http://www.meriajournal.com/en/asp/journal/2008/september/rodman/index.asp#bio

Islamism in Sudan reflects both modern and older cultural-historical movements in Sudanese life. Similar to Islamist movements in the Middle East, it is distinguished by the sophisticated leadership of its ideological and strategic engineer–Dr. Hasan al-Turabi, by a period of official empowerment, and by violent campaigns of implementation during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet the character of historical Islam in Sudan, as well as the demographics of the Sudanese population, remain pluralistic, not isomorphic. The revolutionary project of Sudanese Islamism remains stalled, incomplete and divided today, but unexpired as an attempt to fabricate and impose a a national identity.

MAJOR THEMES

Islamism’s proponents in Sudan, including contemporary official political leaders, have called for a return to Shari’a–Islamic law—as well as an Islamic constitution. They have also mounted a thorough-going program of social engineering, which for a brief period in the early 1990s (“the Comprehensive Call to God”) threatened to marshal extensively the proselytization of non-Muslims, and forcibly impose an Islamist orthodoxy on Sudan’s population. Such an agenda supposes an actively–sometimes violently–homogenizing community of Muslims living under the Koran. Its engine is a reinterpreted, rerooted Islam, relevant to the technology of modernity, but resistant to the perceived cultural pollution of liberalism and secularism. Yet on the Sudanese territorial terrain, a unified national identity remains contested; it is not unambiguously Islamic. Islamism in Sudan remains a program in progress, failed as of 2008, but unexpired as an attempt to impose a national identity on a pluralistic population, presuming–and indeed forcibly applying–a homogeneity of beliefs and a narrow set of political-cultural goals.

Historical Islam, the nominal religion of most of the country, provides perhaps a logical platform for a thrust toward Islamist militancy and an Islamic nationalism, but at the grassroots it provides a weak and divided base for constructing such a regime. The Islamist agenda has waxed and waned through several decades, imposed by force at times and in different regions. The year 2008 sees the Islamist project shattered, between an Arab version, centered in the capital and in the Nile Valley, and a variant version in the west of the country. In addition, at present, the southern part of Sudan, after years of warfare, has won a putative constitutional barrier to imposed Islamism, part of an officially established federated state, sidelining the goal of revolutionary political unitarianism.

The historical suppleness of a pragmatic and strategically flexible Islam is corrupted when Sudanese leaders use the rhetoric of political Islam to cash in on its cultural currency. While the brief Islamist-Mahdi rule in the late nineteenth century offers a precedent for strict Islamic government in Sudan, the logic of the still contested appeal of the National Islamic Front (NIF)–renamed the National Congress Party and now in charge of the government–is a product of four factors: first, a legitimate, indigenous development of Islam and Islamic law; second, the rise of a wily and charismatic Islamist leader, Hasan al-Turabi; third, a mixing of derived and locally developed Islamist ideas–critical interpretations of social ills and the restorative powers of a revived and muscular Islam in the course of the twentieth century; and fourth, the result of the political utility and returns of a strongly enforced Islamism to the ruling (and Arabized) elites in Sudan. While the essentially revolutionary project of Sudanese Islamism remains stalled, incomplete and divided today, growing anti-Westernism in mid-2008 in the Middle East competes for a popular renewal, lately partially counter-balanced by the international financial and political gains of cooperation with the West in the global war on terrorism.

PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES

In comparison to neighboring territories, Islam was late in coming to Sudan. Nearly 900 years elapsed between the death of Muhammad and the official acceptance of Islam by the Sudanese ruling elite. The area of present-day Sudan is home to African, Christian, Nubian, Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic religious and cultural traditions. Yet the modern history of Sudan encompasses one of the first Islamist states in the world–the Sudan of the Mahdi (Redeemer) in the late nineteenth century, also comprising the first native, national Sudanese state. Sudan was also the first modern Sunni state in the late twentieth century to adopt explicitly a rigorous Islamic government and laws. With the seizure of power by the National Islamic Front (NIF) in 1989, Sudan reportedly joined a “Khartum-Teheran Axis,” radically at odds with the West.^[1] Today, despite indigenous conditions, which, on their face, make Sudan an unlikely Islamist state, and despite a largely failed infrastructure, continual civil wars and desperate poverty, the Sudanese governing elite demonstrates an ideological persistence and an international appeal for many Muslim states, continuing to invoke Islamism in its political and legal life, and in its intermittent posturing in foreign affairs.

Violence and warfare have characterized Sudan in 1955-1972 and 1983-2008. Waxing and waning throughout Sudan’s half-century of post-independence history, with but a decade of respite, Africa’s longest running internal conflict reflected deep differences, largely between the Northern and Southern parts of Sudan and their populations, over issues of power-sharing, wealth, identity, and Islamization. More recently, Sudan’s proclivity towards civil strife, and its ideological battles with the West have converged in Darfur, three provinces in the far western region of Sudan, along the Chadian border. Strictly speaking, the fighting in Darfur is not a continuation of the Southern civil war, but it is rooted in many of the same problems: a lack of power and access in Khartum, a failed Islamist project, as well as economic under-development and exploitation. Rebel groups commenced the current phase of guerrilla conflict in Darfur in 2003. By 2004, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had labeled the Sudan government’s (and its proxy militia’s) violent repression of the uprising as genocide.^[2] The U.S. Congress, in the same year, unanimously agreed with the characterization of the conflict as genocide, noting:

The Government of the United States, in both the executive branch and Congress, has concluded that genocide has been committed and may still be occurring in the Darfur region, and that the Government of Sudan and militias supported by the Government of Sudan, known as the Janjaweed, bear responsibility for the genocide.^[3]

For their part, the Sudanese government has responded to the accusations of genocide with rhetoric of their own, calling in 2006 for jihad against any UN or American troops that might come to Darfur. President Omar al-Bashir has refused the presence of troops with “colonial and imperial ambitions.”^[4] The head of Sudanese security and intelligence allegedly extracted loyalty oaths from his men to become martyrs rather than see Sudan host UN troops.^[5] On April 23, 2006, Usama bin Ladin, long linked to Sudan and to the NIF government, and one time Khartum resident, released an audio tape calling on “the mujahideen and their supporters in Sudan… and the Arabian peninsula to prepare… to wage a long-term war against the Crusaders in western Sudan.”^[6] For Khartum, jihad is a powerfully evocative language that mobilizes domestic and international support, as well as the predictably radically oppositionist response from the West.

A rhetorical war is central to the vitality of an Islamist Sudan, and the present government is committed to political Islam. The claim draws material assistance and moral approbation in the Muslim world. The foundation of the claim, as well as the foundation of the National Islamic Front (NIF, National Congress Party (NCP)) government, remains compromised by the complex history of Islam in Sudan. Khartum’s Islamist program, now encapsulated in the vocabulary of jihad, reflects a political agenda, more than a religious revival. This article explores the trajectory of Islamism, its origins in Sudan–how Islam developed instrumentally in the hands of radical leaders, its aims, its practices in its relatively brief heyday and its present political commitments. It also speculates on where Islamism in Sudan may be heading.

ISLAM IN SUDAN: DEMOGRAPHICS AND POWER DISTRIBUTION

The history of Islam in Sudan, to a large extent, is a story of contextualized politicization, but an experience that also represents an unconsummated spread of Islam, compared to neighboring territories. Sudan is at the boundary between the Arab-Islamic world and the African world of various and mixed traditions. It can claim a historical and genealogical link with each. The country reflects demographic and cultural heterogeneity despite the spurts of unitarian efforts by governing elites. In 1956, Sudan became a member of the Arab League; in 1963, it was a founding member of the Organization of African Unity.

