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In Tunisia, as in Egypt, the Islamists who came to power through the ballot box are seeing their popularity erode and are tempted to hold on to power by recourse to authoritarian measures. But they have to deal with the legacy of the Arab spring. They face a new political culture: now, one where people who disagree with the government take to the streets; where there is no reverence for established power and the army and the police no longer inspire fear.

consider the precise nature of this authoritarian turn because it bears little resemblance to the “Islamic revolution” often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Nahda, the Renaissance Party, in Tunisia. It is, on the contrary, a conservative and paradoxically pro-western “counter-revolution”

The electoral and social base of the Egyptian regime is not revolutionary. Instead of trying to reach a compromise with the principal actors of the Arab spring, Morsi is attempting to get all the supporters of the new order on his side. The coalition he is building is based on business, the army, the Salafists and those elements of the “people” that are supposedly tired of anarchy

The essays were supposedly an inspiration for the Turkish party’s so far deft strategy of being a mildly Islamist government in a resolutely secular state.

Overwhelmingly, Tunisians insist that their revolution was a spontaneous, youth-driven affair, propelled by the anomie felt amidst rising education, rising expectations and rising unemployment. Facebook activists amplified the voices of revolt i

But to claim for Nahda a privileged place in the “pressure” that caused the revolution is to invent a lineage that does not exist -- and many Tunisians resent the attempt.

Tunisia’s worst crisis since the revolution that toppled the country’s long-serving, secular-minded dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled into exile in January 2011

In the past few months Islamist thugs have been taking the law into their own hands. Neighbourhood “committees to defend the revolution”, often including Nahda members who were political prisoners under Mr Ben Ali, have been accused of trying to intimidate opposition parties and have incurred growing hostility from more secular types. In December they violently broke up a trade-union rally.

The veneration of local saints across north Africa harks back to pre-Islamic Berber and sub-Saharan cultures. Muslim reformists in 19th-century Tunisia dismissed such traditions as demeaning and superstitious. Under Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first president after its independence from France in 1956, many shrines were turned into museums, cultural centres or even cafés. Others were officially tolerated for giving succour to people with medical or psychological worries. Nahda, which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, has proclaimed an “Arab and Islamic identity”, implying distaste for shrine worship. But the desecrations obliged them to declare their respect for Tunisia’s diverse cultural and ethnic heritage.

"Nothing to invest. No businesses. No land. Nothing." His words make up the refrain to Tunisia's desperately undeveloped and long-neglected interior region, the birthplace of the Arab spring. What have the revolutionaries gotten out of their revolution?

During Ben Ali's 23-year rule, Tunisia focused 90 percent of its investment projects on the coastal regions, leaving the interior disproportionately underdeveloped. Unemployment in the region has increased to 18 percent, twice the rate on the coast, and while Tunisia's average national poverty rate is 18 percent, it ranges from 6 percent in Tunis to more than 30 percent in the center-west governorates.

Bread riots in December 1983 in the same cities launched the most serious challenge to the Tunisian regime. If things don't improve, as seems grimly likely, rebellion may return.

Ennahda’s decision to jettison “political Islam” has far less to do with Islam than it does with politics. Judging by its program, its actions, and the people who run it, Ghannouchi’s party remains a conservative Islamic party. That hasn’t really changed. What Ennahda’s carefully orchestrated rebranding demonstrates, however, is just how skillfully its leaders continue to adapt to the changing landscape of Tunisian electoral politics.

Ennahda’s leaders had to take into account the fact that a large part of Tunisian society remained devoted to the secularist values aired by the old regime’s leading politicians and that they regarded the new ruling party and its aims with suspicion

opponents of political Islam continue to dominate the political scene

before the 20th century, Arabs and Muslims never used shudhudh jinsi to describe homosexuality. For more than a millennium, many learned elites, including religious scholars, linguists and poets, discussed all kinds of sexual relations, including what they called “liwat” and “sihaq” (which refer to male and female sexual acts respectively), that were close to our modern understanding of homosexuality, without using terms like deviant, abnormal or unnatural

When it was first introduced in Arabic in the early 20th century, shudhudh did not exclusively mean homosexuality. Instead, it was more of a scientific and medical category and included a wide range of sexual activities deemed “deviant,” like masturbation, sadism, masochism, fetishism, etc. And contrary to what opponents of homosexuality often claim, mithlyah is not a recent translation of homosexuality that aimed to replace the term shudhudh and normalize homosexuality. Rather, it was the original term that earlier Arab translators chose for homosexuality, coined at the same time as the term shudhudh and within the same movement of translating modern European psychological and sexologist literature. It then took more than three decades for shudhudh to become a synonym of homosexuality and the favorite term in the anti-homosexuality Arab discourse.

(The Quran uses different words when referring to the condemned deeds of Lut’s people: “fahisha,” or obscenity, and “khaba’ith,” or lewdness. Both terms encompass acts beyond same-sex sexual relations, such as highway robbery and dealing in unspecified dishonorable or shameful acts in their assembly.)