The office of the Prime Minister of Tunisia is situated in a three-story whitewashed building with an arched Moorish entry. It faces north onto the Casbah, a plaza in the old quarter of Tunis. The view from the Prime Minister’s window is normally serene, taking in a tiled fountain and pruned ficus trees, but, by the afternoon of a day in late February, thousands of citizens had transformed the Casbah into what looked like a squatters’ camp. They had organized a round-the-clock sit-in to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, and they were joined each weekend by large numbers of like-minded protesters. The fountain was completely covered by tents; ropes hoisted tarps from the trees.

The demonstrations had originated in December, when a fruit seller in a central Tunisian city immolated himself to protest police abuse. His suffering became a galvanizing symbol of injustice, and inspired demonstrations that spread quickly from the provinces to the capital—and then, in turn, to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and other Arab states. In mid-January, Tunisia’s protesters forced the country’s longtime dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, into exile—the first expulsion of an Arab autocrat by a popular uprising in recent history. Ghannouchi was a factotum of the old regime, and even if he was, as he assured the public, only an interim leader, the Casbah protesters regarded the Tunisian revolution as woefully incomplete.

The demonstrators had turned the façade of Ghannouchi’s office into a mural where people could spray graffiti or write on sheets of paper in colored ink. The wall displayed caricatures, political cartoons, a blown-up Facebook page that showed how to join the revolution online, and handwritten signs in Arabic, French, and English. One sign read, “Dear Our Government . . . Get Lost!” Another observed, “Revolutions Never Go Backwards.” Several images pasted on the wall depicted Mr. Burns, the fictional nuclear power plant owner on “The Simpsons,” to whom Ghannouchi bears an unfortunate resemblance.

Students, robed lawyers, jobless men, Islamists, and parents toting young children gathered in loose groups to sing the Tunisian national anthem or Palestinian revolutionary songs with lyrics adapted to the sit-in’s cause. Volunteer organizers wandered by in T-shirts imprinted with the international “No U-Turn” sign. The people at the sit-in demanded not only the Prime Minister’s departure but also the dismantlement of Ben Ali’s political machine, including the secret police and the former ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally.

A military helicopter with a gunner hanging from an open window thumped overhead, and the chanting in the plaza grew louder:


You are a thief!

You are worthless!

About half a mile from the Casbah is Avenue Habib Bourguiba, a colonial-era thoroughfare with a pedestrian median known locally as the Avenue. At the east end stands a building of poured concrete; inside is the Interior Ministry, the headquarters of the State Security Division and its despised “police politique.” As protests continued in the Casbah, thousands of demonstrators had also gathered here, and had raised a one-word banner at the ministry’s door: “Revolution.” Some pelted stones; smoke rose from cars that had been set on fire.

Police officers fired warning shots; the crowd whistled and jeered. Finally, the police lobbed tear-gas cannisters onto the Avenue and chased most of the demonstrators away.

Tunisia is a socially cohesive nation of modest size. Until recently, it had no modern record of violent or popular revolution. Tunisians accommodated the late stages of Ottoman rule during the nineteenth century, and then French occupation, without great upheaval. In 1956, the country’s anti-imperial leaders secured an almost bloodless transition to independence from France, in contrast to neighboring Algeria’s devastating eight-year war. Tunisia’s economy has expanded at rates of between two per cent and eight per cent in each of the past twenty years. Last year, more than two million Europeans visited, drawn to the Mediterranean beaches and the interior desert dunes. The country seemed a very unlikely setting for a national uprising.

