spread of the wearing of veils and other aesthetic markers of religious affiliation in the public space. The public re-emergence of Islam in post-revolutionary Tunisia—certified by the establishment of a composite Muslim public sphere wherein concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘secularism’ have been the subject of a complex intellectual elaboration assumed to be in continuity with the historical specificity of Tunisian Islam (Copertino 2020)—has resulted in contrasting reactions from both external observers and the Tunisian public itself.
Avoiding the emergency rhetoric of many international observers, I argue that the renewed presence of Islam in Tunisia could be linked to a particular sensibility or, better yet, a sort of epochal thinking that influences people's practices, dispositions, and social imagination. This is precisely what Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight (2019: 194) define as a “vernacular timespace,” a “collective sense of living” born of the aspirations, expectations, and anxieties derived from political turmoil—still going on more than a decade after the Arab Spring—and socio-economic uncertainties that were already present before 2011 and are exacerbated within current neoliberal rule. I would also claim that this emotional mindset, which according to Samuli Schielke (2015) has its roots in the historical nexus of capitalism, religious revival, and neoliberal policies that can be found in most states of the Arab region, powerfully affects the younger generations.
Against this background, I suppose that the social imagination of a utopian redefinition of social relations and political order may be stimulated around Islam. Specific Islamic discursive traditions—such as Salafism2 in post-revolutionary Tunisia—can orient people's rethinking of the basis of social interactions and the grammar of individual and collective practices, especially during historical phases of transition. Gender roles, economic problems, and generational rights are all axes along which the moral foundation of social life has been reimagined by Salafism in Tunisia after 2011. As Michael Watts (1999: 96) states, the historical role of Islam may take the form of “a potential source of criticism of the state” as well as a means of assisting “the ruling bloc in exerting leadership.” In this sense, rather than searching for an Islamic essence imbued with revolt or utopian meaning, it would be more fruitful to understand contextual signifiers with which Islam takes shape and is charged by social groups according to changes in social relations and political and cultural junctures.
In this article I consider the nexus between Islam and utopia, starting with the attraction that Salafism held in recent years among young people in Tunisia. Alternating theoretical considerations and ethnographic work related to field research conducted between 2016 and 2018 in the Grand Tunis area,3 I will focus on a group of middle-class youths living in the municipality of Ben Arous, who in recent years have been fascinated by Salafism, although without embracing structured organizations, taking part in formal educational contexts, or adhering to forms of political engagement with a Salafi character. Keeping in the background the historical and political patterns through which a Muslim discursive tradition gains or loses its hegemonic pre-eminence (Asad 1986) in local and transnational social fields, I will deal with the co-existence of transcendent aspirations and local rootedness that characterizes Salafi moral economy within given social and political arenas—an articulation that reflects the intersection of individual salvation and the concerns of social order (Salvatore 2005).
According to the classic tripartite division of contemporary Salafism followed by many scholars (Amghar 2011; Bonnefoy 2011; Wiktorowicz 2006), scientific or quietist Salafism is mainly interested in preserving the original religious message through in-depth Islamic study and education, drawing inspiration for daily conduct from sacred sources and the method of consensus (iğma’) that characterized the social life of the Prophet's Companions (anṣār). This kind of Salafism looks to achieve Islamization not through direct political intervention but through the use of more horizontal actions, such as proselytism and education.4 The young Salafis I met during fieldwork used to support and vote for the Ennahdha political party, although they were not party activists.5
Twelve years after the revolution, the ‘quietist branch’ seems to be predominant within the Tunisian Salafi landscape, although it is not so easy to detect. The definition of ‘Salafi’ itself, with which these youths are generally identified in their social milieus and to which they often resort when describing their religious orientation, was sometimes replaced by themselves with the broader label of ‘good Muslim’. This aporia may be understood partly through considering the increasing climate of suspicion directed toward Salafism, especially after the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis (Merone et al. 2021). This gray zone of Salafi youth is rarely structured in formal educational, political, or associative contexts. Its connections to local and international centers of Salafism (mosques, preachers, local or virtual organizations) has been, and still is, provisional and fluctuating, following self-made imams and autonomously searching for Islamic knowledge. ‘Grassroots’ Salafism in Tunisia developed through flexible and not at all definitive individual itineraries that are sometimes reversible and fragmented (Soudani 2016).
Relating Salafism to utopia may appear paradoxical, if not rough. Even if almost always quietist and not directly involved in politics, Salafism has “obvious social consequences” (Roy 2021: 283), with its segregationist view of women in society, its clampdown against minorities and other Islamic traditions, and its appeal to the integration of Sharia within the apparatus of state law. However, it cannot be denied that in the years following the so-called revolution, Salafism in Tunisia has offered a powerful utopian narrative of extensive religious-oriented social change, inspired by the past and stretching into the future. It is principally addressed to those excluded by the secular and neoliberal political climate (unemployed and uneducated men), but it is also strongly evocative for middle-class youths. As I will describe in this article, one of the ways to explain Salafism's spread among young Tunisians relies not only on doctrinal or theological bases, but also on issues of social justice and political freedom, which are directly connected to the historical phase suffered by the country after the Arab Spring.
