Modern Muslims

by Steve Howard

  In the chapters that follow I provide a perspective on the history of this movement and details of its members’ efforts to organize family and movement life against the backdrop of a Sudan at the beginning of the era it is still mired in today, of intolerant rule by an Islamist state. The execution of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha by the Nimeiry regime on January 18, 1985—for trumped-up charges of “apostasy”—signaled in many respects the beginning of the Islamist era that envelops Sudan today. I will describe here the events leading up to that sharia-defying act and its impact on Taha’s followers. An injunction from the Qur’an—that there should be “no compulsion in religion”—was taken by the Republican Brotherhood as one of its mottos or inspiring principles. And this Qur’anic verse was violated by the government of Sudan and the Islamist organizations that supported it in the act of executing Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. That fundamental conflict is at the heart of this book.

  1

  Unity

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909–1985) was the founder, leader, and guide of the Republican Brotherhood movement. He is at the center of any description of the Republican Brotherhood, and he plays an important role in this one as well. But for me, as I tell my story from the rear guard of the movement, Taha is high on a pedestal, and I understood him best through the voices of the brothers and sisters in Sudan and in exile who invested their lives in trying to follow his guidance. They taught me about his training as an engineer in the 1930s and his membership in the Graduates Congress, the intellectual movement that led Sudan’s independence struggle. He started his own political party to participate in that effort, called the Republican Party, which he then transformed into an Islamic social reform movement in the early 1950s. He wrote and spoke in public about his vision for a modern and peaceful Muslim world, and attracted followers from all over Sudan who became his representatives in disseminating the message of the movement.

  As I came to know the Republican movement I was quickly disabused of the idea that I, as a foreigner from the West, might have any privileges of position or representation. I internalized this message a few weeks into my joining the group while returning to Khartoum as a member of my first wafd, or “delegation,” to the northern city of Atbara. The Republicans took these missions all over Sudan to spread their message of the possibilities of a new direction in Islam and distribute their books on the subject. Our group of about eight brothers had spent ten days in Atbara, a city on the Nile about six hours north of Khartoum by slow-moving train. The Sudanese knew Atbara as the “city of fire and steel” in that it had been a railway terminus and an industrial center of sorts, dedicated to small-scale manufacturing. It remained a working-class city at the junction of the Nile and Atbara Rivers. Our return journey had been tough, riding while perched on our suitcases in a crowded third-class car, eating the dust that blew in from the open windows as the train crossed the August desert. When we reached the station in Khartoum North I anticipated the usual rush of Sudanese hospitality, a shower and a well-deserved hot meal to follow our arduous progress from Atbara. But to my surprise we were taken from the train station immediately to the home of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha in our sorry sweaty, dusty state. I tried unobtrusively to shake the dust that was caked in my hair as we sat in Ustadh Mahmoud’s saloon, the main room of the house, waiting to report on our trip. I wondered as I listened to the speakers if a grimy appearance was a required part of the Sufi ritual of this reporting session.

  My next surprise was my position in the Atbara trip report lineup. Again, I thought that, as a guest, I would have been given an opportunity to speak early in the program. Of course, the leaders of the delegation spoke first, describing how many lectures were given in Atbara, how the crowd received us, how many Republican tracts were sold there, and importantly, how the brothers treated each other during the trip. But then Ustadh Mahmoud continued to call on members of the Atbara delegation to speak to the brothers and sisters assembled in his house to listen to us and our impressions. Again a surprise as some of those called upon were actually younger than I was, a graduate student from the United States! Finally, I figured it out. Brothers were called to speak in the order of their seniority in the movement, an order that was created by Ustadh Mahmoud’s sense of the individual’s capacity to understand, live, and model the Republican ideology, the path of the Prophet Mohamed. As for me, I was a weeks-old newcomer, mustajid, and was not ready to take an early place in the reporting line. But also I realized then that I was no longer considered as a guest.

