Tunisian culture: what the state organised and what households kept

Why a Carthaginian goddess names the Tunisian film prize

The Carthage Film Festival was created in 1966 by the Tunisian Minister of Culture to show films from the Maghreb, Africa and the Middle East. It is held in October and November every other year, alternating with the Carthage Theatre Festival, and a film entered for the competition needs a director of African or Middle Eastern nationality. Naceur Ktari's The Ambassadors, about Maghrebi immigrants in France and the racism they met, took the Golden Tanit for best picture in 1976.

Tanit, consort of Baal Hammon, was a minor figure in Phoenicia and the patroness and protector of Carthage, and she is the only Carthaginian deity with an icon. Her sign, a stylised female form with outstretched arms, appears in tombs, on mosaics and stelae, and on figurines and pottery vessels. The trophy reproduces it.

Her name outlived the city in village custom. Omek Tannou is a rain rite inherited from Punic and Berber traditions that invoked the goddess. During a drought, children carry the sculpted head of a woman, somewhat like the head of a girl's doll, in procession between the houses of a village, singing a refrain that calls on the women to ask God for rain, and each housewife pours a little water on the figure. The words change from region to region, because shta, the refrain's word for rain, carries that meaning only in certain urban areas.

Tanit is one of the explanations offered for the country's name as well. Tunisia comes from Tunis through the French Tunisie, and Tunis is generally traced to a Berber root, tns, meaning to lay down or encampment, though it is sometimes linked to Tanit and to the ancient city of Tynes.

Carthage appears on the insignia of the state too. The coat of arms, adopted in 1861 and revised on 21 June 1956 and 30 May 1963, carries a Carthaginian galley at sea across its upper part. The preamble of the 2022 constitution affirms Tunisia's belonging to the African continent and traces the continent's name to the name once given to Tunisia. In Sousse the Carnival of Awussu, held every 24 July near the beach of Boujaafar, began as the Neptunalia of the Roman province of Africa.

How the Tunisian state took charge of culture

Independence in 1956 gave education and culture priority. The school system was unified, nationalised and Arabised, and a separate body for culture, first called the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Information, was set up so that schools would stop being the only means of passing culture on. The department now responsible for culture and heritage dates its creation to 11 December 1961.

The state ran the presses as well. It produced over 70% of the books published between 1956 and 1987 and gave up centralising publishing in the early 1990s, when private publishers multiplied; editorial production between 1987 and 1996 came to 6,068 titles.

Theatre received its national day from a speech. On 7 November 1962 Habib Bourguiba, whose brother Mohamed was a playwright, devoted a speech to theatre as "a powerful means of disseminating culture and a most effective means of popular education", and 7 November has been the National Day of Drama since. The date took a second meaning on 7 November 1987, when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali came to power, and official references to the figure 7 and to the theme of Change ran through his years in office.

Culture took 0.6% of the state budget in 1999 and 1.25% in 2009, and half of the increase went to houses of culture, cultural committees and associations in the regions. The 2022 constitution keeps the state in the role. Article 49 guarantees the right to culture and the freedom of creativity and binds the state to protect cultural heritage for future generations, and Article 44 directs public education to root the young in their Arab-Islamic identity, to consolidate the Arabic language and generalise its use, and to open them to foreign languages.

What Tunisians speak at home and write at work

Article 6 of the 2022 constitution states that Tunisia is part of the Arab nation and that its official language is Arabic. The Arabic of the home is Tunisian Arabic, known as Tounsi, a set of dialects with no official body of standards, built on a Berber and Punic substratum and marked by Turkish, Italian, Spanish and French. Children acquire it at home and learn to read and write Standard Arabic when they start school at six. Putting it on the page could still cause a scandal in the 1930s, when the novelist Bashir Khraief wrote his dialogue in Tunisian dialect.

French came in with the protectorate's schools, became a marker of social advancement and spread furthest after independence, as schooling did. It has no official status. In 2022 there were 6,321,000 French speakers in Tunisia, about 52% of the population, and French is the language of science teaching in secondary school and of much of the press and business.

The state pushed the other way from 1999. From October that year shops had to give Arabic characters twice the space of Latin ones, and the administration was required to communicate only in Arabic. The Official Journal, which enacts laws and decrees, appears in Arabic with a French translation that has no legal value. Shop signs, menus and road signs are still generally written in both languages, and after the first three grades, taught entirely in Arabic, school is taught half in Arabic and half in French.

Berber survives as Jerba Berber on Djerba and Matmata Berber in Matmata, in southern villages such as Chenini, Douiret and Tamezrett and in Djerban villages including Guellala, Ajim and Sedouikech; Sened is extinct. The BTI 2026 country report cites a Minority Rights Group estimate of 10,000 to 50,000 speakers and notes that the figure is disputed, partly because many Tunisians who identify as Amazigh do not speak the language.

