From the Question of the Islamists’ Future to the Question of State Design A reading of Mr Zuhair

06:12 PM November, 05 2026

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A State Greater Than All

From the Question of the Islamists’ Future to the Question of State Design

A reading of Mr Zuhair Abu Al-Zahraa’s article “The Future of the Islamists in Sudan: Between Regaining Influence, the Crisis of the Project, and the Danger of Retreat”

Dr Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

Introduction

In his latest article, Mr Zuhair Abu Al-Zahraa returns to one of the most sensitive and complex of Sudanese questions: the future of the Islamic Movement after three decades in power, a revolution that toppled its regime, and a war that has reshuffled every card. To the article’s credit, it does not settle for the conventional question of whether the Islamists can return to power. It moves the question to a deeper level: do they still have a viable political project at all؟

In keeping with this series, the present reading complements rather than confronts. It begins with what the article gets right, then traces the points at which its diagnosis stops short of a remedy, and finally sets out the institutional mechanisms that the Charter of Salvation and State-Building proposes to close those gaps. The aim is not to win an argument, but to build together on ground where we agree far more than we differ.

1. What the article gets right

The article has four strengths that deserve recognition, and which, in our view, provide a sound basis for any serious discussion of the post-war period:

Distinguishing three levels. The author refuses to conflate the Islamic Movement as a political and intellectual organisation, the National Congress Party as the former regime’s party, and the military, security and economic networks built up under the Ingaz regime. This distinction is essential, because accountability concerns actions and institutional positions, not intellectual affiliation.
Separating three files. The article holds that excluding an organisation from power-sharing is one thing, depriving individuals of their political rights is another, and disarming armed formations is a third, and that conflating them reproduces the crisis. This is among the most precise statements yet written on the subject.
Methodological integrity. The author is cautious about conflicting estimates of fighter numbers, asks for specific evidence before linking the old networks to war financing, and makes what he reports from Al-Rakoba conditional on its being accurate. We checked what he says about the American decision and found it accurate: the notice published in the US Federal Register designates the “Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood” a Foreign Terrorist Organization, lists the “Sudanese Islamic Movement” and the “al-Bara Bin Malik Brigade” among its aliases, and took effect on 16 March 2026.
An inclusive conclusion. The article concludes that the state Sudan needs “is not a state against the Islamists or with them; it is a state that neither the Islamists nor anyone else is greater than.” That sentence comes close to a definition of the citizenship state as the Charter envisages it.
2. From diagnosis to institutional design

Yet for all the strength of its diagnosis, the article stops at the threshold of the question: how do we build a state that no one is greater than؟ It states the goal clearly and sketches three possible paths, but it leaves the third (a civilian settlement that rebuilds the state) as “a test for all Sudanese forces” without saying how that test is to be passed.

This is precisely where completion is needed. Sudan’s experience since independence has taught us that good intentions and inclusive slogans are not enough, and that every current that has reached power, military or civilian, leftist or Islamist, has found in the absence of institutional constraints a temptation to expand within the state. The problem, then, is not who governs but the absence of a design that prevents any ruler from swallowing the state. The Charter of Salvation and State-Building, in its Ninth Revision, together with the Activation Protocol and the Transitional Bridge Initiative, attempts to supply that design. What follows sets out the parts most relevant to the article’s questions.

3. The distinction the author calls for, already written into the text

The first thing to note is that the distinction the author calls for, between the organisation, its members and its ideas, is not merely an aspiration in the Charter project but a written provision. Section V of the Charter provides for the exclusion of the dissolved National Congress Party, in its senior leadership structures, from the transitional process. But it describes this exclusion as “a narrowly defined judicial exception, not a general political position,” and surrounds it with two safeguards: an individual right of appeal before an independent judicial body for anyone who can show they were not implicated, and an automatic sunset, reviewed once the Truth and Compensation Commission has completed its work, “so as to prevent the exception from becoming a permanent exclusion.”

