Tahar Haddad

Tahar Haddad (1899–1935) was a Tunisian author, trade unionist, scholar and reformer, a graduate of the Zitouna who became a leading figure of the Tunisian labour movement and, above all, a pioneer of Tunisian feminism.¹

Born in Tunis on 4 December 1899 into a modest family originally from El Hamma in the south — some sources wrongly give El Hamma itself as his birthplace — Haddad was educated at a traditional school for six years before entering the Zitouna in 1911; he graduated in 1920, having studied Islamic law.²¹ He became a notary but abandoned the career.¹

Haddad joined the Destour party at its foundation and took charge of its propaganda, but soon left, dissatisfied with its leadership and its attitude to the labour movement.²¹ With Mohamed Ali El Hammi he founded the Association of Economic Cooperation in June 1924 and helped set up the Confédération générale des travailleurs tunisiens (CGTT) that December.² In 1927 he published Tunisian Workers and the Emergence of the Labour Movement, a programme for improving workers' conditions.²³

His best-known book, published in 1930, argued from citations of the Qur'an for the emancipation of Tunisian women: protection against repudiation, the right to refuse polygamy and to choose a husband, education, and even equality in inheritance shares.² The French article describes his method as a modernist reading of the Qur'an and a call to return to ijtihad, drawing on what accords with the shari'a; the English article, citing Qantara, presents him as an Islamic scholar "loyal to the Koran".²¹ The book caused an uproar: the Zitouna establishment and Destour conservatives ran a smear campaign against him, Mohamed Salah Ben Mrad wrote a scathing rebuttal, and fatwas were issued declaring him a heretic, some going as far as declaring him an apostate — verdicts recorded here as his opponents' judgements, not as the museum's.¹²

Haddad was shunned, insulted in the streets, barred from continuing his law studies and from marrying, and withdrew from public life.¹² He died on 7 December 1935; the English and French texts say he died in exile after leaving Tunisia, while the French article's own categories mark his place of death unknown and place his burial at the Djellaz cemetery in Tunis.¹²

A few years after his death Haddad was rehabilitated. His ideas influenced the drafters of Tunisia's Code of Personal Status of 1956, the signature reform of Habib Bourguiba, which banned polygamy and repudiation and secularised family law.¹² He was posthumously made a Grand Officer of the Order of the Republic on the eightieth anniversary of his death.¹

• English Wikipedia, "Tahar Haddad".¹
• Arabic Wikipedia, "الطاهر الحداد".³
• French Wikipedia, "Tahar Haddad".²
• Wikidata, Q969533.⁴