Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0372/03728.txt

Text File | 1991-06-27 | 32KB | 506 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03728}
$Pretitle{289}
$Title{Tunisia
Chapter 2C.   Social Values}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{LaVerle Berry and Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{women
family
tunisian
children
values
percent
code
traditional
status
modern}
$Date{1986}
$Log{Young School Kids*0372801.scf
}
Country:     Tunisia
Book:        Tunisia, A Country Study
Author:      LaVerle Berry and Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1986

Chapter 2C.   Social Values

     Islam is at the root of the traditional system of values. People's power
to influence their destiny or environment is believed to be limited or
nonexistent, and the harshness and unreliability of the climate in most of the
Muslim world have strengthened this belief among nomadic tribespeople. Even
among sedentary people, pestilence and other misfortunes are often attributed
to the will of God.

     To be respected a person must, above all, be a good Muslim. A believer
must publicly profess the faith, pray at established times, and give alms. The
strong resistance encountered by Bourguiba in 1960, when he moved to
discourage fasting during the sacred month of Ramadan, bore witness to the
surviving strength of traditional religious values in modern-day Tunisia. The
same could be said of the more recent upsurge of interest and devotion to
Islam among the young, the Islamists (see Glossary), and others.

     At an early date Tunisia became divided into two cultural regions, and
the distinction between these two can still be readily observed. The first one
consists roughly of the cities and the coastal rural zone, including the
Sahil, and the second one encompasses the rural interior. The differences
between these two regions correspond generally to the historical division
between settled life and nomadism; and their roots go back to pre-Arab times
when Berbers settled in the ancient cities under the suzerainty of
Carthaginians or Romans.

     In the more remote localities, values associated with tribal life have
tended to survive. In the past the people of nomadic tribes were highly
individualistic, and tribal and family loyalties were considered values of the
highest order. Raids and counterraids were frequent. Tribal warfare was
suppressed by the French, and over the years a majority of the nomads either
became sedentary farmers or migrated to the cities. Values associated with
tribal organization have persisted, however, and probably have contributed
to the strong resistance encountered by the government in its efforts to aid
landless farmers and to introduce modern farming techniques.

     The primordial acceptance of mankind's helplessness and complete
dependence on God has been considerably modified in the cities and the coastal
plains since early times. City people came to stress intellectual and
political acumen, commercial success, and wealth. In the Sahil, whose
population came to share values more in common with those of Tunis than with
those of the peoples of the interior, town and village life have been marked
by a considerable sense of security, right to property, and material progress,
and a middle-class value system developed at an early date.

     Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contact between
Tunisia and the Western world increasingly brought modernizing influences, but
their full impact came to bear only with the establishment of a large European
community and the opening up of opportunities in French universities for
significant numbers of Tunisian youth who had attended the already prestigious
Sadiki College in Tunis. The emergence of this educated elite left an old
social hierarchy badly shaken and had an important influence on the spread of
modern values. In part because of its middle-class background and in part
because of its intense nationalism, self-confidence, and sense of political
security, the new elite lent its wholehearted support to the modernization of
society, thus creating an atmosphere of mobility that encouraged many of the
less educated and less privileged to adopt the new way of thinking.

     During the first years after independence enormous efforts were made to
transform attitudes and values and to reduce psychological and social
impediments to investments in human resources, such as new schools and
hospitals, which far outstripped investment in capital goods. The new values
were secular ones, justified not in terms of religious precepts and
traditional values but in terms of natural law and rationalism that assumed
the probability of material and social progress to an extent that appeared to
contradict the traditional Islamic acceptance of man's situation as not
susceptible to change. However, there remained a strong emotional attachment
to Islam that stressed the cultural rather than the strictly dogmatic aspect
of the religion.

     In the years that followed, modern values and their reflection of higher
expectations made parents highly ambitious for their children. Those still on
the fringes of modern society became anxious for their children to become
civil servants or teachers, the only modern occupations with which they were
familiar. Those better integrated in modern society wanted their children to
enter a profession or, perhaps, to become a minister in the government.
Education was regarded as the key to achievement of aspirations, and the
government's phenomenal success in expanding and improving the educational
system during the 1950s and 1960s made it possible for young people of the
1970s to entertain high educational and occupational goals. High aspirations
were the product of the government's encouraging a massive transformation in
attitudes and values by creating a shared commitment to modernization.

     By the mid-1980s, however, such optimism had been considerably tempered
in view of the difficulty of finding professional or white-collar employment
in a low-growth economy. Indeed, many young people found themselves in the
ironic situation of having benefited from the state education system but of
being unable-albeit willing-to repay the social cost of the investment through
productive activity. Finding upward channels blocked and their hopes of
joining the middle class and the elite thwarted, many young Tunisians had
become disillusioned, cynical, alienated from their parents and elders, and
contemptuous of the Westernized middle class they formerly had envied.

     Rejecting middle-class values and ostentatious display of wealth and
seeking alternatives to consumerism and the "get rich quick" ethic of the
1970s, a sizable portion of the younger generation had withdrawn from
participation in state functions and political organizations. Instead they had
turned to the religious sphere for inspiration, guidance, and
self-fulfillment. This movement was especially pronounced among
secondary-school and university students who came from the poorer strata of
society and who were without real hope of upward social or economic mobility.
Hence, there were low levels of participation in state- or party-sponsored
student organizations such as the General Union of Tunisian Students (Union
General des Etudiants Tunisiens-UGET) on the university level or the National
Organization of Students and Youth (Organisation Nationale de Jeunesse
Etudiante) for secondary-school students but ever growing interest in Islamic
social and cultural values and adherence to religious organizations. For
example, significant numbers of the young were joining the Islamic Tendency
Movement (Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique-MTI), which condemned
contemporary society as morally depraved and sought to replace it with an
Islamic-based society and a strict code of behavior. The MTI drew most of its
support from coastal regions, including Tunis, the same locales where the PSD
and the middle classes were concentrated. This regional congruence of two
fundamentally opposed sets of values accentuated in yet another way the
divergence between the older