The utopian proclamations that Salafism refers to are not detached from ‘everyday life’; rather, they are rooted in the ‘common ground’ of concrete behavior and practices as acted out by Salafi youths within spaces of interaction among popular and middle-class social groups (neighborhoods, cafés, mosques, etc.).6 In this way, the ‘futural orientation’ (Bryant and Knight 2019) of utopia is projected ahead into the present, poised on the “threshold between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between what is, and what might be” (McCracken, quoted in Gardiner 2004: 247). The spread of God's message within a society seen as having been morally corrupted (one of the objectives of Salafism) is actively accomplished through the embodiment of the exemplary conduct of Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, from the aesthetic codes to a wider moral posture. In this sense, Salafism is not just an abstract thought; it takes the shape of an everyday religious utopianism that can overcome the dualism between the mundane and the transcendent, the ideal and the concrete, knowledge and practice, and linear and cyclical temporalities (Lefebvre [1947] 1991).
Youths’ relation to Islam must not necessarily be expressed according to radical or revivalist forms: globalized cosmopolitan youths, even if suffering from global inequalities and imbalances (Bayat and Herrera 2021a; Simone 2010), may foster religiosity in innovative and pragmatic ways (Bayat 2010; Masquelier 2010), accommodating widespread democratic issues and pluralistic values within what some authors have defined as a ‘post-Islamist’ worldview (Bayat 2007; Roy 2002). Doing so, they adapt their moral economies to the variety of social experiences, often quite contradictory, that they face within their ordinary lives (Deeb 2015; Deeb and Harb 2013). However, I would not be so sure that we are entering into a post-Islamist age, one in which Muslims refuse to challenge or engage with the “all-encompassing institutions and structures” of “secular-liberal modernity” (Mahmood 2005: 194, 193).7 The Tunisian setting that I will discuss in these pages perhaps offers an alternative interpretation of this topic.
A Tunisian Salafism?
The rise of Salafism in Tunisia after the 2011 revolution, which forced President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to resign, and the renewed visibility of Islam more generally may, of course, be explained by the liberalization of the public sphere that followed the end of the regime. However, in a broader perspective, I agree with Schielke (2009, 2015) who, when dealing with Islamic revivalism in Egypt, argues that the spread of religiosity that questions public spheres within contemporary Arab countries should be linked to anxieties and hopes characterizing the everyday life of several layers of the social strata in uncertain times, especially that of middle-class youths.
Salafism is a multi-scale social fact, crossing at the same time a transnational social field—given that mobility involves people as well as theologies and devotional imaginaries—and more bounded national histories. We cannot understand the rise of Salafism in present-day Tunisia without placing it in the context of the history of the country: the nationalist project of Bourguiba, the secular and despotic regime of Ben Ali, the revolution and its aftermath. We must likewise avoid reducing its complexity to facile and unilineal explicative keys. Even though Salafism is a movement that has noticeably reverberated on a transnational scale, we must not overlook regional and local peculiarities that it has assumed throughout the decades. The spread of Salafism in the Tunisian post-revolutionary scene has represented a new articulation of the historical contradictions facing Tunisia during its post-colonial development.
If the Islamism of the 1970s reflected a fragmentation of the national project that sprang from independence, the same can be said for Salafism nowadays: most of those who joined the Salafi movement during the first decade of the new millennium and in the first years after 2011 represent the divergent social body that has not adhered to and has been excluded from the post-colonial democracy-building process. This is for both material reasons and ideological ones. With regard to the former, think of the unemployed youth, the inhabitants of interior rural regions, and those who suffered from the neoliberal-oriented effort to dismantle the welfare state. With regard to the latter, there are those in the middle class who do not recognize themselves in the secular and Western-like identity project assumed and promoted by post-colonial elites.
Twelve years after the Arab Spring, the current political, economic, and social situation is very critical. Within a climate of extreme political uncertainty, behind which authoritarian ghosts unsettlingly lie, the main economic indexes continue to show a general worsening, well-represented by an increasing rate of unemployment that mainly affects youths. However, what is at stake is not only economics. The problems faced by young people in transitioning from education to employment, as well as the inability to reinforce social bonds and achieve many of the social marks of adulthood (marriage, employment, economic stability), become a severe obstacle to personal fulfillment (Salehi-Isfahani and Dhillon 2008).
Based upon critics of the current political order, the post-revolutionary spread of Islam in Tunisia among young people and its evolution into a social utopia may represent an attempt to found a new social normativity, often seen as inspired by the rectitude of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions. Despite precautions in assigning an ideological character to Islam (Zubaida 2009), whether political or not, it is undeniable that Islamism provides for a crucial understanding of social reality and multiple crises of citizenship (Meijer and Butenschøn 2017), especially among young people.8 ‘True’ Islam—the truth of which is asserted throughout Salafi religious practices and sacred texts—is claimed to be the moral blueprint that can assure prosperity and wealth for its followers.