Sudan has not had a comprehensive census since 1983. The United Nations Population Division estimate of 2005 is 36 million people.^[7] The U.S. government in July 2006 estimated 41,236,378 Sudanese.^[8] The riverian north-central Sudan, in and around Khartum, is home to the vast majority of Sudan’s 15 million persons who claim Arab descent. Khartum has been the center of political life since the Ottoman Egyptians declared it the seat of the Governor General in 1835.^[9] The capital is also home to the majority of the nation’s total population: about 60 percent live within about 200 miles of Greater Khartum. In-migration from throughout the country and increasing urbanization of Khartum have created a mixed city of various confessions–Christians, Sufis, Sunni Muslims and a host of traditional African beliefs. Barring this urban anomaly, the whole of the North is generally characterized as Muslim, and the South as the home of Christianity and traditional African beliefs. In Sudan as a whole, Sunni Muslims account for between 60 and 70 percent of the population.^[10] Islam in Sudan, however, “tends to be associated with Arabism as a composite concept of race, ethnicity and culture,” allowing for a complex schism of ostensibly Muslim Sudanese into ethnic, geographical, and sectarian groups.^[11]

Sudan’s heterogeneity and pluralism–with over a hundred languages, it cannot objectively be called anything else–compete with its Muslim majority and heritage for the national soul. Riverian Khartum is not just the population center. It has been the political heart of the country since the last days of British-Egyptian colonial rule.^[12] Educated urban elites from the military academies and universities formed the overwhelming majority of those pressing for, and eventually designing, the newly independent Sudan. The “Graduates General Conference,” which demanded self-determination in 1942, sprang from university-schooled Arab Muslims. The educated Arab elites dominate the political life of the country in disproportion to their numbers. Ethnically and–to some extent–religiously distinct groups, such as the Nuba, the Fur, the Beja, and the Dinka–have historically been cast in inequitable relationships with the Arabized elite. The bias toward Arab Muslim leadership under colonial rulers, Khartum’s location as the seat of Ottoman and British administration, and the educational and economic opportunities available in the capital, all contributed to a self-styled Arab Muslim political hegemony.

Early Sudanese Encounters with Islam (632-1821)

In the first generations after Muhammad’s death, Arab armies swept over territories extending across North Africa. In 642, and again in 652, they thrust south along the Nile and laid siege to the Coptic-Christian Nubian kingdom of Muqurra, at its capital of Dunqulah. The Arab armies destroyed Dunqulah’s cathedral, but were unable to capture the city. Eventually they accepted an armistice and withdrew. Since the Arabs–who had captured Egypt in 640–failed to take Nubia by force, they concluded a treaty to facilitate trade and travel between the two states. The “Baqt treaty” of 652, between the Nubian King Qalidurat and the Egyptian ruler, Abdallah ibn Abi Sarh, stipulated no surprise attack, and allowed for unfettered passage of goods and persons between the Northern and the Southern Nile basins at Aswan (the only formally recognized fixed frontier of the early Islamic Empire).^[13] The Baqt Treaty, honored for nearly 700 years, permitted and regulated a gradual intermixing of two civilizations. By the thirteenth century, the enfeebled Nubian kingdoms accepted Egyptian intervention in a dynastic dispute (1276), effectively converting Nubia into a satellite entity of Egypt.

Between 1300 and 1500, as the Nubian Kingdoms continued to fracture, the area saw increasing Arabization through intermarriage, trade, and settlement.^[14] In addition, Islamic scholars and Sufi turuqs (brotherhoods) traveled into present-day Sudan and established schools and mosques, spreading Islam into the countryside, and instructing followers in the Islamic practice.^[15] In 1504, the leader of the African Funj tribe, Amara Dunqa, led an army against the crumbling Nubian Kingdom of Alwa and founded the Funj Kingdom, capital at Sennar. The Funj established a large zone of tribute, putting pressure on the Egyptians (now under Ottoman rule) in the north, the Shilluk to the south, and the Ethiopians in the east. Abandoning their nominal adherence to an amalgamation of Christian and traditional African beliefs, the Funj Kingdom leadership officially adopted Islam in 1523. It was “an African, not Arab, state, but derived its ideological force from the newly introduced religion of Islam.”^[16]

As the Funj kingdom expanded in the seventeenth century, the Sufi orders cemented their control over local government, commerce, and social life. The Funj rulers, interested in legitimating their Islamic identity, subsidized the immigration of religious teachers, and underwrote the costs of Sufi schools.^[17] “Arabization and Islamization built on the pre-existing Sudanese social structures and embraced even [sic] the pagan belief systems and practices. In racial, cultural, and religious terms, what emerged is a mold that is uniquely Sudanese.”^[18] The expansion of Islam, along with the notion of Arab tribal descent, and the concomitant membership in a region-wide tribal system, began to fuse the riverian farmers and the desert nomads into a territorial identity, creating the beginnings of a Sudanese consciousness.

The Rise of Arab Sudan (1821-1956)

Eventually, the Funj state debilitated and by 1821 surrendered to the Ottoman Egyptian armies of Muhammad Ali, who had been appointed Ottoman Pasha in 1805, as part of a campaign to wrest control of the country by ousting the Mamluks–a warrior caste and former dynasty, who retained considerable influence over the military and governance at the expense of the nominally ruling Ottomans.^[19] A band of Mamluks sought haven in the Funj Kingdom and created a small state at Dunqulah. Ali invaded in 1821, in part seeking Sudanese slaves to build an army that would replace the dispersed Mamluks, who sought sanctuary in Sudan, a phenomenon repeated in the development of the modern Sudanese state.^[20]

Ali’s Sudan traced roughly the same geographic borders as modern-day Sudan, including the barely known southern provinces. A lax administration from the Ottoman pashalik in Cairo depended upon local extended families and religious institutions. Ali viewed Sudan as a repository for potential army slave recruits. Until the slave trade was banned by Egypt in 1860, tens of thousands of Sudanese were conscripted into the Ottoman armies; commercial slave traders raided villages throughout the country. The Turkiyyah, as the Ottoman-Egyptian era was called, did see administrative and cultural changes, particularly later in the nineteenth century. Sudan under the Ottomans saw the introduction of secular court systems paralleling the Islamic courts, which drew on a more liberal school of Islamic law. Orthodox religious madrasas (schools) were constructed. Scholars, particularly from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, were encouraged to visit and teach in Sudan. Ottoman Egyptian rule focused on expanding and centralizing Islam through bureaucratic administration. To this end, the rulers embarked on a process of spreading Islam to the Christian and Animist south. They pressured the Sufi orders of the north, whose mystical heterodoxies were at odds with the orthodox Sunni practices of the Ottomans. Yet many Sudanese, especially those not enjoying the political favor of the Egyptian Ottomans, were sharply critical of the corruption and excesses of the regime, especially the looting of Sudanese archeological and religious sites. Egypt expected Sudan to be self-supporting, despite a foreign bureaucracy and heavy tax burden.

Deliverance from Ottoman rule came with the rise of Muhammad Ahmad, a faqir (holy man) and leader in the Sammaniyah Sufi brotherhood. Beginning in 1880, Ahmad preached struggle against the Turkiyyah and proclaimed himself the millenarian divine leader of Sudanese Islamic eschatology: the Mahdi.^[21] Sudanese Sufism (properly a Shi’a doctrine), proclaims an eschatology of the Mahdi, the Expected Redeemer, who restores righteousness to the world during the Last Judgment.^[22] In 1882, Ahmad’s followers, known as the Ansar in Arabic, defeated a 7,000 man Egyptian army. Their own ranks swelled to more than 30,000. By 1885, the Mahdi and his Ansar controlled all of present-day Sudan, and created the first indigenous national government–one of the earliest proto-Islamist governments, imposing a rigorous interpretation of traditional Islamic law.

