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 Is Sudan a “Post Islamist” State? II
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The First Islamist Republic
Part I: The Sudanese Islamists’ Wars: Processes of Disintegration from al-Turabi to Khalil
By Abdullahi Gallab
In an interview published on 22 May in the London based Saudi Daily al-Sharq al-Awsat, Khalil Ibrahim, leader of Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) confirmed that he had been part of the Islamist regime of Khartoum when that regime declared its intention to pursue “a rule based on justice and equality.” However, Khalil claimed that it did not take him long to “discover that the regime and its troupe had stolen the people’s food and they were not more than a bandit of thieves who exaggerated [their claim] and manipulated Islam. That is why we rejected the regime and took arms against it.” Such a statement could provide to our thinking that Khalil claims that he alone represents true ‘Justice and Equality’ while the Khartoum regime represents a diversion from that pursuit. In the same interview, however, Khalil denied any relationship with Hasan al-Turabi or his Popular Congress Party (PCP) asserting that linking him to al-Turabi typifies a form of “condescension to the marginalized” by depicting them as “always in need for someone to plan for them and think on their behalf.” Two days after the Omdurman attack, Hasan al-Turabi and ten of his PCP senior members, were arrested by the regime, though some including al-Turabi were quickly released. Khalil added in the same interview “it is the viewpoint of the [Sudanese] Communist Party that could be closer to ours especially in relation to economic and social issues and also in relation to their vision regarding issues of democracy and rights.”
How are we to make sense of all this? Our memory needs only to be nudged so lightly to remember Khalil’s public speeches addressing his JEM troops who were interrupting and applauding him with their characteristic Sudanese Islamists’ response of Allahu Akbar. Such troops were slightly different in their costume and attire from those of the Islamists dababeen of the Popular Defence Forces (PDF) he led in Southern Sudan in earlier days, when he was part of the regime. Khalil’s former role was to organize mujahideen from Darfur to fight the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). It is interesting to watch video clips from both groups disseminated to global audience through YouTube.
Khalil’s 10 May attack on Omdurman was a reminder to some former fellow Islamists who ruminated in the Sudanese press and websites about his role as Amir al-Mujahideen in Eastern Equatoria during the time the Islamists’ regime declared its jihad in southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains. Other Sudanese at home and abroad remembered also Khalil’s appearances on Sudan national TV weekly program fi sahat al-Fidaa (a program that propagated the jihadists campaigns in the South). Neither Khalil nor his sympathizers would like such images and memories and what they represent brought back to their attention today.
The difficulty in coming to terms with this baffling issue arises if we overlook the analytical tools needed to understand the wars of the Sudanese Islamists among themselves. We need to understand today’s conflicts in the context of the disintegration of the Islamist project in contemporary Sudan. Violent fighting among the Islamists is new but not mysterious. It rages not simply from religious or political disagreements over the proper form of establishing an Islamist state or over some doctrinal Islamic values or approaches pertaining to justice and equality, governance, or any aspect of liberation. Rather, these internal conflicts are themselves discordant realities which make up the disintegrating Islamist experience. Discord appeared in the earliest days of the Islamist republic after 1989 but its serious nature only came into open after the crisis that brought this republic to its end in 1999 (see Abdullahi Gallab, The First Islamist Republic: Development and Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan, Ashgate, 2008).
Today, we can clearly perceive the contours of a bigger map of the Sudanese power struggle and its competing power groups and their claims. This includes but also goes beyond the violence and disputes among the Islamists, their different warring parties, and their control of, or exclusion from, state communities. Their contests draw in political, economic, militarized and professional groups and encompass their opposing visions which chart courses of action and responses to versions of Islamism within their ambitions and practice of power. The underlying currents of these conflicts were woven within a fabric that grew out of an engagement with the state and its governance, hegemony, and authority as imagined by the Islamists. Also related was an experience of local and global order, and the notions and recognitions and lack of rights as traversed with myth, ideology, and practice within a particular understanding of the politicization of religion.
Hasan al-Turabi played a hugely significant role in guiding the Sudanese Islamist movement through troubled seas. More than any other individual, he facilitated the transformation of the Islamists from barefoot activists into a propertied middle class. He taught them, as his supporters say, libs al-shal wa istimal al-jawal (to wear the neck scarf and use the cell phone). This class of Islamists grew into a privileged entity. They came of age as the Islamist movement became a ‘Corporation’—a financial and commercial entity with its security and political infrastructure. They consolidated their power position through their control of the state during the lifetime of the first republic. But the Islamists, contrary to their aspirations and claims, have neither been an autonomous nor a monolithic entity.