How the family code changed Tunisian marriage

In 1930 Tahar Haddad published Our Women in Sharia and Society, which argued that Islam and modernity were compatible. Conservatives condemned it. Nearly all of its proposals, among them obligatory consent to marriage, a procedure for divorce and the abolition of polygamy, went into the Code of Personal Status, drafted by fifteen jurists under the justice minister Ahmad Mestiri, promulgated by beylical decree on 13 August 1956 and in force from 1 January 1957.

The code outlawed polygamy, with a year's imprisonment and a fine for a man who married again before a previous marriage was dissolved, and made the consent of both spouses a condition of a valid marriage. It set the minimum age of marriage at 15 for women and 18 for men, raised in 1964 to 17 and 20 and unified for both sexes in 2007; the BTI 2026 report gives it as 18. Divorce, which a husband had been able to pronounce alone before two witnesses, could now take place only before a court. The wife's duty of obedience went too: "Each of the two spouses must treat the partner with kindness, live in good rapport and avoid all prejudice."

Bourguiba defended the ban on polygamy from the Qur'an. The verse that permits up to four wives makes it conditional on treating them justly, and he held that the condition could never be assured. The state created the National Union of Tunisian Women to carry the reforms out, and 13 August, the code's anniversary, became a public holiday as National Women's Day, kept alongside 8 March.

Inheritance was left as it was. Women inherit half of what men inherit, and the BTI 2026 report records that a reform to remove the code's discriminatory articles was debated in 2018 and that the difference remains.

Which Islam the Tunisian state teaches and pays for

Article 5 of the 2022 constitution declares Tunisia part of the Islamic nation and gives the state alone the task of achieving "the objectives of true Islam". The state employs the clergy for it: imams are paid and appointed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the grand mufti, the highest religious authority, is appointed by the president. The teaching of Islam is compulsory in public schools, and the secondary syllabus of religious studies covers the history of Judaism and Christianity too.

Which school the mosques follow

Most Tunisians belong to the Maliki school of Sunni Islam, and Maliki mosques are recognisable by their square minarets. The Ottomans brought the Hanafi school, which survives among families of Turkish descent and whose mosques traditionally have octagonal minarets. Kairouan, founded in 670, keeps the standing of a holy city: UNESCO records that seven pilgrimages there could once take the place of the one pilgrimage to Mecca.

Outside the mosques the country is dotted with marabouts, small white mausoleums of saints in caves, on hills, beside springs and on the coast, where a village, an extended family or a tribe gathers for its festival and where some Tunisians still ask for favours. Belief in the evil eye persists, and shutters are painted blue to keep evil spirits away.

The Arab Barometer's surveys have moved both ways. In 2018 about 33% of Tunisians called themselves non-religious, up from around 12% in 2013; in 2021, 44% called themselves religious, 37% somewhat religious and 19% non-religious. The state prohibited the hijab in schools and government offices, and wearing it, uncommon in Tunisia, increased somewhat from the early 2000s.

Where the Jewish and Christian communities went

Non-Muslims numbered more than 300,000 in 1956 and have since fallen to tens of thousands. Before independence more than 250,000 Christians lived in Tunisia, most of them of Italian and Maltese ancestry, and many of the Italian settlers left for Italy or France after 1956; most of the Jewish population left as well. The Jewish community, whose history in Tunisia goes back some 2,000 years, was estimated at 105,000 in 1948; the BTI 2026 report puts it at 1,500 to 2,000 people, mostly in Tunis and on Djerba.

The El Ghriba synagogue on Djerba draws an annual pilgrimage, kept up by its age and by the legend that it was built from stones of Solomon's Temple. On 9 May 2023 a member of the Garde Nationale killed five people in an attack on the community there.

What Tunisians kept that no ministry organised

Stambali began as a ritual dance glorifying Sidi Saad, a Sudanese Muslim who came to Tunisia with his followers in the 16th century and whose shrine stands in the Mornag region. After independence the authorities banned the ritual and closed many of its sanctuaries. Its followers went on performing it at home.

Storytelling needed no institution either. Into the early twentieth century, narrators known as the rawi, the fdaoui or the meddah travelled on foot from town to town with a bendir, a flute and a few dolls, respected by the religious elite and the popular classes alike. Their genres had names. The nadira told cycles of stories about Jha, a coarse and quick-witted character, and the hikaye were epics of Tunisian towns and villages since the eleventh century, in which a woman named Zazi stands for the Tunisian woman.

The karakouz puppets, present in North Africa from the fourteenth century, played in Halfaouine in Tunis during Ramadan. They spoke Turkish until the beginning of the nineteenth century and Tunisian dialect after it, and the comedy ran on puns, satire and caricature.

Jasmine came with the Andalusians in the sixteenth century and became the national flower. It is picked at dawn, and at nightfall boys make it into small bouquets to sell to passers-by and to drivers stopped at intersections. It has a sign language of its own. A man wearing jasmine on his left ear is single, a gift of white jasmine is a proof of love, and a gift of odourless winter jasmine is an insult.

The national archives hold few documents on Tunisian dances or on the folk arts more broadly.

