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 Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي (Re: Abomihyar)
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African Studies Association, New Orleans, Nov. 11-14, 04
Sudan Women’s Union: The House Matriarchy Built
Abdullahi Ibrahim, University of Missouri-Columbia
The emerging view in the scholarship about the Sudan Women’s Union (SWU) is that it was basically the creation of the patriarchal Sudan Communist Party (SCP). On the contrary, this paper will argue that it was the product of the party’s matriarchy, that is, its women cadre. To this effect the paper will revisit a debate about Marxism and gender that took place in the party after the October Revolution of 1964, which led to the enfranchisement of women as full-fledged citizens. This debate pitted Mr. Mahjub, the Secretary of the SCP, and Ms. Fatima Ibrahim, a member of the Political Bureau of SCP and the President of SWU. In this debate, Ibrahim was critical of the reform of the SWU proposed by Mahjub. The reform revolved around two issues. Firstly, the SWF should engage the gender issue by addressing the relation of men and women in society. Secondly, the SWU should restructure its organization, modeled after the party, comprising a central committee, central specialized bureaus, and branches in the neighborhood. The reform was eventually forgotten because the party had been pressed by political contingencies that led to its tragic downfall in 1971.
The View from Scholarship
The view that the SWU is a deliberate spit image of the SCP, thanks to the party’s patriarchy, is represented by Sondra Hale’s Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State (Westview 1996). She points out the correspondences between the organization of the party and the women’s union. Both have national leaderships, regional offices, and base units in the neighborhoods. She would see this identical organization as something the party imposed on the SWU. She came to this negative view about the SCP from a Marxist feminist platform critical of socialist theory. In application, this once prevalent theory “has too often meant that, categorically, women have had little opportunity to contribute to the building of emancipatory practice, structure, or theory.” (155). Hale’s close study of the experiment of the SCP validated this general feminist critique of vanguard parties. Her study led her “to propose that the patriarchal ideology and structure of the Marxist-Leninist SCP and the gender strategies it has followed have greatly diminished its effectiveness as an agency of any genuine social transformation that takes women seriously.” The party, she maintains, stands guilty in not advocating or engaging in “solving the conventional gender roles.” Party members, she states, “have not understood the subjectivity of oppression, of the connection between personal relations and public political organization, or the emotional component of consciousness.” They neither understood issues of sexuality nor directly addressed them
I will argue that the view that the existing SWU was structured in the image of the party is wrongheaded. Whereas Hale and associate detect a patriarchy at work in the SWU, I am inclined to see the problem of the union as arising primarily from a matriarchy represented by Fatima. The Union was offered by the party an alternative plan to organize on a Marxist platter, and it turned it away. I am not saying though that the SCP is patriarchy-free. To the contrary, I heard staunch communists who would say that they are Marxists minus the stuff on women emancipation. Mahjub, as we will briefly hint in this presentation, was a victim of this misguided patriarchy. His reform of the SWU, as I view it, was an uphill battle against both the matriarchy and the patriarchy in the party. I will use later writings of Fatima (1980) to show that, in hindsight, she saw, without acknowledgement, the positive sides of Mahjub’s structural reform of the SWU.
The Patriarch and the Matriarch
Let me say a few words about the activism of Mahjub and Fatima of the historical leadership of the SCP. Very little has been written about the legacy of the SCP in English. Its abundant publications in Arabic have not been accessible to scholars of radicalism in Africa. Yet there has always been a lingering hunch among these scholars that the SCP’s various political experiences hold the key to a better understanding of radicalism in Africa. Ben Turkok alone pointed to this potential in 1966 and again in 1989.
Mahjub has always been remembered by members of his generation as a brilliant, thoughtful, and a well-read student. As late as 2002, Tayib Salih, the renowned Sudanese novelists, regretted that Mahjub, whom he remembers from his high school times, had gotten himself into politics to the detriment of his literary and cultural talents. After finishing high school in 1946, Mahjub joined Gordon College in Sudan to major in English. However he soon changed his mind and went to Egypt to pursue his education. In Egypt he came into contact with the virulent but rather fractious communist movement. The key to understanding Mahjub’s evolution into a full-time revolutionary lies, I think, in a close study of his association with Henri Currel, the son of an Egyptian millionaire Jew and the leader of a major communist group in the country. In 1948 Mahjub retuned to Sudan to devote himself to the cause of communism. In 1949 he was elected, at the age of twenty-two, to be the secretary-General of the SCP. He remained in this office until 1971 when he was executed by President Nimerie after a failed coup allegedly staged by the SCP.
