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MAJOR THEMES

Islamism's proponents in Sudan, including contemporary official political leaders, have called for a return to Shari'a--Islamic law--as well as an Islamic constitution. They have also mounted a thorough-going program of social engineering, which for a brief period in the early 1990s ("the Comprehensive Call to God") threatened to marshal extensively the proselytization of non-Muslims, and forcibly impose an Islamist orthodoxy on Sudan's population. Such an agenda supposes an actively--sometimes violently--homogenizing community of Muslims living under the Koran. Its engine is a reinterpreted, rerooted Islam, relevant to the technology of modernity, but resistant to the perceived cultural pollution of liberalism and secularism. Yet on the Sudanese territorial terrain, a unified national identity remains contested; it is not unambiguously Islamic. Islamism in Sudan remains a program in progress, failed as of 2008, but unexpired as an attempt to impose a national identity on a pluralistic population, presuming--and indeed forcibly applying--a homogeneity of beliefs and a narrow set of political-cultural goals.

Historical Islam, the nominal religion of most of the country, provides perhaps a logical platform for a thrust toward Islamist militancy and an Islamic nationalism, but at the grassroots it provides a weak and divided base for constructing such a regime. The Islamist agenda has waxed and waned through several decades, imposed by force at times and in different regions. The year 2008 sees the Islamist project shattered, between an Arab version, centered in the capital and in the Nile Valley, and a variant version in the west of the country. In addition, at present, the southern part of Sudan, after years of warfare, has won a putative constitutional barrier to imposed Islamism, part of an officially established federated state, sidelining the goal of revolutionary political unitarianism.

The historical suppleness of a pragmatic and strategically flexible Islam is corrupted when Sudanese leaders use the rhetoric of political Islam to cash in on its cultural currency. While the brief Islamist-Mahdi rule in the late nineteenth century offers a precedent for strict Islamic government in Sudan, the logic of the still contested appeal of the National Islamic Front (NIF)--renamed the National Congress Party and now in charge of the government--is a product of four factors: first, a legitimate, indigenous development of Islam and Islamic law; second, the rise of a wily and charismatic Islamist leader, Hasan al-Turabi; third, a mixing of derived and locally developed Islamist ideas--critical interpretations of social ills and the restorative powers of a revived and muscular Islam in the course of the twentieth century; and fourth, the result of the political utility and returns of a strongly enforced Islamism to the ruling (and Arabized) elites in Sudan. While the essentially revolutionary project of Sudanese Islamism remains stalled, incomplete and divided today, growing anti-Westernism in mid-2008 in the Middle East competes for a popular renewal, lately partially counter-balanced by the international financial and political gains of cooperation with the West in the global war on terrorism.

PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES

In comparison to neighboring territories, Islam was late in coming to Sudan. Nearly 900 years elapsed between the death of Muhammad and the official acceptance of Islam by the Sudanese ruling elite. The area of present-day Sudan is home to African, Christian, Nubian, Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic religious and cultural traditions. Yet the modern history of Sudan encompasses one of the first Islamist states in the world--the Sudan of the Mahdi (Redeemer) in the late nineteenth century, also comprising the first native, national Sudanese state.

Sudan was also the first modern Sunni state in the late twentieth century to adopt explicitly a rigorous Islamic government and laws. With the seizure of power by the National Islamic Front (NIF) in 1989, Sudan reportedly joined a "Khartum-Teheran Axis," radically at odds with the West.[1] Today, despite indigenous conditions, which, on their face, make Sudan an unlikely Islamist state, and despite a largely failed infrastructure, continual civil wars and desperate poverty, the Sudanese governing elite demonstrates an ideological persistence and an international appeal for many Muslim states, continuing to invoke Islamism in its political and legal life, and in its intermittent posturing in foreign affairs.

Violence and warfare have characterized Sudan in 1955-1972 and 1983-2008. Waxing and waning throughout Sudan's half-century of post-independence history, with but a decade of respite, Africa's longest running internal conflict reflected deep differences, largely between the Northern and Southern parts of Sudan and their populations, over issues of power-sharing, wealth, identity, and Islamization.

More recently, Sudan's proclivity towards civil strife, and its ideological battles with the West have converged in Darfur, three provinces in the far western region of Sudan, along the Chadian border. Strictly speaking, the fighting in Darfur is not a continuation of the Southern civil war, but it is rooted in many of the same problems: a lack of power and access in Khartum, a failed Islamist project, as well as economic under-development and exploitation. Rebel groups commenced the current phase of guerrilla conflict in Darfur in 2003. By 2004, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had labeled the Sudan government's (and its proxy militia's) violent repression of the uprising as genocide.[2] The U.S. Congress, in the same year, unanimously agreed with the characterization of the conflict as genocide, noting:

The Government of the United States, in both the executive branch and Congress, has concluded that genocide has been committed and may still be occurring in the Darfur region, and that the Government of Sudan and militias supported by the Government of Sudan, known as the Janjaweed, bear responsibility for the genocide.[3]

For their part, the Sudanese government has responded to the accusations of genocide with rhetoric of their own, calling in 2006 for jihad against any UN or American troops that might come to Darfur. President Omar al-Bashir has refused the presence of troops with "colonial and imperial ambitions."[4] The head of Sudanese security and intelligence allegedly extracted loyalty oaths from his men to become martyrs rather than see Sudan host UN troops.[5] On April 23, 2006, Usama bin Ladin, long linked to Sudan and to the NIF government, and one time Khartum resident, released an audio tape calling on "the mujahideen and their supporters in Sudan ... and the Arabian peninsula to prepare ... to wage a long-term war against the Crusaders in western Sudan."[6] For Khartum, jihad is a powerfully evocative language that mobilizes domestic and international support, as well as the predictably radically oppositionist response from the West.

A rhetorical war is central to the vitality of an Islamist Sudan, and the present government is committed to political Islam. The claim draws material assistance and moral approbation in the Muslim world. The foundation of the claim, as well as the foundation of the National Islamic Front (NIF, National Congress Party (NCP)) government, remains compromised by the complex history of Islam in Sudan. Khartum's Islamist program, now encapsulated in the vocabulary of jihad, reflects a political agenda, more than a religious revival. This article explores the trajectory of Islamism, its origins in Sudan--how Islam developed instrumentally in the hands of radical leaders, its aims, its practices in its relatively brief heyday and its present political commitments. It also speculates on where Islamism in Sudan may be heading.
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