The Transitional Bridge Initiative spells the principle out further. The exclusion covers the party as an entity and its front organisations, together with those who bear documented leadership responsibility or have been convicted of tamkeen, corruption or abuses. It does not extend to ordinary members, nor to civil servants by virtue of past affiliation alone, nor to the Islamist current as an intellectual current with an inherent right to organise and to express itself. The Initiative’s reasoning is that conflating the responsible entity with everyone who ever belonged to it turns a legal measure into an “ideological purge” and returns us to the very cycle of exclusion we seek to break.

This is exactly what the author argues when he separates excluding the organisation from power-sharing from depriving individuals of their political rights. The difference is that the Charter turns the distinction from a moral principle into a legal procedure, with a body to rule on it, published criteria, and a date on which it ends.

4. The Institutional Firewall: neither tamkeen nor purge

The author identifies the core of the crisis as “a model based on the fusion of the party organisation with the institutions of the state, the army, the security services and the economy.” The Charter addresses this fusion in Section VII, the Institutional Firewall, which separates two layers: the political layer, whose nature is to compete and to alternate in power, and the civil-executive layer, which must be built on competence and functional neutrality.

The Firewall rests on three mechanisms: objective, merit-based rather than loyalty-based criteria for appointment to senior executive posts; periods of job protection that prevent arbitrary dismissal at every political change; and independent review committees that distinguish political responsibility for decisions, which is subject to accountability, from functional competence in implementation, which is protected. The Firewall also extends to the military file: no one may simultaneously command an armed formation, regular or irregular, and hold a party-political position.

Most importantly for this discussion, the Firewall works in both directions. Chapter Eight of the Activation Protocol explicitly criticises the pattern of “wholesale purges after every transition,” carried out “in the name of tamkeen or of dismantling tamkeen, depending on the direction of change,” and distinguishes “between individual accountability and collective purging.” The Firewall thus prevents the Islamists, and everyone else, from re-entrenching themselves, while protecting competent civil servants from being removed merely for their affiliation. That is what makes it acceptable to all: whoever fears, as the author does, “replacing one monopoly with another” will find in it a guarantee as much as a constraint.

5. The shadow economy: from blanket accusation to rule-based review

The author is right that the economy “is no longer the backdrop to the crisis” but has become part of the machinery that sustains the war, and right, at the same time, to warn against “reducing” the link between the old networks and war financing “to a blanket accusation.” The question he leaves open is how to deal with this file without allowing impunity and without politicising asset recovery.

Section VI of the Charter (Financial Sovereignty) offers a set of mechanisms. The most important are: an independent body for the governance of gold and extractive resources, with which concession contracts and production and export volumes are registered and published periodically; the transfer of companies and commercial activities owned by the military and security institutions to the Ministry of Finance or a civilian public body; and an independent review of concession contracts concluded since 15 April 2023 in any zone of control, according to published criteria that include the beneficial owner and any link to financing the fighting. Each review ends in a reasoned, published decision to confirm, renegotiate or cancel, subject to appeal. The Charter states that such contracts are “neither automatically void nor automatically valid.”

Chapter Six of the Activation Protocol addresses a further layer, which it calls the gateway economy: the network of “gateway lords,” field commanders who run organised levies on roads and crossings, and which has become a stable structure whose interest lies in the continued absence of the state itself. Here the Protocol separates the track for surrendering weapons from the track for holding accumulated assets to account.

The lesson of the Empowerment Removal Committee, whose decisions the author notes were suspended, cancelled or revised, is that asset recovery entrusted to a politically constituted body remains hostage to shifts in the balance of power. What the Charter proposes is an independent review with published criteria and a guaranteed right of appeal, applying to everyone without exception. In this way the author’s rejection of blanket accusation is honoured without abandoning accountability.

6. Resetting the Military Landscape: comprehensive, not selective

The article rightly warns that any political agreement that ignores or defers the question of armed formations “will leave the seeds of new violence even after the fighting stops.” The author lists the formations associated with Islamist mobilisation: the al-Baraa bin Malik Brigade, al-Bunyan al-Marsous, al-Furqan, and the mobilisation (istinfar) groups.