The British, however, had increased their interest in Egyptian and Sudanese affairs with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. In 1873, an Anglo-French debt commission took over the management of Egyptian financial affairs. As the Mahdiyya expanded military control in 1882, the British, hoping to avoid a costly political entanglement, ordered a withdrawal of all Egyptians and foreigners from Sudan. General Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon, who had been the Governor-General of Sudan until 1880, returned to supervise the evacuation in 1884. Despite requiring additional troop support to execute an evacuation, Gordon nevertheless attacked the forces of the Mahdi. British reinforcements arrived too late; Gordon and his charges were famously massacred.^[23] For a few years, the British were understandably wary of involvement in Sudan, but by 1892, the reconquest of Khartum was adjudged an international political necessity. The British were facing competition at the headwaters of the Nile from French, Italian, and Belgian aspirations, and the planned construction of an irrigation dam at Aswan needed the security of a subjugated Sudan. The British mustered a counter-offensive to reclaim Sudan for Egypt; a joint British-Egyptian army marched south along the Nile in 1896. In two years, the war was won; 11,000 Mahdists died at Omdurman in a last ditch battle against Lord Herbert Kitchener’s forces.

Agreements in 1899 and reaffirmed in 1936, established the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (joint British and Egyptian rule), which at bottom reinstated a Sudanese colonial status similar to the Ottomans, with a governor-general appointed by Egypt but approved by Britain. Sir Reginald Wingate succeeded Kitchener as governor-general of Sudan in 1899 and served until 1916. Wingate utilized the local power structures–shaykhs in the north and tribal leaders in the south–to administer the countryside. He also studied the Mahdia and befriended elements in the Khatmiyya Brotherhood that had opposed the Mahdist regime. His effort to counter the political force of the Ansar by empowering their traditional foes, the Khatmiyya, contributed to polarizing Sudanese politics (and later parties), with the Ansar and the Khatmiyya competing inside and outside opposing parties of several names.^[24]

The Condominium period also saw the separation of northern and southern Sudan. “The Southern Policy of 1930” considered blacks in the southern provinces a people distinct from northern Muslims. The south of Sudan was designated territory eligible for eventual integration with British East Africa. As early as the 1850s, British authorities in Sudan were informed of racial tension between Africans and Arabs: “the [African] hatred against the Turks, whose acts of violence in the past are not forgotten by the blacks, has resulted in alienating the spirit of the people.”^[25] Separation also sprouted from the problems of governing the less tractable south, where incidents of resistance to taxation and other regulations occurred as late as the 1920s.^[26] Also contributing to concern for separating south from north was the practice of slavery and illicit impressment of household servants. Limiting travel and contact between the traders, largely from the north, and the victims, largely from the south, would supposedly reduce the slave trade. Occasional slave raids into under-administered parts of the south continued into the 1940s. The British were “reluctant to throw open the South until its inhabitants could stand on their own feet” and defend themselves.^[27] As Sudanese jostling for independence increased in the 1940s, the British, under wartime pressure to maintain the loyalty of the Empire, reversed this policy. The Sudan Administrative Conference in 1946 decided that Sudan should be administered as one unit. The British needed to appease restive, anti-imperial Northern Sudanese politicians, Egyptian nationalists who dreamed of uniting someday with the whole of Sudan, and forces within the British colonial service who doubted that the under-developed south could survive on its own. The decision also omitted consultation with any of the southern Sudanese.

With the accepted departure of the British, efforts ensued to strengthen an eventually independent Sudan. Between 1946 and 1956, the British accelerated educational and infrastructural reforms in the South, and tried to reassure the Southerners that the North had their best interests at heart.^[28] The British were also keen to craft a unified independent Sudan in order to prevent Egypt from claiming Sudan as part of a pan-Nile Egyptian state. In 1946, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced “no change in the status of the Sudan should be made until the Sudanese have been consulted through constitutional channels.”^[29] The British and Egyptian protectorate over Sudan ended with the 1953 Anglo-Egyptian accord, which gave Sudan three years in transit to self-government. The newly-elected Sudanese parliament unanimously adopted a declaration of independence in 1956.

Crisis of Identity in Independent Sudan (1956-present)

The political history of Sudan after independence can be divided into two period types: parliamentary “democracy” and military dictatorship, which alternated in three cycles from parliamentary rule to dictatorship, culminating in the 1989 coup/take-over by military allies of the National Islamic Front. Afflicting both periods, however, has been the lack of agreement on a Sudanese nationhood, reflected in years of civil strife in the southern and western provinces, and in the continued inability to write an acceptable, durable constitution. The first parliamentary period lasted two years before the advent of the first dictatorship, that of General Ibrahim Abbud. His ouster, in the bloodless “October Revolution” of 1964, preceded an incompetent parliamentarism: in 1968, two claimant coalition governments functioned simultaneously in different buildings, unable to form a consensual governing coalition. Serial attempts at power grabs oscillated between the two main parties: the Umma (remnants of the Ansar) and the Democratic Union Party (DUP, the political wing of the Khatmiyya Brotherhood). These two parties, based in historical and tribal differences, also represented two possible paths for Sudan immediately after independence. The Umma platform called for a strong Sudanese and Islamic state; the DUP favored close ties and eventual integration with Egypt in a pan-Arab alliance. Smaller parties, including the Islamic Charter Front, the Sudanese Communist Party, and various trade and professional unions, completed the mix of interests wrangling over doctrines and access to pelf and official power. In 1969, Colonel Ja’far Numayri seized power in the second military coup; his reign exceeded Abbud’s in duration, until 1985, through a declining economy and rampant corruption.

In the third parliamentary period, the two major parties continued their explicit linkage to the Khatmiyya and the Ansar. By then, they were sectarian parties, based more on family history and religious affiliations than on explicit political platforms. Essentially, they functioned as religious, economic, and fraternal groups with political arms. The influence of these parties, however, waned under the pressures of increasing urbanization and economic downturns. Modernizing protosecular ideologies, including Marxism, were emerging in the urban centers of Khartum and Omdurman. This period of increasing urbanization paralleled the expansion of fundamentalist and Islamist political voices.^[30]

Sudan after independence confronted two kinds of political Islam. There was the Islam of the old sects and families that reflected accommodation with tradition, as well as elements of modernization. It evinced broad social concerns and remained intermittently interested in something like a comprehensive Islamic government. In parallel was the Islam of Hasan al-Turabi and the National Islamic Front, which was radically Islamist and advanced the cause of an Islamic social mobilization, and government strictly by Islamic law.^[31] Turabi and the National Islamic Front interweave with the third period of dictatorship of President Omar Bashir. Since 1989 the country has shifted profoundly toward Islamic government and the suppression of parochial Muslim traditions and other elements of Sudan’s pluralistic traditions. While localized Sudanese traditions have not been wiped out, the country is thoroughly penetrated by a partially non-native ideology–pan-Arab, pan-Muslim, and globally Islamist.

SHARI’A: LEGALISM AND PAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTIONS

The Roots of Modern Islamism

Islamism is sometimes conceived as historical rather than philosophical/ideological. Commentators who describe today’s Islamism as “fundamentalist” are equating the movement with a desire to return to historical roots, rather than a development of a philosophy and ideology that seeks to come to terms with modernity. The centrality of historical texts–the Koran and the Hadith (sayings and deeds of Muhammad) among them–to the modern Islamist project indicates a historical connection that is critical for understanding the sinews of global Islamism. Islamist movements, from the Iranian ayatollahs to the Pakistani Muttehida Majlis-e Amal, agree that implementing Shari’a is essential to the Islamism of a nation.^[32] Islamic law, derived from the Koran and Hadith, is rhetorically and programmatically essential to the propagation of Islamism, and understanding the role of Islamism in Sudan must begin with a look at the history of Islamic law in the country.

