This is an essay I wrote in January 2010, unpublished before this day.  In it, I was fore-reading the possible results of politcal repression coupled with  what at that time looked like the latent symptoms of religious fundamentalism.   Following the acts of violence that targeted journalists, artists and academics in Tunisia at the hands of extremist Salafi groups, I can only express my deep sorrow that 2 years from January 2010, and though the 2 years were separated by an overthrow of dictatorship, those symptoms have developed into a serious malign growth at an incredible speed, and resulted in a grim reality which threatens the stability of a country that has only recently emerged from the claws of autocracy.

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“And the king said: Lo! I saw in a dream seven fat kine which seven lean were eating, and seven green ears of corn and other (seven) dry. O notables! Expound for me my vision, if ye can interpret dreams.”

Qur’an 12.43

From these verses of the Qur’an, the moral is not hard to deduce. If you cannot harvest a good crop in times of plenty to save it for hard times, the result would be that you may end in a situation when you will be forced to chomp through whatever happens to be in your storeroom, even though that which grows in hard times is not often good for eating.  This is prophet Yusuf’s interpretation of the vision of the king of Egypt, and thanks to it, he saves the kingdom from seven years of drought and starvation. 

In Tunisia, we have been little successful in storing up our savings for hard times. In the age consumerism, Tunisia ranks far above the ground among the rest of Arab countries, though a country with limited natural resources and a not-very-solid financial security. When moralities, spirituality and religion fall within the reach of commoditisation and are as a result diffused via satellite media and digital networks, Tunisia, again, proves to be recklessly pioneering in ill-measured consumer behaviour.

Today in Tunisia, and in like in most Muslim countries, we are witnessing the fervent turning up of what is termed by many ‘religious awakening’ that takes on its shoulders the task of awakening generations that have strayed away from the teachings of Islam. When we speak about an awakening, we surely enough presuppose that religion underwent a state of torpor which had preceded it, (and which in itself is situated in the interim of two ages of religious ‘affluence’). But the whole story of religious awakening is a falsification, to my thinking, for if we try to look at the way societal behaviour is enmeshed with religious belief, we would understand that religion has always undermined every aspect of social and moral code and demeanour that define our culture.  Like in most Muslim countries, social conduct and codes of morality in Tunisia cannot be separated from the set of religious beliefs of Islam; with almost no line of demarcation between them as such, a contravention against the one is often regarded as a contravention against the other. 

But what is it in Islam that is being associated with an awakening nowadays?

The popular understanding of this term in Tunisia is more associated with religious practices and the external demonstrations of religious affiliation like wearing religious dress, or reading uniquely books that advocate and sermonise the perfect conduct of the faithful, not to speak about the need to affirm all this by joining cyberspace webs that preach religious zeal. At large, it seems like it is the application of the laws of the sharia’a in society, yet the blurred popular understanding of this term restricts this awakening (especially in a country where legislation has tended to be secular since its independence in the mid-fifties) with those external and social manifestations. So let us say that this awakening is the bringing of the religious legacy from a latent to a visible form that has resulted in the gradual separation between faith and practice, with more emphasis on practice. 

Like in the beginning of every awakening, a guillotine system is summoned to control and chastise. This has nothing to do with societal and religious codes monitoring people’s everyday behaviour in Muslim societies. We are used to being judged, reprimanded and criticised by society when the infringement of a moral or religious code takes place, it is something that has slid deep into the fabric of our social subconscious over the years, and rarely have we conceived of it as a limitation of personal freedom the way the west perceives it. But in the current situation, society, which has always addressed its individuals with the right of community over the individual, now has, along with his attitude of moral duty, a finger of accusation raised against its members. 