Until mid-January, just two Presidents had held power: Habib Bourguiba, an independence leader who, during his thirty years in office, evolved from a modernizing anti-colonial hero into a self-aggrandizing dictator; and Ben Ali, a police-state apparatchik who overthrew Bourguiba in 1987. Both men governed through their nationalistic party, the Rally, which had about two million members, a fifth of the country’s population. Like Communist parties in China and the former Soviet bloc, the Rally used its ubiquitous presence in workplaces and neighborhoods to dispense favors, spy, and coerce, aided by the hard men and the torturers at the police politique: “This government, this political party, this country . . . these people aren’t afraid of anything,” the protagonist declares in “Lion Mountain,” Mustapha Tlili’s searing novel of a Tunisian village under dictatorship, published in 1988. “Whoever refuses to submit must beware! Do you know what they’ll do to him?”

The state suffocated its citizens even when it did not arrest or abuse them. One morning, I visited Lilia Labidi, an anthropologist and writer, who became the interim Minister for Women’s Affairs after the President’s departure. She is a handsome, energetic woman with shoulder-length dark hair streaked with gray; she wore a red blazer and a knee-length navy dress. “Under Ben Ali, we were not allowed to work as we wanted to do, to write what we wanted to write,” she said. She waved her hands as she spoke. This was true “for all people—the élite, for the artists. . . . It was a very hard period.” Tunisian citizens who criticized their country could face criminal prosecution, and Labidi was made to sign a written pledge that she would never express dissent. Such agreements provided the police with justification for arresting wayward intellectuals whenever they wished; some writers migrated abroad, including Tlili.

The interim Tunisian government has established committees to investigate past human-rights abuses and corruption. Citizens arrive each morning at an office building in the Montplaisir neighborhood of the capital, about a mile north of the Avenue, to record their grievances. As I stood in the hallway one morning, listening to petitioners’ stories, a full-bellied man swept in wearing a black suit and wraparound sunglasses. Security guards and committee clerks recognized him as Hedi Ouled Baballah, a standup comedian who had been jailed in 2008 for his mimicry of the President. They greeted him with the enthusiasm of admiring fans.

Baballah had come to inquire about compensation for his imprisonment. I asked about the origins of his trouble.

“I just imitated Ben Ali at a reception,” he said. “I talked about the family, and that they were thieves. . . . Later, I was coming back from the coast, and I found the police politique waiting for me.” He said that they planted drugs in his car and fake currency at his home. He was released after spending two months in prison.

The hallway audience demanded to hear his Ben Ali routine. Baballah smiled, clearly pleased. He threw back his shoulders and talked as if he had rocks in his mouth, with a gangster’s affect. He portrayed the former President boasting about his young son: “His hair is like mine; his nose is like my brother’s; he has the hands of his uncles.” The jokes turned somewhat obscurely on the reputations of Ben Ali’s relatives as drug dealers and thieves, but they worked: convulsive laughter echoed through the building. The clerks were still guffawing some time later, as they ushered Baballah into a reception room to record his claims.

There may be no wiser revolution than one with a laugh track. Still, six weeks after Ben Ali’s fall, violence and insecurity had returned to the capital after an interlude of relative calm in early February. Police or old-regime loyalists in plain clothes patrolled the Avenue and its side streets in packs, beating up whomever they pleased. Downtown, the thin crackle of gunshots had become common. At the end of February, at least five protesters were shot and killed near the Interior Ministry. Since the Tunisian revolution began, about three hundred people have died.

Rumors began to circulate that undercover police politique were trying to infiltrate the Casbah sit-in, in preparation for an attack on its protesters. The Casbah’s security committee dispatched volunteers with clipboards to record the names and home towns of the plaza’s tent dwellers, hoping to identify impostors. Each tent was assigned a number. One afternoon, outside Tent 39, I found Khalid Smiti, a member of the security team. His eyes were red from lack of sleep.

“Too many people came to the Casbah to be with us,” he said. “The secret police are trying to set things on fire and provoke things.” To thwart them, “we are controlling events. We control those who are speaking. If we see someone suspicious, we follow him. At night, we search people for weapons.” He acknowledged that it was unfortunate that surveillance and police methods had to be used to protect a sit-in whose demands included an end to ubiquitous surveillance and police methods. But he believed this was necessary.