How Andalusian exiles shaped Tunisian music

Spanish Muslims began to settle in Tunisia after the fall of Seville in 1248, and the movement became an exodus in the early 17th century. Britannica puts them at some 200,000, settled around Tunis, in the Majardah valley and on the Sharīk peninsula with their urban culture and their irrigation techniques. Matthew Carr gives as many as 80,000 Moriscos, most of them in and around Tunis, where a quarter is still called Zuqaq al-Andalus, Andalusia Alley. The studded wrought-iron doors of Tunisian houses date from the Andalusian period, and the window grilles recall Arab-Andalusian lattices.

In classical music the Andalusian inheritance is the malouf, a form of Arab-Andalusian music. In the towns it is played on the fiddle, the oud and the kanun, with the darbuka for percussion; in the countryside the mezoued, the gasba and the zurna may join it.

At the start of the twentieth century the repertoire divided between the liturgy of the religious brotherhoods and secular Andalusian songs and instrumental pieces. The Rachidia, founded in 1930, owed much of its reputation to artists from the Jewish community, and a music school founded in 1934 set out to revive the Arab-Andalusian repertoire, led by an elite that saw its loss as a threat to the foundations of Tunisian national identity. Radio Tunis, created in 1938, promoted Tunisian musicians exclusively.

In the 1960s and 1970s composers and performers worked mostly in the orchestra of Tunisian radio and television. Anouar Brahem, Dhafer Youssef, Lotfi Bouchnak, Sonia M'barek and Emel Mathlouthi are among the country's musicians. In 2026 a Tunisian nomination for the oud, its practices, skills and performing arts, was pending before UNESCO.

What Tunisian kitchens and workshops produce

How harissa and tabil season the food

The main dish is couscous, minute cooked grains usually served with meat and vegetables, and the kitchen works with olive oil, aniseed, coriander, cumin, caraway, cinnamon, saffron, mint, orange blossom and rose water. Its heat comes from harissa, a sauce of red chilli peppers and garlic flavoured with coriander, cumin and olive oil and often tomato. An old saying holds that a husband can judge his wife's affection by the amount of hot pepper in his food, and that bland food means she no longer loves him. For guests, the pepper is usually turned down.

Tabil, Tunisian Arabic for seasoning and once the word for ground coriander, is garlic, cayenne pepper and caraway and coriander seeds pounded in a mortar and dried in the sun, used mostly with beef or veal. Paula Wolfert argues that it came with the Muslims expelled from Andalusia after the fall of Granada in 1492.

What the potters and tailors make

At the start of the twentieth century each region, and often each village, had its own costume, and traditional dress is now kept mostly for weddings and ceremonies. The jebba became the national dress, a wide garment worn over a shirt, a vest and baggy seroual trousers, white in summer and grey in winter in the countryside and of wool and silk in the towns. The town ceremonial costume adds leather slippers that leave the heel bare and the chechia, a red felt hat sometimes finished with a tassel of black thread. Older women in the towns wrap themselves in the sefseri, a white veil of silk or fine wool, and rural women wear dresses of blue or red cotton in the Berber style, belted at the waist and fastened at the shoulders with two clasps.

Pottery on the coast descends from Guellala on Djerba, which gave rise to the centres of Tunis, Nabeul and Moknine, and a yellow, green or brown glaze is the mark of Nabeul. Kairouan is the national centre of carpet making, and the kilim is a legacy of Ottoman rule. UNESCO's Representative List carries ten elements for Tunisia, inscribed between 2018 and 2025.

How Tunisian film and painting found their subjects

The Lumière brothers were showing films in the streets of Tunis from 1896. The first Tunisian feature, Omar Khlifi's Al-Fajr, The Dawn, came in 1966, 95 minutes on 35 mm film. After independence the state company SATPEC alone produced films; private studios appeared in the 1980s, and Tarak Ben Ammar's in Monastir drew foreign productions such as Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.

Tunisian directors turned the camera on their own society. Nouri Bouzid's Man of Ashes (1986) took on prostitution, paedophilia and relations between Muslims and Jews. Ferid Boughedir's Halfaouine (1990) followed a boy in a Tunis district in the 1960s, and his La Goulette (1996) went back to a suburb where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived side by side. Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palace (1994) looked at an aristocratic palace in Tunis through the eyes of a young woman.

Painting as a Tunisian art form was reborn under the French protectorate, after centuries in which the ruling dynasties had held pictorial art back because of the Muslim prohibition on reproducing the human image and painters had turned to calligraphy. The School of Tunis, founded in 1949 by Pierre Boucherle with Yahia Turki, Abdelaziz Gorgi, Moses Levy, Ammar Farhat and Jules Lellouche, set out to take up native themes and to reject Orientalist colonial painting, and it brought together French and Tunisian Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Tunisian literature is written in Arabic, which goes back to the seventh century, and in French, which arrived with the protectorate in 1881. Albert Memmi, author of the 1955 novel Pillar of Salt, predicted that it was sentenced to die young. The national bibliography counted 1,249 non-school books published in 2002, 885 of them in Arabic, and about 1,700 in 2007, nearly a third of them for children.