Tunisian Quotes

If the full moon loves you, why worry about the stars?

I had never heard of the little Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. And yet, that's where it all began. With an ordinary incident, one that happens frequently, but so frequently that it finally started something unstoppable.

Cloves Where is the scent of cloves coming from? her hair? armpit? or her dress thrown on the Tunisian rug? From the third step in the house? Layla makes everything smell of cloves. Layla is the orchard when it’s wet. She is what the orchard breathes when it’s watered at night. Layla knows now that I am drunk with the scent of cloves, she stiches together my clouds and then scatters them together in a sky like a sheet as she clasps me. Layla feels that my fingers are numb, over the dunes she knows my pulse is hers, my water is hers. Layla leaves me sleeping, rocking between clouds and cloves.

And some were just victims of practical jokes or improbable accidents—like the unlucky amateur archeologists who found the props that a celebrated science-fiction moviemaker had abandoned in the Tunisian desert almost four decades earlier.

if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.’ Illidge spoke with gusto. Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘A coal field’s discovered; oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates—at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.”’ ‘Like

A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.

Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

A woman living in a Kansas City suburb may think Tunisia is another planet, and her life has no connection to it, but if she were married to an air force navigator who flies out of the nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, she might be surprised to learn that one obscure Tunisian’s actions led to protests, that led to riots, that led to the toppling of a dictator, that led to protests in Libya, that led to a civil war, that led to the 2012 NATO intervention, that led to her husband dodging antiaircraft fire over Tripoli.

BEACH BALLS AND LONG SHOTS I WAS WATCHING FROM THE ROOF ONE AFTERNOON WHEN A group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.) Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach balls. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing—they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach balls to keep them afloat, they began paddling across. It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. Hell, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements. I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three balls. Snap. I shot beach ball number two. It was kind of fun.

CIA analysis began by late 1994 to run in a different direction. The insights Black and his case officers could obtain into bin Laden’s inner circle were limited, but they knew that bin Laden was working closely with the Sudanese intelligence services. They knew that Sudanese intelligence, in turn, was running paramilitary and terrorist operations in Egypt and elsewhere. Bin Laden had access to Sudanese military radios, weapons, and about two hundred Sudanese passports. These passports supplemented the false documents that bin Laden acquired for his aides from the travel papers of Arab volunteers who had been killed in the Afghan jihad. Working with liaison intelligence services across North Africa, Black and his Khartoum case officers tracked bin Laden to three training camps in northern Sudan. They learned that bin Laden funded the camps and used them to house violent Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian, and Palestinian jihadists. Increasingly the Khartoum station cabled evidence to Langley that bin Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army. He was a threat.

Libya. A Tunisian street vendor setting himself aflame to protest police brutality in December 2010 ushered in what has become known as the Arab Spring. Mass demonstrations protesting longstanding authoritarian rule in Egypt, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Libya in 2011 stirred national and international debates.

Here is my translation. I don’t get to use my German often these days. It’s not perfect,” she said. “Thank you.” He opened it out, smoothing the folds on the garden table. The letter was addressed to “My Dearest Mary.” Alex read it aloud. It was a love letter of sorts and chronicled the gradual disillusionment of a young German officer fighting a war he no longer believed in. Hans Otto told his young bride of the treatment of Tunisian Jews by the Nazi occupiers, his own feelings of shame and impotence. He explained his loss of faith in the Fatherland that his family long served. Then came the approach in early 1943 by an agent of British Intelligence and his decision to betray his country, defecting with the plane carrying the secret archive.

BEACH BALLS AND LONG SHOTS I WAS WATCHING FROM THE ROOF ONE AFTERNOON WHEN A group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.) Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach balls. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing—they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach balls to keep them afloat, they began paddling across. It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. Hell, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements. I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three balls. Snap. I shot beach ball number two. It was kind of fun. Hell—it was a lot of fun. The insurgents were fighting among themselves, their ingenious plan to kill Americans now turned against them. “Y’all gotta see this,” I told the Marines as I shot beach ball number three. They came over to the side of the roof and watched as the insurgents fought among themselves for the last beach ball.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

Once my father-in-law, Loucif, smelled a perfume I made, Night Blossom, a bouquet of North African flowers, Egyptian jasmine, and Tunisian neroli, blooming open on a bed of sandalwood. It reminded him of an attar his mother once wore. This simple joy of smelling took him to a place back home, to his youth.

The fruit vendor’s anguish set off weeks of nationwide demonstrations against the Tunisian government, and on January 14, 2011, Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, similar protests, made up mostly of young people, were beginning to happen in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and Oman, the first flickers of what became known as the Arab Spring.