This is particularly true in the case of Tunisian Salafism—or, better, neo-Salafism. The intellectual elaboration of Salafism between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries arose from the attempt to seek a deep regeneration of Islam within the context of its unbalanced encounter with the capitalist and colonial West. In this sense, the renewal of Islam was supposed to be achieved through a return to the traditions of the al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, the pious ancestors, who lived beside the Prophet and whose exemplarity represents a guide for today. The encouragement to go back to the foundations of the Islamic sources—the Koran and the Sunna, the textual prominence of which was determined to fit the objective epistemologies of modernity—gave shape to a peculiar fundamentalism whose character was undoubtedly speculative, aiming to place Islam in an active role on the political and cultural scene (Campanini 2016; Geertz 1971). If I speak of neo-Salafism, it is to underline current aspects of contemporary Salafism's major features, which consist in emphasizing the unicity of God (tawḥīd) and adhering to a rigorous literal interpretation of sacred sources. Cultural and juridical Islamic variations (including the quadripartition of juridical schools) are rejected, as are reflexive and speculative orientations, which are blamed for producing undue innovation (bid'ah) and distorting the original content of the revelation (Mandaville 2007).9
The spread of Salafism in post-revolutionary Tunisia can be seen as a counter-narrative questioning the international agencies and post-colonial elites who consider Tunisia's historical relation between Islam and modern political power to be unique in the Arab world. This reference to tunisianité (at-tawnasa) is not only related to secularism; it is also commonly considered by the main national religious bodies, ruling political parties, and state institutions to be a ‘domestic’ religious character that makes Tunisian Islam inconsistent with fundamentalist and radical orientations from the outside, which are therefore excluded from the national community (Zemni 2017).10 However, faced with economic troubles and the rise of social insecurity, this supposed Tunisian secular specificity is losing its power. Instead, it is becoming synonymous with uncertainty and impoverishment in Salafi youths’ discourses and political imaginaries.
Return to the Sacred
When I started fieldwork in 2016, nearly all those whom I encountered tried to explain to me the impact of Islam in the first three years of the post-revolutionary period, even if the Islamization of the public scene had already been visible in the last years of Ben Ali's regime. In parallel with the return of veiling—already tangible during the previous decade (Kerrou 2010)—the rearticulation of the Islamic transnational charity network in the national domain, the rise of Islamic schools and circles, and the appropriation of the sacred space of the mosque by religious actors previously banned from the religious scene—all this led to the Salafi redefinition of Islam after 2011 (Merone 2015). The decentralized nature of Salafism's grassroots, based upon the control of mosques in local neighborhoods, and interconnections with the Salafi transnational media sphere eased the consolidation of youth in post-revolutionary Tunisia's Salafi movement.
Some of the social actors I met in the governorate of Ben Arous had embraced Salafism following 2011, but after a few years they had abandoned their itineraries of religious commitment. More than one informant who had been Salafi between 2011 and 2013 told me that he had, in fact, given up Salafi practice later. Nowadays, some of them are engaged in associative and artistic activities and are not actively concerned with religion. Many people used to define themselves as Salafis and underlined the benefits that the reopening to Islam of the public space had brought to a nation that seemed to them to have become less moral and to have lost its sense of direction. Others, on the other hand, did not regularly identify themselves explicitly as Salafis, even if they sometimes made references to Salafism and adopted its main practices and implications (Haykel 2009). To clarify this point, even those who defined themselves simply as Muslims used to tell me that they agreed with the rigorous thinking and strict moral behavior required by Salafism. Salafi presence in neighborhoods was sometimes greeted as a means to protect the area from the social troubles afflicting peripheral districts, such as smuggling or general delinquency. And from a doctrinal or theological point of view, I found that those who were close to Salafis came to share their strong reprobation of ‘popular’ Islamic expressions. The feast of Mawlid, celebrated on the day of the Prophet's birth in the Islamic world but disapproved of by Salafis, was undervalued by young people close to Salafism, despite the public celebrations and traditions that took place in Tunisia. The reason for this hostility lies in the fact that feasts such as Mawlid disregard the tawḥīd principle, which affirms the unicity of God, leading Salafis to consider such practices as bid'ah, that is, as non-essential heretic innovations.
Even those who were not personally involved in the struggle for the affirmation of ‘true Islam’ were touched by the spirit of the times. In conversations I had during my fieldwork with many young people from middle classes, they could not exempt themselves from reflecting about religion and their behavior as good or bad Muslims (Deeb and Harb 2013; Melliti 2015). The renewed presence of Islam in Tunisian society compels young people, including non-practitioners, to examine their habitual behavior, wondering if it is moral to smoke, drink, or court girls, to mention a few of the more common and banal activities.
Neo-Salafism shares some of the features that Olivier Roy (2004) assigns to contemporary forms of religiosity (including Islam), notably, the stress on an individual formulation of religiosity expressed, in our case, through rigorous textual knowledge and ritual self-discipline. However, as we will soon see, neo-Salafism also provides the seed for the redefinition of social relationships, inspired by a not-so-latent criticism of the current social order due to the fact that it offers discursivities concerning themes and issues relevant in liberal post-colonial states, such as democracy, economy, political representation, capitalistic modernity and ‘its malcontents’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993).
Almost all my interviewees might be ascribed to the so-called scientific or quietist Salafism (although not all scholars consider these equivalent), following mainly feeble and temporary individual trajectories (Soudani 2016). This social organizational pattern has been defined by scholars as chaykhism, a term used to label a weakly structured dimension of the transmission of religious knowledge, wherein those disciples who train with real or virtual masters (chuyukh, sing. chaick) become, in turn, the nodes of a Salafi territorial network (Merone and Cavatorta 2012). In their historical reconstruction of Salafism in Tunisia, Merone et al. (2021) identify some tendencies that were already visible by the end of the 2000s and did not lose their relevance in the first years after the Arab Spring. Among them are “Salafi satellite channels broadcasting from Saudi Arabia and Egypt” as the only available source of religious education, strategic for “the socialization of Salafi norms among youth”; the organization of small informal networks of “religious seekers” gathering in private houses to reflect on religious topics; and private teaching associations “led by self-taught religious teachers” (ibid.: 460).