I crawled into Tent 39 to speak with the protesters resting there on bamboo mats. A cold rain had been falling; the lean-to smelled of wet wool and cigarettes. The occupants were from around Sidi Bouzid, the town in central Tunisia where the revolution had started. The region is economically deprived and politically excluded.

The fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, who had catalyzed the protests, had sacrificed himself “not because he was jobless,” Saiffedine Kamel, a twenty-four-year-old unemployed oil engineer, told me. “It was because he wanted to work and they beat him. He went to talk to the people responsible for his problem and he was beaten—it was about the government.”

A few yards down, I was welcomed into a tent by a band of unemployed young men from the region of Gabès, an industrial port in the south. I asked how much of the old dictatorial regime in Tunisia had to be overthrown before they would be satisfied. “We’ve done nothing—the only result was the flight of the President,” one of the men, Nasser Agoubi, said. The secret police remained on the streets; leading figures in the Rally clung to power. “We need a constitutional congress, first of all,” Agoubi added. “Then we will establish a new constitutional order.”

Such was the discourse of the Casbah sit-in: jobless men from mining and farming towns invoking Enlightenment-era constitutional concepts. I asked many of the protesters which democracies they hoped to emulate. I had expected to hear references to Turkey, Indonesia, or other Muslim countries; instead, they cited the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland. Sit-in participants debated the relative virtues of Presidential and parliamentary systems. To stimulate these discussions, the Tunisian lawyers’ association had invited university professors to the Casbah to deliver periodic open-air lectures on the subject. The over-all goal of the Casbah coalition was to purge the interim government of its Ben Ali holdovers, and to dissolve the Rally and the State Security Division. After that, they said, Tunisians should elect a constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution and overhaul its electoral and political laws.

The lawyers were one of the Casbah’s semi-organized groups. There were also secondary and college students; some of them were affiliated with student unions, which, along with labor unions, had been the most important organized power in the country during the years of dictatorship, apart from the ruling party. Many of the young jobless men in the Casbah had been transported to the sit-in by the Tunisian General Union of Labor, the country’s main labor federation. There were also Islamists—some from Ennahda, the formerly banned, Muslim Brotherhood-influenced party, and others from smaller, more radical groups. There were members, too, of pan-Arab, socialist, and Communist political parties that Ben Ali had marginalized but which now sought to revive themselves.

One afternoon, I noticed a woman wearing a hat and bright-red lipstick, standing alone on the plaza’s western edge and holding up a one-word sign: “Peaceful.” She was Ines Doukali, a twenty-three-year-old college graduate who worked at a call center, where she marketed green-energy products to French consumers. When the violence in Tunis had begun again, a few days earlier, and the future of the Casbah sit-ins seemed in doubt, she and some of her friends had decided to join the protest for the first time. “Our objective in this movement is not to destroy or set things on fire,” she said. “Our objective is political—simply to change. We are not asking for the moon.”

More than a quarter of Tunisia’s population is between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. Political scientists have correlated the presence of large numbers of young men in a society with greater probabilities of violence and political instability. In Tunisia, however, the legions of youth who have participated in the revolution have made their presence felt not only because they have been willing to stand before armed police and throw rocks but also because they are usually well educated and active online, with friends and relatives living in Europe. Many are participants in the global economy, and, as political scientists have long argued, revolutions are often driven by expectations, not by desperation.

As I spoke with Doukali, some of the military helicopters flying above fired warning shots. I asked if she and her friends in the Casbah were nervous. “If I allowed myself to be afraid, then no one would be here, and in that case we cannot succeed,” she answered. “We have to be courageous.”

On a Sunday in late February, I arrived at the Casbah around midday. Tens of thousands of young day-trippers were streaming into the plaza. A teen-ager named Fakhreddine Madini held up a hand-made sign—an ink drawing that depicted Prime Minister Ghannouchi as a cockroach. Madini wore a felt porkpie hat and a Puma windbreaker; a plastic badge identified him as part of the “Revolutionary Movement of Béja,” a town about sixty miles from Tunis.