In fact, the Islamists resemble a class structure. And as such, the Islamist association reflects what Darhrendorf describes as a continuum of “two aggregates of authority positions ….one—that of domination—is characterized by an interest in the maintenance of a social structure that for them conveys authority, whereas the other—that of subjection—involves an interest in changing a social condition that deprives its incumbents of authority.” This continuum has created cleavages and forms of behavior. It has sharpened the exchanges whereby political actors within both center and periphery talked back, interacted with, and challenged each other.
Based on the above, and the analysis developed at length in my book, four conclusions can be drawn with regard to the transition of the Islamist state and its regime since 1999.
First, the conduct of the transition from the end of the first republic has brought about an unrestricted animosity and a never-ending conflict among the groups of Islamists, who have used the state’s coercive power against al-Turabi and those who supported him.
Second, the pattern of a statist transition is evident. At first, the Islamists’ stated aim was less an Islamic state thus totalitarian in nature; more an Islamic society through local jihad; and mega Islamic order through global jihad. But after 1999, the leading group—to use Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘bureaucratic centralism’—became “saturated, that is turning into a narrow clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or even stifling the birth of oppositional forces.” Therefore, in the transition to the current regime and its ‘bureaucratic centralism’, al-Bashir and his group are trying to control not only the other Islamist rivals but also other contending Sudanese political parties which are seeking to take advantage of the new situation for their own purposes.
Third, the growth of an Islamist decentralized private forms of violence, represented by the JEM, and centralized counter violence, represented by the regime and it allies, have both tried to benefit from the old structures of the militarized ‘Islamism/fundamentalism’ of the dababeen and (PDF) as each has been turned by its actors against the other.
Fourth, unregulated intellectual attacks from dissenting Islamists individuals are common and vicious. The number of these dissenters increases but they fail to group themselves into a one united front or political organization that can present itself as an Islamist or a post-Islamist alternative.
The Second Islamist Republic
The second Islamist republic was born out of the 1999 change of direction, or palace coup. It was executed by elements of the military in alliance with some of the Islamists’ ‘artisans’—the executives who were deliberately kept away from any ideological leadership by their mentor, al-Turabi, who positioned himself as Sudan’s sole Islamist theoretician. The state which they hastily created has concentrated power in the hands of ‘Umar al-Bashir, who now has all the power to manage that narrow clique. At the same time, the National Congress Party (NCP), which was once described as the ruling party has also been turned into the party of the state. The ruling elite of that state who have always been labeled as members of a riverain group that belong to the Jaaliyeen, the Danagala, and the Shaygiyya ‘tribes’. Such labeling, for all its oversimplification and exaggeration, is partly true, but incomplete.
The ruling elite behind the second republic can be divided into three distinct categories of Islamist artisans, although certain people have overlapping affiliations: senior party bureaucrats, security personnel, and the military Islamists. The first category includes Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, Ibrahim Ahmed ‘Umar, ‘Usman Khalid Modawi, Nafi Ali Nafi, Mahdi Ibrahim, Awad al-Jaz, Ali Mohamed Osman Yasin, and the group of physicians that Sudanese satire depicts as ‘Médecins Sans Frontières,’ including Ghazi Salah al-Din al-‘Atabani, al-Tayeb Ibrahim (Sikha), Mustafa Osman and the late Majzoub al-Khalifa. The security category includes Nafi Ali Nafi, Qutbi al-Mahdi, Hasan Dahawi, Salah Gosh, Ali Kurti, Abdelrahim Muhammad Hussien, al-Tayeb Ibrahim (Sikha), and Bakri Hasan Saleh. The last group includes ‘Umar al-Bashir, Abdelrahim Mohummed Hussien, al-Tayeb Ibrahim (Sikha), Bakri Hasan Saleh and al-Hadi Abdalla. These three groups emerged as the regime’s verkhushka [pinnacle of power]. They formed the new leadership of the NCP and the organs of state, as well as part of an Islamist commercial class. This verkhushka has been projecting itself as different now that they have freed themselves, the party, and the state from all vestiges of sheikh Hasan’s control and his troublesome way of conducting politics. On the other hand, their awareness of the weakness of the entire Islamist project became clear when the “sacred canopy” of the regime started to shred, forcing them to examine different sources of power through negotiated deals of reconciliation with national and regional oppositional groups. Chief among those with whom they have cut deals is their former sworn enemy, the SPLA.
