Their Second Republic

Islamism in the Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion

Abdullahi A. Gallab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317011378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Building on his successful book, The First Islamist Republic, Abdullahi A. Gallab's Their Second Republic: Islamism in the Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion deals with Islamism, its representations, history, and transformations in the region. Continuing the study of Islamism in power the book affirms the continuous disintegration of the Islamist movement in the Sudan taking a critical look at its institutions and their ideological and rhetorical stances. The book provides an entry point into Hasan al-Turabi's Islamism, its local regimes and their disintegration. The book addresses the profound transformations that stem from the anachronistic qualities of political Islam as it deploys violence to maintain power. Gallab describes this as savage separation of religion and state. The main focus of the book is to provide a socio-historical analysis of developments and transformations of historic forms of Islamism and its runaway world as well as situating it in its local and global contexts.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book, Their Second Republic: Islamism in the Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion, is a continuation of the study of Islamism in power in the Sudan from 1989 to the present. However, it is not by any means volume two of a book series in the study of Islamism in the Sudan. The previous study,¹ covered the period from 1989 to 1999. This study not only affirms the continuous disintegration of the Islamist movement, but it also takes a critical look at Islamism in the Sudan, the runaway countenance of the entire experience as its institutions, and their ideological and rhetorical stances that foundered into oblivion.

The Islamist regime claimed to turn the Sudan into a state-directed society controlled by an Islamic ideal similar in its purity to the Muslim’s during the rule of ‘Umar Ibn ‘Abdul ‘Aziz (682–704 AD)² 14 centuries previously. That was to be accomplished, according to its polemicists, by fusing all the aspects and activities of life and living into one. That totalist dream and program did not survive.³ To quote Hamid Dabashi, “history does indeed, as Marx once frivolously put it, repeat itself (once as tragedy, once as farce)—but the world will not.”⁴ Such politics of nostalgia, which existed in the early days of the Islamists’ rule, soon dissipated as the day-to-day practices of the regime proved to be, at their best, “attitudes lacking a common intellectual method.”⁵ In his book, al-Haraka al-Islamiyya al-Soudaniyya: Dierat al-Daw wa Khiout al-Dhalam (The Sudanese Islamic Movement: The Circle Light and the Threads of Darkness), al-Maḥboob ‘Abdelsalaam admitted that from the regime’s early days, al-boas al-fikri (the poverty of knowledge) of all those who claimed to be specialized in classical Islamic fields of studies and even those who lived within the Islamist experience became clear.⁶ If his claim is to be accepted, it is not entirely surprising that the Islamist state—considered central to having an Islamic system enforced—has been constrained from the start by the ignorance of those who were supposed to write down and apply God’s constitution. Ultimately, such a model of governance can take any form of “contentious politics.” Accordingly, the Sudanese satire is appropriate in describing al-Kizan⁷ (the Islamists): dakhaluna al-jami‘i wa dakhalu hum al-Souq (‘the Islamists’ sent us to the mosque while they scrambled to the market). That Sudanese joke and other similar ones are often circulated and cited by Sudanese community members as evidence of not only their deep-seated disdainful views but also what Islamism has turned into and how it is seen by fellow citizens who suffered a lot from their rule for more than two decades. This book looks at the patterned ways these developments have taken. It offers a portrait of how visible and invisible environments worked together—and sometimes separately—to corrode the internal and external layers of both the first and second Islamist republics. Furthermore, both republics owe much to the debate about the essential nature of Islamism itself; the colonial and postcolonial states and their communities of the state; and the long debate about Islam, politics, and the state.