  The doctoral dissertation that finally made its way out of the Sociology Department at Michigan State University, “Social Strategies in Petty Production: Three Small-Scale Industries in Urban Sudan,” was what I had come to Sudan to research. While serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in neighboring Chad I came up with the idea that I would pursue academic African Studies when I returned home. Chad gave me an appreciation of the cultures of the Sahelian/Sudanic belt that crossed Africa from Senegal to Eritrea, and my Michigan State adviser recommended that I add an African language to my skills in planning a career as an African Studies professor. Arabic seemed like a good choice to go with the French-language skill I had developed in teaching high school in Chad, and Arabic combined with my interest in the Sahelian belt identified Sudan as a site for my dissertation research. I had also developed an interest in Sufism, an aspect of Islam often thought of as its mystical orientation, which further intensified the logic of going to Sudan. I considered Islam’s presence in Africa to be rooted in Sufi teachings and organizations, no matter how far African Islam may have strayed from those roots, and Sudan had a rich Sufi history. As I learned more Arabic and prepared to go to Sudan, I decided that once there I would become a Sufi, although at the time I was not actually sure what that might entail. My time teaching at a lycée in rural Chad had left me feeling that I wanted a deeper experience in Africa, and that Sufism could be its vehicle.

  This young man had so many agendas as he set out for Sudan! But the luxuries of youth, of having that generous Fulbright-Hays dissertation grant, of wanting to savor an African experience and not being in any particular hurry, meant that I was not anxious about the ordering of those agendas. I did have some anxiety, however, about my lack of proficiency in spoken Arabic, despite two years of study as part of my graduate course work. In fact, the greatest stomach cramp I have ever had grabbed me as my plane circled Khartoum Airport at the end of 1981, ready to deliver me into a land where I felt that I could not speak the language. And me with all those agendas.

  My first few months in Sudan were spent observing work in Khartoum’s small-scale industrial sites—where I intended to collect sociological data—and trying to learn Arabic. I discovered that Sudanese hospitality was a great help to my research in that the artisans in the workshops of my study—tailors, carpenters, metalworkers—had no objection to my hanging out in their shops, despite the fact that I was unable to tell them clearly what on earth I was doing there, and they usually offered me tea. These workshops were generally found in the “industrial sites” at the margins of the growing cities, housed in everything from sophisticated shops with showrooms to portable sewing-machine tables that could be moved from backs of trucks to the shade of a large tree. Any of these shops, particularly tailor shops, could also be found in residential areas. Tailors who specialized in women’s clothing had shops that were convenient to their customers and accommodating to women’s culture that restricted their movement beyond home to a great extent.

  Studying the sociology of the urban worker did not necessarily offer me a chance to see where and how these workers lived in their homes, so when a tailor whose shop I had been hanging around invited me home to lunch I quickly accepted; I was also busy sampling Sudanese home cooking when I could. But I had woken that day feeling somewhat queasy and decided to carry on with my research figuring it was the heat getting to me. At lunchtime I walked with the tailor to his house nearby, and he sat me down in the saloon to wait. When the large tray was br
ought out by one of his younger brothers, other men in the family gathered around to share the meal. I crouched down with everyone and picked up a piece of bread to dip into one of the many sauces in front of me. I eyed the bread and noticed a small insect baked into it, hardly unusual but it did set my stomach off. I excused myself, ran out to the courtyard, and immediately vomited all over the entrance to the family toilet.

  It turned out that I had malaria, which often announces itself with severe headache and vomiting. The sympathetic family put me to bed, where I stayed for a day or two, getting to see more of the inside of a tailor’s house than I had planned.

  In my spare time I had also begun my quest to find Sufis who would allow me to live with them and teach me how to become one. These encounters sometimes ended in disaster, usually the result of my still-developing Arabic. One Sufi group that invited me with an offer of a place to sleep became my standard of what to avoid. I sat on the bed that had been assigned to me in the corner of the housh, or courtyard, of the sheikh’s house and watched as the small group of maybe six followers of this sheikh prayed the final three of the five daily prayers at one time so that they could commence an evening of drinking aragi, the home-brewed gin of choice in the area. The Qur’an warns that one should not pray while drunk, so these guys felt that they were sticking to the letter of that revelation while fulfilling a basic Muslim obligation.

