Salafists In Tunisia Target Sufi, The Mystics Of Islam

TUNIS — Finding the Saida Manoubia mausoleum is quite the challenge. The Sufi saint is hidden somewhere in the heights of Tunis, which prove impossible to navigate without the sound advice of residents in the working-class Manouba neighborhood. Someone points out a back alley with sidewalks eaten away by time. The alley gives way to stairs that climb to the sanctuary, where a set of steps are partially hidden behind a double wooden door that seems to lead to a simple house.

“It’s here indeed!" says Hedia, the caretaker of the zawiya, the religious building. "You found it!” The young woman has a timid smile, large, dark eyes, and a soft and serene voice. She explains that Saida Aisha Manoubia lived in this house “from the age of 14 until her death at 76" — in 1257. “But she’s still here with us,” Hedia insists.

Manoubia was said to have read the Koran 1,520 times. This is her burial site, although no sign nearby says so. And for good reason! Since the January 2011 revolution and the amnesty that allowed numerous Salafists to be released from prison, more than 40 Sufi mausoleums have been attacked in Tunisia. Most of them caught fire after Molotov cocktails were thrown at them.

The Wahhabi ideology, which these radical Islamists claim to follow, is opposed to the cult of saints and, more generally, to Sufism, that mystical Islam that has been rooted in the country for centuries and that advocates the abnegation of the being in favor of God. Salafists have little interest in the pious lessons of Saida Aisha Manoubia and other erudites of centuries past. And they associate any surviving traces of those figures...