A cluster of young, full-bearded Islamists waved a flag inscribed with Koranic verses. We talked about their ideology, but it was not an edifying conversation, because every minute or two they paused to shout “Allahu Akbar” in unison. Suddenly, their cell phones buzzed with text messages. Prime Minister Ghannouchi, rumor had it, was about to deliver a nationally televised speech.

I jumped into a car and rode east across a causeway over the Gulf of Tunis, toward Carthage, the nearby seaside capital of the ancient empire vanquished by Rome. Ghannouchi had made use of Ben Ali’s offices and of the residential palace there, presumably to avoid his office above the Casbah.

The Prime Minister’s voice came on the radio. “There is the sit-in at the Casbah—you are all familiar with that sit-in,” Ghannouchi said. “I have stressed that we do not have a magic wand to change twenty-three years of accumulated problems in a matter of weeks.” He said that he had acted pragmatically and realistically since Ben Ali’s departure. And yet “hidden forces” in the country were, he said, “trying to make this special experiment fail. This peaceful revolution came from the youth, who used modern technologies, and two hundred of whom were martyred.”

In Carthage, I arrived at a large, walled compound planted with palm trees. I showed my passport and my press identification; armed commandos outfitted in body armor and black uniforms allowed me in. I found the Prime Minister in a small reception room whose curtains had been drawn. Ghannouchi is, at sixty-nine, a lean and gentle-looking man. He wore a gray suit and a gray tie, and was addressing a row of television cameras from behind a wooden podium. A crystal chandelier hung overhead; an abstract, purple-tinted oil painting was mounted behind him, and an Apple laptop was propped open before him. I squeezed against a wall a few feet away.

“Security must be restored,” he said. He meditated further on the hidden forces that seemed to be troubling Tunisia and on the curious violence on the Avenue, which he could not explain. He spoke of himself in the third person and asked, “Why is the media placing emphasis on the Prime Minister—as if his leaving the government is going to solve all these problems?”

It was a defiant question, but one that he rendered moot a few minutes later when he declared that, in fact, “I have decided to resign.” Some of the dozen or so local cameramen and journalists in the room gasped. He was “not shirking responsibility,” Ghannouchi said, but had decided to comply with one of the demands of the Casbah protesters because “I am not the kind of person to take decisions that may result in more victims and shedding of blood.” His bodyguards hustled him away.

I returned to the sit-in as darkness fell. The crowd was exuberant but confused about what might happen next. Ghannouchi’s resignation had cast the country into unprecedented constitutional territory. Tunisia’s titular President was Fouad Mebazaa, another Ben Ali holdover, who was seventy-seven years old and lacked both credibility and a political base. Mebazaa soon announced a new caretaker Prime Minister, but that appointment, too, failed to inspire confidence: Béji Caïd Essebsi, an eighty-four-year-old lawyer who had not occupied political office for almost two decades.

Fakhreddine Madini had traced a blue “X” through his caricature of Ghannouchi, and drawn a thought bubble above a new sketch of the former Prime Minister: “Where is my plane? I want to go see Ben Ali in Saudi Arabia.” He told me, “We still have our demands. They are not fulfilled. We will continue our sit-in until we have a constituent assembly” to write a new constitution. Electing a new assembly to write a democratic constitution, he said, “will get us out from this current situation. We have to stop working with the old constitution, because it was made by a dictator.”

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The main highway to Tunisia’s interior southern regions is modern and well maintained. Olive trees extend in neat rows to the horizon. On the morning that I travelled south, toward Sidi Bouzid, several days after Ghannouchi’s resignation, winter rains had left the scrublands swathed in green. Eventually, signs of economic hardship emerged. One-room farmhouses dotted the roadside. Smugglers had set up small stands to sell plastic tubs of discounted gasoline from Algeria. Sidi Bouzid lies a little more than a hundred and fifty miles from Tunis; it is a city of a hundred and ten thousand. It is bisected by a long thoroughfare that used to be called Rue 7 Novembre, in remembrance of the day that Ben Ali came to power; locals now refer to it as Mohamed Bouazizi Avenue.

