Tunisia

• 1. Introduction

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  Tunisia sits at the precise point where the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean Basin meet. From its northernmost tip, Cape Angela, you could theoretically scan the horizon toward Sicily and Sardinia to the north and Malta to the east. The country covers 163,610 square kilometres, yet within that relatively compact space lies almost every landscape imaginable: the snow-dusted peaks of the Atlas Mountains in the northwest, the olive groves of the Sahel coast, salt lakes at the northern fringe of the Sahara, and 1,148 kilometres of coastline.

  But Tunisia is not simply a country of striking terrain. Its 12.1 million people carry the genetic and cultural residue of Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans, and the French, all of whom left something behind. The city of Carthage, which dates to the 9th century BC, stands within modern Tunisia's borders. So does the Great Mosque of Kairouan, built in 670 AD, whose minaret is considered the oldest still-standing in the world.

  And in 2011, Tunisia handed the world something it had not expected: a revolution. A 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on the 17th of December 2010, and the country transformed in weeks. Presidents fell. Constitutions were rewritten. For several years afterward, international democracy indexes called Tunisia the only functioning democracy in the entire Arab world.

  How did a small North African country become the site of one of history's most pivotal modern uprisings? And what happened to that democracy a decade later? The answers begin several thousand years earlier, in the harbour of a city that once challenged Rome itself.

• 2. Carthage and Its Rivals

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  Legend traces the founding of Carthage to Dido of Tyre, said to have established the city in 814 BC, a story retold by the Greek writer Timaeus of Tauromenium. Whether or not Dido herself is historical, the Phoenicians were certainly settling the Tunisian coast as early as the 12th century BC, establishing footholds at Bizerte and Utica before Carthage grew into something far larger.

  By the 7th century BC, Carthage had become the dominant civilization in the western Mediterranean. Its people worshipped a pantheon of Middle Eastern deities, most notably Baal and the goddess Tanit, whose symbol, a female figure with outstretched arms and a long dress, appears repeatedly at ancient sites across the region. The founders also established a Tophet, a sacred precinct that the Romans would later modify.

  Carthage fought the Greek city-states of Sicily during the 5th century BC, then spent the following centuries locked in the series of conflicts with Rome known as the Punic Wars. The most famous episode came during the Second Punic War, when the Carthaginian general Hannibal led an army into Italy and came close to destroying Roman power. That war ended in 202 BC, and Carthage functioned as a client state of Rome for another fifty years.

  The end came swiftly. In 149 BC the Third Punic War opened with the Battle of Carthage, and by 146 BC Rome had conquered the city entirely, renaming it Africa and absorbing it as a province. The Romans left their own deep imprint: the Amphitheatre of El Jem still stands, and it was through the Roman occupation that Christianity took root in the region. The Berber bishop Donatus Magnus founded the Donatist movement here, and the Church of Carthage became central to the development of Christian philosophy and theology. Those Christian communities, remarkably, survived in some Nefzaoua villages until the early 15th century, long after the Arab conquest had transformed the wider country.

• 3. The Arab Transformation

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  Somewhere between the second half of the 7th century and the early 8th century, Arab Muslim armies swept across the region. The first thing they did in Northwest Africa was found a city: Kairouan, Islam's first urban centre in the area. In 670 AD, the Mosque of Uqba, now known as the Great Mosque of Kairouan, rose there. Its minaret is the oldest still standing in the Muslim world, and the mosque itself is regarded as a masterpiece of Islamic art and architecture.

  The transition from a Latin-speaking, Christian, Berber society to one that was Muslim and predominantly Arabic-speaking took more than 400 years. For comparison, the same transformation in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent took 600 years. The majority of the population was not Muslim until quite late in the 9th century; a clear majority emerged only in the 10th. Some Tunisian Christians emigrated after the conquest in 698, and others found their way to Sicily or southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries, drawn by the region's long shared history across the narrow sea.

  The Arab governors of Tunis established the Aghlabid dynasty, which ruled Tunisia, Tripolitania, and eastern Algeria from 800 to 909. Under their rule, extensive water systems supplied towns for household use and for irrigating crops, particularly olives. New palace cities rose: al-Abbasiya in 809 and Raq Adda in 877. Later came the Fatimids, the Zirids, and then the Almohads. The Banu Hilal, a warlike Arab tribe dispatched westward by the Fatimids of Egypt, wreaked such destruction across the Tunisian countryside that the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote that lands they ravaged had become completely arid desert.