We would add one essential observation: dealing with weapons cannot succeed if it is confined to one party, because any selective approach will be read as political liquidation, and those targeted will hold on to their weapons rather than surrender them. That is why Section III of the Charter (Resetting the Military Landscape) proposes three simultaneous tracks: integration into a single national army on professional rather than political criteria; demobilisation coupled with genuine economic reintegration programmes; and institutional restructuring that ends the phenomenon of “parallel armies.”

The Charter provides that these tracks apply “to all formations without exception”: the armed forces themselves as regards restructuring, the Rapid Support Forces, the signatory and non-signatory movements, “and the brigades and formations that emerged or expanded in the course of the war alongside either party.” It also separates the institutional fate of a formation from the criminal responsibility of its members: “integration confers no immunity, and demobilisation attributes to no one a guilt not individually established.” The Charter adds a twelve-year cumulative limit on senior command and a separation between command of the army and the headship of state.

7. From istinfar to Nafeer; from the partisan pulpit to the pulpit that unites

The author raises a question of great importance: “society’s right to protect its religious institutions from partisan polarisation.” He warns that continued mobilisation without a political horizon “deepens the militarisation of society and widens division.”

The Charter offers three tools here. The first is Chapter Seven of the Activation Protocol, on monitoring hate speech and incitement in the media, local pulpits and social media. The second is a provision in Section VI prohibiting any party, political organisation or religious institution from receiving binding direction or funding from an external authority, so as to protect the domestic political and religious space from penetration. The third, and most important, is the Grand National Nafeer.

The energy mobilised for fighting is real energy, carrying a spirit of sacrifice and readiness to give. The question is not how to extinguish it but how to redirect it. The nafeer, deeply rooted in Sudanese social life, is the communal practice in which people call on their neighbours to help with a harvest, a building, or a crisis. The Charter makes this heritage the executive vehicle of reconstruction (Section VIII). The young man mobilised to fight becomes the builder of a school, a clinic or a road in his own neighbourhood and village, and those who took part in the war find a dignified place in the peace.

8. Ascending functional legitimacy, and the limits of an external umbrella

The author holds that military progress is measured not by the number of fighters but by “the ability of any force to convert its presence on the ground into political legitimacy.” We agree, and would add that the deeper question is: where does legitimacy come from in the first place؟

The Charter answers, in its first section, with the concept of ascending functional legitimacy. The Sudanese model, whatever its civilian or military façade, has rested on a descending legitimacy, in which the centre produces decisions and resources and then distributes them to the peripheries as far as the balance of power allows. The Charter reverses that direction: the centre derives its legitimacy not from monopolising decisions but from its capacity to represent the consensus the peripheries produce on security, justice and resources. This is given institutional form in the Fourth Pillar (regional representation and weighted consensus). In one of its aspects, then, the crisis of the Islamists is part of a wider crisis: that of a centre which monopolised the state in the name of an ideology or in the name of arms.

On the external front, the author is right that “the Russian-Chinese umbrella cannot by itself resolve the crisis of domestic legitimacy.” We would add that any external umbrella, eastern, western or regional, slides over time from “guarantee” into “tutelage.” That is why the Charter sets a ceiling of 30% on external funding of the operating budget of any transitional track or institution under it, including the Nafeer and its bodies, and prohibits any party or political organisation from receiving binding direction or funding from an external authority, so that national decision-making is hostage to no foreign capital.

9. Measurable benchmarks of transformation

The author concludes that “evidence of institutional transformation is weak,” and that talk of intellectual revision looks “closer to rearranging the façades.” This is a fair assessment. But the complementary question is: what counts as evidence؟ When can we say that transformation has actually taken place؟

Genuine revision is measured not by statements and conferences but by verifiable action. Building on the author’s argument, we propose the following benchmarks, drawn from the provisions of the Charter. They are not specific to the Islamists; they apply to every political force that wishes to be part of post-war Sudan:

Benchmark

How it is measured

Disengagement from arms

An institutional declaration severing any organisational or financial link with armed formations; acceptance that they be subject to the tracks of integration, demobilisation and restructuring; and a commitment not to combine command of an armed formation with a party-political position (Section III).