Shari’a has been deployed and politicized in Islamism as part of a broader philosophical evolution in Islamic thought. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, jurists, schoolteachers, scholars, and activists throughout the Muslim world invoked religious and political theories to liberate their people from political and economic servitude to the West. For example, Jamal al-din al-Afghani focused on the political necessity of pan-Islamic unity in the struggle against Western colonial oppression. Others, like al-Afghani’s Egyptian student Muhammad Abduh, and Syrian intellectual Rashid Rida, were interested in renewal of the religious realm as well, arguing that the stagnation of Islam could be reversed by eliminating the false impositions of earlier generations. Abduh argued for the possibility of modern ijtihad (interpretation) to return to the true principles of Islam.^[33] Renewal was grounded in a modernized and carefully retooled history, to authenticate a form of modern politics.

Of the thinkers who emerged from this lineage, the most programmatically attuned was the Egyptian activist and schoolteacher, Hasan al-Banna. In 1928, teaching in Isma’iliyya, Egypt, al-Banna formed an evening school and social welfare society. With six followers, he inaugurated the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna and the Brotherhood sought to advance the cause of pan-Arab and pan-Islamic unity, including several attempts to reconcile Sunni and Shi’a Islam. The Brotherhood expanded schools and literacy programs, provided social services, revitalized the religious scene by supporting young preachers using modern technology, and amplified Egyptian demands for enfranchisement amidst an emergent nationalism.^[34] Al-Banna himself continued to express the philosophy of pan-Islamic unity and preached the all-encompassing nature of Islam. He also attempted to reconcile Islamic teachings with the structural and technical details of law and government, writing of Islamic constitutionalism:

When one considers the principles that guide the constitutional system of government, one finds that such principles aim to preserve in all its forms the freedom of the individual citizen, to make the rulers accountable for their actions to the people and finally, to delimit the prerogatives of every single authoritative body. It will be clear to everyone that such basic principles correspond perfectly to the teaching of Islam concerning the system of government. For this reason, the Muslim Brothers consider that of all the existing systems of government, the constitutional system is the form that best suits Islam and Muslims.^[35]

For the modern Islamists of the Brotherhood, as well as their predecessors, it is Islamic law–Shari’a–and modern jurisprudential ijtihad that forms the basis of effective Islamic government. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian ally of the Brotherhood added, “Islam has survived by laying down the general, universal rules and principles, and leaving their application in detail to be determined by the processes of time and by the emergence of individual problems.”^[36] Although Islamism is a political ideology, its scope transcends politics. Yet its emphasis on legalism draws on a familiar theme in Islam, channeling the drive to change economic, social, cultural, and political life.

In Sudan, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged in 1949 as the Islamic Charter Front (ICF), in part from Muslim student groups organizing in the universities in the 1940s. Its members were urban and highly educated. Unlike the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sudanese branch drew on elite support and lacked membership from the lower classes or the rural poor. In 1964, the Dean of the Law School at the University of Khartum, Hasan al-Turabi, was elected Secretary General, a position he still maintains. Al-Turabi had recently returned from studies at the University of London and the Sorbonne in Paris, where he had been active in Muslim student organizing, emerging in Khartum as heir of the Islamist philosophical tradition of al-Banna, al-Afghani, and Qutb. (The U.S. September 11 Commission Report labelled him “Sudan’s longtime hard-line ideological leader.”^[37] ) By mixing the historical Islamism of Shari’a with adaptive philosophical interpretations, he has broadly related doctrinal Islam to a contemporary political agenda. In line with Qutb and al-Banna, he has focused on drafting for Sudan an Islamic constitution, and on instituting Shari’a, drawing heavily from the stout tradition of Islamic jurisprudence and rhetoric. Yet he has also generated a strongly socially mobilizing thrust, “the Comprehensive Call” of the 1990s toward social transformation, toward common citizenship, and the imposed practice of social virtues.^[38]

Shari’a in Sudan

Hasan al-Turabi is Sudan’s philosopher-would be king; although deprived of official authority for long periods, he has nevertheless driven the politics of the country for more than 40 years. In addition to his status as celebrated ideologue, he personifies the convergence of the two trajectories of Islamic law in Khartum: the broadly Islamist philosophical developments, and checkered history of Shari’a in Sudan. Such convergence is not confined to al-Turabi’s era: the history of Sudan is a history of encounter, between indigenous Sufis and the Ottoman bureaucracy, between orthopraxy and the heterodoxies of African Islamic amalgamations. The supreme problem of writing the Sudanese constitution, which has not yet been resolved, is tied to the problem of Shari’a and the difficulty of reconciling the pluralist reality of the Sudanese polity with the Islamist desire for a socially pervasive Muslim state, expressed in the Shari’a’s strict application.

Sudanese Encounters with Shari’a (1504-1882)

The Sudanese experience with the Shari’a dates to the first large-scale Islamic state in the southern Nile valley, the Funj Kingdom, centered at present-day Sennar, which conquered the failing Christian Nubian kingdom of Alwa in the early sixteenth century and converted to Islam in 1523. (The Funj divided their tributary lands into administrative sections called dar; the area of Darfur was the home of the Fur people.) In 1620, Sulayman Solong, a Fur clan leader, declared himself Darfur’s first Sultan, and Islam the official religion, thus adding another ostensibly Islamic state. The Darfurians sought to enlarge the influence of Islam by encouraging religious scholars to settle, expanding the construction of madrasas and mosques and–under the reign of Ahmad Bakr from 1682-1772–advanced a policy of forced conversions to Islam. The Sufi brotherhoods were less instrumental in encouraging Islam here than they were in riverian Sudan. Yet individual, often semi-literate, holy men were persuaded to settle by the offer of land and tax-exemption status for the faqir and his descendents.^[39] The Funj allowed for a passive, top-down approach. Although they introduced the Maliki School of Islamic jurisprudence and provided “a stable state framework within which the dissemination of Islam and the Arabic language was given a vigorous impetus,” the state was not active in transforming the social or cultural life along explicitly Islamic lines.^[40] Nevertheless, these older Islamic states bequeathed traditions of some degree of state involvement in religious affairs to a flowering of the Sudanese political imagination in the twentieth century.

