Conference Paper
Religion, Nationalism, and Peace in Sudan

U.S. Institute of Peace Conference
September 16-17, 1997

The Limits and Dilemmas of "Secular" Re-Islamisation Programme
The Case of Sudan

By Dr. Abdelwahab El-Affendi

Rereading Tayeb Salih's famous novel Season of Migration to the North the other day, my attention was caught by a particular conversation in the book, the first between the protagonist, Mustafa Saeed, and the narrator. This was their second meeting, and Saeed wanted to know the narrator. When he was told that the narrator had finished his studies in Britain and obtained a doctorate in English Literature, where he studied the works of an obscure poet, Saeed retorted drylly: We do not need poetry here. If you had studied agriculture, engineering or medicine, it would have been better." The narrator was deeply offended and resented the implication in the use of "we" here. "See how he says we," he said to himself, "without including me in the reference, in spite of the fact that it was me who was the native, while it was him, and not me, who was the stranger." The resentment was tinged with jealousy, for Saeed appeared to have blended perfectly in the village, and became one of its respected residents.

Perhaps no other passage in the novel sums up its central theme better: the impossible fantasy of the modern-educated individual melting back again into the traditional village community, as if nothing has happened. Pretending that he had never been to London, never read Shakespeeare, never seen the world beyond, never tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and was, as a consequence, thrown out of the traditional village paradise as a punishment. But, of course, that "homecoming" was quite impossible.

The relevance of this point to our theme here is two-fold. First, the passage from the traditional life of community, where kin relations and close contact are the basis of social life, to "society" where interaction is role-based" and people deal with what a person is rather than who he is, is regarded by some sociologists as the mark of transition to modern secular society. If this is true, then Sudan could be considered as one of the few spots on earth where community life is alive and well. Khartoum remains, pretty much as when it had first been founded, a huge and unwieldly village. And, second, the dilemma facing the modernized elite in the face of this reality, remains as insoluble as ever. At times, it reveals itself in fantasies like the one described above, of dissolving back into the village of Saeed. At others, it expresses itself in acts of vindictive vandalism directed against traditional community life, its symbols and its structures.

In the elite, I include the modern Islamists who, no less than their rivals, were touched by the acquisition of the forbidden fruit of modern knowledge, and could no less pretend that this did not happen. They also exhibit the same symptoms, in particular the alienation vis-a-vis traditional society, and the alternation between contradictory attitudes towards it.

For this reason, I think it proper to revise somewhat the typology of Islamic activism suggested by John Voll in his comparison between Maahdism and Wahhabism as phenomena of Islamic activism where he tried to contrast what he regarded as two distinct styles of religious revivalism (tajdid) in Islam: a message-oriented approach and a man-oriented one. The first emphasises the adherence to an objective and "permanently existing" message, and minimised the role of the person advocating it. The second, by contrast, puts more emphasis on the charisma and positive contribution of the messenger. The first style is epitomised by Wahhabism and similar "fundamentalist" tendencies, while the second is exemplified by Mahdism, especially in its Sudanese manifestation.

While this distinction is very interesting and quite useful, I have elsewhere tried to point to another distinction which is particularly relevant to modern Islamic revivalist movements. According to this view, the most distinctive characteristic of modern Islamic revivalism since Sayyid Jamal El-Din al-Afghani is their decidedly secular emphasis. While the problem for Muhammad Ahmad the Mahdi of Sudan, or Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, had been the apparent deviation from the demands of the faith, this was only an incidental matter for Afghani or Muhammad Abduh. For them, the problem was the worldly decline of the Muslim Ummah relative to its rivals which, though seen as having been caused by deviation from the true path of faith, is nevertheless lamented in itself. The cure for deviation from the faith was thus being sought mainly to cure the other ill: backwardness and subordination to the infidel.

It is important, though, to note that "Islamist" reformers are to be distinguished from outright secularists. The distinction comes from the fact that they continue to stress the relevance, even the centrality, of Islamic values and teachings to the renaissance of Muslim communities, while secularists either oppose or ignore this factor. Thus while Daniel Pipes is right to note that modern Islamists fall too much under the influence of the West, it is not accurate to dismiss their Islamic credentials completely. However, there is an important aspect in which these modern activists could be distinguished from the likes the Mahdi of Sudan, or even from men like Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a very "modern" reformer. The Mahdi reportedly told his followers: "I have come [to preach] the ruin of this world and the flourishing of the next." Taha, in a less dramatic fashion, preached a mystical religious message which focused only incidentally on this side of life. Men like Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, were somewhat ambivalent. al-Banna was personally moved by a deep mystical vision and lived an intensely religious life. The organisation he constructed, by contrast, was a very elaborate set-up, complete with a secret military wing and a number of allied economic ventures. The organisation, especially the secret wing, possessed a logic of its own, and not only tended to get out of control, but at times reflected a marked divorce between practice and the real ethos of the organisation.

