البحث عن معنى الحياة: د. فاروق مُحمّد إبراهيم – الفصل الأول

Quote: A New-Humanism Movement for Peace and Human Rights in Sudan An Alternative National Project for Northern Sudan, from perspective of the Sudanese Committee for the defense of Human Rights and Freedom, by committee coordinator Farouk M Ibrahim Abstract All post-independence projects to achieve good governance and better life for the Sudanese people through changing governments reached a dead end, and the country is on verge of total collapse. This paper proposes an autonomous nationwide grassroots non-partisan direct democracy movement for peace and human rights, here and now, based on theistic humanism, to change the Sudanese people first, by uniting human rights activism based on knowledge with spiritual struggle based on faith, in order for the Sudanese to get the governments and better life they deserve. Universal monotheism extending loyalty to the human species as a whole and interpreting faith to mean absolute individual freedom and comprehensive social justice are fundamental tenets of the movement, and a body of reformist ideas on humanist lines is presented in its favor. A model of human societies developed by evolutionary biologists to accommodate science and religion in an intellectually convincing and spiritually satisfying unified worldview is adopted. The paper argues in favor of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the current scientific debate (Defenders of the Truth, by Ullica Segerstrale, OXFORD 2000) towards the model of human societies developed by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary (The origins of Life, OXFORD 2000, pp 145-8) in conjunction with Tillich’s definition of faith as ultimate concern (Dynamics of Faith, 1957, Harper Torchbooks) and Dobzhansky’s Biology of Ultimate Concern (1967, Fontana). This paradigm shift gives credence to the universal project shift advocated by Henryk Skolimowski (The Participatory Mind, a new theory of knowledge and the universe, A Penguin ARKANA, 1997). Proactive engagement of a critical mass of 1% of the population of Sudanese university students and young graduates, i.e. a transformative core of about 10 000, in a process of acculturation and mobilization for 5 years, is considered adequate for movement’s take-off. Presentation 1 All post-independence projects to achieve good governance and better life for the Sudanese people through changing governments reached a dead end, and the country is on verge of total collapse. Blaming the traditional sectarian political parties for current Sudan’s problems is just like blaming the British. Those parties reflected consciousness of their day and had no plans beyond replacing condominium flags by that of the independent Sudanese republic, and maintaining status-quo. Faced with post-independence problems beyond his scope, the elected Prime Minister suspended the Westminster modeled 1956 constitution in the third year of independence and, with connivance of the two main Sectarian leaders, handed power to the army, which resumed colonial-type rule by decree 2 Post-independence politics were dominated by two paradigms of Khartoum University student politics, secular-Marxist and Islamist. Led by the powerful, communist dominated labour and tenant-farmer’s unions, and associations of professionals, women youth and students, the Sudanese people peacefully toppled the military dictatorship and placed the ‘Union of Unions’ at the head of a six-month transitional government to end the South civil war, restore civil rights and freedoms under the amended 1956 constitution, and hand over political power to a democratically elected government 3 Post-intifada politics were dominated by polarization and bid for power by, on one hand, a Turabi-Sadik Almahdi led block which proceeded, after banning the Communist Party and dismissing its elected Constituent Assembly members, on power monopoly plans through a retrogressive Islamic constitution, and, on the other hand, the Communist Party, the powerful labor Unions, the secular democratic associations, and the clandestine Free Army Officers for a military coup 4 The May 1969 coup, which took place on the eve of the third reading of the Islamic Constitution Bill gained immediate and overwhelming popular support. Decrees were promulgated, after immediate national dialogue, for control of commanding heights of the economy by the state, for a five-year rehabilitation and economic development plan, agrarian reform, regional autonomy for the South, educational reform and expansion, local government reform based on grassroots democracy, , and a Nasserite-type Socialist Union. While post-colonial political and economic structures permitted top-bottom development, popular morale and support was high, and the Addis Ababa peace agreement, which ended the South civil war, lasted for over ten years 5 Everything was initially designed by and for the Communist Party as the engine of transformation, and this was the regimes Achilles heel. A majority of 17 to 6 outvoted Numeiry in a meeting of the communist-controlled free officer’s organization on timing of the coup. Nevertheless, since Numeiry already had forces in the field, he proceeded with coup and faced the communists, on whose support he depended, with a fate-accompli. The struggle for power, which started in day one, ended by a coup-counter-coup in July 1971, after which the Communist Party was crushed and its historical leadership executed 6 Running out of steam, the project lost potency and the regime progressively turned into one-man rule. By 1977, following Numeiry’s ‘national reconciliation’ move, Turabi and his Islamicist movement stepped in key government and political positions to deflect regime’s course. Abrogation of the Addis peace, the infamous September (Islamic) laws, oath of allegiance to Numeiry as president for life, resurgence of the civil war, and execution of Ustaz Taha for heresy were the outcome. By the time Numeiry realized threat to his authority the April popular uprising matured. However, by that time Turabi’s fascist student group was transformed into a formidable national political and economic force. The President, Prime Minister, Army Chief, and some key cabinet members of the transitional government were committed Islamicists. Everything was set for the subsequent fragile parliamentary government to give way to the June 1989 coup 7 Dr. Turabi spelled out regime objectives after ending the self-imposed prison deception, ‘you go to the Presidential Palace and I go behind bars’. ‘We were organizations in society; first Moslem Brotherhood, then Islamic Charter, then the National Islamic Front’, he said. ‘Our objective is to become society itself. Those outside us will be outside society’. Plans were at hand for ‘remoulding the Sudanese person’ on Islamicist image and a Ministry of social affairs was established under the then Turabi deputy, A. O. Taha. An army of tens of thousands of ordinary and intrinsically decent people, lured by the ‘state religion’ and corrupted by material benefits, was recruited for the job. Cynical theological formulae were tailored to justify every Islamicist act; the religion of the state became opiate of the people. The overall outcome is today in front of our eyes. The South has been