From the Test of Citizenship to Its Guarantees Complementing Zuhair Osman Hamad (Abu al-Zahra)’s ar

01:00 AM October, 26 2026

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From the Test of Citizenship to Its Guarantees
Complementing Zuhair Osman Hamad (Abu al-Zahra)’s article “Religion and the State in Sudan: The Elite’s Impasse and the Test of Citizenship”

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

“Complementing, Not Confronting” series

Introduction

In his article published on 17 October 2026, Zuhair Osman Hamad returns to the oldest and most entangled question of the Sudanese state: the question of religion and the state. Yet he does not approach it through its familiar door. From the first line he refuses to reduce the debate to a binary confrontation between advocates of an Islamic state and supporters of a secular one. He reads it instead as one expression of a deeper crisis: a crisis of foundation in which the source of legitimacy, the limits of power and the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the institutions of government have never been settled.
This reading is, in my view, among the most mature contributions on the subject to have appeared during the war. This paper therefore does not come to dispute it, but to complement it. The article frames the “test of citizenship” as a set of decisive questions, and leaves – whether by intent or for lack of space – a further question unanswered: what institutions will compel every political project to pass this test, not once when the constitution is drafted, but on every day of governing؟ This is where the Charter of Salvation and State-Building seeks to contribute.

1. Points of Convergence

The article converges with the Charter on five essential matters, which I set out because they form common ground on which to build:
Moving the question from identity to power. Hamad argues that the real question is not whether religion is present in society, but how the state deals with that presence without becoming an instrument for imposing one particular interpretation. This is the core of the distinction on which the Charter rests, between a “citizenship state” and an “identity state.”
Judging projects by their effects. The author writes that secular, Islamist and conciliatory projects alike “are not measured by their names, but by the freedoms they allow.” This criterion is very close to what the Charter calls “ascending functional legitimacy”: legitimacy earned through performance and accountability and built from the base upward, not derived from the ideological banner that those in power raise.
Even-handed critique. The article holds the Ingaz experience to account for turning a declared religious reference into a tool for entrenching power, while equally holding secular discourse to account should it end as “a closed elite identity” that looks down on religious society. This fairness in distributing accountability is a precondition for any serious national dialogue.
Linking religion to the structure of centre and periphery. The author rejects the idea that religious disagreement is merely a cover for interests, but he equally refuses to isolate it from the historic imbalances in the distribution of power, wealth and representation. This is precisely the angle from which the Charter views the crisis of the Sudanese state.
No need for philosophical consensus. The article states that “democratic societies do not need a comprehensive philosophical consensus in order to coexist.” This converges with the Charter’s principle of the “rejection of completeness”: the Charter does not claim to offer a final conception of the common good to be imposed on all, but shared rules under which people who differ can live together. One may recall here what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” noting that this connection is mine, not the author’s.

2. From Questions to Institutions

The strongest part of the article is its closing list of questions: Are rights equal regardless of belief؟ Who holds the authority to interpret the reference framework؟ How is a conflict between a religious interpretation and a constitutional right resolved؟ Can the judiciary protect the individual from a power that enjoys majority support؟ Elsewhere he adds two exceptionally precise questions:
“Who interprets this reference؟ Who oversees its interpretation؟ And what prevents the ruler from presenting his political choices as religious rulings that may not be challenged؟”
Yet the article stops at the question. There is a gentle irony here: the author faults conciliatory formulas because they cannot resolve the contradiction “unless they are transformed into rules capable of application and accountability,” and then closes his own article with lofty ethical criteria that have not yet been turned into rules and institutions. A question, however precise, protects no citizen; what protects the citizen is an institution with the authority to answer and the capacity to enforce.
Here the Charter offers what it calls the “Institutional Firewall.” Its basic idea is that the danger does not lie in a ruler holding political or religious convictions, but in the fusion of authorities that ought to remain separate: the political authority that competes to govern, and the executive and military authority that holds the instruments of coercion. If a firewall with independent guardians stands between these domains, it becomes difficult for any group – whatever its reference framework – to convert its electoral mandate into control over the army, the security services and the civil service.
I believe the logic of this firewall extends naturally to Hamad’s question of “who interprets.” If the instruments of coercion are shielded from partisan use, a monopoly over interpretation loses its capacity to become punishment or deprivation. Society retains its full right to express its values, to reason about them and to disagree over them, while no authority may turn its own interpretation into a ruling enforced by force. Added to this are the guarantees of fundamental rights set out in the Charter’s constitutional annex, which no passing majority has the power to abolish.

