The Casbah in Tunis’s Old City, hard by the ancient Az-Zaytouna mosque and university, is where the Turkish bey once exercised a shaky control over his militias. There was something 17th-century about the scenes in the Casbah on October 14th. Thousands of people, including Salafist Muslims, who wear beards and long robes and aim to emulate the ways of the Prophet in a literal interpretation of the Koran, protested against the screening of a French-Iranian animated film they judged insulting to Islam. Police skirmished with teenagers and staid fathers of families, watching amid wafts of tear-gas, said they thought the film unacceptable too. Ahead of Tunisia’s first democratic election since the country inspired the Arab spring across the region, the religious sentiment of the street is still a force to be reckoned with.

On October 23rd voters are due to elect 217 members of an assembly that will write a new constitution and pave the way for legislative and probably also presidential elections next year. The poll is shaping up as a contest between the main Islamist party, Nahda, on the one hand, and those Tunisians, on the other, who believe that a constituent assembly and subsequently a parliament in which Islamists held a controlling bloc would be disastrous.

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