Review of Abdel Salam Sidahmed, Politics and Islam in Contemporary Sudan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
This book represents an interesting but ultimately incomplete discussion of Islam on the Sudanese national political stage. Actually the book is more a chronicle of a century of abuse, as political actors and parties invoked Islam for partisan, sectarian and personal gain. The curious result of that abuse, however, was the triumph of Islamist politics, and the disappearance, in northern Sudan, of organized forces advocating a serious 'secular' vision for the country. Sidahmed's contribution is in reminding the reader that Umma, DUP and NIF, and the various political personalities guiding the northern Sudanese movements, repeatedly drafted Islami-centric constitutions and party platforms.
The book opens with a discussion of Condominium rule, setting out the basic themes of Islam in Sudanese politics. British authorities, like their successors, tried to manipulate local symbols of Islam (the Mahdi's legacy, the shari'a courts, the Grand Gadis, the mosques and prayerbooks) to gain legitimacy. Sudanese politicians and imams of the time, apparently, did the same. The ensuing 'game', as Sidahmed occasionally calls it, diverted energy and resources from serious problems facing the country (North-South relations, and development).
Sidahmed is quite disparaging of the constitutional committee established during the brief democratic period of 1965-69. While there was much rhetoric of Islam, the actual drafts and positions that emerged from the discussions reflected European political theory and experience, Sidahmed argues, and very little Islam. Other than banning the Communist party and calling for shari'a, it seems the Islamist parties had little notion of what an Islamic constitution should look like, and so they crafted a European one. The problem seems to have been in resolving the tension of advocating equality of participation pre-conditioned on acceptance of Islam as a basic tenet of society.
Sidahmed also dispels some myths about the unfortunate 1983 shari'a laws. These were not enacted out of a sudden delusional fanaticism; Nimeiri had repeatedly and gradually taken steps to cloak his rule in the language of Islam. According to Sidahmed, Nimeiri after the 1971 suppression of his erstwhile leftist allies, turned to the Republican Brothers as ideological cheerleaders. But far clearer evidence of this gradual Islamism was the post-1977 governments of national unity, where Nimeiri first took in the Umma Party and then the Muslim Brothers.
The Umma Party and especially its leader Sadiq al-Mahdi are then skewered; their use cynical use of Islam as a symbolic weapon in political struggles was all too evident during the brief democratic interlude of 1985-1989.
When it comes to the NIF takeover of 1989 Sidahmed finds similar evidence of duplicity and cynicism. The coup was indeed an NIF coup, he asserts, and one should not be misled by apologists who say the NIF did not acquire power illegitimately. The 'elections' and 'consultations' that have taken place periodically since the regime began have also been a sham. The NIF has tried to maintain some semblance of popular legitimacy by constantly invoking an empty (and sometimes even fantastic) imagery of Islam in Sudan as like the Islam of the time of the Prophet (with martyrs, jihad, and houri). The military rulers and NIF backers invoke and praise shari'a without actually enforcing the harsh laws to any real degree.
The book is easy to read, although there are numerous grammatical and stylistic errors. One wonders, after reading Sidahmed's book, why Islam retains any symbolic currency at all among political actors and their constituents. The interpretation through the book, of a certain commonality among the Umma Party, DUP, and NIF is certainly controversial and topical. If each group loudly proclaims its own interpretation of political Islam to be "more truthful" (NIF), or "more reasonable" (DUP), or "more authentic" (Umma), surely one would expect that the populace would throw up their hands in disgust. Why are people fighting and dying if the northern NDA leaders are ideologically on the same wavelength as the NIF leaders? It must be that the Islamic rhetoric does not actually matter that much, that the politicians are allowed to continue to play such games. Islam is really used to mark constituencies in a different struggle. That struggle is not over ideologies, but rather, as usual, over control of resources and power. Which leads to the question of what is going on behind the stage, where the real action is, so to speak. That is a question that Sidahmed only hints at, with a short concluding discussion of socio-economic changes - the rise of remittances and the mughtarbin and the decline of an 'old order' of tradition and obedience (the order described by MacMichael and other colonial officials, and which might perhaps be in need of some revisionist historiography).
For the reader seeking a general overview of Islam in Sudanese politics the book can be recommended. Sudanese and Sudanist political scientists may be somewhat disappointed in that there is not enough original material or research; the book relies almost exclusively on official documents and newspaper accounts. An in-depth study of the sociology and politics of the rank-and-file, Islamicist-oriented, northern Sudanese man and woman remains to be written. I hope Sidahmed takes up the challenge.