The Tunisian Revolution “The free, youth revolution” from an anthropological perspective

Abstract

In this paper I focus on the anthropological aspects of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 showing how anthropology could offer several angles of insight into the study of this revolution, which represents a new model of political revolutions. I show that this revolution has three major particularities: the young age of the revolutionaries, the independence of their thought and action, and their nonviolence. These particularities would not remove it from the political revolution category, but they mark a new step of paradigm change in the history of political revolutions. The behavior of the revolutionaries and their real objectives are among Muslim good morals, which are compatible with those adopted by the modern Western civilization and the Universal Moral Code. I present the dynamics of this revolution showing how it has removed immediate obstacles for reaching gradually its real objectives after the establishment of a new modern democrat constitution. In this paper, I also show how the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of Tunisian population has protected this revolution against attempts aiming to deviate it from its real objectives. As the spread of the political-religious terrorism is one of the major problems emerged after the launching of this revolution, I discuss the current causes of this spread and propose some initiatives that could be applied immediately for combating this terrorism at the cultural and intellectual levels. Moreover, I reveal its initial roots to provide a long-term strategy underlining, particularly, the need for a deep general review of all what falsely allocated to Islam and the motivation of Muslims to revitalize the real essence of Islam.

Keywords: Tunisian revolution particularities, Political revolution, Tunisian population history, Anthropology, Political-religious terrorism, Islam, Free Muslim Thought