  Whatever their disposition toward Islamic principles, I was in awe of the unexpected hospitality offered by all these Sudanese willing to take in the wandering American. My first solo bus trip out of Khartoum was an excellent illustration of this welcome. I had wanted to make a weekend visit to a small village in the Gezira called Um Magad, to start to get a better idea of the rural roots of my urban workers. The village was on the west bank of the Blue Nile as it rushed north out of Ethiopia’s highlands, joining the languid White Nile at Khartoum to make the main Nile. But because all of these mud-walled hamlets looked alike to me from the road, I mistakenly got off the bus one village south of my destination. I walked into the warren of walled compounds and asked the first man I saw if this was Um Magad. He didn’t really answer me but gestured that I should follow him to his house. He sat me down in his saloon and disappeared, returning quickly with a large aluminum tray featuring a breakfast of foul (long-simmered fava beans), tomatoes, a fried egg, and bread. We ate in some degree of silence, or rather I ate and he watched me: it was a late hour for a farmer’s breakfast. Finally he escorted me to the place where I had entered his village and he pointed in the direction of Um Magad, where I headed, most likely for another breakfast.

  When I reached Um Magad after a short walk I was subjected to a logical and silent interrogation from villagers—very conventional Sudanese Muslims all—that I never experienced with any Republican brother. The old men of this Blue Nile village wanted to know how “Muslim” I really was. A few of them made a gesture miming the cutting off the tip of the index finger with the other index finger—and then gesturing “so?” with both hands as they anticipated a positive response from me. The Prophet’s sunna, or personal practice, required that men be circumcised, and while this was standard practice for all Sudanese males, it was not an initiation question on the Republican list. The miming of the delicate question by the old village men rather than asking me directly was also an indicator of the sense that the questioners felt it was a somewhat rude question to begin with. The earnest desire of these older villagers to see me Muslim was confirmed by the frequency with which they would quietly stuff a Sudanese one-pound note into my shirt pocket or squeeze one into my hand discreetly. This was their way of congratulating me on my decision to embrace Islam; more baraka than I felt worthy of.

  I remember that weekend in the Gezira as also getting me into more trouble as I tried to figure out customs related to the traditional garments that Sudanese men wore. The clothing that men wore under the jellabiya, the arage long shirt and baggy pants sirwaal, were also appropriate for sleeping and/or just hanging-out around the village. I visited this village, Um Magad, at the torrid height of the hot season, and the men invited me to join with them as they took a quick afternoon swim in the Blue Nile. As we reached the river bank, I noted with dread that everyone was swimming in their boxer-short-type underwear. I guess I thought of the long cotton billowy pants as underwear, so that was all that I was wearing! I gave my Arabic a good workout by trying to explain my dilemma to one of my hosts as we stood on the bank of the river, who of course calmly said “mafi mushkila,” no problem, and told me just to swim in the pants. So I floated along the Blue Nile with my pants inflated as water wings.

  Although my Arabic vocabulary improved in interesting ways from that experience, I returned to my research focus and to getting to a point in the language where I could do interviews. An American friend who was teaching at the University of Khartoum where I was a research affiliate told me about a marvelous Sufi chanting, or dhikir, she had recently attended in Omdurman, the old city across the Nile from Khartoum, and how much I might enjoy that cultural exposure. She introduced me to Abdalla Ernest Johnson, an American who taught English language at the university and who had been a Republican Brother for several years. He took me to the dhikir that week before sunset on Thursday, when the Republicans gathered for one of their major meetings of the week at the home of their leader, Ustadh (teacher) Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.

