Who Speaks for the Sacred?: The Politics of Blasphemy in Tunisia from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day

Abstract

From the Ottoman and French colonial periods, through independence, actors supporting and opposing Tunisian blasphemy prosecutions have consistently argued that blasphemy against Islam “hurts Muslims’ feelings.” These hurt feelings are framed then as dangerous because they threaten public order. This dissertation focuses on three sets of little-studied blasphemy cases in what is now modern-day Tunisia (1857, 1904, post-2011/Arab Spring), all of which occurred during transitional moments where control of the state seemed up for grabs. The dissertation begins in 1857 Ottoman Tunis, with the prosecution of a Tunisian Jewish cart-pusher for blasphemy; it then moves to 1904 Tunis under the control of French colonial authorities, and the prosecution of a young, brash Muslim reformist. In the post-Arab-Spring moment, the dissertation examines the prosecution of seven Tunisian citizens for blasphemy allegedly committed via various art forms (2011-2013); and the dissertation closes in a small coastal courthouse, with the prosecution of young Tunisian men for sabb al-jalāla, or insulting the majesty of God (2019-2022). This project leaves room for anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s contention – that there is something “particular” in Muslims’ embodied relationship with their religion that makes them particularly vulnerable to blasphemy – while bringing in blasphemous acts’ political and historical underpinnings (which Judith Butler has criticized Mahmood for neglecting). It argues that the repeating affective framing of blasphemy – as a crime that wounds Muslims’ feelings – enables actors, who lack religious authority or training, to intervene in the name of preventing social disorder. By naturalizing a public order that they are in fact bringing into being, these actors then claim to rightly sit at the helm of the state whose people (and feelings) they are allegedly protecting. This recourse to the affective sidelines – or reconstitutes – the political, allowing plaintiffs to disavow the political work these prosecutions do for them, while evacuating the alternate visions of the Tunisian public sphere contained within said blasphemous acts. It also points to a prevailing vision of the caretaker State as responsible for protecting its citizens from some (though not all) bad feelings, by the curbing of others’ personal freedoms. In this sense, then, blasphemy prosecutions allow the state to reassert itself as properly “state-like,” particularly during transitional moments in which its “stateness” has been put into question. Finally, this project lays the groundwork for a new comparative project on hurtful speech more broadly, as hate speech legislation has emerged over the past thirty years as blasphemy laws in Europe have declined in use or been repealed. Like blasphemy prosecutions, hate speech prosecutions draw upon affective articulations of the crime and its consequences.