separated and civil war is not only rampant in Darfur, Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan, but also war has become the regime’s way of existence and its survival mechanism. The fascist Islamicist student movement of 1977 is now the capitalist class; its Cadres are the Sudanese state; its ideology is state religion. The regime cynically created its own opposition under Turabi himself, just in case. The old society is now the proletariat, outside gates of the Islamicists paradise. This ‘achievement’ was secured through unprecedented mass dismissals, mass murders, massive legalized theft, robbery and piracy of state property and funds, unthinkable corruption, unlimited human rights abuse, and unending civil war. The worst is that without plugging the ‘vivid reality of inherent unity under the rule of one God,’ which is the foundation of the Sudanese national character, from their own hearts first and then hearts of the tens of thousands of wretched citizens whom they used and abused, the Islamicist project would not have succeeded. Even worse, disintegration of the national character is now creeping to the rest of the population. The country is held at ransom: either to submit or to regress and disintegrate, not six decades to the eve of independence, but seven centuries to the eve of collapse of the Christian Kingdom of Dongola, which Trimingham considered “to offer an instance of the grave dangers of the Church being simply the religious institution of the state”. So, what is to be done ? 8 The public mood in Sudan now, to the last activist, even the Islamists calling for regime change, is: separate religion from state and politics, and then forget about it. I call here for a different strategy. “Islam”, in the introductory words of S. Trimingham, (Islam in Sudan, 1949,) “has influenced the psychology of the people of the Northern Sudan and fused their religious and social ideas into a unity of outlook which excites our wonder and admiration. The Sudanese received Islam whole-heartedly, but, through their unique capacity of assimilation molded it to their own particular mentality; escaping the formulae of theologians, they sang in it, danced in it, wept in it, brought their own customs, their own festivals, into it, paganized it a good deal, but always kept the vivid reality of its inherent unity under the rule of one God.” Islam in this sense is not a belief that we are free to take or leave. It is our existence and being, the foundation of our national character. It is the vivid reality of inherent unity under the rule of one God that inspired the Mahdi (1843-85) to unite the heterogeneous peoples of the Sudan, when their morale was at its lowest, to sweep the corrupt representatives of the decadent, imperfectly modernized Egypto-Ottoman power out of the country, and to heroically resist reinvasion 9 This paper proposes an autonomous nationwide grassroots non-partisan direct democracy movement for peace and human rights, here and now, based on theistic humanism, to change the Sudanese people first, by uniting human rights activism based on knowledge with spiritual struggle based on faith, in order for the Sudanese to get the governments and better life they deserve 10 Program of the movement is promotion of rule of law, independence of the judiciary and human rights and freedom for all citizens and persons present in the Sudan, as provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and associated regional and international conventions, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights for men, women, children, displaced persons, refugees, persons with special needs, migrant workers and others, without any discrimination on whatever basis. The nation-state is here considered a project to confer human and citizenship rights to a given population. Such national commitment is a precondition for universality of human rights 11 Universal monotheism extending loyalty to the human species as a whole and interpreting faith to mean absolute individual freedom and comprehensive social justice are fundamental tenets of the movement, and a body of reformist ideas on humanist lines is presented in its favor. A model of human societies developed by evolutionary biologists to accommodate science and religion in an intellectually convincing and spiritually satisfying unified worldview is adopted. The paper argues in favor of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the current scientific debate (Defenders of the Truth, by Ullica Segerstrale, OXFORD 2000) towards the model of human societies developed by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary (The origins of Life, OXFORD 2000, pp 145-8) in conjunction with Tillich’s definition of faith as ultimate concern (Dynamics of Faith, 1957, Harper Torchbooks) and Dobzhansky’s Biology of Ultimate Concern (1967, Fontana) 12 This paradigm shift gives credence to the universal project shift advocated by Henryk Skolimowski (The Participatory Mind, a new theory of knowledge and the universe, A Penguin ARKANA, 1997). Skolimowski expounds substitution of the classical Project that continued from antiquity roughly to the sixteenth century and derived its knowledge and values from religion gradually by the secular project, which derived its knowledge, and values from science. The secular project is in its turn giving way universally to a third, holistic, integrative, synthetic, humanist and evolutionary project. It is the project advocated in this paper. To distinguish theist humanism from 18th century secular humanism, which is ambivalent towards religion, the term new-humanism is here applied. As described by Skolemowski, “the term project is used to denote the overall realm which directs our visions (within a given culture) and guides our inspirations, as well as justifies the ends of our lives. The idea of the project is much larger than that of the paradigm. The project engenders paradigms that serve it. It is a matter of vision and deep beliefs. After people invest their beliefs in it, they try to justify it rationally” 13 Implementation of this project needs , first, a core of transformative ideas, or paradigms, second, a core of transformative activists, or paradigm group, third, a program of action based on human rights conventions and UN Millennium Goals, and fourth, a social base of neighborhood committees for societal transformation. Proactive engagement of a new-humanist transformative core group of 1% of the population of Sudanese university students and young graduates i.e. about 10 000, in a five-year program of acculturation and mobilization is considered adequate for take-off of a grassroots based human rights’ movement 14 The movement is not a political party and would not aim to bid for political power. It is independent of governments and political parties. It complements present opposition strategy and does not oppose it. Participation in transitional governments deprived the October 64 and April 85 human rights movements of continuity and ended up as military dictatorships. The new-humanist movement will maintain itself as a popular, decentralized, autonomous movement based on general assemblies of Sudan’s 134 localities, linked through bottom-up coordination committees, as a model of direct democracy and permanent intifada