Charmula is one of numerous Tunisian examples of salt and sweet being used together. But Tunisians say that all these salt-and-sweet dishes are foreign imports brought from Spain in 1492 by expelled Muslims. The Affes family, which owns one of the two largest couscous factories in the world—the other is in Marseilles—is from Sfax. Here is Latifa Affes’s recipe for charmula: Salt any large fish. Poach it and serve with the following sauce: 1 kilo red onion, 1 kilo raisins, ½ liter olive oil, salt, black pepper (some use coriander powder but I do not). Mince onions and cook them slowly in olive oil for about two hours. Soften raisins in water and pass through a sieve to remove seeds. Add to olive oil mixture and cook on low heat for two days. Add salt and pepper.

The “sex jihad” coverage emanated from media outlets associated with either the Tunisian security services or the Syrian state, both of which were keen to portray the fighters and women flowing into Syria as deviants or terrorists, or, in this instance, deviant-slut terrorists.

She learned from the passport office that she would need her husband’s permission in order to leave the country with the baby, and her father’s permission to leave at all. To stem the flow of young Tunisians to Syria, the government had started imposing often arbitrary travel restrictions on citizens under thirty-five. The cost of the journey, the air tickets alone, amounted to more than she had.

As I pull out of the driveway, I see him step behind my car and splash a glass of water onto the rear windshield. It’s an old Tunisian tradition he’s done countless times before: to throw water behind a loved one as they venture out on a long trip, a blessing to ensure their safe return.

The Arab Spring of 2011 revealed just how transformative communications technology can be in powering collective action. The protest movements that swept the Middle East and North Africa and led to the downfall of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes all started with a rural Tunisian fruit seller named Mohammed Bouazizi. On

The Arab Spring of 2011 revealed just how transformative communications technology can be in powering collective action. The protest movements that swept the Middle East and North Africa and led to the downfall of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes all started with a rural Tunisian fruit seller named Mohammed Bouazizi.

Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate. But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name. “Is he Iraqi?” “He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.” “Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.” “We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.” “And Saddam.” “Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?” “You forgot Saladin,” said Gabriel. “What do you want to do about him?” “I suppose we could do nothing and hope he goes away.” “Hope is how we ended up with him in the first place,” said Fareed. “Hope and hubris.” “So let’s put him out of business, sooner rather than later.

During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7

Now, Benny was no eejit. He wasn't expecting the Tunisian nationals to be Irish. What he did expect was darkish people with Irishy personalities. That was not what he got. The Tunisians weren't interested in conforming to Benny's preconceptions. They stubbornly insisted on being themselves.

A secularist but not an atheist, he used the example of the Prophet, who according to tradition did not fast in Ramadan during wartime, to argue against fasting during Ramadan any time the Tunisian people were engaged in the new collective jihad against economic stagnation, because fasting hindered performance. This led to one of the most extraordinary, but little-known, moments of Arab political theater. In a live television interview aired during the Ramadan fasting hours, Bourguiba paused, turned to the camera, and took a long, symbolic swig from a glass of orange juice. There was, however, nothing symbolic in his promotion of secular virtues. He replaced the sharia legal system with civil courts, abolished the independent system of Islamic charity called the waqf, brought the mosques and their imams under state control and had their doors locked outside of prayer times, outlawed proselytizing, and in 1981 officially banned the wearing of the veil (he famously called it an “odious rag”) in schools and in government institutions in an attempt to phase it out of Tunisian society completely.

Life expectancy in Tunisia is above seventy-four years, schooling and health care are free, the poverty rate is less than 4 percent, and high literacy rates have helped a third of Tunisian youths to enter university, where women make up 60 percent of the students.19 Since The Change, as the transition of power in 1987 from Bourguiba to the current head of state Ben Ali is known, per capita income has increased more than five-fold, from $725 to $3,800.20 The Wall Street Journal further reported on how evidence for the campaign which led to the reduced birth rate “is everywhere.

While Tunisian women basically walk the streets free of hassle, Egyptian women suffer more abuse and harassment than women in any other Arab country, indeed, perhaps in the world. According to the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, in 2009 some 98 percent of foreign women, and 83 percent of Egyptian women, said they had experienced sexual harassment.

