History of Tunisia
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In 814 BC the city of Carthage was founded in present-day Tunisia. From 700 to 409 BC there were repeated conflicts between Carthage and Greece over spheres of influence and trade routes. Under the Magonid dynasty the Carthaginians dominated the western Mediterranean but the Greeks regained the upper hand at the Battle of Imera in 480 BC. Skirmishes between Greeks and Carthaginians in Sicily spilled over to mainland Tunisia in 311 BC when the Greeks invaded Cap Bon. Carthage became a major rival to the Roman Republic for the domination of the western Mediterranean in the 4th century B.C., leading to the First Punic War. From 218 to 202 BC the Second Punic War ravaged the region, with Hannibal crossing the Alps to attack Rome. Carthage was eventually destroyed during the Third Punic War, and Tunisia was made part of the Roman Empire and its citizens sold into slavery.
In 44 BC Julius Caesar landed in Tunisia in pursuit of Pompey and Cato the Younger, who had gained the support of the Numidian king Juma I. After Caesar's defeat of the rebels at the battle of Thapsus, much of Numidia was annexed. During the 1st and 2nd century AD Carthage was rebuilt under the supervision of Augustus, and several new towns were founded, often on the remains of old Punic settlements. This process of development was accelerated after Septimus Severus became the first African emperor of the Roman Empire in 193 AD. Early in 238, local landowners ignited a full-scale revolt in the province. The landowners armed their clients and their agricultural workers and entered Thysdrus (modern El Djem), where they murdered the offending official and his bodyguards and proclaimed the aged governor of the province, Gordian I, and his son, Gordian II, as co-emperors. The senate in Rome switched allegiance, but when the African revolt collapsed under an assault by forces loyal to emperor Maximinus Thrax (who succeeded the Severus dynasty), the senators elected two of their number, Pupienus and Balbinus, as co-emperors.
In the 429 Tunisia was captured by the Vandals and became the center of their short-lived kingdom until they were ousted by the Byzantines in 534.
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[edit] Middle ages
An Arab Muslim army entered Tunisia in 670 under the command of uqba ibn Nafa with permanent intentions. Arriving by land the Arabs passed the Byzantine strongholds along the coast. They founded the city of Kairouan, using it as a base to subdue individual pockets of Christian and Berber resistance. Tunisia was considered a natural center for an Arab-Islamic regime and society in North Africa. It was the only region that had the urban, agricultural, and commercial infrastructures essential for a centralized state.
[edit] Aghlabid Dynasty (800 - 909)
After several generations a local Arab aristocracy emerged, which was resentful of the distant caliphate's interference in local matters. A minor rebellion in Tunis in 797 took on a more ominous nature when it spread to Kairouan. The caliph's governor was unable to restore order, but Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab, a provincial leader, had a well-disciplined army and could. He proposed to the caliph Harun al-Rashid, that he be granted Ifriqiya as a hereditary fief, which he was acquiesced. Ibrahim bin al-Aghlab and his descendants, known as the Aghlabids, ruled Tunisia, Tripolitania, and eastern Algeria on behalf of the caliph from 800 to 909. The Aghlabid military elites were drawn from the descendants of Arab invaders, Islamized and Arabized Berbers, and black slave soldiers. The administrative staffs comprised dependent client Arab and Persian immigrants, bilingual natives, and some Christians and Jews.
Tunisia flourished under Aghlabid rule. Extensive irrigation works were installed to supply towns with water, irrigate royal gardens, and promote olive production. In the Qayrawan region hundreds of basins were constructed to store water to support horse raising. Important trade routes linked Tunisia with the Sahara, the Sudan, and the Mediterranean. The Aghlabids captured Sicily in 835. A flourishing economy permitted a refined and luxurious court life and the construction of the new palace cities of al-'Abbasiya (809) and Raqqada (877). Despite the grandiose construction projects and economic expansion, many from the Arab officer class and ulema of Kairouan were increasingly critical of the regime. The hostility in religious circles arose primarily from the contemptuous treatment of Berbers who had embraced Islam. The Islamic doctrine of equality regardless of race was a cornerstone of the Sunnite movement and the Maliki school of Islamic law which had developed in Kairouan, and was the basis of opposition to Arab-caliphal rule in North Africa.