Because in Tunisia, perhaps more than in any other Muslim country, the religious was deeply thrust into the subliminal side of social behaviour -for a number of reasons where the political and the economic closely interlace -  this religious ‘awakening’ is a bit more violent and misread.  Why more violent, one may ask, when in the rest of Muslim countries, people, religious organisations  and political parties sometimes are preaching for the same revival of the teachings of Islam with an equal zeal?  The difference in the Tunisian society is that the determent of the religious affiliation resulted in facing the profundity of its interment, and therefore, in a fierce revolt against this long suppression.  Aspects of religious practices specifically have been divorced from daily life in Tunisia during many decades following independence, mainly due to the attempt of the government to present a polished, tourist-oriented facade of a country purged of religious fanaticism, leading to the confinement of religion into the social and moral subconscious.  Terms like secularity for instance are strictly being interpreted as religious agnosticism now in mainstream understanding in Tunisia, and it is has turned into a serious accusation as I have witnessed in debates among educated people sometimes. There is more insistence on naming and defining practices related to different sects of Islam, when only ten years ago the majority of Tunisian laymen rarely discussed or understood the difference between Shiite or Sunnite affiliations.  This is what has resulted from the sudden need to restore bonds with Islam, a need which only a time of crisis can stir with such exigency as I see it.

The situation in Tunisia would not be hard to understand, if we see how in the Arab Muslim world at large, Islamic identity has been growing into a vital urge and pressing demand that Muslims addressed to their governments. In a time when Muslims are facing the marginalisation of their status inside their countries because of governmental repression and outside with a mass fear of Islam, there is no doubt that a deep frustration is pervading among us.  When religion is combined with the glory of the past and the achievements of the Islamic empire, it is more than a spiritual requirement, it is a necessity.  Religious movements all over the Islamic world, Salafis to give but an example, advanced and called for the romanticised project of reviving the past of the Islamic Empire.  In Tunisia, the facing of this crisis also led to the elaboration of how to revive an identity rooted in Islamic heritage and belonging, and how to restore the glory of its past that manifests itself in the alliance with shari’a among youth especially.  The answer came quickly, and information network helped it spread faster than ever.

 But religious sentiment is not simply the process of bonding with God and putting into practice all inborn baggage left by our ancestors; it is also the hard and long harbouring of meanings out of teachings and texts left by this heritage.  This is a process that takes place over decades and perhaps centuries to develop, over a slow and gradual development of systems of thinking, cross-fertilisations resulting from contact with different cultures, interaction with historical changes, and, I might even venture to say, with the help of the process of trial and error. When the urge of a crisis stimulates this slow process to surge with the speed of governmental verdicts in states of emergencies, I would expect the results to be far from benign. And when this happens in a country like Tunisia where religion had been the red scare of both the population and the government for many decades, (the first government in Tunisia as well as the present one practically witch-hunted and categorised all aspects of Islamic affiliation like dress –wearing the veil is banned by Tunisian legislation - and even sacraments, as religious fanaticism) we can only expect a state of confusion to follow this revival. The fear of persecution has nursed over the years a fear turned against religion itself, and many generations (including mine) were brought up by fearful parents to believe in the necessity of divorcing the religious debate from our daily life. Now, suddenly summoned to fill the void of missing united Islamic identity, a long path that should have been walked is being simply crossed out of the map.

History says that whenever religion is summoned to answer for the needs of community in hard times, it often fails to fulfil its rescuing mission, for it often does so with open claws. False prophets’ appearances(in Islam or in different religions) for instance often coincided with times when communities were looking for certainties.  But that is not all, for now mass communication is accelerating everything, and it is this speed that is hazardous. What we are living today is a situation of crisis that is not much different from past crises, only it is now much more accentuated, and it risks causing abiding effects.  The predicament of the modern Islamic world is that more than ever in its history, the need of religion (out)matched the need for (non)basic products, following a period when religion witnessed a relative withdrawal from everyday life in some parts of this region. A return to religion after a long severance from its essential function of relating the spiritual and worldly will cause a throw into turmoil to inevitably come about. Muslims found themselves unable to contextualise religion within its large metaphorical significance and were caught in the literal meaning of religion at a time when modernity facilitated communication.

