The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Sudan

The history of the interaction between Islam and politics in Sudan traditionally begins with the anticolonial revolution led by the “Mahdi” Muhammad Ahmad (a former Sufi turned messianic leader claiming to be the “rightly guided one,” a figure from Muslim eschatology) in 1881. According to those who celebrate the current political order, it pauses for about 100 years, and then resumes with the Revolution of National Salvation (thawrat al-inqādh al-waṭanī) in 1989, which brought to power General ‘Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir with the backing of the National Islamic Front (NIF) and its erstwhile leader Hasan al-Turabi. President Ja‘far Numayri’s imposition of the shari‘a in September 1983 is another convenient starting point for what is understood to be the current wave of Islamization. A more careful appraisal of Sudanese history, however, suggests that the relationship between Islam and politics in Sudan has been a consistent and complex feature of the development of the political order since at least the 16th century. Starting with the mutually beneficial relationship of Sudanese Sufi shaykhs with the leaders of the Funj kingdom of Sinnar and continuing during Turkish-Egyptian rule in the 19th century, Islamic politics wove through even British colonial efforts. Governor General Francis Reginald Wingate (r. 1899–1916) indeed deserves a seat among the great reformers of Sudanese Islam. It was under his initiative that the British created a new scholarly religious class (‘ulama’) in Sudan, which they hoped to appropriate, while suppressing the remnants of ecstatic Mahdism and other “local” varieties of Islam from which they feared a reemergence of Islamic political fervor. In the immediate postindependence years, political rule vacillated between a party affiliated with the Sufi Khatmi order (which went by several names) and a party affiliated with the sons (and religious organization) of the aforementioned “Mahdi” (Hizb al-Umma). “The Revolution of National Salvation” brought to power an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood for the first time, the NIF, which experimented with projects to create an Islamic economy, education system, legal apparatus, and social order, funneling significant resources to such projects. Since the coming of the Revolution of National Salvation, Islamic politics has by no means been stagnant, as the Islamic political project of the early revolution has been reworked to meet the demands of an ever-changing political context.

It is in this fertile ground that Sudanese Islamic political thought has flourished. The luminaries of the modern period—individuals such as Hasan al-Turabi (b. 1932), the liberal Muslim reformer and “post-Sufi” Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (d. 1985), and the leader of the Umma Party Sadiq al-Mahdi (b. 1936)—are well covered in the modern literature. Less attention has been paid to the unique situation of a large class of Sudanese intellectuals who were perhaps the first in the Sunni world to put the ideas of resurgent 20th-century Muslim Brotherhood–style Islamism into practice with the foundation of the Islamic state in 1989. The period from 1989 until the present has provided a laboratory in which the utopian ideas of the Islamic Movement (al-ḥaraka al-islāmiyya) were reformulated in order to respond to realities on the ground. Forced to confront the religious and cultural diversity of Sudan (made up of more than 100 languages, a sizable Christian population, and followers of tribal-based religious systems), and an international and regional political landscape that responded negatively to Sudanese reforms, these Islamist thinkers had to factor in variables unimagined by their earlier brethren who had never tasted power. Despite the notoriety of thinkers like Turabi, the Revolution of National Salvation and its project of social reform (called by the intellectuals who led the movement the Civilization Project, al-mashrū‘ al-ḥaḍārī) has received little scholarly attention, and its leaders’ agenda of Islamic renewal remains hidden in the pages of government reports of ministries such as Social Planning (Wizarat al-Takhtit al-Ijtima‘i), in local periodicals, or in the multitude of cultural products produced by the government or its allies such as poetry and song.

Moreover, Sudanese Islamic intellectuals outside of the NIF and its offshoots, such as the leaders of Salafi groups, like Ansar al-Sunna and the shaykhs of myriad Sufi orders, put barely a word to the page, and thus their politically relevant thought is little known outside of Sudanese circles. Indeed, the true range of Sudanese Islamic political thought outside of the ruling Islamist elite has mostly gone unnoticed in scholarly literature, with the notable exception of the trend begun by Taha, the Republican Brotherhood movement.

Since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 with the majority non-Muslim and southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the reorganization of the state it occasioned, some scholars have heralded the end of the Islamic experiment or the beginning of “post-Islamism,” as if a failure of the ideas of an intellectual such as Turabi amounted to the failure of Muslim politics more broadly. A closer look at this period reveals that the problems faced by the ruling elite when it had to harmonize its vision of the Islamic state with political realities on the eve of the short-lived experiment with national unity, did not lead to a dead end for Islamic politics but rather to a new flourishing thereof. Muslim organizations from Sufis to Salafis took the opportunity that this opening of the political window afforded to offer new interventions into models of Islamic statehood, public order, and the proper relationship between religion and politics. With the separation of the south on July 9, 2011, some members of the ruling party in the north have promised to cancel the multicultural provisions of the Sudanese Constitution now that the non-Muslim southerners are “gone” and indeed are celebrating separation as a new birth for the project of Islamic statehood more broadly. In the new Republic of South Sudan, the southern Muslim minority is putting forth its vision for the role of Islam in this avowedly secular state, and its positions span from an embrace of a religion-blind secularism as the best way to achieve equal rights for all south Sudanese, to armed rebellion demanding 30 percent representation for Muslims in the new government. It is undeniable that Islamic political thought will play an important role in Sudan’s immediate future in both the north and the south.