Fatima Ibrahim is a member of the Political Bureau, the CC of the SCP, the President of the SWU, and a former MP. At the early age of a high school girl Fatima realized her oppression as both a colonized and a woman. She was among the first group of educated young women who formed the SWU in 1952. In 1956 she was elected to be the president of it. Her career working for women in a Muslim society is sensitively delineated by Afkhami Mahnaz, Women in Exile. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1994.
Mahjub’s reform
After the 1964 Revolution Mahjub was working on a structural reform of the party and its mass organizations. Mahjub sought to sensitize the party to the structural changes the society had been undergoing as a result of October Revolution. Mahjub was seeking to revamp the progressive youth and women mass organizations to rise up to the level of the challenges posed by these transformations. In his report to the Central Committee in December 1966, Mahjub pointed to the fact that, thanks to the Revolution, a youth category, not just young adults, had come into existence. Also, the Revolution, he argued, engendered politics beyond suffrage, which women had already won, and consumer blues. A generation of women with cultural and social desires was thrown at the party necessitating that it goes back to the drawing table.
To accommodate these emerging gender concerns, he came up with a two-fold strategy; a theoretical as well as organizational one. Theoretically, he called upon the party to engage Marxism in order to develop a conceptual approach to these youthful and gender realities beyond conventional wisdom. He spelt out aspects of this Marxist understanding in his “Marxism and Women Emancipation” published in al-Shu’i (#131, 1968:49-83). In this article, he drew basically on Lenin’s conversation with Clara Zetkin. Typically he pointed out to the inextricable connection between women liberation and the overall class struggle for socialism. His main focus, however, was elaborating this liberation in gender terms. He locates the subordination of women, as a gender, in the superstructure of the society, that is, “the level of ideology, force of habit, ideas and dominant philosophies.” Although economic and legal structures oppressing women can be changed to do justice to women, he maintains, cultural habits die hard and would haunt us until the time of socialism. He envisions this new society as a community whose men, in the words of Raymond Williams, unlearned the “inherent dominative mode” of the old sexist society. To restore citizenship to women, Mahjub advises the party to embrace the gender grievances of women as inseparable from the objectives of the democratic revolution. Addressing these gender issues, he argues, would not sit well with men whose privileges would be threatened by such move.
Mahjub keeps coming to the inattention of the party to gender issues. Had we addressed them, he maintains, we should have developed a capacity to question the privileges men enjoy at the expense of women. Although we endeavor to bring men and women to work together to change society, he says, we need to be aware that the contradiction between men and women is a fact of life that can neither be ignored nor papered up. The struggle against patriarchal misconceptions and privileges, he says, is a duty we have not taken up seriously. Importantly, Mahjub keeps making the link between sharia, the mainstay of family law in Sudan, and gender consciousness without going into any details. Focusing on gender issues, he argues, would energize reforms in the family law and co-opt religion in the progressive enterprise in the country.
On the organizational level, Mahjub based his reform on the understanding that the women social movement is multi-layered and it would be unwise to lump it all in a static, one-dimensional organization. He saw the need to replace the then existing organization of the SWU Union, consisting of a central committee helped by various specialized offices, town committees, and neighborhood branches, by a women social movement in tune with the whole gamut of women’s agenda for liberation. The new organization would consist of an effective leadership on the national level functioning as the hub for autonomous activities and expressions by which women impact society and change their lives. Mahjub’s proposal wanted to retire the neighborhood branches of the SWU that reduce women resourcefulness to a single activity.
Fatima’s Position
Mahjub’s reforms were vehemently opposed by the women leaders of the SWU. Fatima criticized them in the party forums and continued in practice doing business as usual. In response to Mahjub’s article, Fatima published a rejoinder in al-Shu’i # 132. Her article contains some clues that may reveal why Fatima was so adamant in opposing Mahjub’s reforms. She devotes a significant part of the article to issues of moral codes governing women’s political work in the party and the SWU. This emphasis may reveal some biographical details of the participants in this discourse on Marxism and women.