Salafism between Morality and Politics
If the roots of Tunisian Salafism lie in late 1980s Islamism (Blanc 2017), among its current players we can certainly find young people who are part of a ‘surplus population’, excluded from the labor market and neoliberal economic policies that Tunisia had signed up for over the last three decades. Furthermore, as ethnographic research revealed to me, a high percentage of youths strengthen their religious convictions as a consequence of daily interactions with the state apparatus (starting with the police), which are marked by contempt, suspicion, and social control. In fact, in recent years police repression has taken place, mostly targeting the young segments of the Tunisian population who have been perceived as possibly disruptive elements of the precarious social order, especially in peripheral districts and towns (Lamloum and Catusse 2021). Men with long beards and shaved moustaches, and young women wearing a niqāb or face veil have been the focus of control by the security forces. Several people told me that they used to be stopped by the police because of their regular attendance at the mosque. Since then, their movements, including abroad, have been recorded and their social network profiles regularly checked to look for content on politics or Islam.
Even if the majority of young Tunisian Salafis do not intervene directly in the national political scene and are more interested in the observance of doctrinal features and orthopraxy, they nevertheless tend to express a profound rejection of the Tunisian state and its ruling class (Parteger 2011). However, the recent fascination with Salafism cannot be detached from the failure of social renewal promised by the revolution, the awareness of which passes a merciless moral judgment on political leadership. The ruling class is accused of having betrayed (‘stolen’ is a commonly used term) the revolution, and herein lies the origins of the conviction that it will be only through a return to true Islam that Tunisia (and the Arab people) will be great again.
It is undeniable that a fundamental feature of Salafism, and of every Islamist path, is reference to origins, to a time of supposed ideal justice on earth, a paradigm of political action (Benslama 2004). And yet we should try to keep quite distinct the attempts to restore origins in the political and social realm at all costs and the expression of references whose outline is eminently moral and identitary. In this way, even references to Sharia usually concern national identity rather than representing the claim to establish particular juridical domains. I will cite an excerpt from a conversation I had with Bilel, a young Salafi, just under thirty, working as a computer programmer in a company based in Tunis. Bilel had recently converted to more pronounced manifestations of religiosity and was generally labeled as Salafi in his neighborhood in Ben Arous,11 a definition that sometimes he too used for himself.
For us [Muslims], stealing is a sin, and I have been educated to feel strongly about that. Unfortunately, Muslims often steal, and if Sharia will be brought into force, there will be no more stealing. Do you know its rules? The hand is cut off. No one would steal anymore.
And would you agree to apply it?
It is something chosen by God. No one would steal anymore. A friend of mine works as a guard in an accessory shop and watches on the surveillance camera. He told me about a rich woman who was stealing things priced at one, two dinars … Stealing is not a matter of money. It is about blood. It has become an illness in our country. That is why God requires hands to be cut off. Even in our society, where today more people pray than did in the past, these phenomena are still present.12
In Bilel's words, Sharia conveys a radical criticism of the present day. The act of stealing is judged as a moral outrage in a time when social and economic relations are hardly asymmetric. The possibility of cutting off thieves’ hands, even though kept in mind and cited, does not rely on a concrete political purpose. Stealing is considered a moral sin, and its social critique soon gives way to the presentation of a wider framework of redemption.
I do not intend to suggest that references to Sharia are just a metaphor of political critique, but they can help us to comprehend the social and political ground on which ethical and moral discourses take shape. Claiming the rightness of Sharia is part of the redefinition of political affiliations through new articulations of the relation between the national and the transnational levels, across time and space, as we will see. Political oppression under Ben Ali's regime and the high level of repression put in practice by police and security forces against Islamists and other kinds of political and social activism make it necessary not to separate the ethical pattern of the Salafi religious subjectivation (evident in the strict adhesion to daily rituals and orthopraxy) from the wider political premises that triggered the evolution and spread of Salafism after the revolution.
Talel, a friend of Bilel who was also living in the municipality of Ben Arous, became interested in Salafism on the threshold of the Arab Spring, when he started to develop a new religious attitude due to the strengthening of the Salafi network in Tunisia. Given his closeness to Bilel, both were called “the Salafis” in the Hay Lesken neighborhood in Ben Arous. Almost always, it was possible to see Talel wearing the white qamīṣ, ready to go to the mosque at prayer time. Even during our encounters, Talel and Bilel used to stop our discussions to perform the prayer. Once, during a conversation, Talel clearly underlined the political roots of Tunisian Salafism, overlapping intergenerational contrasts and combining personal as well as wider social change. Salafism sneaks in a generational fracture (Mabrouk 2012; Pargeter 2012; Torelli et al. 2012) as young pious Muslims critically compare their daily commitment to their religion with the more intermittent observance of their parents, revealing their unease and how they sometimes face familiar conflicts.