This aspect of modern religious organisations have been recognised by some analysts as a concomitant of the process of secularisation in modern societies, which touches even religious organisations. It is also important to note that the very nature of modern organisations also creates this effect. When the Church of England invests some of its funds in various ventures, this could entail that the activities of the church would actually be supported by a variety of individuals and "customers" who do not have any connections with the Church, including atheists and even (God forbid!) Catholics. This creates a clear divorce between the values espoused by the church and the activities supporting it. But when the church invests in apartheid-era South Africa, the divorce between practice and value turns into a conflict.

The phenomenon I am trying to describe here is comparable, but distinct from, the above processes. One example of it is the transformation of the Mahdist movement in Sudan at the hands of the Mahdi's posthumous son, Sayyid Abd al Rahman. The military defeat of the Mahdist movement at the hands of the British in 1898 created a series of dilemmas for the substantial army of faithful who survived the disaster. The more urgent problem for the faithful was first that of physical survival under occupation. The second was how to make sense of it all. The sudden disappearance of the Mahdi before the materialisation of any of his major promises of victory and salvation was problem enough. The collapse of the whole enterprise at the hands of the infidel who became the new masters was quite another. Sayyid Abd al Rahman succeeded not only in assuring the physical survival of the community of the faithful, but engineered a veritable revival in its fortunes. He also made the necessary ideological transformation which would make this survival meaningful. The original theory required that either the Mahdi would triumph or, failing that, the end of the world would come, heralded by the return of the resurrected Jesus Christ (Nabi Isa) who would establish a righteous kingdom on earth. Claimants of this prophetic mantle appeared regularly in the country in the decades following the collapse of the Mahdist state, leading a number of minor revolts that were quickly put down.

Sayyid Abd al Rahman replaced all that with an ideology of quietist collaboration and "waiting." This was done by reinterpreting the Mahdist ideology along lines that brought it closer to mainstream sunni orthodoxy. This secured both acceptance from mainstream religious authorities and acquiescence by the British. But it also effectively delinked the survival of the Mahdist community from its ideological background. While the ultimate legitimation of the movement derived from the Mahdi and his mission, this became akin to the Marxist idea of the "economic determination in the last instance," where, to quote Althusser, this last instance may never come. However, tension remained within the movement between its revolutionay-mystical ethos and its effectively secular orientation. At least four times in recent memory, it expressed itself in terms of uncontrolled violence. This happened in 1954, 1961, 1970 and 1976, although in the last two instances, the events were more or less engineered by the political leadership, and could be deemed to be in line with the leaderhsip's secular ethos. At present, another attempt is being made to summon the faithful to "jihad." And while the aims are this time decidedly secular and perfectly rational, the language used by the leadership is reminiscent of the old ideology.

Unlike the Mahdist movement, the modern Islamist movement in Sudan, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groupings, was soberly rational from the start. From its early years, the movement displayed conscious pragmatism, manoeuvring itself constantly on the political scene and changing its alliances as its saw fit. However, it did not appear to lose sight of its "determination in the last instance" by its distinctly Islamic goals. Not until 1977, that is. In that year, the opposition led by Sadiq al-Mahdi made a deal accepting in essence the regime set up by former President Gaafar Nimeri, its single-party apparatus included. In exchange, limited freedoms and participation in the regime were allowed. The Muslim Brotherhood lived up to its deal, which meant acceptance of the secular constitution and the one-party state, not to mention one-man rule. This was a clear departure from the movement's ideology. But unlike Sayyid Abd al Rahman's collaboration with the British, the ideology of the movement was not revised substantially to accommodate this new turn of events. Rather, the pretence was that the collaboration did not exist. But the result was the same: the practice and the theory were significantly divorced from each other.

This situation also put its imprint of the Islamisation programme instituted by Nimeiri in 1983. While Nimeiri appeared to be in "Mahdist" mood during his Islamisation programme, heavily influenced as he had then been by his close sufi advisors, he was sober enough to make it clear that he was more concerned with consolidating his rule than with implementing abstract values. "Islam," he said in one of his speeches, "counsels respect for privacy. But we will search homes if we see fit." Again the survival of the agency of the Islamisation programme was effectively delinked from the actual content.

This situation reached a climax with the advent of the current government to power after the coup of June 1989. If the military government had a premeditated Islamisation programme at the beginning, then it had done its best to keep it a secret. It was left to its enemies to brand as a "front" for the forces of Islamisation, an "accusation" that turned out later to have a lot of truth in it. But as far as the government was concerned, it remained just that, an "accusation." Again the Islamisation programme was visibly delinked from the agency that was supposed to carry it out: in this case, a military government that came to power and kept itself there by means that were not directly related to its alleged programme. There was no proclamation here of a "Mahdist" mission, nor of "jihad"; not even a mass revolution with Islamic slogans a la Iranian model. All there had been was a clean, bloodless coup, where tanks and guns were the only language used, together with the crisp and austere language of military decrees.