Western societies are perhaps much more familiar with experiencing this rift between the individual and the mysticism of religion caused by the progress of modernity. Because it has a longer history of secularisation, the west has found itself in a clash between the need for religious and the scanty valuing of spirituality.  Let me explain by giving an example. The story of Carlos Castaneda in the 1960s gave away the paradox of the wide estrangement of the western man from the spiritual, and yet the lurking presence of the Christian divinity in latent chambers that burst out in hybridised forms in hard times. Castaneda made a trip to North Mexico and came back with an account of his encounter with Don Juan, a shaman from the Yaqui Indians of North Mexicowho became his guru and took him as an apprentice.  Not surprisingly, his book The Teachings of Don Juan which renders his adventure, has enthralled people over the United States at a time when a whole generation was getting disillusioned with the Vietnam War and experiencing the callous internment of spirituality into individualistic lifestyles and self-absorbed pursuits.  The need for a spiritual meaning of that time was harsher than in any time, and, like in all times of crisis, people end up inventing their spiritual symbols if they do not find them.  This is the time when Carlos Castaneda came talking about flying to alter universes and the possibility of living in new dimensions. Millions of Americans became the devotees of Castaneda, hoping to journey to other worlds like he did.  

Thinking about this story, I find that the attitude of Castaneda’s followers was nothing more than a desire to re-establish the metaphors of Christianity that has gone into hibernation, waiting for the time to surge in a new shape.  The practices of a shaman, as reported by Castaneda, were somehow uprooted from their original context of the Yaqui Indians, and they rather have a romanticised aspect anchored in the Christian belief.  Castaneda said he ‘flew’ as a bird, and he was believed to have flown.  His followers were waiting for him to turn into a ray of light and disappear into infinity, until his death with liver cancer shattered all their dreams.  The metaphorical language of the North Mexican religion was understood in its literal sense, because the heirs of Christianity were looking for a new terrain where they can reproduce their repressed metaphors, and finally chanced upon it. Have any other person claimed to have learnt the teachings of Martians, perhaps the result would not have been much different.

In our modern Tunisia, the country that has been oblivious of religion and yet not totally oblivious of it, we are witnessing a similar phenomenon. When the question of revitalising Islam - as the air bag against big shocks - was raised in the last decade in Muslim countries, Tunisia more than other countries faced a big dilemma as religion has been confined to the social and moral subconscious as I said earlier.  Generations oblivious of religious vocabulary and teachings suddenly started looking for answers to questions that a meagre religious reality could not provide, and became as a consequence immersed in TV programmes that lectured on religion, and then ended up consuming just as immoderately they have consumed everything else.

  The shock of the loss of dignity felt by Muslims all over the world would be less intense in places where communities invested their pasts without feeling estranged from their presents.  In Tunisia, no such thing has existed for decades. In the Castaneda fashion, young people started hunting for miraculous substantiations to sustain the validity of their beliefs, while the essential spiritual backdrop based on the metaphorical understanding of religion has been – and is still- missing. A process of fragmenting the symbolic form of religion is now taking place, leading to a classic collective trance. With the progress of information technology, we are risking to have perhaps the largest trance in the history of Islam if things keep going the way they do.

Despite that, it is not yet too late, I am hopeful.  What I call ‘times of peace’ essential to avoid such one-dimensional understandings of religion can also be summoned in times of crisis, if we try to produce peaceful understandings of all spiritual legacies, religion included, with open minded readings of their metaphors that take for objective the harmonisation with  our present time. Perhaps from my position, my attempts to define the pillars of a religious system suitable for a nation that has chosen religion as the language of its cultural and individual identity are too personal and too limited to expound, but as a legatee of this heritage, I can define what is NOT suitable for it.  From day to day, we, legatees of Islam, are gradually acquainting ourselves with the effortlessness of raising fingers of accusation against diverse attitudes, and the legitimacy of openly speaking and acting abuse against such differences. If we look back at the consequences that similar situations resulted in, we can feel that a hazardous process may have been unleashed. 

Going back to this heritage with the desperateness of the famished, we should end up with all the troubles of indigestion.  If nations suppose that religion is a nimble and trouble-free time traveller, a stipulated set of teachings that passes swiftly between the gates of history without having to adjust and labour hard on its meanings, they are certainly mistaken.  Whether they wear the robes of political secularism or religious faithfulness, the lean kine can start to feed on us if, by mistake of indolence or inattention, we should neglect to feed them.