الأستاذ محمود محمد طه: أزرعوهم في أرض الحوار يموتوا موت طبيعي

Quote: Mixing with the natives During summer holidays the students, and some older members, would travel in delegations of ten or more to spread the second message of Islam. They went as far as Darfur in the west and Juba near the Ugandan border. When they arrived in a town, they organised a frenetic series of activities - sales of Republican literature in the streets in the morning, a discussion corner at noon, more book sales at dusk then a lecture in the club at night. They sometimes organised exhibitions. The group would split up and go to outlying villages, and seek out a shaykh, a teacher or a student, anyone likely to know of their cause, and ask them to introduce them to the people . The experiences of these delegations is a story in itself: everyone who was interviewed about them spoke of them as a formative experience in his or her life. In the mid 1970s, most Republicans were from fairly privileged Nile valley backgrounds. Their identity was based on Arabic language, the sufi Islam of the Khatmiya or the small tarigas and their city educations. Some of them had travelled outside the Nile valley to the poorer regions of Sudan, but they travelled without leaving home - they would stay with relatives working in regional cities who held important posts, and they would not mix with the "natives", non-Arabs, poor agricultural workers, non-professionals . But the delegations changed all that - the delegation was a chance for these graduates to engage with Sudan's diversity. They would travel by camel, bus, or walk between villages, sleep rough or in village khalwas, and try to meet people who were different from themselves. These meetings were moments of spiritual training, they introduced middle class city kids to another Sudan. Perhaps the encounter helped to make sense of the movement's asceticism. Republicans belonged to a middle-class, urban movement which forsook material wealth for spiritual glory. However, their abstinence may have had social, as well as psycho-spiritual meaning - it helped them identify with people from poorer, traditional communities.