Fatima is famous for being a strict moralist when it comes to women’s participation in politics. Her emphasis on moral code is understandable in light of the fact that she pioneered women emancipation in a strongly patriarchal urban culture in Sudan. To squeeze the cause of women liberation in this “no women land,” as described by an English journalist in the 1950s, Fatima and her comrades had to willingly and courageously put on the veil of their discontent to avert the politically-motivated gossip about women modesty which could have distracted people from the real focus of their activism. One must hasten to say that their selfless sacrifices were rewarded in building a grass root women organization of the first degree. This veiling is of one piece with the terrain of what Afkami describes as the unusually agonizing reality for being a pioneer struggler “for women’s rights in Muslim society” in which “the personal is political.” This effacing of the personal is a camouflage these strugglers employ to carry out their subversive praxis. This Spartan veil has precluded Fatima though from endorsing the liberal ways young women enjoyed thanks to the 1964 Revolution. A few months ago she returned to Sudan from a long exile in Britain. Back home she chastised her Sudanese comrades in the Diaspora for alleged moral laxity for indulging in smoking and drinking and endorsing gay rights. In violating the Spartan moral code of the pioneers like Fatima, the younger generations of educated women are unwelcome in the SWU and have to join youth leagues and trade unions which are less puritan.
Mahjub’s reform could not have come at a worst time. The wedding of Mahjub at the time these reforms were advanced factored in the discourse of Marxism and women. Mahjub’s marriage was objected to by a circle in the party and others in society at large because the would-be wife of the Secretary-General was too liberal to their “proletarian” taste and ethics. Mahjub’s association with liberal women writers and academicians did not help either. Fatima may have thought his reform was intended as a Trojan horse for his associates to take over the leadership of the SWU.
The most significant part of Fatima’s article though was that in which she objected to Mahjub’s organizational reform. She describes as unfounded Mahjub’s conclusion that the SWU was a one-dimensional organization that lagged behind in revolutionizing communist work among women. On the contrary, she states, this longstanding SWU structure, consisting of a central committee, town committees, and neighborhood branches, was flexible enough to suit the specific circumstance of women in the country.
Fatima argues that the view that the WU has run its course is superficial and wrong for not taking into account the adverse realities surrounding women in the country. Mahjub’s proposals are too complex for SWU for not taking the level of women’s consciousness into account The majority of these women are still backward, unaware of their rights, and victims of men, superstitions, and religious sectarian influence. Considering the intellectual backwardness of women, she argues, it would be impossible to mobilize them by means of a highly sophisticated organization such as the one suggested by Mahjub. Blame for the poor communist performance among women, she argues, should be directed to the party. Instead of owning up to its inadequacies in its work among women, the party, as evident by Mahjub’s proposal, chose to liquidate the SWU.
Fatima’s remained theoretically and in practice committed to the traditional organizational set up of the SWU. Her Hasaduna (Our Gains in Struggling for the Women Cause, Year) is celebratory of neighborhood branches, the single feature that bring it closer to a party-like organization. Fatima describes in the book the circumstances in which these branches emerged in the 1950s and the emancipatory role they played in women’s lives. Hostage to a patriarchy that monitored their every move, women could not leave home to attend or participate in activities of the WU held in downtowns. To connect these women with the SWU, neighborhood branches were established for women to access the SWU through them. The experiment was too rewarding then for Fatima to rethink their function in a changing society in which women are no longer watched or stalked every step of the way.
The Reforms in Hindsight
In a reflective mood in the 1980s Fatima was apparently inclined to endorse Mahjub’s overhauling of the SWU she had opposed in the 1960s. Her re-examination of the state of the union replicates Mahjub’s reforms. After a careful evaluation of the positive contribution of the neighborhood branch to the SWU, she confesses that the union has failed to create forums attractive to women workers and young women who had not shown up in the neighborhood branches. What kept young women away from the branches was that they could have joined the Sudanese Youth Union and had fun in its gender-blind activities. Women workers, on the other hand, were satisfied by participating in the politically animated trade unions. Having said this, Fatima seems to suggest that the SWU should have reinvented itself to court these emerging and influential communities of women. Central to this reinvention is the adoption of a gender strategy addressing women as women. In holding fast to the neighborhood branch concept, Fatima seems to argue that the union did not make conscious efforts to link with these women on the forums they had chosen to express themselves. The union was not only isolated from women clubs, athletic teams, artistic and musical groups, partying, and beauty contest, but condemned them as the tentacle of bourgeois decadence that would corrupt the women movement. The union’s organ, Sawt al-Mara, Fatima states, [on the other hand] failed to compete with an Egyptian women magazine because the latter “touched on women life in general and youthful lives in particular such as love affairs. Sawt al-Mara avoided dealing forthrightly with these affairs in deference of the conservatism rampant in our society that detest love sentiments and repress them. Our magazine could have come to grips with these matters though from a scientific and socialist vantage point and within the limits of decency and modesty observed by our society.”