The town office of the Constitutional Democratic Rally had been gutted and rechristened in spray paint as “The Peoples’ House.” Graffiti covered other Ben Ali-regime buildings: “Stand Up for Your Rights”; “Gloire à Nos Martyrs”; “Don’t Give Up.” Across from the corner where Bouazizi immolated himself stood a fifteen-foot, abstract sculpture that had formerly honored the Rally government. Several large photographs of Bouazizi hung on it, his face streaked with red paint.

Bouazizi lingered in a hospital for two weeks as anti-government protests invoking his name spread. His death, on January 4th, seemed to galvanize Tunisians into a decisive fury. His choice of self-immolation was not by itself a unique act of despairing self-sacrifice. About a dozen other young Tunisian men had immolated themselves in recent years. But they had done so in the “urbanized coastal and northern areas,” where social ties were relatively weak, Leila Ben M’Charek, a Tunis-based scholar and political analyst, told me. In Tunisia, tribes are no longer a source of social or political power, but they have left a legacy in southern and central towns like Sidi Bouzid. “There is this ‘country folks’ solidarity” in the interior of Tunisia, said Christopher Alexander, an American political scientist who researched his doctoral thesis in the country and now teaches at Davidson College. “In a little place like Sidi Bouzid, half the town or more is likely a cousin of Mohamed Bouazizi,” he said. This sense of collective belonging and common cause probably girded the early uprising by speeding the metamorphosis of Bouazizi’s private suffering into shared outrage.

Bouazizi set himself on fire on Friday, December 17th, around noon, on an asphalt lot across from the government building on the main avenue. Abdel Karim Baccari, a primary-school headmaster and general secretary of the regional education union, described the aftermath for me as we sat in the offices of the General Union, not far from the intersection where the revolution began. “Numerous people gathered that afternoon at the mayor’s building to protest,” he recalled. “The initial slogan was ‘Dignity Before Bread,’ because Bouazizi was humiliated.” This first round of protests continued into the night. The next day, he went on, “the demonstrations were more organized. Some people in the General Union regional office, some human-rights activists, and also some politicians from legal and illegal opposition parties developed the slogans. The most prominent slogan was ‘Working Is a Duty—You Thieves.’ ”

It was daring for the protesters to accuse Rally members of corruption; normally, Tunisian workers limited their public demonstrations to economic demands. But the degree and character of corruption under Ben Ali had become much worse during the last years of his rule, after the family of his wife, Leila Trabelsi, muscled into power. Two French journalists chronicled the Trabelsis’ dealings in a 2009 book, “The Queen of Carthage,” which had circulated in the Tunisian underground. American diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks late last year documented similar allegations of outlandish corruption. One of Ben Ali’s brothers-in-law allegedly acquired an airline, car-assembly plants, a Ford dealership, one of the country’s main radio stations, and extensive real-estate holdings.

Organized-labor leaders quickly reinforced the early street protests. Ben Ali had tolerated the General Union. He tried to control its national leaders, but the union housed political parties and ideological activists, from Communists to pan-Arab socialists and Islamists. In the south, during the last decade of Ben Ali’s rule, some union organizers supported strikes and protests by phosphate miners and disgruntled farmworkers. In 2008, workers in Gafsa staged an uprising. In July, 2010, farmers mounted a sit-in outside the same mayor’s office where Bouazizi immolated himself five months later.

As the demonstrations in late December spread, “Ben Ali let out his militias to attack and loot,” Baccari said. “So towns formed small resistance committees.” Many of these neighborhood-watch coalitions later evolved into political-action committees where debates unfolded over the revolution’s goals. Participants in the Casbah sit-in who belonged to the groups referred to the movement as the Committee for the Protection of the Revolution. They sometimes met and coördinated in the General Union offices, but their membership spanned well beyond organized labor, Baccari and other union officials said.