Some three decades after the Funj were conquered by the Egyptian-Ottomans in 1821, the Ottoman pashalik, in a modernizing mode, revised the legal systems of both Egypt and Sudan, introducing a commercial and criminal code administered in secular courts. This system, featuring laws not derived from the Shari’a, functioned alongside traditional Islamic courts, relegating the Shari’a courts to a secondary status and reducing the power of the qadis (Islamic judges). The Ottomans restructured the Islamic courts on the basis of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, rather than continuing the much stricter Maliki school.^[41] Copied by the later British administration, colonial rule of the Ottomans sought to separate the religious courts from the non-religious and to control the powerful qadis. The British, after their explicit recognition of the separate jurisdiction of Islamic courts in 1902, appointed the head qadis in an effort to select individuals more amenable to colonial interests.^[42]

A Shari’a Hegemony: The Mahdist State (1884-1898)

The Shari’a gained a strong handhold in a unified Sudanese legal system with the rise of the early Islamist-type state: the Mahdiyya, the indigenous, messianic Islamic state that ousted the Ottomans in 1885. The Islam of the Mahdiyya was puritanical and harsh. Shari’a was enforced in its more extreme forms. Women who left their homes unaccompanied, who were unveiled, or who spoke in loud voices were flogged. Visits to the tombs of Sufi saints were banned and variant and local forms of Islamic practice were rejected. The Mahdiyya was the product of both localized Sudanese traditions–the Mahdist myth of deliverance–and imports from outside the country: the African jihadists in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa, especially of the early nineteenth century, distinguished scholars whose religious views rested on a tradition of authoritarian and unchallengeable authority.^[43] It also reflects the Wahhabist movement of the Hijaz, exemplified in today’s Saudi Arabia, which sought to establish a purified Islam and railed against Sufi idolatrism and other localized innovations.^[44]

Independence (1956 and afterward)

Shari’a and the question of the governing law continued to haunt the country after independence. Wrangling over a constitution contributed to the overthrow of parliamentary civilian government in 1958. General Abbud’s military government, despite executive freedom, failed to write a constitution, choosing instead to emphasize the national identity issue via Islamization and by suppressing political and cultural differences in the South. The Sudan African National Union, formed in 1963, grew increasingly active in the refugee camps and among guerrilla groups in opposition and, as noted by Øystein Rolandsen, “it was only after the military coup led by General Abbud in 1958… that occasional skirmishes escalated into a full-fledged civil war. The escalation was mainly caused by Abbud’s program of Islamization, which led to increased repression in the south.”^[45] Islamization, in the form of the penetration of Islamist philanthropy and non-governmental organizations, and the threat of introducing universal Shari’a combined to sharply inflamed North-South tensions and guaranteed a stalemate on a national constitution.^[46]

Ironically, Shari’a served, after Abbud, as both a rally-point for national unity and a source of deeper division. Despite the heterogeneity of the country, the possibility of Islam as a national identity was persuasive to many Arab Muslim leaders in the North. After another brief parliamentary interlude, the Sudanese Free Officers Movement took power in a second military coup, declaring Colonel Ja’far Numayri Prime Minister in 1969. Influenced by leftist trends in the Arab world, Numayri raised the banner of Arab socialism and outlawed all political parties.^[47] In an attempt to consolidate his socialist position, Numayri published a provisional constitution in August 1971, describing Sudan as a “socialist democracy.” His newly-acquired political ideology attracted rewards from the Soviet Union. Between 1969 and 1971 the USSR supplied Sudan with arms and advanced military equipment for the struggle against the “Anya Nya” rebels in the South. After a coup attempt against him by more orthodox Marxists in the Sudanese Communist Party, Numayri cooled towards socialism. By the late 1970s he reached out to other political elements, including Hasan al-Turabi’s Muslim Brotherhood and Sadiq al-Mahdi’s Umma Party. Numayri’s later embrace of the Islamist movement in Sudan was the cornerstone of his 1977 policy of national reconciliation. To cement this new alliance, he appointed Hasan al-Turabi chairman of a new committee for the “return of the laws to compatibility with the Shari’a.”^[48] This enabled him to exchange military aid from the Soviet Union for donations from Saudi Arabia.

In the Southern Sudan, granted some autonomy under the 1972 Addis Ababa peace agreement (ending the first era of civil war in the country), local politicians began to campaign for extending their authority. Numayri struck back by suspending the Southern Regional Assembly in 1981. Two years later he redivided the South into the three former provinces of Bahr al-Ghazal, al-Istiwai, and Aali al-Nil. Additionally, in a move doubtless influenced by al-Turabi’s position as attorney general, Numayri introduced the Shari’a in September 1983 as the national law of Sudan, including the controversial hudud corporal punishments, a move applauded by the Muslim Brotherhood. Not only did Numayri shift dramatically from socialist to Islamist, he personalized a newly-acquired status–insisting that military officers swear allegiance to him as the Imam of the Sudanese umma. The implementation of Shari’a was equally dramatic: thousands of bottles of alcohol were dumped into the Nile, and public corporal punishments ensued. People in the South and moderate Northern Muslims staggered under the wave of amputations and floggings. Reportedly, even al-Turabi fainted upon witnessing a public amputation. Shari’a, however, had become the premier law of 1980s Sudan. It remained in place after Numayri’s removal in 1985.^[49]

Ideological and Political Connections

Equally important as the effect of Islamism and Shari’a inside Sudan has been their influence on Sudan’s international image. Al-Turabi and the Islamic Charter Front (later the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Islamic Front, and now the National Congress Party) emerged as destinations for assistance from pro-Islamist Saudi banks and charities. Pro-Islamist relief agencies moved in. An example was Da’wa al-Islamiyya, which was secretive and suspected of connections to jihadism, but also functioned as a more benign charitable association. Relations between Sudan and neighboring Arab states were ambivalent but strengthening in the 1970s and in the early 1980s. Al-Turabi cultivated connections with maverick Islamic states, such as Libya, where he spent three years in exile during the Numayri years. Al-Turabi and the Sudanese Islamists continued to press for an Islamic constitution. In Sudan, this encounter between a burgeoning pan-Arab trend and previous indigenous trends meshed, revolving around the application of shar’ia law, a growingly open Arab racism versus “blacks” in the east, and paralleling ideological changes, from the Funj Kingdom, through the Mahdi era, and into Numayri’s “socialist” period.

THE ISLAMIC STATE: SUDAN AFTER THE NATIONAL SALVATION REVOLUTION

On June 30, 1989, a third parliamentary period in Sudan’s history abruptly ended in a coup. Colonel Omar al-Bashir established the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) for National Salvation. He commenced governing the country in adherence to Islamist principles, committed to retaining Numayri’s Shari’a laws. In a bit of tactical jiu jitsu, the RCC imprisoned the major leaders of the National Islamic Front, including al-Turabi, in order to safeguard the legitimacy of the NIF, by distancing it from the coup, and in order to gain international acceptability, especially from Egypt, by avoiding the taint of hard-line Islamism. The RCC regime achieved immediate recognition by Egypt and the United States. After a few months in jail, al-Turabi popped up in the new government.

Under the NIF, Sudan became the second country in the world and the first Sunni country to govern according to Islamist principles, joining Iran. Sudan attracted Islamist groups, many with terrorist pedigrees, including Usama bin Ladin and his al-Qa’ida network.^[50] Into the 1990s Sudan cultivated its dual status as problematic global pariah and magnet for Islamic and Arab organizations unwelcome in states like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt. When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (as well as the Arab League) urged Iraq’s immediate withdrawal. Al-Bashir denounced the invasion. However, after al-Turabi emerged to side with Iraq, Sudan abstained from the ultimate vote in the OIC. Reflecting the tide of evidence that also placed Sudan in the midst of Islamist destabilization efforts in Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, in 1993 the U.S. State Department placed Sudan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.^[51]

