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The place of Islam within the Constitution polarised the constitutional debates in Tunisia between 2011 and 2013. In order to overcome incompatibilities between Ennahdha’s constitutional programme, which proposed to islamize the institutions and the law, and the proposals of the secular parties, which intended to guarantee a clear separation between the State and religion, the constituents used two main methods. On the one hand, “semantic uncertainty” which meant keeping article 1 of the 1959 Constitution with all its linguistic ambiguities ; on the other hand, “conceptual creativity” through the emergence of the new notion of a “civil State” that both camps could appropriate while giving it either convergent or divergent meanings.