In late December, desperate to restore control, Tunisian police resorted to firing live ammunition at protesters—not only in Sidi Bouzid but also in nearby Kasserine and in other places outside the south. By mid-January, dozens of unarmed civilians had died, and many more had been wounded. Some were shot in the back as they fled.

Word of these attacks drew young bloggers and amateur cell-phone cameramen from Tunis and other well-wired coastal cities, to document police abuses. Some of the media volunteers had been participating in online dissent networks inside Tunisia for years. The most influential of these was, which had been founded in 2004. Its bloggers had long struggled on the margins; now they found themselves joined by scores of young volunteers who were outraged by the conduct of the police.

The organizers benefitted because the Ben Ali censors had unintentionally made Facebook the one-stop venue for digitally adept revolutionaries. “Tunisia started blocking video-sharing Web sites in 2007,” to thwart Nawaat and others, Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian-born Internet activist with the nonprofit Global Voices, told me. The effect of these decisions by the censors, Ben Gharbia pointed out, was that the regime “concentrated everything on Facebook, and then that was the main platform to organize.”

Facebook’s popularity boomed in Tunisia because of its nonpolitical attractions. By 2010, Ben Gharbia said, Ben Ali’s censors had concluded that shutting down the site could incite “the Tunisian users who are not pro-revolutionary.” Instead, the censors tried watching and blocking the Facebook pages of known political activists. This tactic failed after Bouazizi’s immolation. By late December, as police shootings and other abuses inflamed the nation, “everybody was involved in doing that sort of publishing through social media.”

In early January, online, labor-union, and political-party organizers called Tunisian citizens onto the Avenue. They arrived by the hundreds of thousands, and the Tunisian Army’s commanding general, Rachid Ammar, refused to issue orders to shoot the protesters. The Tunisian Army was a relatively small institution. Ben Ali had kept its officers out of politics, to prevent coups of the sort that he himself had carried out in 1987. Ammar has said little about his decision to turn against the President, but, at the decisive moment, he and other officers evidently concluded that the protesters’ cause was a just one. Twenty-eight days after Bouazizi’s self-immolation, Ben Ali fled.

Tunisia was the first Arab state to abolish slavery, in 1846. The country’s Personal Status Code, enacted soon after independence to protect the rights of women, enshrined in law protections concerning marital, property, and workplace rights. The Tunisian League for Human Rights, which was founded in 1977, is the oldest independent advocacy group of its kind in the Arab world. These strands of historical liberalism help explain Tunisia’s modernization, even under its postwar dictators. If the Tunisian revolution ultimately succeeds, even partially, it may be because of the country’s sense of its own exceptionalism.

After I returned to Tunis from the south, I met with Moncef Marzouki, a physician who led the League for Human Rights, which has several thousand members, in the first years after Ben Ali took power. Marzouki was working at a law office in an older section of the capital. Like many Tunisian intellectuals, he is trying to organize a new political party, which he has named the Congress for the Republic; he and his colleagues hope to attract urban and secular voters seeking a liberal democracy. He is a caramel-skinned, partly bald man who exudes nervous energy; on the morning we met, he was dressed like a Parisian, in gray and black.

In his youth, Marzouki had visited India to study Mahatma Gandhi’s protest methods. Later, he travelled to South Africa to examine its transition from apartheid. In the early nineteen-nineties, the Ben Ali regime carried out a series of show trials, and executions, of Islamists, and Marzouki confronted Ben Ali directly, arguing that he should adhere to the rule of law. In response, the President pushed him into exile.