Fatima neither acknowledged Mahjub for these re-visions nor showed any intention of revamping the SWU to admit these long banished communities of women into its ranks. The SWU continued to do business as usual. It is still around holding to its traditional forms of organization
Conclusion
In the sixties it seems that Mahjub successfully addressed theoretical issues Marxist feminists only addressed in the 1970s and 1980s. In these late decades these feminists were working to “unravel the relationship between class and gender hierarchies.” (Brenner 12), This led them to investigate “the degree to which women’s oppression is constructed independently of the general oppression of capitalist production . . .. and the degree to which the oppression of women is located at the level of ideology” (Brenner 11). Three approaches to women’s oppression emerged, the domestic labor theory, the patriarchy concept, and the cultural production approach. The domestic labor theory premised its research on the theory that “women’s oppression is an integral part of capitalism and not independently determined.” The patriarchy approach, on the other hand, saw women’s oppression as a “relationship of dependence and powerless ness vis-à-vis their husbands and fathers” “for men have privileges as men and wield power, even within the working class” This approach is concerned of incorporating patriarchy in class analysis (Brenner 12). Finally, the cultural production approach, which was inspired by the rejection of economism and the reprioritization in Marxism, “focuses on the creation of masculine and feminine subjectivity and the representation of gender difference in cultural production (Brenner 12). Barret (1980) is a critical assessment of all these approaches. Mahjub suggested broadly for his party a gender strategy that made the oppression of women by men a priority never to be compromised in the nationalist or economist ideology. He did not need more than Lenin according to Zetkin to come up in the 1960s with a gender strategy that scholarship only broached in the 1970s and 1980s. There is something to praxis that we are still far behind in appreciating.
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الكاتب |
Date |
 د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 08-29-07, 06:39 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 08-29-07, 07:36 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Safia Mohamed | 08-29-07, 07:59 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | حيدر حسن ميرغني | 08-29-07, 08:10 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | فيصل محمد خليل | 08-29-07, 08:10 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 08-30-07, 00:09 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | zumrawi | 08-29-07, 11:10 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Bashasha | 08-30-07, 03:57 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Tragie Mustafa | 08-30-07, 04:04 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Bashasha | 08-30-07, 04:35 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 08-31-07, 02:16 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Saifeldin Gibreel | 08-31-07, 07:24 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | حيدر حسن ميرغني | 08-31-07, 08:09 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-01-07, 02:52 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Mohamed Elnaem | 09-01-07, 04:51 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-01-07, 07:28 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-01-07, 09:15 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Saifeldin Gibreel | 09-01-07, 12:13 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | غادة عبدالعزيز خالد | 09-01-07, 02:38 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-02-07, 01:52 AM |
| ان تسمع بالمعيدي خيرا من تراه | Mutwakil Mustafa | 09-02-07, 04:56 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | عبدالغفار محمد سعيد | 09-04-07, 04:21 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 03:52 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 03:55 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Bashasha | 09-05-07, 04:27 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 04:34 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Bashasha | 09-05-07, 04:40 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 04:59 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | omar ali | 09-05-07, 06:34 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 07:05 AM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 08:36 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Bashasha | 09-05-07, 09:11 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Mohamad Shamseldin | 09-05-07, 10:32 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 11:50 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-05-07, 11:26 PM |
| Re: د. عبد الله علي ابراهيم يحاضر عن عبد الخالق والأتحاد النسائي بأيوا سيتي | Abomihyar | 09-07-07, 08:18 AM |
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Abomihyar
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست