Until recently, hardline Salafis in Tunisia held on to the belief that the country was a land of da’wa (preaching), not a land of jihad.
The Islamist-led government elected after the 2011 revolution had given them the freedom to spread their puritanical brand of Islam so even the most radical among them saw no point in confrontation.
The coexistence, however, has now been shattered, as the government turns up the heat on Ansar al-sharia and the Salafi group’s leader declares that Islam should be defended in Tunisia just as it is in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The stand-off came to a head on the weekend, when an attempt to defy a government ban on the annual gathering of Ansar al-sharia led to clashes in a Tunis suburb and in the central city of Kairouane. One protester died and scores of policemen were injured.
Tunisia’s prime minister, Ali Laraydeh, declared on Sunday that Ansar al-sharia was not a legal organisation, and must either follow the law or “end its existence”.
And so Tunisia has entered a new phase of confrontation between the various strands of Islamist ideology competing in the new state. As elsewhere in the region, not least in Egypt, formal politics in Tunisia have been dominated by the polarisation between liberals and mainstream Islamist parties (Nahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt), overshadowing the equally if not more worrisome tensions provoked by the spread of Salafi ideology.
To be sure, there are different kinds of Salafis, from those whose only aim is to preach what they believe is a return to the real, pure Islam to others whose aim is to fight a global jihad. It would be unfair to paint all Salafis with the same brush but it is also difficult at times to draw a clear line between groups with different objectives.
In Tunisia, Nahda (in which Salafis make up part of the base), hoped that by allowing them to operate openly, Salafi groups would remain non-violent. Its leaders maintained that they would not repeat the repression that they were subjected to under the old regime. The strict Salafi Islam is alien to Tunisian society, they assumed, and its impact would remain limited.
Yet, as Anne Wolf, a Tunisia-based analyst, wrote in the Abu-Dhabi based The National newspaper, the Salafis’ central strategy has been to recruit Tunisian youth through their social welfare services, making themselves “an integral part of the Tunisian landscape” and therefore a challenge to the party in power.
Moreover, as many of Nahda’s critics have noted, the government has not dealt firmly with those who have attacked or harassed artists, journalists or disrupted the secular opposition’s meetings, giving the Salafis the impression that intimidation was an acceptable tool.
In some ways, the clash with Ansar al-sharia was long in the making, even if the first menacing signs appeared last September, when some of Ansar’s members were accused of the attack on the US embassy. The regional context has accelerated the confrontation, with the Tunisian government’s concerns about al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, the north African extremist group, growing in the wake of the war in Mali and the attack on an oil installation in Algeria.
Indeed, Nahda turned more decisively against Ansar after militants tied to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb clashed with Tunisian troops along the border with Algeria, injuring more than a dozen soldiers.
Aaron Zelin, a US expert on jihadi groups, says that security forces’ lack of progress in finding and engaging these militants drove the government to crack down against Ansar al-sharia, arguing that some of its members had links with al-Qaeda.
The broader problem, however, is what Mr Zelin calls Ansar’s “dual message” – the group was acting as missionary in Tunisia but supporting jihad abroad and allowing members to fight with extremist groups in Syria and Mali. This duality was always a dangerous formula and one that was bound to provoke trouble at home.