  Throughout these upheavals the Hafsid dynasty, ruling from Tunis, established commercial links with Christian Mediterranean states. By the late 16th century, the Tunisian coast had become a stronghold for corsairs, a reputation that would persist into the Ottoman period.

• 4. Ottoman Rule and French Conquest

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  The first Ottoman conquest of Tunis came in 1534 under Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha, the younger brother of Oruç Reis and Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman Fleet under Suleiman the Magnificent. But Ottoman control did not become permanent until 1574, when Kapudan Pasha Uluç Ali Reis seized the city from Spain in a final reconquest. The Ottomans held it until 1881.

  Within the Ottoman system, Tunisia evolved quickly toward something resembling self-rule. The local beys acquired virtual autonomy, and the Hussein dynasty of beys, established in 1705, endured until 1957. The governing councils conducted business in Turkish, and the plague ravaged the country in three major outbreaks: 1784-1785-1796-1797, and 1818-1820. In the 19th century, the ruling beys attempted to modernise the country's institutions, inspired by reform efforts in Istanbul. Those ambitions produced mounting international debt.

  In 1869 Tunisia declared itself bankrupt, and an international financial commission took control of its economy. France used a Tunisian incursion into Algeria as a pretext to invade in 1881 with roughly 36,000 soldiers, forcing Bey Muhammad III as-Sadiq to sign the Treaty of Bardo. Italy objected, but Tunisia became a French protectorate. European settlers were actively encouraged: the number of French colonists grew from 34,000 in 1906 to 144,000 in 1945, and by 1910 there were also 105,000 Italians in Tunisia.

  During the Second World War, the Vichy government controlled the protectorate and implemented its antisemitic statutes there. From November 1942 until May 1943, Germany occupied Tunisia, and SS Commander Walter Rauff continued to implement the Final Solution. The six-month Tunisia Campaign pitted Allied against Axis forces; initial German and Italian advances were eventually overwhelmed by Allied supply and numbers, ending in Axis surrender on the 13th of May 1943. Tunisia's liberation marked the end of the war in Africa.

• 5. Independence and Bourguiba

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  After the Germans were expelled, France reimposed control and once again banned nationalist political activity. The popular Moncef Bey was deposed, the French claiming he had been sympathetic to the Axis, though the real reasons remain debated.

  Habib Bourguiba became the central figure in the independence campaign. In 1945 he slipped past French surveillance and reached Cairo, making contact with the Arab League. On the 13th of September 1949 he arrived in the United States, attending an American Federation of Labor meeting in San Francisco. The French objected to his presence, and American officials were wary of encouraging political change in North Africa given the spectre of Soviet expansion.

  Bourguiba also travelled to Italy on the 6th of November 1951, meeting Alberto Mellini Ponce De León, an old friend who had helped free him from German captivity, Mario Toscano of the Foreign Ministry's documentation office, and Africanist scholar Licinio Vestri. The Italians stayed neutral, unwilling to damage relations with NATO ally France or foreclose future ties with Tunisia.

  Tunisia achieved independence on the 20th of March 1956, with Bourguiba as Prime Minister. A year later Tunisia became a republic and Bourguiba its first President. Independence brought rapid social transformation. A Code of Personal Status adopted in 1956 gave women full legal standing: the right to run businesses, hold bank accounts, and obtain passports independently. It abolished polygamy and the unilateral male right of divorce. Sharia courts were abolished the same year.

  Yet the political picture was far darker. From 1977 until 2005 Tunisia served as a shooting location for five films of the Star Wars franchise, suggesting an outward-facing cosmopolitanism, but Amnesty International and The Guardian called Tunisia one of the most modern yet repressive countries in the Arab world. In 1982 the Palestine Liberation Organisation relocated its headquarters to Tunis. On the 1st of October 1985 the Israeli Air Force bombed those headquarters, killing at least 60 people.

  In November 1987, doctors declared Bourguiba mentally unfit to govern. Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali assumed the presidency under Article 57 of the constitution, in a bloodless transfer of power. The 7th of November became a national holiday in Ben Ali's honour.