  Abdalla joined the semicircle of brothers and sisters who stood chanting the name of God in the declining sun outside of the house. The dhikir was intense, led by a brother with a big voice who had been appointed by Ustadh Mahmoud, and followed by the rest of the group of about fifty, strongly repeating over and over, some swaying in rhythm to the act of remembering the name of God, the meaning of dhikir. Others stood straight in intense concentration of the simple phrasing, as if repeating and absorbing the name of God might instantly transport them somewhere else. I stood off to the side barely resisting the rhythm, behind Ustadh Mahmoud who oversaw the group of chanting brothers and sisters standing next to the blue door to his house made of jalous, the mud construction material common in this region by the river Nile.

  The chanting ended with a resounding Allah! and with Ustadh Mahmoud blessing the whole group with the phrase, Allah yafizkum (may God keep you) just before the call to the sunset prayer, al-mughrib. Like the chanting ritual, the Republican call to prayer had its own modernist and dramatic riff. In my few months in Khartoum of trying to get to a point where I could converse in Arabic, I had discovered that the azan, or call to prayer, was a most useful language teaching tool. Azan is called out from mosques all over the city five times a day, the same ancient, prescribed pledges over and over (except for the early morning azan, which includes the wonderful line, “prayer is better than sleep”). And the azan’s words are clearly enunciated in song. I found that by figuring out the meaning of the words to the azan, I could begin to take the sentences apart and string them into other contexts. So, for example, while weaving the first early morning azan phrase “prayer is better than sleep” into conversations would only produce amusement, there were infinite uses for my new knowledge of the comparative grammatical construction “better than” (kheirun min . . . ).

  As my Arabic improved, I noticed a sharp increase in my own invocation of the name of God. There seemed to be an expression praising the Almighty for everything from completing a bath or haircut to starting a car, or commencing or finishing a meal. God was more ever-present in my life as it was voiced in Arabic than He had ever been in English.

  Back at my first dhikir, the Republican Sisters filed inside Ustadh Mahmoud’s house for the sunset prayer while the brothers rolled out long straw mats on which to pray in the empty lot to the west of the building. Abdalla presented me to Ustadh Mahmoud, who said something about inviting me to lunch in a couple of days. He was not a tall man, but stood very straight for a man of seventy-something, dressed in the simple white cotton arage shirt and sirwal pants that were the comfortable ev
eryday standard. I participated in the sunset prayer, went through a round of warm handshakes while collecting some new Arabic greetings, and then made my way back across the Nile to Khartoum where I stayed in a flat that Michigan State University had rented for medical researchers. I stayed there for free as the well-educated night watchman.

  I was excited to return to Omdurman as soon as possible for my meeting with Ustadh Mahmoud, so Abdalla arranged for us to lunch with him two days later, on Saturday afternoon. We arrived at the blue door, and I was ushered into the ordinary and small house that was crowded with a multigenerational group of brothers and sisters performing a variety of tasks for the organization, or just wanting to be near their teacher. We met with Ustadh Mahmoud in his small bedroom/study, containing a single angareb, a bed of rope and wood, and several bookcases crowded with tomes in Arabic and scientific artifacts, like smooth stones and seashells. There were decorated verses of the Qur’an on the wall and a small table and two chairs. Ustadh sat on the bed and we took the chairs. He asked me to explain what I was looking for in Sudan, and I gave him a quick and simple half English/half Arabic review that primarily focused on my research and why I had selected Sudan for my study. I didn’t say to him, “I want to be a Sufi,” but that was what I was thinking as I told him of my spiritual interests in Sudan. Over our lunch of the thin flat sorghum crepe-like bread kisra and a vegetarian version of the wild okra stew um rigayga (“mother of the thin hair” for its stringy-okra consistency), his most memorable words to me that afternoon were, “We have no formal initiation ceremony in the Republican Brotherhood, and you are welcome to join us and see what we are about.” I found this significant in that my reading about some Sufi orders had taught me about the recruitment and elaborate induction processes that included pledging obedience and loyalty to the sheikh and other rituals. He was not effusive with me, but certainly cordial and interested. I thanked Ustadh Mahmoud for lunch—he was a teacher to his followers, not a Sufi sheikh—and returned to Khartoum to think about how involved I wanted to get with Ustadh and his followers.