ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there are also deep historical reasons for such a broad convergence, and describes the subtle and ambiguous ways in which secularists and Islamists continue to diverge in their views on Islam and the state. In the case of Tunisia, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fiction of the independent jurist was maintained in the official language of the law, whereas in reality the sovereign encroached on sharia law. In nineteenth-century Tunisia, a movement for codification of the law was initiated and encouraged by state administrators and reformers such as Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi and foreign agents, in particular British and French consuls. In Tunisian religious, legal and political history, sharia remains implicit and unstable. It haunts the margins of the Personal Status Code (PSC), always changing sites, from state official publications to jurisprudential interpretations. The PSC in particular was seen as exceptional' by Tunisian politicians and legal scholars.