Before the revolution, when you could never discuss anything, you were afraid, you trembled if you wanted to deal with a political issue. But if you got in trouble with the police, you could pay and avoid complaints. Things are the same today … My parents are Muslims, but they do not do the prayer. I had troubles with my father, especially when I wasn't working yet. He didn't like that I always wanted to do the prayer by going to the mosque. In some periods I had to go out from the window to perform the dawn prayer, so that he couldn't notice it. I told my father: “Look at today's Tunisia, what a low level we have reached. Perhaps if we engage more in religion things may become better, if we recover our first ancient values!”13
Decades earlier, Abdelkader Zghal (1980) had asserted that the rise of Islamism in Tunisia took the shape of political contestation: the state's authoritarianism resulted in Islamism's conversion into political militancy. In this sense, it would not be entirely satisfactory to understand Salafism as just an attempt “to create reactionary utopian communities” (Zemni 2017: 138). Far from being an untouchable archetype, Salafism became actualized through critical topographies imbued with political meanings.
Young Salafis used to link the ideal reference to mythic past times with their interest in countries such as Saudi Arabia, which is considered to be a ‘true’ Muslim country, compared to Tunisia, which is criticized as being the worst Muslim nation and having totally sold out to Western interests. Bilel has been on a pilgrimage to Mecca several times, for both the Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages. The same can be said for Talel, who at the time of my fieldwork was preparing to marry. He had already planned to spend his honeymoon in nearby Tabarka, reserving the possibility to plan a larger subsequent (and more expensive) journey to Mecca. At the time of our meetings, Bilel was planning to move to the Gulf. Every time I met him he was getting ready for a trip to Mecca, or he had just come back. His admiration for Saudi Arabia was linked to a persistent devaluation of his own country. According to Bilel, wherever God is tangibly present, as in Saudi Arabia, people are strong, powerful, and feared by everyone.
The rise in the price of basic necessities, along with the government's periodic proposal to reduce state funding, would confirm, according to my interviewees, the pathological Tunisian addiction to the decisions of their foreign economic partners. Behind this charge we may see the popular concern about increasing social inequality and economic suffering. Compared to the severe and constant difficulties faced by post-revolutionary Tunisia, the Gulf countries have become examples of prosperity and success in modern times, exemplified by the commonly cited technological power of large cities built in inhospitable desert environments.
The individuation of a golden age, during which the Islamic civilization is supposed to have been the strongest in the world—inventing medicine and mathematics, for example, which would arrive later in Europe—went hand in hand with the resurgence of a conspiracy theory. For many of the young people I met, there is now a war against the Arab people, a war whose consequences they experience in their daily lives. Terrorism is part of this war. The establishment of the Islamic State (Daesh) and its aftermath—including the large number of young Tunisians who went to Syria and Iraq to join the caliphate—were often depicted as a plot by Western powers and Israel to destabilize the region.
Another conspiracy theory concerns the production and sale of oil. Many young Tunisian Salafi men think that fossil fuel is not an asset, despite the presence of small deposits situated on the border with Algeria. As they once showed to me, the existence of these fields can be verified using Google Maps. They are very close to unnamed airplane runways that, according to them, are used to load the extracted oil and export it immediately. Foreign countries are the only ones to benefit from Tunisian oil, even if Tunisia desperately needs the income. However, the critics of cultural identity transcend geopolitics and become relocated in everyday life, which seems to have lost a religious moral register under which intersubjective relationships could take place. The return of Islam to daily life constitutes the necessary condition for social regeneration. As Bilel once stated: “Tunisians throw waste in the streets, there they pay no attention to the environment. There is no civic conscience, no mutual aid. Nobody thinks of the consequences of their actions or cares about other people. There is no compassion. Islam has disappeared from this country.”14
Concrete Utopias
There is not only a mythical reference to origins. In today's Tunisian Salafism there is also a daily concrete communitarian and almost utopian dimension, in which the mundane and the exceptional, the linear and cyclical temporality, intersect “on the terrain of the totality that constitutes everyday life” (Gardiner 2004: 243). Even if Salafism idealizes the past and the exemplary virtues of Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, it links them to a future state of things. This orientation toward the future (Bryant and Knight 2019) needs an everyday set-up, through multiple preparatory activities aimed to allow people—especially the youth—to learn and rediscover true Islam. In this sense, it would be possible to resort to Ernst Bloch's ([1954] 1986) concept of a ‘concrete utopia’, which Bloch used to define a willful and anticipatory mode of thinking oriented toward becoming a real possibility, quite the opposite of immature abstract utopias (Levitas 1990).
For young Salafis, when speaking to youths who know nothing about Islam, helping them to rediscover it is the first step in laying the foundations for deeper social change. Even though scholars such as Olivier Roy have focused on Salafi ritual concerns and lack of interest in theoretical or doctrinal matters, I have found a strong interest in the dimension of knowledge to be the true core of Salafism (Nakissa 2019). However, within the network of young Muslims who have been fascinated by Salafism after 2011 and who do not take part in any structured Salafi organization, the knowledge/educational context is often informal. The young people I met in Ben Arous usually discuss religion in many of the ordinary places where they physically meet, such as cafés and private houses. Otherwise, they have online meetings with preachers, notably from Egypt or the Gulf, and generally avoid asking the imam of local mosques about any doubts concerning religion. Friends and the Internet are the main sources of information for young people. Those who become more informed on religious issues take on the commitment to share their knowledge with friends, colleagues, or neighbors who do not have the same understanding.