From France, Marzouki and other secular Arab dissidents debated how to apply civil disobedience against the dictatorships in their home countries. He grew frustrated, he said, with the assumption, often made by American and European leaders, that it might be possible to persuade Arab authoritarians to voluntarily reform their police states—an approach that despots learned to effortlessly deflect. Marzouki and his colleagues had considered gradual reform to be a possibility in Tunisia during the nineteen-eighties, but Ben Ali shattered their illusions. “I am extremely surprised that in the West you have a lot of people who keep thinking that you can reform Syria, you can reform Saudi Arabia,” Marzouki said. “It’s completely nonsense. . . . A dictatorship is a dictatorship, and it is not something you can reform.”

Particularly after the September 11th attacks, however, Arab dissidents in exile, and those working underground at home through organizations like Nawaat, came to realize “that we couldn’t overthrow this kind of dictatorship by guns,” Marzouki said, because “you will be treated as terrorists. . . . So what was left? Only civil resistance.”

That civil resistance evolved with a new Arab generation. There were strikes and sit-ins backed by labor unions, but people also relied on Facebook, YouTube, and Al Jazeera. There is a danger, though, if not a likelihood, that the secret police and their corrupt allies in industry, or radical Islamists, will assert themselves forcefully. The recent record of popular revolutions of Tunisia’s type is a mixed one. In Indonesia and the Philippines, new democracies have wobbled but have proved resilient. In Russia, elements of the old police state held their ground and ultimately regained control.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the fear of Islamists taking power was long used to explain and justify American support for secret-police regimes. The secular-minded Tunisians I met expressed both anxiety and a resigned acceptance of the fact that political parties influenced by Islam are inevitable in their prospective democracy. When free elections are held, Ennahda might attract a quarter or more of a national vote. The hope among Tunisian secularists is that Ennahda will fashion itself on Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, which has for the most part participated coöperatively in democratic politics.

Ennahda “is not a threat for democracy because it is a moderate, conservative political party,” Marzouki told me. The greater threat, “even for Ennahda itself,” he predicted, will arise from other, younger and more extremist Islamist groups influenced by international proselytizing from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, a problem evidenced on the Tunis streets by the gangs of religious radicals who attacked a synagogue and tried to burn down a brothel, with its workers and customers inside. “We are probably going to have to face them and defeat them, but legally and by the means of democracy,” Marzouki said.

Rachid Ghannouchi (no relation to the former Prime Minister) is the leader of Ennahda. He told me, when I asked about his party’s involvement in the Casbah movement, “We are working with others within the councils of the revolution.” He lived in exile for more than twenty years, and returned to Tunisia from Great Britain after Ben Ali’s departure. “The country needs a new constitutional parliament.”

Ghannouchi is a thoughtful, mild-mannered man; following his long residence in London, he speaks about political Islam in a relaxed manner. Tunisian secular leaders regard him as a credible moderate, but some of them question his ability to control more radical leaders within his party. I asked him if he expected the United States and European governments to accept Ennahda’s legitimacy. “I think they have to accept this reality, not only in Tunisia but everywhere,” Ghannouchi said. “Political Islam is not possible to avoid. It is part of the change. . . . They have nothing to fear.”

In the days after the Prime Minister’s departure, leaders of political parties who enjoyed popular support because of their historical opposition to Ben Ali resigned from Prime Minister Béji Caïd Essebsi’s cabinet one after another. Their resignations indicated that the Casbah’s cause had acquired momentum. Whereas, earlier, these leaders had calculated that participating in Ghannouchi’s interim regime would serve their interests, they now seemed to be betting that it was time to join the protesters. Still, the immediate effect of their decision to leave the government was to exacerbate instability; each day seemed more unsettled than the one before.

“There is no more confidence,” Ahmed Néjib Chebbi, who is a founder and leader of the Progressive Democratic Party, a prominent secular and socialist-leaning opposition party, declared. Speaking at a downtown hotel that was teeming with chain-smoking, leather-jacketed police politique, he added, “I am seriously fearing that Tunisia will fall into turmoil and experience violence.”

