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Protecting the Sacred: Tunisia's Islamist Movement Ennahdha and the Challenge of Free Speech

McCarthy, Rory

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Abstract

Since the 2011 uprising, Tunisia's Islamist movement Ennahdha has proposed a political project based on reclaiming the nation's Arab-Islamic identity. At the heart of this is the issue of ‘protection of the sacred’, which seeks to define limits to freedom of expression to protect religious symbols from criticism. This is part of Ennahdha's post-Islamist evolution. The movement has drawn away from its earlier ambitions to Islamise the state and now seeks to reconstruct the role of Islam by asserting a cultural Islamic identity, which recasts religious norms as conservative values and which has yet to determine the precise limits of new individual freedoms. The result was to propose a new set of rules for the community under which Tunisians would freely express their religious belief in a way denied them under the former regime, but would also live under a state that defended and guaranteed their religious values.

Citation

McCarthy, R. (2015). Protecting the Sacred: Tunisia's Islamist Movement Ennahdha and the Challenge of Free Speech. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42(4), 447-464. https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2015.1005055

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Feb 17, 2015
Publication Date 2015
Deposit Date Sep 2, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
Print ISSN 1353-0194
Electronic ISSN 1469-3542
Publisher Routledge
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 42
Issue 4
Pages 447-464
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2015.1005055
Related Public URLs https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf21aa72-ab57-47b0-9e9b-9197180594af

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