Law and Social Change in Tunisia: The Case of Unregistered Marriage

In the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’, Tunisian media reported a practice of so-called ‘urfi, or unregistered, marriages among university students. For Tunisian women’s rights activists, the phenomenon was the result of Salafi influence that had been able to enter Tunisian legal practice after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 2011. For these activists, the Tunisian law on marriage registration had initially been able to change social practices through the introduction of civil marriage upon independence and was currently overturned under Salafi influence. Against the background of the recent Tunisian debate, this article examines the application of the law on marriage registration by judges and lay people between independence and 2011 in order to understand to what extent this law was indeed effective in bringing about social change in the field of marriage registration.