In the Casbah, on the evening of Thursday, March 3rd, cell phones buzzed once again with news that a speech had been hastily scheduled on national television. President Mebazaa appeared before the nation in a black business suit with a white pocket kerchief. The Tunisian coat of arms and the national flag surrounded him.

“We denounce the attempts of some to terrify people and to obstruct the trajectory of the revolution,” he said. “I want to emphasize one more time the necessity of showing our same sense of responsibility that was so marvellous in the eyes of the world during the revolution’s heyday—and the necessity that everybody should go back to work.”

Mebazaa then announced that his government would capitulate to all the demands of the protest movement. There would be no transitional Presidential election; rather, on July 24th the government would oversee a free election for a “national constituent assembly,” to rewrite Tunisia’s constitution as the assembly saw fit. The constituent assembly would, he said, act as “a mirror that truly reflects the people’s ambitions.”

He concluded, “We announce the beginning of a new era based upon the full rule of the people over a new political system that definitively breaks with the old regime. God help us to fulfill what is good for our dear country—and peace be upon you.”

The next morning, scores of Casbah protesters shouldered duffel bags, rolled-up mats, and folded flags, and streamed toward rows of buses parked outside. Cars and trucks honked their horns in celebration. The scene inside the plaza suggested a high-school graduation: young people embracing in tears, writing telephone numbers on scraps of paper, inscribing memorial messages in calendar books. Teams of volunteers scrubbed the plaza’s granite tile with soaped brushes. The protest’s participants had concluded, during the twelve hours since Mebazaa’s speech, that his announcements amounted to the success of a second Tunisian revolution. The Interior Ministry would soon issue a statement promising the dissolution of the police politique.

The buses had signs in the windows indicating the towns to which they would return volunteers: Sidi Bouzid, Gafsa, Gabès. Passengers clustering around the vehicles said they intended to travel first to the Tunisian-Libyan border, to drop off the tents and blankets they had used for the sit-in to aid refugees uprooted by the ongoing fighting in Libya.

The sudden appearance of the buses around the Casbah suggested that an agreement had been reached during the previous several days between the interim government and the sit-in’s most organized supporters—the General Union of Labor, Ennahda, and some of the leftist political parties that had rejected Ghannouchi’s regime. This idea gained credence when Essebsi later explained to Le Monde that he had taken his position “following a fairly frank discussion” with the General Union, after which the federation had “approved” him for the office.

For the first time since the nineteen-fifties, an Arab population will try to independently construct a constitutional democracy from scratch. Tunisia may yet be the only Arab state to attempt this following the recent upheavals. In late March, Egyptian voters approved hastily written constitutional amendments for free parliamentary and Presidential elections soon, which is precisely the sort of transition plan those in the Casbah sit-in sought to prevent. The outcomes of the protest movements in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere cannot be known, but none of them appear to be close to achieving the election of a constitutional assembly. The conditions in Tunisia seem more favorable to a durable democracy than those in many other Arab nations. The population is well educated; there are no sectarian or tribal divides; and there is a foundation of civil society. Tunisia’s success would not guarantee that its neighbors will follow, but its failure would be a dark portent.

In the Casbah, a thin young man with thick black hair, dressed in a black Adidas jacket, stood in the doorway of a bus, holding a bouquet of white roses wrapped in plastic. He said that his name was Ramzi Hani, and that he had been a neighbor of Mohamed Bouazizi. He had ridden to the capital and slept under a tarp for two weeks. “We almost won,” he said. “It is eighty per cent of a victory. There is twenty per cent left to go.”

I asked where the roses had come from. “Some people from Tunis brought them, just to remember the good moments and time we spent together,” he said. “I’m going to take them to Sidi Bouzid.”

As we spoke, other passengers walked by to pluck single flowers. They climbed onto the roof of the bus, waved the roses, and led hundreds of people in chants and songs.

Overnight, the sit-in’s participants had composed new lyrics. They chanted now with abandon:



A new constitutional assembly!

A new constitution!



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