Moncef Marzouki

Mohamed Moncef Marzouki (born 7 July 1945) is a Tunisian physician, human-rights activist and politician who served as interim president of Tunisia from 13 December 2011 to 31 December 2014. ^{1 2}

He was born in Grombalia on 7 July 1945. In his youth he travelled to India to study Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent resistance, and later to South Africa to study its transition from apartheid. He studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg in France and practised as a physician. ¹

He was president of the Tunisian Human Rights League from 1989 to 1994 and a leading figure of the Arab Commission for Human Rights. When the government cracked down on the Islamist Ennahda movement in 1991, he confronted President Ben Ali, calling on him to adhere to the law. He was a founding member of the National Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience in 1993 and was arrested on several occasions on charges relating to the propagation of false news and working with banned Islamist groups. In 2001 he founded the Congress for the Republic; the party was banned in 2002, and he ran it from exile in France. ¹

After Ben Ali's departure in the Tunisian revolution, the Constituent Assembly elected him interim president on 12 December 2011, and he took office the following day, succeeding the acting president Fouad Mebazaa. His presidency saw the drafting and promulgation of the 2014 constitution. He stood in the 2014 presidential election and lost to Beji Caid Essebsi, leaving office on 31 December 2014. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article describes his orientation as secular and modernist, and reports his position that religion should be separated from the state so as to preserve religion's purity from opportunistic political conflict, together with his statement that this view of his is not unbelief or atheism. These are political positions; no article names a school or affiliation for him, and his record rests on the Arabic infobox's Islam in general, against which Wikidata carries a Sunni value that no text corroborates. ^{2 3}

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