• 6. Revolution and Its Aftermath

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  Mohamed Bouazizi was a 26-year-old street vendor. On the 17th of December 2010, after a municipal official named Faida Hamdy confiscated his goods and humiliated him publicly, he set himself on fire. Anger spread immediately. Bouazizi died on the 4th of January 2011, and Ben Ali, who had ruled for 23 years and claimed over 80% of the vote in each election, fled the country on the 14th of January 2011. The protests spread across the Arab world in what became known as the Arab Spring.

  Tunisia's transition was chaotic but real. Courts banned the former ruling party, the RCD, and confiscated its assets. A new Constituent Assembly was elected on the 23rd of October 2011 in a vote international observers declared free and fair. The Ennahda Movement, previously banned under Ben Ali, emerged as the largest party with 89 of 217 seats. On the 12th of December 2011, Moncef Marzouki, a veteran human rights activist, was elected president. In 2014, his government established a Truth and Dignity Commission as part of a national reconciliation process.

  The country on the 26th of January 2014 adopted a new constitution that guaranteed rights for women and required the President to be Muslim. Tunisia voted for parliament on the 26th of October 2014 and for president on the 23rd of November 2014. For several years between 2014 and 2020, the Economist Democracy Index ranked Tunisia as the only democratic state in the Arab world.

  Terrorism struck in 2015. An attack on the Bardo National Museum killed 22 people. Weeks later, gunmen killed 38 at a Sousse beachfront. President Beji Caid Essebsi extended the state of emergency. That same year the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet won the Nobel Peace Prize for building a pluralistic political order.

  Essebsi died in July 2019. Kais Saied won the subsequent presidential election by a landslide and was sworn in on the 23rd of October 2019. On the 25th of July 2021, amid protests over government dysfunction, he suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and removed legislative immunity. He later named Najla Bouden as prime minister, the first woman to hold the post. A constitutional referendum in July 2022 passed with roughly 30% turnout and significantly expanded presidential powers. By 2022 the Democracy Index classified Tunisia as a hybrid regime. In April 2023 the government arrested Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi and closed the party's headquarters. On the 6th of October 2024, Saied won a second term with more than 90% of the vote on a turnout of 28.8%.

• 7. Society and Culture

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  Tunisia's population is predominantly Arab-Berber, with genetic studies showing dominant North African paternal lineages alongside significant Middle Eastern Arab input. Around 1,000 to 1,500 Jews remain, concentrated mainly on the island of Djerba, where the Jewish community dates back some 2,600 years. Djerba is home to El Ghriba synagogue, considered one of the oldest continuously used synagogues in the world, drawing pilgrims once a year who regard it as a site connected to stones from Solomon's temple.

  Arabic is the official language, but French functions as the language of instruction in the sciences in secondary school and is spoken by roughly 52% of the population as of 2022. Children begin learning French at age 8 and English at age 11. University enrollment more than tripled in a decade, from approximately 102,000 students in 1995 to 365,000 in 2005.

  Nearly 98% of Tunisians identify as Muslim, yet a 2018 Arab Barometer survey found that more than one third also identified as non-religious, making Tunisia the least religious country in the Arab world by that measure. A subsequent 2021 survey found a reversal of that trend, with 44% calling themselves religious and 19% non-religious. The constitution guarantees freedom of belief. The bulk of Tunisian Muslims follow the Maliki school of Sunni Islam, recognisable by the square minarets of their mosques, while families of Turkish descent follow the Hanafi school, whose mosques have octagonal minarets.

  Tunisian painting has its own distinct lineage. The School of Tunis, founded in 1949 by Pierre Boucherle alongside Yahia Turki, Abdelaziz Gorgi, Moses Levy, Ammar Farhat, and Jules Lellouche, brought together French and Tunisian artists of multiple faiths and rejected the influence of Orientalist colonial painting. After independence in 1956, a Ministry of Culture guided the art world, producing internationally recognised figures such as Hatem El Mekki and Zoubeir Turki.

  In music, the founding of Radio Tunis in 1938 gave Tunisian musicians an official platform, with the station initially promoting Tunisian artists exclusively. The Carthage Film Festival, created in 1966, rotates with the Carthage Theatre Festival; its grand prize, the Tanit d'or or Golden Tanit, is named for the ancient Carthaginian goddess and shaped after her symbol. Football remains the dominant sport, with the national team, known as the Eagles of Carthage, winning the 2004 African Cup of Nations on home soil. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, Oussama Mellouli won gold in the 1,500 metre freestyle; in 2012 he added a bronze in the same event and another gold in the marathon swim.