These moments of horizontal acculturation are linked to the search for autonomous access to religious knowledge (Cordova 2021a). Many young Tunisians I met found information about history, religion, and politics without waiting for any authoritative validation (Melliti 2015). Within the peer groups I had the opportunity to meet in the Grand Tunis governorates, young people who had been intrigued by Salafism after 2011 explicitly made reference to the acquisition of knowledge, underlining the subsequent sharing of that information. Their informal circles of Islamic discovery usually rely on someone who has already achieved notable progress in the ‘true’ knowledge of Islam, no matter his job or formal educational path. Bilel, for example, used to consult chuyukh online to solve doubts concerning religion:
Here [in Ben Arous] the imam has changed many times. He's not permanent. You know, today, thanks to the mediatization and the free media … I started with Facebook. The chuyukh, those who master religion and teach it … You can find them on Facebook, speaking about the tawḥīd, and much more … You can ask a chaykh for a meeting, you ask him a question … And he will not answer just by his own mind. Rather, he relies upon the aḥadīt- [reports of Muhammed's sayings and acts, the reliability of which has been verified] that tell you what to do and what not to do … Everything is verifiable, there's no problem … God does not give them [the chuyukh] powers, but strength in knowledge.15
The dynamics I am dealing with here quickly assume a strong territorial connotation because the personal knowledge of Salafi people in mediating relationships with this movement is more significant than commitment within the Salafi ideology itself. However, we cannot fail to grasp the trans-local connections that feed and shape contemporary Tunisian neo-Salafism. Many Tunisian Salafis look outside to find the proper religious way, as embodied by the Gulf countries, for example, while reproaching the lack of religiosity in Tunisia. Not surprisingly, these young people search the Internet and find sources of information and ritual prescriptions provided by popular Egyptian or Gulf chuyukh, such as Mohamed Hassan and Wajdi Ghanim on satellite and YouTube channels (Hirschkind 2012).
During my fieldwork I took part in the consumption of Islamic media products with young Muslims who had recently embraced Salafism. Some of my closest interviewees used to meet in a house and watch/attend sermons held by foreign preachers, which they debated later. During one of these encounters,16 in which Bilel took part and that was held at a workmate's house, a group of four men aged under thirty who knew each other watched on YouTube a khuṭbah or sermon that focused on the themes of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment, relying on the ninety-ninth Koranic surah (Al-Zalzalah, ‘the earthquake’). After watching the video, while drinking some tea, the four young men searched on the Internet those aḥadīt- quoted by the preacher that they did not yet know in order to memorize them. Transnational openness spreads more easily if mediated within peer groups, and Islamic global signifiers became meaningful in tangible spaces such as neighborhoods, cafés, and so on. When asked about Salafism, my interviewees, including those less involved in the practice of religion, said they knew several young Salafi men who used to be described as ‘neighborhood people’ and were now recognized for their marked religiosity, devoid of any extremist or insane connotations. The issue of sharing the same conditions of life—notably having roots in the same district or neighborhood—recurred regularly.
More than a space for collective or political action, Salafism has been and still represents, although perhaps in less evident forms today, the grounds for reciprocal recognition of shared generational anxieties, concerns, and desires. Once I began my research and started getting in touch with young Salafis, I discovered to my amazement that my non-Salafi interviewees denied Salafis the status of radical ‘others’, which I was all too quick to use, emphasizing instead that they led quite similar lives, sharing common difficulties and problems that were widespread among young people—the economic crisis, unemployment, and delays in getting married and starting a family. Karim, a young graduate of a vocational training school in Ben Arous, who was a very good country music musician, used to tell me that he knew many young people who embraced Salafism and were “good guys,” just more sensitive to religion. Most importantly, sharing knowledge and faith plays a role in the building of identity and signifiers that are alternatives to a hegemonic global order perceived as exclusionary (Janson 2010). These Islamic counter-publics (Hirschkind 2006) express tendencies and postures ‘other’ than those presented by the secular register.
The Tunisian scholar Olfa Lamloum (2015: 137) describes Salafism as “a reaction to the retreat of the social state in the last twenty years … and which tolerates, or enhances, the popular practices and strategies of the young people.” Salafism therefore would offer a space of mobilization that fills the empty spaces of political participation—something that is even truer for the early years after Ben Ali's escape, taking into account the basic needs of the popular strata. In many heavily populated districts, Salafi groups actually organized forms of economic assistance, food banks, even health care. Understanding Salafism from its local-territorial inscription is necessary, as Lamloum states, highlighting its characters of urban and social proximity.
Furthermore, Salafism presents a youthful connotation (Mabrouk 2012), emerging as a vector that defines levels of personal and intersubjective identification. Preaching tents that were set up by Salafi groups in many places for a few months after 2011 were not just an example of the affirmation of the sacred in the public space. They were also generational meeting places where young people at the margins of the state and power could find acceptance and protection instead of the usual repression, censorship, and control, which is even more true for residents in disreputable, poor, and stigmatized districts. Concrete local articulations of believers’ communities are shaped through tangible and recognized cultural forms. By means of styles, ideas, and communicative codes, young radicals publicly affirm their presence (Meyer 2009), feeding practices and politics of personal and confessional distinction that turn aesthetics into a political matter.
There is another point that gives Salafism a generational character: its reversibility. As I have stated above, many young people told me that they had experienced a Salafi ‘phase of life’, having been fascinated by the movement's commitment to truth and justice and its attention to the deep causes of politics and history. Salafism offers granitic—if not dogmatic—certainties for every question, even that of identity. However, for many of my Salafi interlocutors that experience came to an end, although not because of any particular negative episode, nor do they deny their previous involvement. In most cases, they admit that they have been not able to follow that kind of total commitment, with its deep impact on various aspects of daily life and its demand for an ethical reorientation of the self.
