Tahar Haddad was a Tunisian reformist writer and trade-union organiser whose 1930 treatise on women's status in Islamic law became the principal documentary basis for the post-independence Tunisian Code of Personal Status. He was born in 1899 in the Halfaouine quarter of Tunis to a family of recent migration from the Hammama tribal confederation of southern Tunisia — the Saharan-edge tribes around Gafsa, Tozeur, and the Chott el Djerid whose dialectal speech preserves substantial Berber substrate.
He studied at the Zitouna mosque-university through the early 1920s, where he absorbed the reformist Salafi-Maliki currents associated with Abdelaziz Thaalbi and the Destour movement. From 1924 he worked alongside Mohamed Ali El Hammi to organise the Confédération Générale Tunisienne du Travail, the first independent Tunisian trade-union federation, with substantial documentary work on rural labour conditions and on the position of agricultural workers in the colonial economy.
His 1930 book Imra'atuna fi al-shari'a wa al-mujtama' ("Our Woman in Sharia and Society") argued from within the Maliki legal tradition that Islamic law's treatment of women required substantial reform on questions of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and education. The book provoked an immediate orthodox reaction at the Zitouna and across the Tunisian religious establishment; Haddad was effectively professionally and socially excluded from the religious-scholarly milieu for the remainder of his short life.
He died of tuberculosis in 1935 at the age of thirty-six. The 1956 Code of Personal Status of independent Tunisia, drafted under Habib Bourguiba and his minister Ahmed Mestiri and considered the most progressive women's-rights legislation in the post-independence Arab and Berber Maghreb, drew substantially on Haddad's framework — abolishing polygamy, requiring judicial divorce, raising the marriage age, and establishing equal inheritance in many cases. The southern-Tunisian rural-tribal background of his early life, with its Saharan Berber substrate, has been increasingly emphasised in the post-2011 Tunisian historiography of his work.