Individual accountability

Acceptance of the jurisdiction of the three-tier transitional justice structure, and surrender of individual responsibility to its bodies, rather than taking refuge behind the organisation or its weapons (Section V).

Financial transparency

Submission to the review of concession contracts and of the assets of companies linked to the military and security institutions; and refusal of any binding direction or funding from an external authority (Section VI).

The Institutional Firewall

Acceptance of merit-based appointment and of independent review committees, and abandonment of the logic of tamkeen in the civil service (Section VII and Chapter Eight of the Protocol).

Pulpits that unite

Keeping mosques and religious pulpits out of partisan polarisation and combat mobilisation, and accepting the hate-speech monitoring mechanisms (Chapter Seven of the Protocol).

With these benchmarks, the “second path” the author describes, genuine reconstitution, becomes not a hope we wait to see fulfilled but an open road with clear conditions. Whoever takes it earns a place in the new state through deeds, not by bargaining over shares.

10. The Transitional Bridge: the third path, with a roadmap

The author sees the third path, a civilian political settlement that rebuilds the state, as “a test for all Sudanese forces.” For that test, the Charter proposes a specific roadmap through the Transitional Bridge Initiative, whose main features include:

A civilian transitional sovereign council of no more than seven non-partisan members, chosen by weighted consensus after public hearings; no military party may sit on it or nominate its members.
A transitional task government with a mandate of no more than twenty-four months, whose head and ministers may not stand in the first general elections.
An absolute ceiling of five years on the transitional period, not extendable on any pretext, with an indicative date for general elections in the thirty-sixth month.
Treatment of the Juba Peace Agreement as a standing reference that cannot be cancelled unilaterally, distinguishing its substantive issues, which are preserved and referred to the Charter’s mechanisms, from its power-sharing seats, which do not carry over automatically.
The bridge is completed by the three-tier structure of transitional justice (Section V): local reconciliation councils for community-level violations; the Truth and Compensation Commission at the national level; and a Serious Crimes Chamber for grave violations that admit neither reconciliation nor amnesty. This structure gives the distinction the author calls for its practical instrument: each degree of responsibility has its own forum, so that the perpetrator of a grave crime is not treated the same as someone who merely lived under the regime or shared its ideas.

Conclusion: Iftiqār, a state in which no one can do without anyone else

Mr Zuhair concludes that “the real battle is not between Islamists and non-Islamists, but over the nature of the state in which Sudanese want to live.” We share this conclusion, and add to it the concept on which the Charter rests in its first section: iftiqār, mutual interdependence.

No party to the Sudanese equation can resolve the crisis alone. The army lacks a popular legitimacy that force alone cannot win; civilians lack an executive capacity that representative legitimacy alone cannot supply; and every intellectual current, Islamist or otherwise, needs a neutral state that protects them all. But the Charter sets two conditions for this interdependence: that the stronger party acknowledge its need for the weaker first, not the other way round; and that this acknowledgement be translated into real institutional effect in representation, resources and power, rather than into rhetoric that consumes itself.

That first condition is, in our view, the key to the question the author poses. The forces associated with the Islamists today hold more influence inside the war camp than their weight in society, and that is precisely why the initiative is asked of them first: to acknowledge that they cannot govern Sudan alone, nor build a state that others will not accept.

The state that no one is greater than is the state in which everyone knows they cannot do without one another.

This is the state Sudan needs, and that the Islamists themselves need before anyone else: a state that protects them from their opponents if they lose, and protects their opponents from them if they win. The road to it runs neither through exclusion nor through re-entrenchment, but through an institutional design that makes tamkeen itself impossible for everyone.

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