Growing political instability was further exacerbated by the Fatimids in Egypt, who stirred a rebellion which forced the last of the Aghlabids, Ziyadat Allah III, to evacuate the palace at Raqadda in 909. The Fatimids went on to conquer much of North Africa and Egypt. After moving their capital to Cairo, the Fatimids abandoned North Africa to local Zirid (972 - 1148) and Hammadid (1015 - 1152) vassals. The region became submerged by their various quarrels, resulting in political instability that was connected to the decline of Tunisian trade and agriculture. The final blow was dealt by nomadic migrations from Arabia and Egypt, when the Banu Hilali Bedouins defeated the Zirid and Hammadid states and sacked Kairouan in 1057. As the invaders took control of the plains the local sedentary peoples were forced to take refuge in the mountains, and in central and northern Tunisia farming gave way to pastoralism. The immigrants also assisted in the process of Arabization, with the Berber language virtually disappearing.
[edit] Almohad and Hafsid Dynasties
Anarchy made Tunisia a target for the Norman kingdom in Sicily, who between 1134 and 1148 seized Mahdia, Gabes, Sfax, and the island of Jerba. The only credible Muslim rulers in the Maghreb at the time were the Almohads (ruled 1130 - 1269) in Morocco, who responded with a counter-attack which forced the Normans to retreat to Sicily. The Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min (1130 - 1163) conquered Morocco, intervened in Spain, and invaded Algeria and Tunisia. Despite the power of the dynasty the religious doctrine championed by Almohad was never successfully implemented. Alternative expressions of Islam, including that of the Maliki jurists, the popular cult of saints and Sufis, and the philosophy of Averroes, were always tolerated. The Almohad empire, like its predecessors, soon dissolved in Tunisia. In 1230 they were succeeded by the Hafsids (ruled 1230 - 1574), who were recognised by Mecca, which furthermore acknowledged the ruler Al-Mustansir as caliph. In 1270 an attempted invasion by Louis IX of France was repulsed. Tunisia prospered through increasing European and Sudanese trade under Al-Mustansir, who used the money to transform Tunis, his capital, with a palace and the Abu Fihr park. The estate he created near Bizerte was said to be without equal in the world.
In 1492 Muslim and Jewish migration from Spain culminated in the fall of Muslim Granada. The new comers brought much-needed skills in agriculture and crafts. From 1534 to 1581 Tunisia become a pawn in power struggles between Spain and Turkey, and in 1574 it was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.
[edit] Ottoman Empire
The Tunisian state was rebuilt by the imposition of Ottoman rule in the late 16th century. The Ottomans made Tunisia a province of their empire in 1574, and garrisoned Tunis with 4,000 Janissaries recruited from Anatolia, reinforced by Christian converts to Islam from Italy, Spain, and Provence. In 1591 the local Janissary officers replaced the Sultan's appointee with one of their own men, called the Dey. While the Dey dominated Tunis, a Corsican-born Tunisian tax collector (Bey) named Murad (d. 1640), and his descendants, dominated the rest of the country. The struggle for power made allies of the Dey, the Janissaries, and Bedouin tribes against the Beys, the towns, and the fertile region of the countryside. The Muradid Beys eventually triumphed, and ruled until 1705, when Hussein ibn Ali came to power. The period from 1705 to 1957 witnessed the reign of the Husseinite Beys, including the highly effective Hammouda Pasha (1781 - 1813). In theory, Tunisia continued to be a vassal of the Ottoman empire -- the Friday prayer was pronounced in the name of the Ottoman Sultan, money was coined in his honor, and an annual ambassador brought gifts to Istanbul -- but the Ottomans never again exacted obedience.
[edit] Modern history
In the 19th century, the country became mostly autonomous, although officially still an Ottoman province. In 1861, Tunisia enacted the first constitution in the Arab world, but a move toward a republic was hampered by the poor economy and political unrest. In 1869, Tunisia declared itself bankrupt, and an international financial commission with representatives from France, United Kingdom, and Italy took control over the economy.