I am not suggesting that constant engagement with the Islamic tradition—requiring compelling ethical self-cultivation—represents an exceptional and almost ‘unreal’ moment in young Salafi existential trajectories, as if it were destined to give way to actual contradictions, desires, and ambiguities in life.17 Actually, focusing on the lived experience of religiosity presents the undeniable basis for understanding “how ways of being Muslim are crafted, imagined and experienced in relation to historical political and economic transformations which simultaneously constitute and transcend ethnic-religious boundaries, as well as those between secular and religious spheres” (Osella and Soares 2020: 468).
Even if Salafism itself is a form of ‘everyday Islam’ after all, it is undeniable that embodying the Salafi ideological and ethical project is anything but easy (Schielke 2015). Shaping daily actions and practices according to virtuous patterns of behavior outlined by Prophet Mohammed and his Companions means dealing with severe constraints.
Conclusion: The Perfection of the Past for an Imperfect Present
In this article, I have argued how Islam, and particularly Salafism, may aim under specific historical conditions for a social utopia or ‘retrotopia’, to reference Zygmunt Bauman's (2017) concept of complicated current times. In this sense, when trying to understand the paths of religious subjectivation undertaken by young Salafis, it is necessary to situate the social spread of Salafism within the historical genealogy of national and transnational political events and struggles.
For this reason, I have recalled in broad terms the political evolution of post-colonial Tunisia and the meanings that Islam has acquired against the background of two opposing historical and political motifs. On one side, we find tunisianité, the exceptionalist claim of a national character—supposedly unique in the Arab world—that has been proposed by the elites who have run Tunisia since the end of colonialism. This claim is focused on the peculiarity of Tunisian Islam, the essence of which is supposed to be a form of moderation summoned to sustain the actions of institutional political power (the so-called state Islam). On the other side, and admitting that this is a very schematic scheme, we find opposition to this hegemonic historical bloc being exerted by the social groups that have not shared in the promises of freedom and social wealth of independence and of the more recent revolutionary process. These social segments have also made use of Islam to shape the language and aspirations of the contestation, de-domesticating Islam through openness to transnational Islamic doctrines and movements such as Wahhabism. Here, Salafism acquires the historical density of a transnational ‘fact’ powerfully resonating with internal social and political turbulences within which stands the return to the sacred pursued by those generations more exposed to the high tax of social and economic insecurity brought by neoliberalism, in parallel with the authoritarian turn of post-revolutionary regimes. The recovery of an original and mythical perfection—another telos for modernity rooted in the deeds of the Prophet and his Companions—has been the motivation on which many young Tunisian Muslims draw in order to discover and affirm themselves and shape their subjectivity.
Utopia describes an ideal society that has not yet appeared. However, this concept is not detached from “concrete forms of social and cultural life” (Gardiner 2004: 245). After all, concrete utopias are praxis-oriented (Levitas 1990), and some social practices carried out by young Tunisian Salafis (preaching tents, providing basic necessities, helping unmarried men find a wife, daily discussions in cafés) work as scaling devices and combine different frames of action (Ben-Yehoyada 2017). As part of daily social life in neighborhoods, districts, and towns, these practices also reflect on and project into wider national and transnational spaces.
Based on my fieldwork, the extraordinariness of Salafi ethical subjectivation is mitigated in daily interactions between Salafis and non-Salafis. Both share similar experiences, rooted in the current social and political panorama of post-revolutionary Tunisia. One of the reasons that Salafism became more popular after 2011 is that it claimed to be able to link utopia with everyday life in concrete ways, proposing solutions to the concerns and worries experienced by young people—thus representing a ‘concrete utopia’ according to Ernst Bloch's definition ([1954] 1986). The return of justice envisaged by Salafism is not an abstract ideal; rather, it requires ‘educated hope’ (Levitas 1990), given that it needs to be anticipated through acts and disciplined behavior that can affirm in the public space another telos for modernity.
As an example, consider the practice of quoting aḥadīt- (sing. ḥadīt-)—especially those concerning the qualities and duties of the fair sovereign, a classic issue in Islamic thought—in many contexts of everyday life. A performative reference to allochrony, this practice is acknowledged to have the authoritative power to inform daily social situations and to take on new meanings (Mahmood 2005; Messick 1993). An often cited ḥadīt- that my Salafi interviewees and Muslim acquaintances in general referred to is emblematic of the critical functions that Islam may assume. The ḥadīt-, reported by Abou Talba, tells a story about Prophet Mohammed and his Companions, who complained to him about the suffering caused by prolonged hunger. Their weakness and pain were so bad that they showed him how they had all tied a stone over their stomachs. The Prophet lifted his robe, and they saw that he had tied two stones over his stomach. This episode is usually alluded to in order to point out the Prophet's empathy and compassion, compared to the greedy and selfish ruling class currently in power. This ḥadīt- is representative because it demonstrates how the Islamic utopia has its roots in political criticism of the present day, taking shape in the life and experience of the ‘actual world’. Once again, we find how utopia, symbolized by the ideals of compassion and justice embodied by the Prophet, is not unworldly, nor is it detached from a reference to the actual political dimension of the present. We also may find a temporal movement in which the past feeds the future through the perception of unequal present time. It can be seen as an implicit call for change, even if it involves a transformative process differing from ordinary politics and participation. Referencing Bloch, Levitas (1990: 15) contends that “while abstract utopia may express desire, only concrete utopia carries hope” toward real possibilities for a “better life” in the future.