Competition among these verkhushka groups and the feuds that have been brewing among the first category in particular, has created a new power with its own dynamics. It formally turned the transition to the second republic into some sort of domination without the charismatic leadership of sheikh Hasan. It also turned ‘Umar al-Bashir himself into a political power who manages all three groups of the verkhushka. To strengthen their positions, each member of these groups continued to build around himself a smaller clique with total loyalty to himself based on blood and ‘tribal’ relationship. One aspect of this process is the strategy employed to appoint governors, senior employees, and even leaders of local administration as a way of expanding the state machinery in the center and the regions and empowering a class of the Islamist elite through which the regime could control national life.
While it is true that al-Bashir has never been known for his vision or leadership and his verkhushka has not promised to restructure the regime or to implement any serious democratic changes, the transition to the second republic has taken a different route. First, the regime is founded on fear both as a primary representation and confirmation of its deeper feeling of insecurity and as a tool of survival for the regime. Thus, although they have been divided by their personal ambitions, fear remains the cement that has kept those verkhushka groups together. Second, the regime started negotiations with different opposition groups with a strategy that would turn reconciliation with the opposition, in the form of separate negotiated deals with each party, into a kind of complicity to recycle the entire political process into a new form of power relations through which the regime would emerge dominant. This has been expressed clearly by al-Bashir after signing the recent ‘national compromise agreement’ with the former Prime Minister al-Sadiq al-Mahdi on 20 May 2008. Third, the regime continues to exercise new forms of intimidation and ways of inducing fear, or using the state to extend or cut back rewards for those who have been opposing it.
As the 10 May attack on Omdurman and other recent events show, the regime is reworking its approach to the security forces and the legal system in an attempt to achieve its ends. In the first course of action, the National Security forces are given wide-ranging powers of detention, investigation, surveillance, and other access to the private homes and communications of citizens. The second course of action concerns the way in which the judicial system is used in the regime’s attempts at control. This is evident in the court system that was invented to deal with special cases. These two approaches are coordinated with equal intensity but in two different directions to deal with new problems as they unfold. And as the regime boasts about what it describes as the expanding margin of civil and press freedoms, serious steps have been taken toward an authoritarian system with maximum claim over all citizens.
Consequently, these developments, which indicate the decline of the Islamist project , illustrate the new course of Sudanese politics, as reproduced within the process of the regime’s disintegration, on the one hand, and the regime’s attempts of transition and consolidation, on the other. However, we must observe the operations deployed by the regime through the state apparatus and the party, and how such actions affect the system’s survivability. As the regime tries to circumscribe the expanding fields of political, press, and civil activities, a new shift in its strategies emerges.
A brief examination of four consequences of this transition follows. Matched by the violent trends and vicious cycles that set the tone of the conflict among the Islamists, these also reveal the tension between contending visions and ambitions in the pursuit for political power.
al-Turabi’s War
The events that began with the removal of al-Turabi from power in 1999 and escalated into his imprisonment have far-reaching consequences, not only because of their impact on the political orientation of the Islamist regime, but also because they released the jinni of long suppressed conflicts in the Islamist movement that had been brewing for some time. These events and the blind hatred that they inspired within the ranks of the Islamists not only baffled most Sudanese at home, but also dumbfounded other Islamists in the region and abroad. In a statement issued by ninety Islamist leaders from around the Muslim world and Europe, which was published in the London based al-Quds al-Arabi, they expressed their bitter feelings about the detention of the seventy year old sheikh by his own “brothers.” As for the Sudanese public, al-Turabi’s Islamist republic had died. This republic and its civilizational project, “had never erased the allegiance of those Sudanese loyal to the Mahadiyya and Khatmiyya Brotherhoods leaving Turabi the leader of a small minority movement in the urban communities where the Blue and White Nile meet.” For the official Arab and Muslim state members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), al-Turabi’s removal caused more than an audible sigh of relief. For Egypt and its president Hosni Mubarak, who accused Khartoum twice in 1994 and 1995 of exporting terrorism to Egypt and devising plans for his assassination, the removal of al-Turabi was a welcome step toward better relations between the two countries. Hosni Mubarak’s security chief Umar Sulaiman did not hesitate to suggest the liquidation of al-Turabi who represented a more serious threat to the Sudan than John Garang. Of course, the idea of liquidating al-Turabi was not confined to Sulaiman, as some of the Islamists in the NCP debated the idea. In his book al-Turabi wa al-Ingadh; Siraa al-Hawa wa al-Hawia, Abdel Rahim Umar Muhi al-Din documented that at least two of those who attended a meeting argued for his liquidation. Furthermore, it came as no surprise that the Board of Sudanese ‘ulmā’ denounced al-Turabi in a statement issued on 27 February 2001, days after he signed his Memorandum of Understanding with the SPLA, describing him and his supporters as fiaa kharija [a small deviant group] and urging the state to take this issue seriously and by facing the al-Turabi-Garang coalition with decisiveness and caution and without transgression or injustice.