In the spring of 1881, France invaded Tunisia, claiming that Tunisian troops had crossed the border to Algeria, France's main colony in Northern Africa. Italy, also interested in Tunisia, protested, but did not risk a war with France. On May 12 of that year, Tunisia was officially made a French protectorate. The French progressively assumed the most responsible administrative positions, and by 1884 they supervised all Tunisian government bureaus dealing with finance, post, education, telegraph, public works and agriculture. They abolished the international finance commission and guaranteed the Tunisian debt, establishing a new judicial system for Europeans while keeping the sharia courts available for cases involving Tunisians, and developed roads, ports, railroads, and mines. In rural areas they strengthened the local officials (qa'ids) and weakened independent tribes. They actively encouraged French settlements in the country - the number of French colonists grew from 34,000 in 1906 to 144,000 in 1945, and the French occupied approximately one-fifth of the cultivable land.
Nationalist sentiment increased after World War I. The nationalist Destour Party was set up in 1920. Its successor the Neo-Destour Party, established in 1934 and led by Habib Bourguiba, was banned by the French.
During World War II, the French authorities in Tunisia supported the Vichy government which ruled France after its capitulation to Germany in 1940. After losing a string of battles to Bernard Montgomery in 1942, and then hearing of the landings during Operation Torch, Erwin Rommel retreated to Tunisia and set up strong defensive positions in the mountains to the south. Overwhelming British superiority eventually broke these lines, although he did have some success against the "green" American troops advancing from the west. The fighting ended in early 1943, and Tunisia became a base for operations for the invasion of Sicily later that year. It was very important in World War II.
Violent resistance to French rule boiled up in 1954.
[edit] Tunisia since independence
Independence from France was achieved on March 20, 1956, as a constitutional monarchy with the Bey of Tunis, Muhammad VIII al-Amin Bey, as the king of Tunisia. Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba abolished the monarchy in 1957 and established a strict state under the Neo-Destour (New Constitution) party. He dominated the country for 31 years, repressing Islamic fundamentalism and establishing rights for women unmatched by any other Arab nation. Bourguiba envisioned a Tunisian republic (he ended the old quasi-monarchical institution of the dey), which was secular, populist, and imbued with a kind of French rationalist vision of the state that was Napoleonic in spirit. Socialism was not initially part of the project, but redistributive policies certainly were. In 1964, however, Tunisia entered a short lived socialist era. The Neo-Destour party became the Socialist Destour, and the new minister of planning, Ahmed Ben Salah, formulated a state-led plan for the formation of agricultural cooperatives and public-sector industrialization. The socialist experiment raised considerable opposition within Bourguiba's old coalition, and it was eventually ended in the early 1970s.
"Bourguibism" was also resolutely nonmilitarist, arguing that Tunisia could never be a credible military power and that the building of a large military establishment would only consume scarce investment and perhaps thrust Tunisia into the cycles of military intervention in politics that had plagued the rest of the Middle East.
President Bourguiba was overthrown and replaced by Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on November 7, 1987. President Ben Ali changed little in the Bourguibist system except to rename the party the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD by its French acronym). In 1988 Ben Ali tried a new tack with reference to the government and Islam, by attempting to reaffirm the country's Islamic identity by releasing several Islamists activists from prison. He also forged a national pact with the Tunisian party Harakat al-Ittijah al-Islami (Islamic Tendency Movement, founded in 1981), which changed its name to an-Nahda (the Renaissance Party). An-Nahda ran strongly in the 1989 elections, and Ben Ali quickly banned Islamist political parties and jailed as many as 8,000 activists. To the present, the government continues its refusal to recognize Muslim opposition parties, and governs the country by military and police repression.
In recent years, Tunisia has taken a moderate, non-aligned stance in its foreign relations.
[edit] Sources
Ira M. Lapidus A History of Islamic Socities 2nd Ed. Cambridge University Press
[edit] See also
- History of Africa
- North Africa during the Classical Period
- Ifriqiya
- Barbary Coast
- List of Beys of Tunis
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