The three experiences in the last two centuries that continue to have the deepest effects on Sudanese life are the two colonial experiences, the postcolonial states, and the October 1964 Revolution.⁸ The first colonial experience (1821–1885) was responsible for the creation of the Sudanese borders that remained until 2011. It created a center and margins with Sudanese peoplehoods and their social, cultural, and economic differentiations that survived proceeding states. The second colonial experience (1898–1956) added to the growth of both the center and the marginalized areas within the same geography. It also added to the existing condition of social differentiation by creating a new community of the state.⁹ The first postcolonial experience of the Mahdiyya was successful in liberating the Sudan from foreign rule. However, neither the Mahdist state nor its leader were immune from using draconian measures and violence against their own population, even as some of that population used collective violence against the regime. On the one hand, everyone agrees that the second postcolonial states (1956–present), who have been dominated by military regimes, have not been up to the task of liberating the country and the state from a myriad series of contrivances and mentalities of ‘totalist’ politics, ideologies, and systems—or from systems the state created to give effect to such a role. On the other hand, the October Revolution stands as a great movement for the Sudanese enthusiasm for liberation from the accumulative and singular role the central state has played in colonizing the Sudanese life since 1821. Like other Sudanese regimes, the Islamist rule has its similar and dissimilar historical and structural causes and preconditions, as well as the primary impediments for its violent, oppressive, and destructive nature. We need a completely different analytical framework to understand what happened in the Sudan in the past quarter century of Islamist rule. Such a framework leads us to look at the Sudanese experience and its complex and complicated developments and the way it has been informing the Sudanese’s present experience, its complexity, and the rising Muslim—not Islamist—and global consciousness that provided for technologies of change, meaning, and liberation from tyranny. My approach builds on my previous two books, The First Islamist Republic (2008) and A Civil Society Deferred (2011, 2013) to provide some necessary background to explain the essence of the Sudanese Islamism and its relationships and forms within which it has been partly or wholly interwoven. Building on my previous colonial and postcolonial research, Chapter 2 provides three points on the Sudanese Islamist fields of action, conditions, and relationships in which the Islamist movement originally emerged and then developed, rose to power, degenerated, and rapidly regressed into oblivion. With a similar approach, Chapter 4 provides a deeper look at the October Revolution through the lens of collective revolutionary and counter-revolutionary practices associated with the succession of political developments in the field of al-Turabi’s Islamism, in particular, thereafter.

Furthermore, this study—by looking into the essence of Islamism—argues that the prevailing state of consciousness not only provides the beginning for what lies ahead, but it also endows us with the material evidence that the belief behind pursuing Islamism as a rendezvous with an Islamic, Muslim, or even Islamist state and system has proven to be irrelevant. Here lingers the most serious question: does that projection not simply signal the end of the Sudanese model of Islamism or does it also signal the beginning of the end of Islamism itself as an ideology and political project? This study aims to show that through demonstrations in which Islamism itself has been deprived of any meaningful significance, and while all elements of failure open up in the Sudanese project, pronouncements of other models might express the nature and reveal the shape of these ventures of Islamist representations elsewhere. This interpretive claim, as Frederic Volpi says, represents an effort to free this approach “from rigid analytical framework” to what amounts to “making sense of the modern developments in the light of the past but not predetermined by the past.”¹⁰

From Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology to Francis Fukuyama’s highly controversial book The End of History, the literature on the demise of regimes and their ideologies is massive and wide ranging. Narratives and counter-narratives within the realm of the human production of knowledge have been making an “effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives.”¹¹ The end of Islamism and its totality of social and political ideology—what is impatiently foreseen by many as inevitable—is a project and order coming to fulfillment. Many would argue that the Arab Spring has come as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a self-justifying objective that revealed the power of the active forces of the corrosive actions of inner, covert, and overt realities incongruous to the ones shimmering at the top. Such realities manifest themselves behind an alternative reality that continues to interrogate, challenge, and confront the essence of Islamism. Hazem Kandil, reported that he “asked the old, bearded man standing next to me in Tahrir Squire why he joined the protests. ‘They promised us that Islam is the solution,’ he replied. ‘But under Muslim Brotherhood rule we saw neither Islam nor a solution.’ The country that invented Islamism may well be on its way to undoing its spell.”¹² Many would argue that in addition of the brothers’ dismal performance in power, the poor performance of the Sudanese Islamist was an eye opener for 33 million of Egyptian citizens to march against the Islamist rule.

This study will address all this, largely through a sociological analysis of the Sudanese Islamists’ movement, which can be viewed, in part, as a continuing movement of political Islam or Islamism seeking certain kinds of sociopolitical change that would colonize all of the religious, social, and economic life of the population by holding the state and using it as a vessel for violent and nonviolent ways to reach that end.

