Women in Tunisia enjoyed unparalleled rights in the Muslim world under Ben Ali, they will one day miss him dearly.

TUNIS — Tunisian politicians have provoked outrage by debating draft laws that would impose prison sentences for vaguely defined acts of blasphemy and approving wording in the country’s new constitution that says women are “complementary” to men.

The clash between the Islamist-dominated interim government and those who fear that rights and freedoms are being eroded is the latest struggle in the battle to redefine Tunisia’s political and cultural landscape after the 23-year rule of former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was deposed last year.

“Bad day at the Commission of Rights and Freedoms,” read a note posted last week on the Facebook page of Selma Mabrouk, a member of the centrist Ettakatol party and the parliamentary committee tasked with drafting a new constitution. The ruling, she said, “seems to break completely with the idea of equality of the sexes”.

The panel approved an article to the new constitution under the principle that a woman is a “complement with the man in the family and an associate to the man in the development of the country”, according to Ms Mabrouk’s August 1 Facebook post.