According to the Information Minister at the time, Ghazi Salah el-Din al-‘Atabani, one of al-Turabi’s former disciples, al-Turabi was arrested for “conspiring with the rebels to topple the government.” His detention has followed several announcements, by himself and by some of his party leaders, about a ten-point Memorandum of Understanding signed in Geneva on 19 February 2001 between the PCP and the SPLM. Representatives of the two parties announced in Geneva that they had agreed on “the escalation of popular resistance to force the government to depart from its totalitarian course and let the nation choose a patriotic government that achieves just peace and builds true democracy that preserves liberties and basic human rights.” Later, in a press conference in Khartoum, al-Turabi himself called on the Sudanese people to rise up against ‘Umar al-Bashir.
Following the signing of the MOU, the regime cracked down on the PCP by detaining more than thirty senior party officials in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country along with al-Turabi as well as shutting down their daily newspaper Rai al Sh‘ab and the party’s offices throughout the country. The cycle of enmity between the contending Islamist parties was taken a step further with the purge of most al-Turabi loyalists from government and the security apparatus, and by taking harsh measures that shook the financial standing of his supporters in the private sector. In what has been described as “a witch hunt”, al-Turabi’s “second and third tier supporters” were followed relentlessly. Badr al-Din Taha, one of al-Turabi’s senior disciples, claimed that the humiliation that they suffered from the other party was far worse than what the Communists did to them. But it was al-Turabi himself who expressed the bitterest sentiments about the hostilities between him and his former disciples.
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i Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Sanford University Press, 1959), 176.
ii Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1139.
iii J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, The Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000, (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2003), 279.
iv ‘Abd al-Rahim ‘Umar Muhy al-Din, al-Turabi wa al-Inqadh; Siraa al-Haw wa al-Hawia Fitnat al-Islamien fi al-Sulta min Muzakirt al-Asharaa ila Muzakirat al-tafahum maa John Garang (Khartoum: Marawi Bookshop, 2006), 412.
v Ibid, 448.
vi AP, Former Sudanese Parliament Speaker Arrested (21 February 2001)
vii PANA, 21 February 2001
viii International Crisis Group, God, Oil, and Country: Changing the Logic of War in Sudan (Brussels: International Crisis Group Press, 2002), 42.
ix Muhy al-Din, al-Turabi wa al-Inqadh, 412.
(عدل بواسطة Sahar Yousif on 06-04-2008, 01:26 PM)
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Re: Is Sudan a “Post Islamist” State? II (Re: Sahar Yousif)
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Is Sudan a “Post-Islamist” State? II
posted by admin
Part II of The Sudanese Islamists’ Wars: Processes of Disintegration from Khalil to Turabi
by Abdullahi Gallab
Khalil’s War
The mutual hostility among the Islamists has been merciless. However, the same al-Turabi supporters who had subjected other political, social, and ethnic groups to such treatment now complained of their fate, after the state turned against them. But this hostility that came with the second republic has brought out into the open very serious elements with dire consequences. The first of these relates to the way that the Islamists’ will to order and strategies of control turned into impulses that brought in their wake claims of difference based on regional solidarity. In turn, these presented themselves as particularist individual and group demands which metamorphosed into everything that the Islamists, with their universalistic aspirations, had earlier resented and feared. It was one of the Islamists’ strategies to encourage those of their members who belong to Sufi turq or leading tribal families to penetrate these institutions and replace their fathers or relatives as leaders. Firstly, because of the high numbers of Darfurian students who had been joining the Islamist movement for the last four decades, especially at the University of Khartoum, and secondly because of the successful mini-intifada led by the young Darfurian Islamists that forced Ja‘far Nimari to replace al-Tayib al-Mardi whom he appointed as a governor of Darfur in 1981. Among the leaders of the so-called al-Fashir intifada were Daud Bolad, al-Shafii Ahmed Muhammad, Amin Banani, and Farouq Ahmed Adam. In the period after the downfall of Nimairi, the Islamists discovered that their dreams about Darfur were far from reality as their gain in the 1986 elections was limited to the two seats won by Ibrahim Abakr Hashim and Abdel Gadir Adam. Later some of those young Darfurian Islamists began to turn against the movement as their two parliamentarians defected to the DUP.
