Democracy and Pluralism in the Discursive Traditions of the Tunisian Islamic Movement

In this paper I discuss from the anthropological perspective the discursive practices of the Tunisian Islamic movement about democracy and pluralism. In the Islamic discourse, such ‘ideascapes’ (Appadurai 2001) are part of a wider discussion, whose subject is the specificity of Tunisian Islamic modernity. People I carried out my research with are both da‘wa activists, whose aim is spreading pious lifestyles and reasoning methods, and Islamists (intellectuals and militants), engaged in the democratic reconstruction of the post-revolution State. The practical and theoretical elaboration of the ideascapes of democracy and pluralism, carried out by these subjects, is part of the contemporary Islamic discursive traditions.