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Salafists Protesting in Tunis
Nessma channel reports that the protestors threw firebombs at Nabil Karoui’s house and forced his wife and children to flee out the back of the house. The station owner, who had apologized for the movie, was not at home at the time of the attack.
Police had to use tear gas earlier in the day to disperse thousands who demonstrated against the movie in the capital after the Friday prayer. The people poured to the center of the city after the imam preached in al-Fatah mosque against the movie, named Persepolis, and calling it a serious attack on the religion of the Muslims.
The movie, which is a adaptation of a novel belonging to Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi, and speaks about growing in Iran after the revolution in 1979, contains a scene where a character is considered to depict God, which in the Islamic culture is a sacrilege. The movie won the jury prize at Cannes, in 2007.
The preacher at al-Fatah mosque argued that the timing of broadcasting the movie in Tunis was a very bad one and that it was selected on purpose by the TV channel owner to divide the Tunisians a few days before an important election on October 25, when they will choose the members of the constitutional body that will make a new constitution for the people of the north African country.
Though the TV station owner apologized for the incident on more than one occasions, the protests were stirred in other cities as well: Sousse, Monastir, Sidi Bouzid, and Beja.
Suppressed by the dictatorial regime of Ben Ali, the conservative Muslims are asserting themselves as a very important force in the country, stirring protests against the symbols of the secularism.
They are called Salafists, just like the Salafists in Egypt and other Muslim countries, and have caused numerous problems over the last few months, since they organized themselves.
In June they stormed a movie theatre which was releasing a movie consider insulting to Islam, and last week they attacked an university which refused to enroll a student who was wearing the Muslim veil.
The party with many chances to win the elections on October 25 is the Ennahda Party, a movement that advocates the moderate form of Islam.
While in Tunisia last month, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed Tunisians a moderate form of Islam the way it is in Turkey. On that occasion Erdogan said that there was no contradiction between democracy and Islam and presented his country as a successful example of how capitalism and democracy can grow in the same country.
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