State-Sponsored Terror

Sudan’s isolation grew in the 1990s, parallel to the implication of involvement of Sudan’s state apparatus in assisting terrorist networks in its international neighborhood. Much material and consultative assistance flowed to Sudan from Iran. In 1994 Hasan al-Turabi disingenuously claimed that there were no Iranian military personnel in Sudan, “not one Iranian businessman or even tourist.”^[52] Al-Turabi was personally committed to the relationship as an example of ideological and political rapprochement between Sunni and Shi’a Islamist organizations–one of the goals of his PAIC, envisioned as a rival to the older pan-Islam, pan-Arab organizations. In November 1989, after a visit to Teheran by Ali Usman Taha–then second vice president of Sudan–the presidents of Iran and Sudan met there. President al-Bashir sought material support for his radical direction. Iran’s President Rafsanjani promised a major road-building project and agreed to cooperate on security and intelligence matters. Al-Turabi diligently built working relationships with the Iranian mullahs and facilitated, with Usama bin Ladin, a training alliance between the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese Hizballah and bin Ladin’s Sudan-based al-Qa’ida.^[53] In September, 1991, while visiting Sudan to provide assistance, an Iranian military delegation prepared a military cooperation pact between the two countries.^[54] In late 1991, President Rafsanjani traveled to Khartum, where he proclaimed the North-South civil war a “jihad” that should be pursued with all vigor. To underscore his point, he presented Sudan with a gift of $300 million in Chinese arms. In a pattern similar to their relationship with Hizballah in Lebanon, Iran assisted with arms and training, with commercial development, and with jihadist training in camps established around Khartum–camps actually run by al-Qa’ida with help from the Sudanese security services. Iranian advisers died in battle in 1992 while participating in the jihad in Kordofan, opposed by Sudan People Liberation Army (SPLA) forces, during the period of renewed North-South civil war. The Sudan government also opened Port Sudan to Iranian use; Iranian warships were occasionally spotted in the Red Sea en route to Sudan.^[55]

In March 1990 the Sudan government had officially welcomed all “Arab brothers,” who could henceforth enter Sudan without a visa, thus commencing a mass migration of Islamist militants and peripatetic terrorists. This prefigured a rise in Arab racism in the burgeoning Darfur conflict. Many Afghan-Arab fighters, unwelcome in their home countries at the end of the Afghan-Soviet war–often traveling through Iran–wound up in Sudan. At the Khartum airport, mujahidin were welcomed with Sudanese passports; influentials received diplomatic passports.^[56] Operatives departed Sudan for Bosnia, Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, and other Arab countries in a widening effort to help Islamist militants.

The long, interrupted, and renewed North-South civil war, especially in the 1990s, invited intervention by Sudan’s neighbors. Southern resistance groups, especially the largest and most renown, John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A), drew help from Ethiopia and Uganda. Sudan reciprocated in those countries by funding anti-government guerrilla movements. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya, Chad, and Uganda all have accused the Sudanese government of providing material support to armed insurrectionists.^[57] Uganda, for example, charged the NIF government with funding the Lord’s Resistance Army, an indefatigable, fanatical cult militia, which regularly kidnapped children for conversion into soldiers. Uganda retaliated by supporting the SPLA. Sudan channeled resources to Islamists struggling in other countries, such as Somalia and Yemen.

Membership in the International Islamist Club

Al-Turabi’s Islamist project went beyond pan-Islamic unity. The objective was to bring together various extremist Islamist organizations to discuss theory, strategy, and insurrectionary tactics. To this end, with President al-Bashir’s blessing, al-Turabi organized a meeting of militant and terrorist groups in the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC), a direct competitor to the Organization of Islamic Conference and the venerable Arab League. Delegates representing over 40 states attended the first PAIC General Assembly, in Khartum, April 25-28, 1991. Turabi presided and was elected secretary-general. In attendance were Yasir Arafat, representatives of Hamas, as well as bin Ladin, members of the Filipino Abu Sayyaf movement, Imad Mughniyya of Hizballah, Tunisian leader Rashid al-Ghannushi, Anwar Haddam of the Algerian rebel group FIS, and Ayatollah Mahdi Karrubi, head of the Iranian Society of Combatant Clergy.^[58]

The group spanned a wide range of the geographic, sectarian, and ideological groups within the now global Islamist movement. Al-Turabi envisioned the PAIC as a means to assemble “Muslims from all over the world,” overcoming “internal divisions, Shi’a, Sunni, differences in jurisprudence or spiritual orders.”^[59] Both the first and second general assemblies offered al-Turabi and cohorts opportunities to attack the West, expatiate on Islamist principles, and expand the PAIC as an Islamist intellectual clearinghouse. At his most grandiose, al-Turabi envisioned Islamism playing as historic a role as liberalism in the West, providing the materials of a global revival. In London in 1992, at a time he was publishing and recording sermons and lectures widely distributed in the Arab world, al-Turabi paused to enunciate a grand strategy for Islamists:

The historical test for Muslims has always been to recover after every set-back, seeking through the renewal of faith (iman), the renewal of thought (ijtihad) and the resurgence of action (jihad) to salvage religion from temporal containment and ensure its progressive development, relevance and continuity in history.” ^[60]

Al-Turabi’s vision of Sudan as the philosophical and logistical heartbeat of the global Islamist movement also encompassed jihad and violence. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in part involved Sudanese nationals, working in Sudanese diplomatic offices in United States, and linked to the NIF regime itself.^[61] Al-Qa’ida’s bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar al-Salam in 1998 led to the well-known American retaliation, bombing a site in Khartum purportedly involved in manufacturing chemicals for explosives, even after bin Ladin had departed Sudan for Afghanistan. The June 25, 1995 assassination attempt against Egyptian President Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has been traced to Khartum. The failure to meet UN demands for the extradition of suspects from Sudan led to the imposition of UN sanctions.^[62]

Facing Problems at Home

In a limited sense, the Islamist project in Sudan has instigated some mobilization of opinion and action toward a certain unified, if vague, international goal. The threat of militant Islamism has also stiffened governments in neighboring states against ties with Sudan. (Libya has blown hot and cold on spillover actions from Darfur, which had the effect of intervening in the politics of Chad.) Sudan’s ideological hardline has invited economic repercussions, by way of international sanctions, the loss of humanitarian and military donors, and escalating war costs. Internally, as well, by most measures, domestic Islamist policies have failed. The implacable commitment to Islamism of the regime’s early years led to a turn to Islamic solutions for economic and social problems unconnected to needs and realities on the ground. Ideology trumped workability. While the NIF regime faced the conditions of a “failed state” when it took over in 1989, the regime’s tenure has resulted in little improvement in basic infrastructure, economic conditions, and human development.

Economic Stagnation and Failure

In the 1980s, the country’s economic crisis deepened; traditional investors divested, but Islamic banks and businesses expanded with assistance from tax incentives, access to hard currency, and political connections to the powerful Muslim Brotherhood. Numayri’s regime, increasingly Islamist in orientation, encouraged the Islamic economic institutions with large-scale exemptions from private sector regulations. The Faisal Islamic Bank, for example, reaped spectacular results, due to exemption from most banking regulations and from profits and capital gains taxes.^[63] Several Islamic banks were owned or linked to the Saudi royal family, which supported the “neo-Wahhabi” Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood inside Sudan. These banks served to funnel money through unregulated channels into terrorist networks.^[64] Saudi and Sudanese links to the Islamic banks in Khartum led several families of September 11 victims to file a law-suit seeking damages for the Sudanese government’s involvement in financing al-Qa’ida.^[65]

As early as September 1990, divergent Sudanese policies evinced concern about continued Saudi support. Sudanese support for Iraq during the first Gulf War led Minister of Finance Abd al-Rahim Hamdi to worry that Saudi Arabia would restrict Khartum’s banks and force the closing of those with Saudi royal ties.^[66] Nevertheless, the NIF regime continued to support Islamic banking practices and restrictions. Al-Bashir’s announcement that the Shari’a would continue to govern the country involved expanding Islamic economic practices, including state collection of zakat–the charitable contribution enjoined on every Muslim–and the banning of usury and the collection of interest. Quasi-governmental organizations, such as the Diwan al-Zakat and the Islamic Pious Endowments organization, were established to regulate the expanding Islamic orientations of the financial sector.^[67]

Economic problems, however, continued to plague the NIF regime, especially connected to increasing entanglements in terrorism. In 1995, the United Nations instituted minimal sanctions against the Sudan for its refusal to hand over suspects in the investigation of the failed Mubarak assassination. The United States instituted economic restrictions in 1997 and commenced assistance to the exiled opposition group of Sudanese, the National Democratic Alliance, which was operating out of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with representatives of the NDA and of John Garang’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement in Kampala in December 1997. The Saudi government, too, grew reluctant to provide assistance as it became clear that Sudan was supporting insurgent elements inside Saudi Arabia, including bin Ladin, whose Saudi citizenship had been revoked in 1993 and who was implicated in the bombing of the Khobar Towers inside the Kingdom in 1996. Even Iran cooled its ardor for the NIF regime, responding to a 1997 request for military material with a modest offer of a team of mechanics.