I met the great Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf in Dubai about seven years ago when he received the Sultan Al Owais Award. I was the only Tunisian journalist invited to attend this celebration. I found the man humble, despite his great cultural standing, and if he lives in Paris, the Lebanese consider him the pride of Lebanese culture today. He is a renewed writer who improves writing in both Arabic and French and has fluency in the conversation that helps him express his positions and opinions easily .. I had an important conversation with him in the center of the center of the day. Mahmoud Harchani

Today, the job of journalism has evolved from merely reporting on to contributing to the making of the event itself, influencing public opinion and directing it according to what serves specific interests and purposes. In this case, it is no longer possible to talk about the issue of impartiality and independence of the media. As long as the matter is with most of the media, it is subject to the rule of supply and demand or how much you pay to be on your side, and in this case even if I do not support you, I will not attack you, embarrass you, or confine you to the enemy circle Mahmoud Harchani Tunisian writer and journalist

When, as secretary of state, he had to entertain the Tunisian envoy, come to Washington to negotiate on behalf of the Barbary pirates, and granted the Arab’s request for concubines for his eleven-strong party, he put down the cost as ‘appropriations for foreign intercourse’ (Jefferson was not amused).

Throughout this section, we’ve seen how the US government, which increasingly resembles a terrorist organization, worked with extremists, including its then-asset Osama bin Laden, to destabilize and then destroy Serbia. According to John Schindler, professor of strategy at the US Naval War College, the American Department of State and President Clinton sought to bomb the Serbs to help the Muslims, “following the lead of progressive opinion on Bosnia.” Thousands of Arab-Afghans (Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Iraqis, Libyans, Jordanians, and others), with extensive combat experience gained fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan on behalf of the Americans, opened a new front in the Balkans. They had weapons procured with help from the US government, as well as money from the Saudis and Americans, including that passed through the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. They had the assistance of the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Office), set up to recruit, train, and aid fighters for the Afghan war. Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, wanted a repeat of the Afghanistan model in the Balkans, using Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan to send arms to the combatants. Front companies, secret arms drops, and Clinton’s National Security Council all played a role. The result was the creation of a larger and more capable cadre of murderers, war criminals, and human rights violators. They enabled the United States to topple a socialist opponent of its policies in Yugoslavia, tap the natural resources of the region, and control the routes from and access to oil and natural gas in Central Asia. American propaganda that flooded the media about murderers, war criminals, and human rights violators was particularly effective in gaining support in the United States and abroad. Like actions against the USSR, the United States trained fighters, supplied arms, and provided financial aid to rebels seeking to overthrow their government. Washington and NATO applied economic sanctions to Yugoslavia, hastening the country’s collapse. The KLA, directly supported and politically empowered by NATO in 1998, had been listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization supported in part by loans from Islamic individuals, among them allegedly Osama bin Laden.

The phenomenon of Saudi women deveiling in transit is so well known that I remember a Tunisian work colleague making jokes about it. “When Tunisian women get on the airplane to leave the country,” he would say, “they put the hijab on, and when the Saudi women board, they take it off!

With scathing sarcasm, Abdelwahab Meddeb, the Tunisian reformist, said of Islamist terrorists, “No criminal is more despicable than one who not only fails to feel any guilt after [committing] his crime, but also harbors the illusion that this [crime] will bring him . . . divine reward. This conversion of bad into good not only spares him guilt, but also turns an unhappy person into a happy soul.

He threw Scholscher a challenging glance. The major was thinking of the motives that could drive a man like Haas to live alone for twenty-five years among the elephants of Lake Chad. It was again that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind, a spark that sometimes blazes up and takes astonishing, unpredictable and explosive forms. He thought also of the old Chinese who never move without their pet grasshoppers, of the Tunisians who take their caged birds to the cafe with them, and of Colonel Babcock who spent hours with his eyes fixed on a jumping bean, which kept him company. He was slightly astonished to hear that Haas believed in God — there seemed to be a contradiction there; it’s true, he thought, taking a pull at his pipe, that God hasn’t got a cold muzzle a man can touch when he feels lonely, that one can’t stroke Him behind the ears, that He doesn’t wag His tail at the sight of you every morning, and that you cannot catch sight of Him trotting over the hills with His ears flapping and His trunk in the air. One can’t even hold Him in one’s hand like a nice warm pipe, and since a spell on earth after all lasts fifty or sixty years, it’s perfectly understandable that people should end by buying themselves a pipe or a jumping bean.

Most of Nusra’s fighters were foreigners—Saudis, Qataris, Tunisians . . .

Three Islamists—an Egyptian, a Tunisian, and a Syrian—wanted to take coffee and pay the boy later. He told them, “Even if the Prophet Mohammed came I wouldn’t give it to him on credit.” The Islamists considered that blasphemy and killed the boy.