The politicization of faith : settler colonialism, education, and political identity in Tunisia
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation addresses the puzzle of why some people adopt secular rather than religious political orientations. Examining the case of Tunisia, this dissertation first locates the historical origins of Islamist and secularist political ideologies in the localized experience of colonization and colonial education. In the first half of the dissertation, I show that Tunisians across localities had differential access to French and traditional Islamic primary education due to variation in settler land acquisition and settler educational institutions. Importantly, colonial expansion in Tunisia coincided with the secularization of public education and the subordination of religious institutions to secular political authority in the French Metropole. The differential provision and ideational content of French secular and Islamic education led, in turn, to the development of distinct secular and Islamist political orientations among the Tunisian population. This has important implications for the study of religion and secularism in the Middle East, as well as highlights the role that individual-level attitudes play in shaping the elite ideological factions of national political movements. The second half of the dissertation demonstrates the persistence of the Islamist-secular divide, both in terms of the ideological debates and divisions between the members and supporters of the country's Islamist and secularist parties, as well as in terms of Tunisia's political geography. I show that the leaders of the Islamist and secularist factions of Tunisia's nationalist movement, the Neo-Destour, held distinct views about the independence of religious institutions and the appropriate relationship between religious and political authority. I then demonstrate that Tunisian politics continues to be organized around the Islamist-secular political cleavage, with many of the same ideological debates centered around questions of the independence of religious institutions re-emerging, particularly in the recent period of democratic consolidation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Blackman, Alexandra Domike |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Blaydes, Lisa, 1975- |
| Degree supervisor | Scheve, Kenneth F |
| Thesis advisor | Blaydes, Lisa, 1975- |
| Thesis advisor | Scheve, Kenneth F |
| Thesis advisor | Grzymała-Busse, Anna Maria, 1970- |
| Degree committee member | Grzymała-Busse, Anna Maria, 1970- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Alexandra Blackman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Alexandra Domike Blackman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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