Habib Bourguiba

Habib Bourguiba (3 August 1903 – 6 April 2000) was a Tunisian politician and statesman who led his country to independence from France, served as prime minister of the Kingdom of Tunisia from 1956 to 1957, and then as the first president of Tunisia from 1957 to 1987. His official birthdate is 3 August 1903, though he stated that he was likely born a year earlier, in 1902, or possibly in 1901. ^{1 2}

He was born in Monastir to a poor family, and attended Sadiki College and the Lycée Carnot in Tunis before taking his baccalaureate in 1924. He graduated from the University of Paris and the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1927 and returned to Tunis to practise law. ¹

In the early 1930s he became involved in anti-colonial and Tunisian national politics, joining the Destour party and co-founding the Neo Destour in 1934. He became a key figure of the independence movement and was repeatedly arrested by the colonial administration; his involvement in the riots of 9 April 1938 led to his exile to Marseille during the Second World War. Released in 1945, he moved to Cairo to seek the support of the Arab League, returned to Tunisia in 1949, and rose to lead the national movement. After the failure of peaceful negotiations he played an effective role in the armed unrest that began in 1952, was arrested and imprisoned on La Galite Island for two years, and then exiled in France, where he led the negotiations with Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France that produced the internal-autonomy agreements. He returned to Tunis on 1 June 1955 and defeated Salah Ben Youssef's challenge for the leadership at the Sfax Congress of 1955. ¹

Following independence in 1956, King Muhammad VIII al-Amin appointed him prime minister, and he acted as the country's de facto ruler before proclaiming the republic on 25 July 1957; parliament elected him interim president until the constitution was ratified. In power he implemented a strong education system, worked on developing the economy, supported gender equality and proclaimed a neutral foreign policy. The main reform of the era was the Code of Personal Status of 1956. He established a strong presidential system which became a twenty-year one-party state dominated by his Socialist Destourian Party, a cult of personality developed around him, and in 1975 he was proclaimed president for life. ¹

Bourguiba's governments reshaped the place of religion in the state: religious courts were abolished and the judiciary brought under civil courts, and the Code of Personal Status reformed family law. In February 1961 he publicly invited citizens not to fast during Ramadan, presenting abstention as part of the struggle against underdevelopment; the position drew sharp criticism in the Muslim world, and in 1974 Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz accused him of apostasy. Scholarship cited in the English article holds, against that reading, that his break was more with traditional society than with Islam as such. The museum records these positions as their sources state them and adopts none of them; no source names a school or personal affiliation for Bourguiba himself, and his record gives Islam only as the Arabic article's infobox and Wikidata state it, in general terms. ^{1 2 3}

On 7 November 1987 he was removed from power by his prime minister, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and kept under house arrest in a residence in Monastir. His health improved enough for him to leave hospital on 13 March 2000 and return to his house in Monastir, where he died on 6 April 2000. He was buried in the mausoleum he had built for himself in Monastir. ¹

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