As the Islamist movement started to expand after the 1960s, the Darfurians were at its heart. However, as the movement transformed into the ‘Corporation’ after the 1980s, the Darfurians became marginalized. The leadership designated some members and disqualified others for access to the highest strata of the Corporation and in doing so designated most Darfurians to a lower status. That is to say that there was a discrepancy between a person’s achieved prestige on the one hand, and that person’s ascribed prestige on the other. By the time the Islamists came to power, this identity management had produced well defined formations within the movement. Some of the Islamists from Darfur such as Daud Bolad—a prominent Islamist student leader in the al-Fashir intifada—dissented and allied themselves with the SPLM leading to a 1991 rebellion in Darfur against the government. Bolad’s experience within the Islamist movement convinced him that inconsistency between his achieved and ascribed status had located him in “a place of involuntary exile.” This tension led him to rebel against the regime in an attempt to change the system as a whole. According to some allegations, one tragic aspect of Bolad’s ordeal was that his rebellion was crushed and his life was believed to have been taken by an old friend and bodyguard from his university days, al-Tayeb Ibrahim (Sikha) the then-governor of Darfur. Another example comes from Ali al-Haj, who became the focus of the satire and ridicule of the other faction of the Islamists, and continued to feel bitter, evaluating his “own complicity with his position, as to what one did wrong” . These examples reveal a sharp conflict within the Islamist middle class.
Hence, the conflict among the Islamists, wrongly described by some as an issue of race and ethnicity, has entered the political center of both the regime and the country. This is truly a conflict between ‘domination’ and ‘subjection’ within the Islamist middle class. The ‘latent interest’ of each one of these two groups became ‘manifest’ when the Islamists assumed power and started using the state as a regulatory authority structure. It is certainly true that some of the Islamists on both sides like to characterize the conflict in racial terms. Others would like to see it as fitna bi al-sulta [obsession with power]. But what seems like an expressive language describing a deeper conflict with racial and ethnic terminology and labeling, has been transformed by some into a vehicle to political power. This in itself has recreated a new kind of an Islamist politics of belonging, where an in-group takes power.
As complex as it might look, the conflict that split the NCP into two antagonistic groups is actually another round in the battle within the Islamist middle class in relation to authority. In essence, it is about the struggle for domination, especially when the Islamist state community, including ‘Umar al-Bashir, felt that al-Turabi and his supporters were planning and taking serious steps toward a program that would threaten their presence in the house of power and eventually undermine their interests as a group. It is true that the groups of the so-called gharaba [western Sudanese] in general, and Darfur in particular, who stand behind al-Turabi constitute a substantial block in the PCP. This presented a project of substantial numbers of the Islamist elite with specific cultural and ethnic characteristics and “tactical necessity and common interest.” This construction in itself might help create a higher ideal and expectations, because al-Turabi himself is not a gharabi and his leadership to the new party might help to break the closure practices enforced by what have been described as the riverain Northern elite, the dominant group in the NCP.
In this respect, it seems that the regional issue and the race issue have added two tools to the Islamists’ kit in the political fight. Cultural prejudices on the one hand, and the creation of different techniques for breaking the barriers and closure on the other, have been played by both parties as ammunition in their ongoing fight against one another. When these two processes come together, an interesting phenomenon emerges that is worthy of exploration.
Certain developments were informed by and in turn influenced the latent conflict between the two groups before it came to the surface in 1999 and afterwards when it became manifest in the third regional Islamism of Khalilism or JEM. The first development relates to al-Kitab al-aswad [The Black Book], which was prepared and printed before, but only widely distributed immediately after the split. The book was published in two parts, the first in May 2000 and the second on August 2002. On the day it was published, as many as 1,000 copies of the book were distributed after Friday prayers in mosques and other places in Khartoum. The following day, copies were placed at the desks of senior government officials including ‘Umar al-Bashir. According to Professor Abdullahi O. El-Tom of the National University of Ireland, who translated the book into English, more than 50,000 copies were photocopied and circulated before eventually being posted on the internet.
William Wallis of the British daily Financial Times, who interviewed one of the authors of the book, was told that the group compiled the book “over a period of five months and with many clandestine meetings in which each member kept his own network of collaborators to himself - somehow plucked sensitive records from state archives. From these and more public information, they catalogued iniquities to rival apartheid in South Africa, documenting the narrow ethnicity of senior officials in successive governments, and castigating the moral bankruptcy of the incumbent regime that had based its legitimacy on Islam.” Although Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Harakat al-Adl wa al Muswaa [Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)], claimed that he wrote The Black Book, another member of the movement Idris Mahmoud Logma, told Wallis “that he and 14 others - including one former state minister, [a clear reference to Khalil Ibrahim] prominent among Islamists - developed the idea for the analysis. Most of them were young Muslims from black African tribes in Darfur who had graduated from Khartoum universities.”
