Tunisia Feature: The Truth About the "Salafi Fanatics" (Marks)
Monday, October 1, 2012 at 8:49
Salafists demonstrate outside the El-Fath mosque in Tunis, 17 September 2012 (Photo: Salah Habibi/AFP)
Local journalists covering previous instances of Salafi-oriented unrest --- from the October 2011 demonstrations against the film Persepolis to this June's riots at an art exhibit in Tunis's upscale La Marsa district -- have tended to narrate events from afar without directly interviewing Salafis. Such slipshod coverage has tended to leave readers with a broad-brush portrait of Tunisian Salafism --- one that obscures important details concerning the movement's composition and complexity. Far from being a monolithic group of highly organized extremists, Tunisia's Salafis are in fact a loose collection of religiously right-wing individuals whose identities and motivations require far closer scrutiny.