Simultaneous to the time the regime was facing a problem of willing donors, it faced a surge of expenditures. The war in the South was costing over a million dollars a day. The regime had inherited a crippling international debt. Sudan had been declared ineligible in 1986 for additional International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending, due to account arrears to the IMF. In 1993, the IMF took the drastic step of suspending Sudan’s voting rights. In 2000, Sudan’s accumulated debt stood at $20 billion, including $1.6 billion to the IMF.

Among the remaining sources of funding available to the regime was the international network of Islamic charities that had provided support for the civil war, as well as for famine relief and social services. In 1993, Sudan received a large payment from the massive Iranian Foundation for the Oppressed. Sudan had already received large sums from Saudi charities, as well as from humanitarian charities in the United States and Western Europe. Yet “Islamic economics” failed to provide the stability and revenue stream required by the international donor community. By 1994, Sudan had adopted the standard liberal economic reforms and austerity measures prescribed by the IMF and World Bank in a desperate bid to return to eligibility for the international donor pool.

Petroleum, not Islamic economics, saved the Sudan economy. By 2000, oil alone had caused Sudan to achieve a trade surplus for the first time in 20 years. In 2005 Sudan was producing an average of 363,000 barrels of crude oil per day at its Unity and Heglig fields in the South.^[68]

National Disunity and Civil War

Coming to power, the NIF government faced two major domestic political issues. First, they had inherited a country divided by civil war and civil heterogeneity–a continuing problem, exacerbated by the NIF’s rigorous ideological and religious stances. Second, the NIF lacked a popular mandate to govern, seizing power and acting to discourage both dissent and the possibilities of counter-coups. Southern rebel victories in the early 1990s, and the expanding insurgency in Darfur, in the east and in the Nuba Mountains, undermined confidence in the regime. Reaction grew apace against the intransigent Islamist policies begun under Numayri and the NIF. Moderate and secularized Muslims in the North mounted stronger opposition to policies of Arabization or Islamization on pragmatic grounds. Finally, the sociocultural pluralism of the country blocked the formation of a unified Sudanese national identity, making law and government a patchwork of compromises at best, and incitement to mutiny at worst. The second issue, legitimacy of authority, remained untethered to the fractured national identity and a continuing controversy over an acceptable constitution. Several military coup attempts failed. This web of unresolved issues contributed to the unification of all the opposition parties–the Umma, the DUP, the trade unions, the Darfurian rebels and the Southern rebel forces–against Khartum.

The NIF regime tackled the first problem in a feckless fashion: the lack of a national identity putatively would be remedied by embarking on a program of Islamization, making Sudan a Muslim country and suppressing the Christian and Animist obstacles to the Shari’a. The government initiated Comprehensive Call (Da’wa) in southern Sudan between 1992 and 1996, replete with extensive funding from Islamic charities. The project sought to unify education, proselytization, humanitarian development, economic assistance, and counter insurgency efforts by forcibly establishing camps for black Africans where they would be instructed in the Koran and in subservience to Khartum.^[69] Apostasy became a criminal offense; the Shari’a continued to be enforced as the law of Sudan. The NIF articulation of a national Islamic character had been flawed by inability to separate Islam from Arab descent. A malignant racism characterized relationships with fundamentalist Muslims in the Beja Mountains and in Darfur. In 1999, when al-Turabi was sidelined by al-Bashir, the Sudanese Islamist movement split–mainly along ethnic lines. Most of the westerners supported al-Turabi, although not without recriminations and bitterness, while the central Arabs supported al-Bashir. Al-Turabi’s fall in 2000–al-Bashir suspended parliament and declared a state of emergency to remove him–seems to reflect a subtle shift in Sudanese politics, although belied by few immediate substantive policy changes, as al-Bashir’s government continued to rely upon the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the NIF/National Congress Party.^[70]

The division caused by the civil wars (in the south and in the east) was addressed solely as a military, rather than a political or cultural matter. The NIF poured money into the wars, hoping for a swift military solution. The government conscripted the jihadist Popular Defense Front (PDF), forcing northern Muslims to wage a bloody and indecisive war against the southern rebels–largely non-Muslim, and including minority Christians, who invited aid and succor from Christian missionary charities and Christian politicians in the West, especially in Britain and the United States. The government contributed to the religious war label by enlisting support for its campaign in Islamist terms in order to muster assistance, domestically and internationally. In 1989, al-Turabi characterized the war in the South as a jihad; in 1992, six pro-government ulama in Kordofan issued a fatwa in support of jihad in the Nuba Mountains; but with jihad came a “scorched earth”–even genocidal–military strategy. A 1991 Africa Watch report on the Nubian people in Eastern Kordofan Province described widespread killings, disappearances, attacks on the educated and leadership class, and forcible efforts to Islamicize the Nubians–tantamount to ethnic cleansing.^[71] President al-Bashir reinforced the Islamist rhetoric on Sudanese Independence Day in 1995, when he called for a mass public jihad against all unbelievers in Sudan.

Exacerbating the second issue of severely limited domestic legitimacy, Khartum embarked on an ambitious program of elimination of dissenters and opponents of the regime. The notorious “Ghost Houses” of Khartum appeared; stories of disappearances and torture were rampant throughout the city. Reports of violent repression against opponents were met with the blithe pronouncement by al-Turabi that “Islam does not permit such things.”^[72] Many prominent politicians were jailed, exiled, or fled: in 1992, the government invaded the headquarters of the DUP and the Umma in Khartum North and tortured Sid Ahmad al-Husayn, the most senior member of the DUP, and arrested the Khatmiyya leader Shaykh Muhammad al-Haddiyya.^[73] Egypt, Eritrea, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States attracted large numbers of a growing Sudanese expatriate community. Contacts increased among the leaders of exiled organizations and the Sudanese rebel movements operating inside the country. The 13 major parties, including the SPLM, formed an umbrella opposition-in-exile group called the National Democratic Alliance in 1989, and helped augment international opposition to the NIF regime–although the political, religious, and ethnic factions inside and outside Sudan have little in common even today, beside their intense dislike of the NIF regime. Still, they constitute a large slice of the numerical population and potential political influence inside Sudan. To counter them, the NIF regime continues to oscillate between brute force and tactical conciliation.

Reconciliation and Defiance

Moves Toward Peace

In January 2005, the Khartum government of NIF/NCP and the main SPLA/M southern factions signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in Nairobi, Kenya, to end the decades long civil war. The CPA spells out the terms of the peace settlement in exquisite detail, including power sharing, wealth (including oil revenues) division, security arrangements, and the disarmament and integration of southern militia units into the national army. In addition, the CPA allows the South to hold a referendum, after six years, on the question of independence. Under the integrated Government of National Unity (GoNU), an interim National Constitution and Declaration of Principles was signed on July 5, 2005, preliminary to drafting a permanent constitution.