Whatever the case, as Logma told the Financial Times, during the time when they were writing, they “were not thinking of rebellion”, but rather they “wanted to achieve [their] aims by democratic and peaceful means”. He concludes by saying, “Later we realized the regime would only listen to guns.” On its own terms, a second group of Islamists led by the fifteen personalities who wrote The Black Book followed the path of Daud Bolad, whom they described as a martyr in their book. Among these fifteen personalities, Mohi al-Din identifies Khalil Ibrahim, Idris Ibrahim Azruq, Suliman Jamous, and Jibrial Ibrahim as among the most devout and dedicated to the Islamist movement and regime. Here, as de Waal argues, “the ‘Black Book’ marked a symbolic rapprochement between the Islamists and the secular radicals of Darfur. Hence the unlikely alliance between the latter group, who were busy putting together the Darfur Liberation Front (renamed in early 2003 the Sudan Liberation Army, or SLA) and the Islamist-leaning Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).” It may be true that the book “caused a stir throughout the country and showed how northern Sudan was becoming polarised along racial rather than religious lines”, but it is equally true that the contenders on all sides operated with opposing arguments, accusing the other party that they were rallying along racist lines.
Here we must ask ourselves an important question. What made the regime so frustrated that it would act violently toward al-Turabi and his party after the Geneva agreement? Abdel Rahim ‘Umar Mohi el-Din argues that after the MOU and al-Turabi’s press conference, al-Turabi’s call for an intifada in which the Darfurians and southerners around the city would participate might escalate into an armed confrontation. The security apparatus alerted the government to this danger and advised swift action against al-Turabi and his party members. This fear came from the steady growth of an underclass in the shantytowns surrounding the cities of Khartoum, Omdurman, and Khartoum North as well as other urban centers in the country. The war in the south, the drought and desertification, and the instability and insecurity in Darfur led to massive dislocation and displacement of the citizens of western and southern Sudan. The migration and settlement of the rural and urban poor was a serious concern for this government and previous ones. The growing presence of these groups around the capital and its twin cities became a nightmare for the government. This has been especially true since the split of the NCP and the regrouping of al-Turabi’s faithful followers around the PCP, which draws most of its support from individuals and groups from western Sudan. In the past, this underclass and its younger generation that has moved into the cities, which is called Shamasa in the local Sudanese dialect, has added intensity and manpower to the street demonstrations. In this way, this underclass played an important part in the success of the uprisings of 1964 and 1985.
The underclass has been viewed as a political threat and has been stigmatized socially and culturally in the local press. With the surfacing of what could be interpreted as xenophobia or racism, even more severe forms of subtle and overt violence against the underclass might be instituted by the government. This kind of terror, in addition to the amputation of limbs, floggings, and kasha, which echoes some of the atrocities carried out by Nimairi and his NIF allies in the period 1983-84, could be repeated using past methods or by way of new techniques as the need arises. As they sustain the breeding ground for the growth of more Shamasa, the kind of punishment referred to is an introduction to upcoming orchestrated campaigns to chase them out of the areas surrounding the urban cities.
Taking into account the regime’s awareness that a massive force for riot and rebellion has always been at hand, any attempt of organized protest causes serious alarm and will be promptly subdued. So it seems that what made the government act decisively against the al-Turabi-Garang MOU was its fear about the possible manipulation of the underclass of the urban cities. The announced plan to work together—to escalate “popular resistance to force the government to depart from its totalitarian course” —is hard not to read as an indication of collaboration in order to monopolize the western and southern segments of the underclass and the Shamasa to support a planned intifada.
The violence against al-Turabi and his party produced serious difficulties for the regime. In trying to secure their position by launching a preemptive strike against him and his camp, the regime moved the battleground from Khartoum to an additional field which is Darfur. Although the leaders of the rebel group of JEM deny their relationship to al-Turabi’s PCP, without the conflict among the ranks of the Islamists and the developments that ensued out of it, the situation in Darfur would have been very different. But does that make the JEM the military wing of the PCP? No, on the contrary, while there are indicators that regime is weakened and the more public despair of the regime’s political moves increases, the more the contending parties including the JEM see a window of opportunity to push harder on their ultimate target as an Islamist revolutionary alternative that could force the ruling Islamist clique out of power and stand al-Turabi on his feet. Was there coordination with one or more political and military groups to stage a military or popular move to monopolize the western segments of the underclass and the Shamasa to support a planned take-over? It would be outlandish if that were not the case.