In all appearance, there had never been a thing like it, and no previous model to measure it to. But if we seek an ideological justification for such a move, it is to the late Ayatollah Khomeini that we must turn, and his doctrine of the "Absolute Jurisdiction of the Jurist," enunciated in early 1988. The doctrine says that the survival of the Islamic state, if such were to come into existence, is the absolute value to which all other values, including explicit religious teachings, must be subordinated. According to this doctrine, Nimeiri had it right all along. If God and His Prophet advised against peeping into peoples' homes, but such an act was necessary to safeguard God's favourite regime, then the Almighty would understand if His advice was ignored in this particular instance.

There is a logic to this position which soon turns into a paradox. If indeed there were to be only one Islamic state, or one Muslim community on earth, then the survival of this "chosen" community, would indeed be a paramount value from a religious point of view, just as the physical survival of the individual human being is a paramount value from the point of view of the individual and religion as well. Did God not permit the eating of pork and the drinking of wine, even the declaration of unbelief under duress to save one's life? But the paradox arises when we are to determine to what extent a community could ignore the values which are the essence of its existence as a religious community and continue to be regarded as such? Where, in other words, do we draw the line? When does the "last instance" ever come? What can a community do to preserve itself and still be worth preserving?

This situation throws genuine dilemmas and problems I do not pretend to to try to resolve here. At the practical level this endows the "Islamic programme" with a flexibility that could make for pragmatism and accommodation. If the survival and independence of the state are the supreme concern, then it is perfectly logical to accept compromises with minorities and other groups to ensure this. Khomeini's Iran, after all, had accepted weapons from the "Great Satan," and even from Israel to persecute its war against the lesser Satan next door. But this raises another important point. The Iran-Contra affair was a scandal not only in Tehran, but also in Washington. Is this "Machiavellianism" then an inescapable feature of political life as such, as Machiavelli (not to mention Henry Kissinger) had assiduously tried to convince us? Put in other words, when does "pragmatism" and flexibility become "Machiavellianism" and absence of principle?

Going back to Voll's typology, one could say that "secular" re-Islamisation movements are generally man-oriented, rather than message-oriented. They depend for their success on confidence in the credentials of the leadership which in effect advocates suspension of adherence to Islamic principles. A strong and credible leadership is needed to "tame" the mass following. This task has usually been undertaken by leadership which relied on inherited charisma and tradition to bolster its position while transforming itself to fit the new role demanded by the circumstances. But while these "transformed" leaders have succeeding in engineering significant shifts in their communities, the compromise they had wrought remains tentative and unstable. Be it the Moroccan and Jordanian monarchies, the Wahhabi state in Saudi Arabia or the Neo-Mahdist movement in Sudan, the avowedly religious legitimation of the leadership entails the continued reiteration of commitment to religious values, and is periodically challenged by movements from below. Admittedly, this is less so in Morocco and Jordan, but only relatively. Even in post-revolutionary Iran, where a Weberian "routinisation of charisma" is gathering pace at the moment, revolt does not seem far below the surface. This may have to do with the specificity of Islam as a message- and community-based religion which continues to defy institutionalisation of religious authority, a develompment that in turn is an indispensable prerequisite for secularisation. This underlines one of the central paradoxes of the situation: in order to affect religious change, the leaders in question must pose as religious leaders. But as soon as the transformation they were seeking succeeds, they cease to be religious leaders and are seen as mere secular functionaries. They therefore immediately forfeit their religious role, which is then taken over by new challengers, returning matters to square one.

While this problem is pronounced in the case of traditional religious movements, some of whose leaders were carried along by a previous wave of Islamisation which they did not engineer themselves but were forced to cope with, it is more so in the case of conscious re-Islamisation movements. In spite of their secular methods, these movements have sought, and succeeded, in creating some genuine religious movements that soon spiralled out of control from their perspective. In Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, the forces of Islamisation are being challenged in turn by new groups which chastise them for the compromises they feel pressed to make with the status quo.

But perhaps the central point that is posed by this development is that there is a real danger that the "elasticity" of principles implied in the conduct and thought of these new movements could drag people into an area of moral vacuum with debilitating consequences. The analogy of the communist experience suggests itself to the mind at this juncture. In between the hell presented by Capitalism, and the paradise promised by Communism, some people succeeded in carving for themselves a niche where everything was permissible. We know enough about that "transitional zone," to recommend alternative routes of travel.

The views expressed above do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policy positions.

For More Information

Please contact the Religion and Peacemaking Initiative by e-mail at religion@usip.org. Written inquiries may also be sent to the address listed below.