Relation to Ben Ali Regime There are a couple paragraphs at the end of the Life and Career section regarding Meddeb s relationship to the Ben Ali regime that seem rather ambiguous Meddeb has been criticized for regularly praising the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia particularly by French journalist Alain Gresh and sociologist Vincent Geisser who have accused him of minimizing the numerous human rights violations of the regime 5 6 However while the Ben Ali regime was falling apart in January 2011 he started to support the Tunisian revolution as chronicled in his book Printemps de Tunis 2011 Albin Michel And in a 2012 interview in Le Courrier de l Atlas entitled Islamism is an impoverished stupid and detestable interpretation of Islam Meddeb refutes the accusations head on Indeed there is a chapter in Contre pr ches where I praise not the Ben Ali regime but a Tunis which under his dictatorship continues to give its place to the liberated woman Tunis is the only city in Islam along with Istanbul where one sees sovereign women unveiled liberated sure of themselves living coherently with feminism and gender theory I have perhaps been the intellectual the most distant from this regime without any ties of any kind while some of our friends tried to reform it from within and failed concluding that it was not reformable 7 In March 2004 the Tunisian embassy in France organized a reception in honor of Meddeb 8 The lead sentence almost seems to suggest Meddeb s support claiming he regularly praised the regime while the rest of the paragraph appears to me to directly contradict such a criticism saying he supported the revolution overthrowing Ben Ali and quoting him directly addressing his criticisms Given the ambiguity it seems like the section doesn t have that much place in the article unless it presents some kind of conclusion