For decades, the Tunisian mind has navigated a cultural pincer movement. On one side stood the legacy of the French protectorate, functioning as a heavy and patronizing shield. On the other, a well-financed religious orthodoxy from the Gulf waited to fill any vacuum. As the Francophone architecture weakens under the weight of justified domestic resentment and its own condescension, Tunisians are actively searching for an exit. But the exits currently being offered are simply different forms of intellectual tenancy. We are shedding an old landlord only to sign a lease with a new one.

To understand the Gulf franchise, we must recognize the structural reality of the entities funding it. They are not sovereign powers in the historical sense. They are rentier fiefdoms sustained entirely by petroleum extraction, whose ultimate survival and security are perpetually outsourced to Western powers. This produces a profound underlying fragility. To compensate for their global subservience, they project dominance downward. The vassal seeks to become the master in its own backyard. Unable to assert true independence or produce original thought on the world stage, they satisfy their imperial ambitions by treating the broader Muslim world as their ideological property, dispensing theology and capital from above while demanding that nations with deep intellectual histories behave as obedient client-subjects.

Because these rentier states have not produced any significant scientific lineage or a transformative literary tradition, their primary cultural export is erasure. Mecca stands as the clearest exhibit: centuries of intricate Ottoman and early Islamic architecture leveled and replaced by a colossal clock tower that reduces the Kaaba to an accessory at the base of a luxury mall. When this model is exported to Tunisia, it overwrites our historical Mediterranean Islam, Maliki in its legal texture and Sufi in its introspection, with a flat script designed purely for obedience. The result is a brain drain of the most insidious kind. The Syrian civil war exposed the brutal efficiency of this mechanism. Financed and organized by Gulf capital, Tunisian students and scientists, trained in our strongest faculties and major European institutions, were reprogrammed and redirected into proxy conflicts across the Levant. Minds prepared to construct were channeled into demolition through the same religious infrastructure marketed to us as renewal.

The brilliance of the Maghreb feeds wreckage in the Mashriq. And this is not accidental. It is driven by the quiet terror of the rentier state: the knowledge that a neighbor possessing human capital, deep historical roots, and a population in the habit of reading books exposes the Gulfā€™s own artificiality.

Here an uncomfortable admission is required, one that will satisfy neither the Francophone establishment nor its detractors. For decades, Franceā€™s deep entanglement with Tunisia functioned as a barrier against Gulf penetration. Not a principled one. France did not shield us from Wahhabi financing out of concern for Tunisian autonomy. It did so because the Gulfā€™s religious-political infrastructure threatened a sphere of influence Paris considered its own. The shield was a side effect of rivalry, not solidarity.

Under Bourguiba and through the Ben Ali era, the Francophone architecture, for all its condescension, occupied the space that Gulf capital now seeks to fill. The periods of deepest Gulf penetration into Tunisian civil society correlate precisely with the periods of loosened French engagement: the post-2011 opening most obviously, but also the quieter shifts of the late 1990s when French attention drifted toward Central Europe and the Sahel. Each withdrawal created a vacuum. Each vacuum was filled by entities whose interest in Tunisia begins and ends with ideological compliance.

And that architecture is weakening further, under pressure from domestic resentment, French strategic retrenchment, and the sheer gravitational pull of Gulf money. The space it occupied does not remain empty. Every French cultural center that closes, every cooperation agreement that lapses, every young Tunisian who turns from the French system does not thereby become free. They become available. And availability, in a region awash with patient capital seeking ideological clients, is more dangerous than dependency.

It would be comforting to dismiss the Gulf states as relics destined to fade with the petroleum age. Comforting, and mistaken. They understand the clock is running. Saudi Arabiaā€™s Vision 2030, the UAEā€™s reorientation toward finance and AI, Qatarā€™s dual role as diplomatic intermediary and media proprietor: each converts temporary petro-wealth into enduring structural leverage. Sovereign funds embedded inside Western economies, ownership stakes in global sports, branch campuses of imported universities. The objective is to become too intertwined to be dislodged. Whether the hedge succeeds or collapses into yet another purchased modernity remains open. What is not open is the underlying interest: a genuinely industrialized, intellectually autonomous Maghreb would represent an intolerable mirror.

Tunisiaā€™s post-2011 trajectory briefly exposed the limits of this influence. Gulf-aligned currents, Ennahdha foremost among them, reentered from exile carrying more financial resources than any political formation in our history had ever commanded. The democratic aperture should have accelerated their ascent. Instead freedom became their liability. Released from the need to conceal, they grew confident enough to reveal: the Laarayedh administrationā€™s missteps, the 2013 assassinations and their visible ties to Salafist currents, all in plain view because the actors believed victory was already secured. Hubris accomplished what authoritarian closure never could. The only counter that worked was precisely that exposure: let them organize, speak on air, march openly. In time they reveal the face beneath the mask.

Honesty requires one further correction. The comfortable story frames everyone as a passive victim of sophisticated propaganda. Certain Tunisians operating within the Gulf orbit grasp precisely what they are enabling and proceed regardless, because the funding dwarfs anything a small North African economy can muster. That is compensated labor wrapped in devotional language. The operatives, the media personalities, the religious entrepreneurs acting as franchise holders: they are salaried. The capital underwriting them is patient, vast, and functionally inexhaustible. It will rebrand, find fresh conduits, persist.

The question is stark: what defense does a small country mount against functionally inexhaustible resources, at the precise moment when the older, accidental shield is withdrawing? Sunlight proved corrosive where censorship only hardened resolve. But exposure alone reveals the fraud. It does not build the alternative.

And the alternative cannot be borrowed. Not in French, not in English, not in Gulf Arabic. A country that does not think in its own language is permanently available for someone elseā€™s script. The Gulf franchise succeeds not because its theology is compelling but because it enters a space where no confident local alternative exists. French succeeded before it for the same reason. The rotating landlords change. The tenancy remains.

The only lasting countermeasure a country of our scale possesses is to institutionalize the Tunisian language not merely as a tool of communication, but as the sovereign vessel of our culture and history. I have made the full linguistic case for this elsewhere. Here I will say only this: our native tongue is the living archive of our Mediterranean complexity. Until this entire heritage is written into law, taught in schools, and wielded as a medium of serious thought, the minaret will broadcast the foreign franchise, the streets will remain divided, and we will continue paying rent on our own forgetting.