The Dissenters’ War
With the transformation of the social structures of the Islamist movement into a Corporation and the development of a community built around the Islamist state and the regime’s nomenklatura, a gradual but continuously growing number of disillusioned Islamist intellectuals started to identify themselves and to make their presence known. While around the core group of the regime’s state community and the regime’s nomenklatura other layers had been established by appointments to major offices in the state as a reward for loyalty to the regime, other individuals and groups started to distance themselves from the regime. As totalitarian policies, which were presented as Islamic, and the new class made up of representatives of the Corporation, including a mixed bag of Islamists, serial opportunists, speculators, businessmen, and army and security personnel, began to exert their influence within the new Islamist state, a gulf opened between them and certain Islamist intellectuals. The disenchantment of these intellectuals with the regime’s political and economic performance led to the emergence a group of Islamist dissidents like Hasan Makki, al-Tayyib Zain al-‘Abdin, and Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed, which began to grow to include some of the young Islamist media cadres, chief among them Osman Merghani, Adel al-Baz, and Mahgoub Aurwa. Clearly disturbed by the performance of the regime, other Islamists distanced themselves from the entire project. Some of these, including Abdelwahab el-Affendi and al-Tijani ‘Abd al-Qadir, based their self-criticism and their criticism of the movement on different assumptions. Most, if not all of these dissidents still maintain their faith in an “Islamist” orientation of some sort despite their opposition to al-Turabi and the regime’s policies. Since their credentials as Islamists were unimpeachable, they could not be accused of being enemies of the Islamist project, and their commitment to the Islamist movement has given their attacks on the regime a special weight and credibility that are disturbing to the regime. Out of the intensification of the internal and external criticism and satire that marked the year that preceded the end of the first Islamist republic in 1999, trends of timid criticism by some of those inside the regime emerged and focused on certain ills of the system.
Nevertheless, during the lifetime of the Islamist regime, the camp of Islamist dissenters continued to grow. Until this day, they still present themselves as individuals frustrated with the performance of the past and current regimes. They sound angry and self defensive, as if they are seeking validation from the ‘sacred history’ of a movement which is no longer valid. It is healthy to have such a critique and examination to the past period, but it would be admirable, while they are within such a moment of historic potential, if they could rise above their frustration and anger in order to present something that would add to the national discourse with regard to their vision for the future of the movement.
Conclusion
Within these wars among the different groups of Sudanese Islamists, all factions are living in a “state of suspended extinction” as each side has been turned by the other into an object to be eliminated through the tools that they all mastered since the days when such tools were used against old enemies. These tools are the state apparatus of coercion and private violence. This state of suspended extinction generates disintegration rather than regeneration. The feature of Islamism that assures such disintegration is that the Sudanese political experience in general is ridding itself from Islamism. Paradoxically, many among the Islamists themselves, sympathizers as well as their detractors are not fully aware of that, and those who are aware are not yet sure where to go from there.
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i. T. Abdou Maliqalim Simone, In Whose Image? Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 205.
ii. Ibid.
iii. Cliford Geertz, Old Societies and New States (New York: Free Press, 1963),
iv. William Willis, The Black Book history or Darfur’s darkest chapter (London: Financial Times, Saturday 21 August 2004)
v. Ibid.
vi. Willis, The Black Book history or Darfur’s darkest chapter
vii. Muhy al-Din, al-Turabi wa al-Inqadh, 461.
viii. Alex de Waal, “Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap”; available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n15/waal01_.html; Internet; accessed on 31 March 2007.
ix. Ibid.
x. Muhy al-Din, al-Turabi wa al-Inqadh, 460.
xi. Shamasa is an Arabic term meaning “the people of the sun”. It refers to the thousands of homeless children in the three cities. Some of them wash cars, some steal, and others beg. Some of them move across the railway line between big cities as transients. They have developed a certain language for communication and have tightly knit structure.
xii. Kasha is an Arabic term meaning to drive away or round up. It refers in this context to the mass arrest and deportation of thousands of displaced southerners and westerners from the Khartoum slums.
xiii. AP, Former Sudanese Parliament Speaker Arrested (2001, February, 21)
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Re: Is Sudan a “Post Islamist” State? II (Re: Sahar Yousif)
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Is Sudan a “Post Islamist” State? III
posted by Alex de Waal
This last few days, this blog has launched a discussion on political Islam in Sudan, focusing on the recent book The First Islamic Republic: Development and Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan, by Abdullahi Gallab. It began with an essay by Abdullahi. Mine is the first commentary—others will follow over the next month.