With the help of African Union mediators and international support, the GoNU and one major Darfurian rebel faction at Abuja signed a peace agreement on May 5, 2006. Since the signing of the CPA, some senior Sudanese officials have recognized that lasting peace in other parts of the country must be based on a similarly comprehensive power and wealth sharing model. The Minni Minawi faction of the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) signed the peace accords, but three other rebel splinter factions remained unconvinced that their demands were fully addressed. Despite intense international pressure, none of the reluctant groups has yet signed a peace agreement with Khartum. A joint statement from Asmara, Eritrea, on June 7, 2006, asserted that the Abuja peace was brought about by international “intimidation;” that it merely reproduces “old divisive and partial solutions that cannot bring peace to Darfur or Sudan.”^[74] The three outlying rebel factions signed a cooperation agreement in Asmara, Eritrea, in late June 2006 and founded the National Redemption Front, pledged to continue its struggle against Khartum in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan. By 2008, two of the main factions were “negotiating” separately, on their own.

Continuing International Pressure

Obviously, the NIF regime faces obstacles to acceptance in the international community, although the two recent internal peace agreements promote a more benign image. The IMF has issued positive interim reports about Sudan’s debt repayment scheme. The continued flow of oil revenues ensures a new era for Sudan’s credit rating. Sudan has made concerted efforts to repair relations with Egypt and Libya, as well as with other Arab nations. In the South, African mediators have succeeded in crafting a peace agreement, serving temporarily to improve Sudanese relationships within Africa. The Darfur imbroglio remains unresolved, although Sudan has attracted some African support in its stand against “colonialism” in the guise of European contributions to a UN monitoring and peacekeeping force. Perhaps most remarkably, Sudan has emerged as a strategic U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, providing key information about global Islamist networks and detaining suspects within its borders.^[75] While the regime has accepted an African Union/UN peacekeeping monitoring group in Darfur, an actual end to fighting has eluded international efforts due to foot-dragging and resistance by Sudanese authorities and their secret support of marauding militias.

Despite this mix of developments, equally positive as negative, Sudan’s international legitimacy remains tarnished by the Darfur crisis, where mass killing is undeterred by UN peacekeepers now on the ground. Amidst three years of public international discussion and debate, UN officials have issued statements and Security Council Resolutions on the situations in both the South and the west. Resolution 1590 of the Security Council, March 24, 2005, authorized 10,000 troops for a UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) to monitor peace arrangements in the South and to implement the CPA. The UN Security Council Resolution 1706 of August 31, 2006, authorized 20,600 troops to enforce the 2006 Darfur cease-fire; in 2005 sanctions and travel restrictions were placed on Sudanese leaders deemed supporting the violence.^[76] The Security Council has also referred the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court for investigation into possible “crimes against humanity,” although the United Nations in 2005 did not use the term genocide. In March 2007 the UN Mission in Sudan spoke of “gross violations” of human rights by the Sudanese government. At the International Criminal Court in July 2008 ten charges of war crimes were filed against President al-Bashir, who allegedly “masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part” three ethnic groups in Darfur.^[77]

Walking the Tightrope

Islamism in Sudan as a viable program is receding for the new Government of National Unity, trapped between an effort toward renewed international (especially economic and commercial) acceptance and the bloody residue of the campaign to create a unified national and Islamic identity. Al-Bashir’s modified isolation of al-Turabi suggested a shift toward greater pragmatism. Nevertheless, despite divisions among its adherents, Islamism remains influential in official circles, particularly in the security services and in the military. An Islamist posture appears central to the president’s grip on the country. An increase in cooperation with the United States in the realm of anti-terrorism ruffles the feathers of militants in Khartum. Al-Bashir’s June 2006 pronouncement that he will not allow “colonizing forces” to “internationalize” the Darfur conflict was a gesture of appeasement.^[78] Recent actions reflect the tenuous balance: Salah Gosh, head of Sudanese national security and intelligence, revealed death pledges from members of the security services and the Popular Defense Forces, asserting, “if the choice is between recolonialization of Sudan and incursion into its soil by foreign troops, then interior of earth is better than its surface.”^[79] Concurrently, Gosh cultivates a close relationship with U.S. intelligence services. Gosh made an unpublicized flight in April 2005 to Washington D.C. aboard a CIA jet to high-level meetings with intelligence staff, described in the State Department as providing “specific information that is… important, functional and current”; Gosh acknowledges that Sudan’s partnership with the U.S. intelligence community is strong.^[80] Sudan cooperates with the United States in an effort to shed sanctions and to quit the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The 2005 Report on Terrorism still designated Sudan as active (along with Cuba, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Iran), but it also stressed Sudan’s “cooperative commitment against known and suspected international terrorist elements” and its ability to produce “desired results” against them. Nevertheless the 2007 Report on Terrorism still retains Sudan on the list.^[81]

Regime stability remains a challenge in Sudan as long as the Government of National Unity (formed by the Coalition Peace Agreement) barely functions as a unit. Salva Kiir, vice president and representative Southerner (successor to his SPLM chief, the late John Garang), claimed that the coalition was not consulted concerning the rejection of UN troops. At a rally in the southern city of Juba, June 30, 2006, Kiir announced, “the position of the SPLM is obvious and has no problem with the deployment of international forces in Darfur.”^[82] In the past Kiir favored secession for the South. His regional popularity renders ignoring him a problem for al-Bashir and the present National Congress government.^[83]

Internationally, it is unclear whether an expanded UN peacekeeping force could operate effectively in Darfur, since there is little peace to keep. A Darfurian National Redemption Front (of rebel factions) seems a phantom; barely observed ceasefires alternate with violent outbreaks. Additionally, the enforcement of the CPA also remains spotty; actual power and wealth sharing arrangements remain unclear. The spectre of the agreement for the Southern Sudan’s referendum on independence–two years hence, if on time–haunts the commitments and arrangements for a coalition government. The present petroleum extraction processes are located in the South; if the South votes for secession, it will create uncertainty for outside investors and undermine the present financial basis of an improving Sudanese economy. It will also set a dangerous precedent for a regime facing restive eastern provinces in addition to Darfur.

Where does this leave Islamism in Sudan? A respected authority, Alex de Waal, recently observed that “Sudan’s Islamist project may be said to have failed.” He offers five reasons for his belief: 1) The security organ of the Islamists took over the political cause. 2) The financial operations of the Islamists corrupted the long-term political strategy. 3) Arabist racism infected the movement, undermining the integration of western Sudanese into the country’s commanding elements. 4) Islamist thought is weak in the matter of governing a pluralist society. Counter-insurgency expanded under the flag of jihad. 5) Al-Turabi’s personalization of the movement, opportunism, and identification of the Sudanese Islamist state with his own rule.^[84] At the same time the issue of an enforced and effectively administered settlement with the South also contradicts the campaign of militants in the North, especially in Khartum, to impose Islamist governance over the whole country. In consequence of the CPA, Shari’a no longer applies to the Southerners.

Sudan today is no Iran. Rather, in some respects, the present position of Islamism in Sudan, as ideology and political program, somewhat resembles that of Pakistan: the government, (until recently) headed by a military leader, cooperates in the war on terror with the United States and Europe, yet faces weakened, but not destroyed, Islamist adherents within the government and within the political elite. Despite the project’s current failings, perhaps the most intriguing element in the Islamist journey in Sudan has been the quarry role of Islamist thought and its practice over the past 20 years or so, for modernizing Muslim politicians as well as for militant and extremist Islamist political actors alike.

*Harvey Glickman is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, USA.

*Emma Rodman, Haverford Class of 2007, is an undergraduate senior political science major.

*The authors extend grateful acknowledgement to the Haverford College Faculty Support Fund, which provided assistance for research in connection with this study.

NOTES