historians-from-tunisia

"In committing politically, taking up important roles, and expressing their views, these militants were hardly representative of colonial Tunisia’s mostly illiterate and poor Muslim population. But they did break out of the positions generally attributed to women."

"These women’s commitment would nonetheless shape their lives in an enduring way — and leave a mark on Tunisia’s own history. As inspiring figures who had fought for women’s autonomy, they helped prepare the ground for the blooming of Tunisian feminism in the 1980s"

"As I see it, the universal is besieged by the hegemony of the commodity and that of the religious. Two faces of globalisation that have nothing to do with the universal, that is anti-universal, which is a thesis I worked on in my book La Double Impasse, in which there are extensive sections on the culturalist and the essentialist."

"How do I introduce myself? Every work, academic or research-based, rests one way or another on a personal make-up. If I wasn’t who I am, or I didn’t receive the make-up that I did, perhaps I wouldn’t have written what I wrote.”"

"I believe that in Tunisia, and perhaps in all the Arab countries, the communist parties — for all their many mistakes and shortcomings — were the only place in which ethno-religious affiliations were overcome, which is an element that can’t be overlooked in my personal make-up. My childhood was not at all marked by that kind of segregation."

"Then history took its course, and the lives and fates of individuals were tied to the collective history, as is always the case in our countries, and the Jewish minority left the country, for numerous reasons."

"The Arab world doesn’t want to know it, and this comes out clearly today, when we see what’s happening in Libya with the return of the slave trade. This is the dark part of Arab history. Africans know it and remember it perfectly well."