The Sudanese Islamists have been vigorously criticized by their adversaries and by human rights activists such as myself, especially during the years of attempted totalitarianism and terror in Sudan, approximately 1989-94. Our concern here is the subsequent internal debate among Sudanese Islamists as to why their project has run into crisis—or outright failed, according to many. Even Hassan al Turabi has admitted failure. The diverse and fragmented nature of the Sudanese Islamist movement is reflected in the fact that some of these critics are outside the country (for example Abdel Wahab al Effendi), some in domestic opposition (Amin Banani), some in military opposition (Khalil Ibrahim), and some in government itself (Ghazi Salah al Din al Attabani). Very little of this debate has been reflected in English language publications. Abdullahi Gallab’s book is the occasion for bringing this debate to an English language audience.
Let me suggest five reasons why Sudan’s Islamist project may be said to have failed. I agree with Gallab and others, that the Islamists’ moment of victory—the June 1989 National Salvation Revolution—was also the moment at which their project took a fatal wrong turning (though the seeds of that historic error had been sown in the 1970s).
Reason one: the Islamists’ security organ became a master, not a servant, of the political cause. The Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brothers, Hassan al Banna, made the mistake of creating a ‘special branch’—a secret security organization, within his organization in the 1930s. The special branch ended up in control of the organization and led it on a path to disaster, including the death of its founder. His Sudanese brethren repeated the error half a century later. In this case, the Islamist securitate seized power and protected themselves, but the reign of terror they unleashed and the brutal compromises they made in order to stay in office so polluted the Islamist project that it could not recover its integrity. Organized violence was the sorcerer’s apprentice of revolutionary Islamism. We are familiar with revolutions that consume their own children. As Gallab remarks (quoting John Garang), this one ultimately consumed its father.
Reason two: the Islamists’ financial strategy became a master, not a servant, of the political cause. When the Islamists began to build up their own independent economic base in the 1970s, they anticipated that the financial clout they obtained would allow them to rule Sudan. So it transpired—they invested in the country just as the sectarian and secular businessmen were taking their capital abroad, and having bought the commanding heights of the economy, considered that they owned the state as well. But money, like power, corrupts. After a few years in power, Sudanese Islamism became a tool of a financial structure–dubbed ‘the Corporation’ by Gallab–that increasingly paid only lip service to Islamic principle.
Reason three: the Islamists failed to escape from the most deep-rooted political disease in Sudan, namely racism. Under Hassan al Turabi, the Islamist movement sought to emulate the example of the Mahdi and mobilize a mass following in western Sudan, forging an alliance from certain sections of the riverine elite and thereby storming the center of state power. They certainly succeeded in taking the center of power—but the westerners never felt fully enfranchised within the commanding structures of the movement, especially security and finance. Islamism always remained paired with Arabism and was therefore literally only skin deep. This split erupted most famously with the publication in 2000 of the Black Book and the subsequent JEM rebellion.
Reason four: political Islam itself lacks the theoretical tools to tackle the challenges of governing a complex society, especially one that is socially, racially and religiously diverse. Having seized power and faced with the diversity of Sudan, the Islamists had no strategy for accommodating pluralism. Rather, they played divide and rule at a tactical level, supporting those groups that professed loyalty to their cause against those that didn’t, and seeking to impose a new socio-cultural identity by force. Thus the ‘civilization project’ became an imperial project and while urban dissent was suppressed by terror and ghost houses, rural resistance was the subject of devastating counter-insurgency under the rubric of jihad. And of course, totalitarian rule simply failed, so that today the same rulers stay in power by abandoning their ideological project and running the country as a never-ending political auction in which they buy loyalty on a day-to-day basis.
Reason five: the character of Hassan al Turabi himself. After examining a vast archive of his writings and speeches, my co-author Abdel Salam Hassan came to the conclusion that Turabi’s definition of an Islamic state is a state ruled by Hassan al Turabi. (See our jointly-authored chapter in Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa.) Through his opportunism, lust for power, and readiness to throw aside or humiliate even his most senior colleagues, Turabi ultimately destroyed the movement that he himself had done more than anyone to create. Yet such his dominance over Islamism in Sudan that it is almost impossible to conceive of a Sudanese Islamic movement without Turabi—his former colleagues and protégés cannot escape his shadow. The act of political parricide carried out on 12 December 1999 haunts its perpetrators, much as they know that it was necessary for Sudan’s survival. Such is Turabi’s enduring personality cult that even those Islamists who have repudiated their mentor may subconsciously believe that only when Turabi rules will Sudan become a truly Islamic state.
Gallab provocatively calls his book, The First Islamic Republic. His title challenges us to ask, has today’s republican order, ostensibly still ruled by Islamists, reverted to Sudan’s traditional governance by military-commercial partnership in which Islam is no more than a garb of convenience?
*http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2008/06/01/is-sudan-a-...-islamist-state-iii/
(عدل بواسطة Sahar Yousif on 06-04-2008, 01:44 PM)
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Sahar Yousif
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست