Reuters reports: Tunisians turned out in huge numbers to vote in the country’s first free election on Sunday, 10 months after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a protest that started the Arab Spring uprisings.

The leader of an Islamist party predicted to win the biggest share of the vote was heckled outside a polling station by people shouting “terrorist,” highlighting tensions between Islamists and secularists being felt across the Arab world.

The suicide of vegetable peddler Bouazizi, prompted by despair over poverty and government repression, provoked mass protests which forced President Zine al-Abidine to flee Tunisia. This in turn inspired uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the moderately Islamist Ennahda party, took his place in the queue outside a polling station in the El Menzah 6 district of the capital.

“This is an historic day,” he said, accompanied by his wife and daughter, both wearing Islamic headscarves, or hijabs. “Tunisia was born today. The Arab Spring was born today.”

As he emerged from the polling station, about a dozen people shouted at him: “Degage,” French for “Go away,” and “You are a terrorist and an assassin! Go back to London!”

Ghannouchi, who spent 22 years in exile in Britain, has associated his party with the moderate Islamism of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. He has said he will not try to impose Muslim values on society.

In Tunisia, ideas about Islam, and restrictions on things like alcohol, are more relaxed than in many Arab countries.

“This morning I voted for Ennahda and this evening I am going to drink a few beers,” said Makram, a young man from the working class Ettadamen neighbourhood of Tunis.

Nevertheless, the party’s rise worries secularists who believe their country’s liberal traditions are now under threat.

Larbi Sadiki writes: Islamists define all things political in the Arab world. This applies to extremist Islamism as well as to civic Islamism.

Indeed, October 24, 2011, the day after the election, will be a turning point in the history of Tunisia. The Islamists will resoundingly establish themselves as a key political player in the country’s democratic transition. Thus far Tunisia has been run by Francophile elites favouring secular politics. In this regard, Tunisia will be following in Turkey’s footsteps.

Those who are not versed in Tunisian politics should go and stand in the square opposite the Municipality of Tunis and just absorb the architecture of political Tunisia. This square has no analogue elsewhere in the Arab world.

With the municipality to one’s back, the Sadiki school – founded by reformer Khayr al-Din Pasha – symbolises not only Ottoman connections, but also a reformist agenda begun more than 150 years ago. To the right, stands the Aziza Othman hospital, named after a woman who cultivated the earliest forms of civic networks in Tunisia.

Just opposite the Kasbah, the seat of government and the lush manicured trees shading the squares joining the prime minister’s office and the ministry of finance, the onlooker sees architectural syncretism at its best. Various shapes of domes and minarets – Tunisian and Ottoman – dot the skyline of Tunis, the country’s hub of political power. Some of my pro-democratisation students from the University of Exeter and I brainstormed on how to understand this perennial quest for synthesis in Tunisia.

It is this synthesis which will triumph. The embrace of the Habib Bourguiba Avenue, a mini-Champs Elysees with its open-air cafes, a refuge for all, including the unemployed, and the Medina, the Old City, hints at how Tunisia will vote.

Tunisians champion syncretism, and this is really the crux of Tunisia’s “political culture”. They do not wish to ditch their Arab and Islamic heritage. Nor do they wish to detach from the brighter spots of reformist politics in their history. French and European inputs into the mix of their culture are now deep-rooted and appreciated.

Angelique Chrisafis reports:

Wiping his hands on his apron as chickens turned on a spit, Haj Ali Yocoubi gestured from his restaurant towards a burned-out building and a few carcasses of cars. The chef in his 50s witnessed some of the worst repression of January’s Tunisian revolution, when police killed several young protesters in Ettadhamen, this poor, densely populated suburb known as the “badlands” of Tunis. Since then, sporadic rioting has raged past his pavement tables.

Last month Yocoubi closed his restaurant early as the unrest flared following more anti-government protests. A state curfew was imposed as young men went on rampages, burning banks, shops and police stations and looting.

“It’s as if people are on a knife-edge. This is a tinderbox. It seems calm but you sense it could blow at the slightest thing,” Yocoubi said. “People still can’t find jobs. For the first time we feel free to speak out, but there’s a political limbo. We hear about democracy, but now we’d actually like to live in one please.”

It is six months since the rural fruitseller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in despair at the humiliations of the regime, sparking a people’s revolution that ousted Tunisia’s dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and inspired uprisings across the region. But Tunisia has yet to properly celebrate its revolution.

The Observer reports:

Manoubia Bouazizi has grown used to the idea that her son Mohamed no longer belongs to her but to the Arab world. In the streets near where she lives on the outskirts of Tunis, she is stopped by people who recognise her, who have heard she is the mother of the market trader who set himself on fire in protest against an authoritarian regime, who kick-started the Jasmine revolution, and so the Arab spring.

His likeness is everywhere. Around the corner from her home, a pizza restaurant proprietor has mounted a full-colour reproduction of Mohamed’s face in his window to advertise a special discounted “Revolutionary Menu”.

Manoubia freely admits she, also, has made money from the global interest surrounding her son’s death. Sometimes she will be paid by the media organisations who want to interview her, and she has a ready-made contract drawn up for them to sign. The family were given 20,000 Tunisian dinars (about £9,000) by former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali as compensation for their loss and there are rumours – which Manoubia denies – that she has sold Mohamed’s vegetable cart to a rich businessman in the Emirates.

Still, her new-found prosperity is much in evidence. The Bouazizi family used to live in a modest, concrete house in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. Now Manoubia, her husband and her six surviving children have decamped to a large apartment in La Marsa, a pretty seaside suburb of Tunis. Inside, there are caged canaries hanging from the tiled walls and a computer in one of the bedrooms.

When asked to describe what kind of person her son was, Manoubia has difficulty replying. “I can’t think of one single memory,” she says. “He was a man of good faith.” When pressed, her daughter Laila remembers that her brother’s favourite meal was “steak and chips” and that he supported Esperance Sportive, a Tunisian football team. Other than this, the family is disinclined to dwell on personal detail.

For Manoubia, as for those around her, it seems that the man has been subsumed by the myth. “It is strange to think that my little Mohamed should grow up to become this person,” Manoubia says, sitting in the front room of her rented house, her black robes gathered around her and set starkly against a bright orange blanket covering the sofa. She turns away as she speaks, not making eye contact, and it feels sometimes as though she is reciting answers she has learned by rote, having formulated the sentences hundreds of times before. “I am proud and happy that he should have been the first spark of the revolution.”

It is a phrase I will hear again and again, in varying forms across Tunisia. Some will call Mohamed Bouazizi “the drop that tipped over the vase”; others will insist that his death “lit the touchpaper” for the Arab spring revolts. But listen closely and there is also a growing murmur of dissent among those who believe that Mohamed was not a political hero but a media creation, manufactured by a myth-making machine that swung into action in the immediate aftermath of his death.

Al Jazeera reports:

A crowd has gathered to ponder the black-and-white photographs which have been pasted across the face of building that was, until recent, the local offices of the former president’s much-loathed party.

“I have no idea what these photos mean. Do you know?” Meddeb Nejeb, a high school teacher, asks Al Jazeera.

He might be yet to grasp the meaning of the photographs, but Nejeb wants to know more.

For the artists behind what is one of the most ambitious contemporary street art projects to vibrate the Arab world, the artwork is about replacing the once all-pervasive presidential photography with mosaics of ordinary, anonymous Tunisians who rose up against their government.

The group are using street art to kick-start conversations and to challenge their compatriots to see the familiar in a new, post-revolutionary, light.

In the spirit of people-power, the project, titled “INSIDE OUT: Artocracy in Tunisia”, features a hundred ordinary Tunisians, putting their images where only presidents once hung. The portraits were taken by six Tunisian photographers, in collaboration with the renowned French street artist known as JR and other international artists.