Similar to The First Islamist Republic, this study is organized primarily around the following sources: (1) close observation and writing as a journalist and a sociologist on one of the most significant developments of our time—that is, the emergence of different Islamists’ movements in the Muslim world in general and in the Sudan in particular; (2) previous and continuing fieldwork and direct interviews with primary sources, including major players in the political field of Islamism in the Sudan, university professors, journalists, intellectuals, and different Sudanese politicians including those who are supportive and sympathetic of and in opposition to the idea of Islamism in the Sudan and elsewhere; (3) a thorough reading of Sudanese, Arab, and international newspapers, magazines, websites, and journals; and (4) synthesizing the primary research, recent books and articles written in Arabic and English or translated to these two languages by Sudanese and non-Sudanese Islamists, academics, journalists, and other writers about certain aspects of the development of the Islamists’ state in the Sudan and Islamism in general.

Now one might immediately ask the implicit question: why is a second book about the Islamist experience or the Islamists in the Sudan necessary? The answer to that question is that the study of Islamism and the Islamist experience in the Sudan goes beyond the course of that particular event in time to the very nature of Islamism itself as a reflection of a sociopolitical and, to a certain extent, religious phenomenon. This study involves the structure of power in which the sociopolitical processes and their never-ending conflict with their renewable individual and group ambitions evolve and lead the directions they have been taking. It offers an explanation to an interlude of thought, a record to a human experience, of why the Sudanese Islamism (what I call al-Turabi Islamism) has been called into question by the Sudanese and others and why it faced resistance before and after its decay and descent into oblivion. It is true that many scholars, observers, and even Islamists from outside the Sudan—for reasons we need not get into here—exclude the study of the Sudanese Islamist experience from the study of the other prevailing grand schemes of Islamist developments worldwide. It is also true that Islamism as a phenomenon “had been largely excluded from the mode of inquiry developed by social movement theorists in the West until recently, when a handful of scholars have attempted to bring the Islamic activism into the realm of ‘social movement theory.’”¹³ Moreover, closing the gates of discourse on religion and Islamism—and its promotion, in particular—as opposed to on the state itself in most Muslim countries, entailed harsh treatment and responses from these ruling regimes that led one way to prison and torture, another to the growth of underground dogma, and a third way to a state-manufactured religious datum. While the title of this book indicates that it addresses a specific Islamist model and experience, it is important to look at how individuals could use Islamism, its codes and ideologies, in a similar way as in other totalitarian experiences. From that, some conclusions might be drawn about the future directions of Islamism in general.

What Is Islamism?

One more time, the question “what is Islamism?” arises. Specifically, the debate about Islam within certain global sectors now undertakes Islamism from start to finish. Hence, one does not need to look far to find an array of terms, definitions, and statements by scholars, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists who then use those definitions to try to create theories about Islamism. Some are not without an element of irony. As Robert Cox argues, theory “is always for someone and for some purpose.”¹⁴ In fact, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars, as well as those labeled “Islamists,” have debated the terms immensely. The most important element of that debate is that the issue at hand is rather of an ideology than of a theology. This ideology presents itself, in the words of Karl Marx, as “anxiously conjur[ing] up the spirits of the past to [its] service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”¹⁵ The terms Islamist and Islamism—widely used to denote a choice of political ideology unified in well-defined ways and differentiated from other Muslims in specific doctrinal ways (rather than the simple fact of being born Muslim)—are applied here to describe current individuals, groups, and manifestations of Islamist movements, political Islam, and those who are ...

Table of contents

• Cove Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliterations and Other Matters
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Making of Islamism in the Sudan
• 3 Ḥasan al-Turabi: The Making and Unmaking of al-Turabi’s Islamism (1)
• 4 Ḥasan al-Turabi: The Making and Unmaking of al-Turabi’s Islamism (2)
• 5 In Whose Image? The Same Question One More Time
• 6 Al-Turabi Islamism and its Webs of Ironies
• 7 ‘Alī ‘Uthmān Moḥamed Ṭaha: When the Hurly-burly’s Done (1)
• 8 ‘Alī ‘Uthmān Moḥamed Ṭaha: When the Hurly-burly’s Done (2)
• 9 The Great Exodus: Walking Out of the Islamist Regime and its State and the Liberation and Citizenship Debate
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index