The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Taha, Mahmoud Mohamed (1909–85)

While Mahmoud Mohamed Taha founded and led a political party that worked toward the independence of Sudan, he devoted his life to leading his followers to a new understanding of Islam that had emerged from his own Sufi training. Taha essentially eschewed politics as he focused on his movement to redirect Muslims to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, but in a Sudan that had never experienced completely secular governance, Taha and his movement were frequently confronted with the political consequences of their beliefs.

Taha was born in 1909 in the Blue Nile village of Hijaleej, about 100 miles south of Khartoum. He was raised surrounded by the intense Sufi teaching atmosphere of Sudan’s Gezira region, but he never affiliated himself with a particular sect. He received the best Western education a man in colonial Sudan could obtain, studying engineering at Gordon Memorial College, the precursor of the University of Khartoum. He found work in Sudan’s growing railroad sector and also in the many agricultural schemes started by the British. He also joined the Graduates Congress, the Khartoum University alumni group that stimulated and organized much of Sudan’s independence activity.

Sudan’s struggle for independence from Anglo-Egyptian control was largely dominated by the Umma Party, followers of the 19th-century Mahdi, and the Democratic Unionist Party of the Khatami Sufi sect. The former sought to rule Sudan through the descendants of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, and the latter had close ties to Egypt. Taha wanted Sudan to be free and independent of these influences, and to that end he founded in the early 1940s the Republican Party, whose objective was to found a Republic of Sudan. Taha was elected president of the Republican Party at its first meeting, and the group quickly published its manifesto, “Say, This Is My Path!,” which advocated party principles that spoke to Islamic ideals. Taha and several other party members were arrested by the colonial police for distributing pamphlets, becoming Sudan’s first political prisoners. The group was released quickly, but Taha himself soon again ran afoul of colonial proscriptions. A woman was arrested near Taha’s hometown for performing on her young daughter female circumcision, an ancient and non-Islamic practice that was still common throughout the Horn of Africa and Egypt but that had been banned by the British colonial authorities. Taha led a demonstration at the Hassaheisa jail where the woman was held; he was arrested and sentenced to a two-year term, under the impression that Taha was in support of female circumcision. Taha’s point, however, which would become a cornerstone of his later movement’s work, was that the British could not legislate Sudanese morality and that female circumcision would continue in Sudan until girls and women were given equal access to education.

Sudan achieved its independence on January 1, 1956, but Taha spent the 1950s formulating his New Islamic Mission, the religious movement that grew out of his political party. The movement was popularly known as the Republican Brotherhood, in recognition of its party roots, and most of Taha’s early followers were members of his party.

Taha’s postprison time in retreat generated the themes of his New Islamic Mission. He studied the Qur’an and came out with an understanding of the qualitative difference between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Qur’an. The Medinan verses, he said, were meant for the unsettled society of the Medinan era and included much of the Qur’an’s revelations about war, the obedience required of women to men, and strict social controls, while the Meccan verses, which contained the Prophet’s own sunna, or personal conduct, were meant to be practiced by all humankind all the time, which Taha called Islam’s “second message.”

Taha spelled out this Islamic social philosophy in his best known book, The Second Message of Islam (1967, trans. 1987). Through the 1960s and 1970s he continued to lecture around the country and to attract a small group of men and women, known as the Republican Brothers and Sisters, to his teachings. He was taken to court or tried on charges related to “apostasy” over these two decades, and Taha emerged invigorated in each case. His small movement grew a little; his followers took on his writings and speeches, particularly after he was banned from speaking in public or publishing his work, and distributed about two million copies of Republican tracts all over Sudan, largely through individual sales.

When Sudan’s president Ja‘far al-Numayri declared his version of the shari‘a as state policy in 1983, the Republican Brotherhood launched a public attack on these laws, considering them dangerous in a multireligious secular society. About 70 members of the group, including Taha and four women from the Republican Brothers and Sisters, were arrested in 1983 and were released about 18 months later. They immediately took to the streets again with a new pamphlet, and Taha and four of his followers were arrested on “apostasy” charges. The four followers were forced to denounce their leader on national television in early January 1985. Taha, who would not recant, was tried and convicted of apostasy. He was executed by hanging at the age of 76 on January 18, 1985, before a crowd of 10,000 onlookers. The Arab Human Rights Organization declared that day “Arab Human Rights Day.”

See also excommunication; Sudan