Libertà, dignità, autorità. Il processo rivoluzionario tunisino e l’attivismo islamico in una prospettiva politico-antropologica

The practical and theoretical elaboration of the concepts of democracy and pluralism, pursued by the Tunisian Islamic public, is an aspect of contemporary Islamic discursive traditions and is part of a broader project focused on the declination of a specific form of Tunisian Islamic modernity. I suggest a combined effort of the anthropological and political approaches to social and political activism, to analyze in a more complex way the dynamic interactions between Islamist and da‘wa movements in the MENA region. I refer to both these kinds of activism as the Tunisian Islamic public. I analyze in an anthropological perspective such concepts as pluralism, moderation, democracy. The interpretive paradigm allows to balance the experience- distant concepts of political-anthropological analysis with the experience- near concepts of Tunisian social actors involved in the revolutionary process: I tried to locate the analytical concept of democracy against the background of the ideological and practical tools of the protagonists of the revolutionary process. The sub-categories covered under the broader concept of democracy are closer to social actors’ own experience: I refer to such concepts as freedom, dignity, social justice, pluralism, toleration, governmentality, that are analyzed with reference to both their explicit formulation and implicit understandings by the individuals and groups involved in the revolutionary process. I interpret the quest for an Islamic understanding of such concepts, carried out by the Tunisian Islamic movements after the 2011 Revolution, as part of an authorizing discourse [Asad 1986] about the Tunisian specificity, aimed to legitimate the social and political commitment in the name of Islam. This discourse draws on the local interpretations of Islamic practices, on the work of modern and classical Islamic thinkers, and on the reasoning about democracy and human rights.