L'autre révolution [The other revolution] by Mohamed Kerrou (review)

Inspired by Hannah Arendt, Professor Mohamed Kerrou defines the "other revolution" as the creation of a new political order following the overthrow of an ancien régime. As a participant-observer as well as a political sociologist well-grounded in post-Kantian theory, he breathlessly recounts the revolution of January 14, 2011, and its aftermath of struggles to achieve a framework for the full exercise of free citizenship. Mere constitution-making is not enough for Kerrou, unlike Arendt, because he considers that Tunisia's other revolution also requires a change of mentalities, not just a top-down constitution. The closure during Ramadan of cafés and restaurants, for instance, is opposed to both the spirit and letter of the 2014 constitution. As of late 2018, when Kerrou's narrative ends, he complains of a "rotten compromise" between two elderly politicians supporting a government staffed by some 15 leftovers from the ancien régime. The alliance of elites came at the expense of the people's many civil liberties, notably those of minorities like atheists, black people, homosexuals, and Imazighen/Berbers.

Kerrou places the Tunisian Revolution in historical perspective. National liberation simply exchanged rulers—the cart changing donkeys, a Tunisian proverb has it—with founding president Habib Bourguiba "infantilizing" the Tunisian public before giving way to a police state. Kerrou's "other revolution" appears to this reviewer to be grassroots Bourguibism, the first president's children finally assimilating his calls for dignity and a progressive citizenry, replete with public hygiene and care for the environment. So far it has not happened: like many of his Tunisian readers, Kerrou sees 2011 as "the prickly pear revolution" (thawrat al-hindi), not the sweet-smelling jasmine it is often referred to as, and observes that the fervor and solidarity of the unleashed citizenry only lasted for "about a week" after Zine el-'Abidine Ben 'Ali's departure before evaporating into strikes, anarchy, even killing animals in zoos as well as trashing the environment, turning Tunisia into an "open air garbage dump."

Conventional accounts of the revolution's "founding myth," he argues, ignore the tribal politics in Sidi Bou Zid that are key to understanding the conflict between Mohamed Bouazizi and the female municipal official. They usually do not indicate that the video of Bouazizi's self-immolation was faked, probably picturing an available substitute of a Buddhist monk in flames, promoted by Al Jazeera, a pro–Muslim Brotherhood television channel. Subsequently, the woman who had supposedly slapped Bouazizi was acquitted for lack of evidence, while his family was awarded a dwelling in posh coastal town of La Marsa and then set up in business in Canada, not far from one of Ben 'Ali's escaped crooks.

Almost every page in Kerrou's critical study has new insights or entertains dark hypotheses. For instance, why did authorities crack down so much harder in the town of Thala than elsewhere in the early days of the uprising? He points to its marble industry being in the hands of the former first lady's family. What actually happened on the day of Ben 'Ali's departure remains a mystery despite extensive details of this "mysterious and ambiguous revolution … told from inside as if it were a fable."

It is quite true that the Tunisian labor union, with its million members out of a total population of 11 million, was the solid core of a civil society that enabled a successful political transition and was awarded a Nobel Prize for protecting Tunisia's political transition. The "plural dynamics" of civil society, however, involve not one but three public spheres, not only the official one of nongovernmental organizations guaranteed by the state and its institutions but also those of political Islam and of a popular "arena of confrontation between between … secularism and Islamism." The latter's social movements project an informal civil society that Kerrou associates with the informal economy, breeding rampant corruption and popular protests far more...