3. Why Does the State Remain a Prize؟

In its conclusion the article reaches a diagnosis of great importance: that the elite’s impasse lies in “continuing to view the state as a political spoil or a tool for imposing a single intellectual project.” But it does not ask the next question: why does the state remain a prize after every revolution, every agreement, and every change of faces and slogans؟
The Charter’s answer is what it calls the “gateway economy.” Since its formation, the Sudanese state has functioned as a set of gateways: a gateway to public employment; a gateway to licences, contracts and finance; a gateway to representation and recognition. Whoever holds the keys to these gateways holds the power to distribute rents. And when the gateways are closed to all but the bearers of a particular identity – religious, cultural, regional or partisan – the struggle to define identity becomes a struggle over the keys, not over meanings.
This explains, in my view, the phenomenon the author observes so accurately: that the question of the state’s identity returns to the forefront whenever foundation-building falters, “not as a settled debate governed by institutions, but as part of the struggle for power.” Religious – or secular – discourse becomes in such conditions a tool for determining who passes through the gateway and who stands outside it. The solution, therefore, is not to change the discourse alone but to dismantle the gateways themselves: through transparent rules for employment, contracting and finance; through caps on external funding of political forces; and through separating the right to public service from loyalty to any group. When the price of controlling the definition of identity falls, the intensity of the struggle over it falls too.

4. Representation by Place, Not by Lineage

The article rightly calls for linking the constitutional debate to “questions of decentralised governance, the fair distribution of resources, political participation, and guaranteeing the rights of the regions.” But this call remains general unless it answers a procedural question: how is diversity translated into representation without becoming a tribal or sectarian quota system that reproduces the problem؟
In its “Fourth Pillar,” the Charter proposes that representation rest on place rather than lineage: geographic representation units, and weighted voting that ensures the voice of less densely populated regions is not dissolved in the majority of the centre. The difference between the two principles is essential to the subject of this article in particular. Representation based on lineage or sect makes religious and cultural identity a condition of political presence, whereas representation based on place makes the citizen present as an inhabitant of a land and a participant in its destiny, whatever his or her belief.

5. When Ambiguity Becomes Policy: Evidence from Constitutional History

The heading Hamad chose for one section of his article – “When ambiguity becomes policy” – describes a real phenomenon, and warns of “a verbal agreement that does not survive the first real test of power.” Yet the article contains almost no historical evidence, and such evidence makes the idea tangible for the non-specialist reader. I propose recalling some of it:
The September 1983 Laws: when Sharia was proclaimed under Nimeiri by decree from above at a moment of political and economic crisis, not through constitutional consensus. This was among the factors that contributed to the renewed outbreak of war in the South.
The 2019 Constitutional Document: which came after the revolution and was almost silent on the relationship between religion and the state, so that the question was deferred once again in the name of transitional priorities.
The July 2020 amendments: which abolished the penalty for apostasy and criminalised takfir as part of a package of legal amendments. This bears directly on the author’s question about the individual’s right to “change his belief.” Yet these reforms remained executive decisions in a transitional setting and were never transformed into entrenched constitutional guarantees.
The Addis Ababa Declaration (September 2020) and the Juba Declaration of Principles (March 2021): in which Prime Minister Hamdok, and then Sovereign Council chairman al-Burhan, agreed with Abdelaziz al-Hilu, in closely related formulations, on separating religion from the state and on the state not adopting an official religion. But the principle remained confined to negotiating documents and never found its way into a constitution or an institution.
The “Tasis” Charter (Nairobi, 2025): signed by the Rapid Support Forces and their allies, which according to published reports declared the state secular, set against a Port Sudan discourse that invokes religious reference in mobilisation. Here “ambiguity as policy” reaches its peak: the question of religion and the state is used not to resolve the contradiction but to draw the lines of alignment in the war, with each side raising the formula that wins it allies.
This evidence shows that the problem has never been an absence of texts. Sudanese have written many declarations on separating religion from the state, and others on its religious reference. The problem is that all these texts remained suspended on the will of whoever governed, with no firewall to protect them and no institution to enforce them.