Albeit with some caution, I would suggest that far from being just a reactionary movement, Salafism (excluding its jihadist segment) takes part in the constitution of a political field influenced by tendencies spread on a planetary scale—including populism—and by global civil society values (Benhabib 2006) that submit dominant authority to a vigilant and critical gaze. The formation of a transnational civil society that affirms on a global scale democratic and pluralistic values crosses Arab and Islamic societies to such an extent that Islamist tendencies cannot avoid being affected by this global hierarchy of values, although in contradictory ways (Bayat 2007). Whereas utopia defines a social fantasy that has always been present in the history of Islam and Islamism, young Muslims nowadays can easily assemble symbolic repertories and frameworks of action related to different realms, especially thanks to new communication technologies.
According to what I have observed in Tunisia, Salafism is no exception to this tendency. Inspired by a search for purity that readily results in the location of enemies and disbelievers, the spread of Salafism in post-revolutionary Tunisia cannot be linked only to foreign agencies and interference. Beyond and within the call for a return to ancient ways of conduct and ethics, young Tunisian Salafis are sensitive to globalized concerns about the authoritarian concentration of power and armed forces’ abuses, even if filtered through identity motifs that tend to be exclusive and not fully respectful of pluralistic instances. After all, as this article has shown, Tunisian Salafism embodies in quite distinctive ways the anxieties and troubles of the post-revolutionary transition.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Andrea Priori, Eva Gerharz, and Max Stille for including me in their highly qualified, passionate research and editorial project on young Muslims and utopias, despite my different area of expertise. I also extend thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their useful remarks and suggestions, which have improved the quality of this article.
Notes
The reform of the heritage system was among the main interests of a special commission instructed by Tunisia's former president, Béji Caïd Essebsi, in 2018. Heritage constitutes the only domain within the family law system that did not follow the changes brought by the 1956 Code of Personal Status (Majalla).
Salafism is a Sunni Islam movement that advocates the return to the original and pure form of Islam of the ancestors (salaf), as exemplified by the first three generations of Prophet Muhammed's Companions.
The research aimed to explore processes of political subjectivation (Vacchiano and Afailal 2021) among young people from the lower and middle classes. I also have to specify that I have focused especially on men, even though Muslim women are equally crucial to the definition of the Tunisian religious panorama.
The other two segments of neo-Salafism are made up of political Salafism, which directly intervenes in the political system, and Jihadism. This is clearly an ideal repartition that needs to be adjusted to address those in intermediate categories, for example, young quietists who do not disdain politics, including elections. Some authors distinguish between a ‘scientific’ and a ‘quietist’ Salafism, the latter being a sub-category of the scientific tendency (Merone et al. 2021).
I discuss youths’ militancy in Ennahdha in another article (Cordova 2021b). The ambiguity characterizing the relations between Salafism and the hegemonic political establishment of Tunisian Islamism after 2011 is better analyzed in Merone (2015) and Ounissi (2016).
In writing of everyday utopianism, I cannot avoid referencing Lefebvre ([1947] 1991, [1961] 2002), especially since he offers an approach that integrates the dimension of experience and knowledge that is useful in describing social phenomena across both the mundane and the transcendent. However, I firmly do not posit that Salafism is the kind of utopianism Lefebvre had in mind. Salafism does not present those critical potentialities, nor does it aim to revolutionize the everyday.
A careful analysis could show us how some of the contemporary forms of religious commitment (Amir-Moazami 2010; Roy 2004), not only do not fit, but also challenge secular and neoliberal Western political and social trajectories. Saba Mahmood's (2005) research on a women's piety movement in Cairo is an outstanding—and much criticized (Soares and Osella 2009; Vicini 2020)—example of how pious ethical subjectivation develop political and ethical agency not so easy to understand in terms of progressive politics.
In this article I use the term ‘Islamism’ in a broad sense to label groups and movements engaged in Islamic politics, and as a cultural term spread across several social spheres and groups.
Tunisian scholastic Salafi circles have instead recently accommodated their doctrinal universe toward Malikism, driven by securitization and suspicions targeting Salafism (Merone et al. 2021).
However, we would be wrong if we simplistically reduce political references to tunisianité to the disputation between secularists and Islamists. Ennahdha's activists themselves have claimed the historical legacy of reformism. The political-intellectual elaboration formulated by Ennahdha's leadership in recent years has resulted in a particular variation of secularism (almaiyya juz'iyya) that does not provide for the exclusion of religion from public life (Copertino 2020).
Ben Arous is a municipality a few kilometers from Tunis that gives its name to the homonymous governorate.
Interview with Bilel, 16 April 2018, Ben Arous.
Interview with Talel, 15 October 2017, Ben Arous.
Interview with Bilel, 30 May 2017, Ben Arous.
Ibid., 13 April 2017.
The encounter took place on 20 May 2017.
For Fadil and Fernando (2015), the ‘everyday Muslim’ approach (Marsden 2005; Schielke 2009, 2015) risks fostering an ontological divide between Salafis (and all those Muslims involved in piety movements) and other Muslim believers. A reply to Fadil and Fernando is provided by Lara Deeb (2015).
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