6. A Religiosity That Did Not Pass Through the State

Hamad divides the currents engaged with the question of religion and the state into three: the civil-democratic, the Islamist and the conciliatory. The division is useful for analytical purposes, as the author himself says. But it overlooks a fourth mode of religious presence, which is in fact the oldest and most widespread in Sudan: Sufi and popular religiosity, which lived for centuries in society without passing through the state.
Islam spread in the Nile Valley Sudan, particularly from the era of the Funj Sultanate, through shaykhs, Sufi orders and khalwas more than through the sultan. Wad Dayfallah’s Tabaqat preserves the picture of a society in which religious authority was distributed among many shaykhs, each with his own masid, his followers and his own ijtihad, none of whom held a monopoly on defining religion for all. The orders multiplied – the Qadiriyya, the Sammaniyya, the Khatmiyya, the Tijaniyya and others – so that plurality of interpretation was a social reality before it was a political demand. The khalwa and the masid performed the functions of education, mediation, dispute resolution and shelter for the stranger, in a society where the state was absent from most of people’s lives.
This observation matters beyond history. It means that rejecting the state’s monopoly over the interpretation of religion is not an imported idea alien to religious Sudanese society; it is closer to the way that society has lived its faith for centuries. A state neutral toward belief does not collide with this religiosity; it protects its plurality from being swallowed by a single authority. This is a partial answer, from within the Sudanese experience itself, to the question the author poses to the civil current: how can it communicate with religious society without becoming a closed elite identity؟
Honesty requires, however, that we not turn this picture into romantic nostalgia. In the twentieth century the religious capital of the orders and the great religious houses was converted into political capital through the sectarian parties – the very sectarianism the article cites among the causes of failed consensus. Successive regimes also sought to co-opt or contain the shaykhs. Here this observation meets the “gateway economy” once more: the danger was never in communal religiosity itself, but in the moment it became a key to the gateways of the state. What the Charter proposes is not the exclusion of religion from the public sphere, but closing the road by which any capital – religious, tribal or financial – is converted into privileged access to power and resources.
I should make clear that this observation is social and historical in nature, not a call for an alternative religious reference. The Charter takes care to ground its political documents on a civic philosophical basis on which Sudanese of all beliefs can meet – and that care is itself one of the requirements of the citizenship the author calls for.

7. The War and After: From Warning to Alternative

The article rightly warns that “a settlement confined to distributing influence among armed forces or political elites, without constitutional guarantees for citizens, may reproduce the crisis in a new form.” But it offers no picture of a transitional period that would prevent this.
Here the Charter proposes the “Transitional Bridge Initiative”: a transitional period with a maximum time limit of five years, so that transition does not become a permanent condition justifying the tenure of those who manage it, and whose task is to build the institutions that will protect citizenship, not to share out posts. This is coupled with “three-tier transitional justice,” which addresses the legacy of violations at multiple levels of accountability, redress and reconciliation, so that victims are not asked to forget in the name of peace, nor does the demand for justice become revenge that shuts the door on settlement. The question the author poses – “who governs, by what mandate, under what oversight, and for whose benefit institutions and resources are managed” – is not answered on the day an agreement is signed, but in the engineering of the period that follows.

8. Mutual Revision and the Principle of Iftiqār

Hamad closes his article with a call for “mutual revision”: a revision of discourses that conflate the sanctity of religion with the legitimacy of the ruler, of discourses that look down on religious society, and of elites who defer foundational questions. It is a noble call, but it assumes the parties will revise themselves voluntarily – an assumption the Sudanese experience does little to encourage.
Here the Charter offers the concept of iftiqār – mutual interdependence. The idea is that the parties do not need to agree philosophically in order to submit to shared rules; it is enough for each to recognise that it cannot govern Sudan alone, nor feel safe if others govern it without constraint. This is what is expressed, in different languages, by Heidegger’s notion of “being-with” (Mitsein), Levinas’s responsibility before the face of the other, the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and Elinor Ostrom’s research on how communities govern shared resources through rules they make themselves. The revision the author calls for becomes possible when it shifts from a virtue we hope for from the elites to an interest imposed on them by an institutional structure that makes exclusion costly and partnership rewarding.

Conclusion: A State That Recognises Before It Demands

Hamad’s article ends with a sentence that deserves to be remembered: the Sudanese citizen “waits for a state that recognises him before it demands his loyalty.” I agree with him entirely, and I would add that recognition is not achieved by declaration alone. Sudanese constitutions and declarations have recognised the citizen many times – and then those in power withdrew that recognition at the first test.
The recognition that endures is the one guarded by institutions: a firewall that prevents political mandates from being turned into control of the instruments of coercion; gateways opened by transparent rules, not by loyalties; representation grounded in shared land, not in lineage or belief; a transitional period limited in time and in mission; and a justice that neither forgets nor avenges. In this way the questions of the “test of citizenship” that the author formulated so skilfully become constitutional provisions to which everyone who governs is held accountable.
This is not a substitute for what Hamad has written but a complement to it. He has framed the question well, and the Charter is a modest attempt to contribute to the answer – an attempt open by its nature to criticism and development, because it rejects completeness just as it rejects monopoly.