Modern Muslims

by Steve Howard

  When I first met Mahmoud Mohamed Taha in early 1982 he had been focusing on his work to spread his idea of an Islam for contemporary times for more than forty years. He transmitted a message of tolerance and equality that he felt was the only way for Islam to be practiced under the conditions created by a modern, changing, and dangerous world. Sudan in Africa was the locus of his life’s work. Omer El Garrai remembered Taha saying, “I am an African. I like the night, the scent of buhur (incense), the hot weather.” In his book Religion and Social Development Taha wrote, “Africa is the first home of Man. In it his life appeared at the beginning and in its freedom will be achieved at the end.”1 Taha had a dark complexion; the color called azraq (dark blue) by the Sudanese, and he bore the traditional facial scars of his Rikabiya ethnic group, a people with origins in the far north of the country. Although the African and Arab heritage of Sudan has been a significant factor in Sudanese politics, one Republican friend told me that Taha had said, “We are black or Negro. We are not Arab but our Mother Tongue is Arabic. We inherited values from both Arab and Negro.” This kind of thinking was also trouble in Sudan, roiled by its complex Afro-Arab identity issues. The quarters opposing Ustadh Mahmoud, it occurred to me, were also the ones engaged in the suppression of Sudan’s African identity. Taha’s work as a religious reformer was preceded by his participation in the effort to secure Sudan’s political independence as a republic, a period of time in which he also became known to the British colonial authorities as a troublemaker.

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha did not have a rigorous religious education. In the 1930s Taha studied engineering at Gordon Memorial College, which until 1944 was Sudan’s only government secondary school, later to become the University of Khartoum. Young men studied at Gordon College in order to provide skilled manpower for the colonial administration. He was employed by Sudan Railways for two years, working for various lengths of time in Kassala and eastern Sudan, and Atbara. He also joined the Graduates Congress, the Gordon College alumni group that was the crucible for Sudan’s independence struggle.

  The Graduates Congress was established in 1938, two years after Taha’s graduation, with an idea of the Indian Congress in mind, according to Ahmed Khair, one of its early leaders.2 The Graduates Congress stimulated the nationalist activism that fueled the move to independence from the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium that ruled Sudan. Political parties were spawned by the Graduates’ efforts, with many of them maintaining ties to either colonial patronage or the traditional Sufi sects. Taha’s vision at that time was of the establishment of a Republic of Sudan, a political entity not yet existing in an Arabic-speaking country. Other Sudan parties pushed for either integration under the Egyptian crown or hereditary religious rule under the Mahdi family. Taha and ten colleagues, all employees of the colonial government, founded the Republican Party in October 1945 to work toward an independent republic. Taha was elected chairman at its first meeting.3 While the group considered its small size and discussed forming a coalition with one of its rivals, the Ummah Party of the Mahdists, a vote was taken and the consensus was against such a move. Omer El Garrai had told me that Ustadh Mahmoud had explained to him that initially the majority had wanted to join the bigger party, but the discussion yielded a decision to the contrary. El Garrai said that Ustadh Mahmoud told him, “If we had decided otherwise, you wouldn’t be here with me today.” Ustadh Mahmoud’s point was that if the much larger Ummah Party had absorbed the Republicans their identity would have been lost.

  The small group that had rallied around Ustadh Mahmoud’s principles decided against making other alliances because they felt that neither political Islamism nor secularism were solutions for Sudan’s problems. The Republican Party manifesto, Ghul: Hathihi Sibeeli (Say: this is my path!), a title with a distinctly Qur’anic ring, detailed a civil society rooted in Islam and the Qur’an.4 The large parties, the Ummah and the Democratic Unionists—both had religious roots and overtones in their rhetoric, but no specific Islamic agenda at that point in the independence struggle. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha wrote a letter describing his politics in 1963 to then Harvard doctoral researcher John Voll that was prescient with concerns that would overtake Sudan decades later.

  My own party was “The Republican Party.” It built its ideology on Islam. We opposed the tendencies of some of the political parties towards an Islamic state because we were sure they did not know what they were talking about. An Islamic state built on ignorance of the pure facts of Islam can be more detrimental to progress than a secular state of average ability. Religious fanaticism is inalienable from religious ignorance. . . . The Republican Party was the most explicit party in outlining a program for the formation of an Islamic state—only we did not call it Islamic. We were aiming at universality, because universality is the order of the day. Only the universal contents were tapped.5

  Ahmad Khair of the Graduates Congress wrote about the Republican Party in the midst of Sudan’s struggle for independence. “The men of the Republican Party proved their true will and the strength of their belief, and that is why they enjoy the respect of all. Their leader proved to have sincerity, power and resilience. It is perhaps these reasons, in addition to their different objectives, that caused them to stand alone and in isolation.”6

  In 1946 Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and several members of his party were arrested by the colonial administration for unlawful political activities—they had been handing out anticolonial leaflets—and were sentenced to one year in prison, becoming Sudan’s first political prisoners of the independence movement. Republican Party members agitated for their colleagues’ release, and the group left prison after fifty days. Taha was back in prison after two months for leading a demonstration to protest the arrest of a woman, Alminein Hakim, in Rufa’a for the circumcision of her daughter, Fayza, an incident which became an emblem of Taha’s spiritual philosophy of human development and its implications for women; it was a story that was told to me many times by many different Republican brothers and sisters. And it was a story with implications for Taha’s intentions of putting his ideas into action.

  In response to a markedly paternalistic public outcry in Britain, the colonial authority “added Section 284A to the Sudan Penal Code forbidding the practice of a severe type of female circumcision known as Pharaonic circumcision.”7 My own reading of the colonial documents was that the public attitude in Britain was driven more by the sensational aspect of the cultural practice than by any genuine concern for women’s and girls’ health. And all over colonized Africa, the “native question” was debated with conflicts over legal actions taken by colonial governments and the perception of the colonized as to whether the prohibited activities were in fact their legitimate rights. Yusif Lotfi, one of the younger brothers of Taha’s wife told me that he had understood from Ustadh Mahmoud that the British had imposed the law to bring to the world’s attention how “primitive” Sudan was, not yet fit for independence. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha organized his historic protest after Friday prayers in Rufa’a, his hometown, an incident reported by a District Officer of the British colonial government:

  The Hassaheissa-Rufa’a disturbances, of which we have not yet received full reports, came as a complete surprise. They were indicative, however, of what is to be expected when a few fanatics find grounds for stirring up an irresponsible town population which is already undermined by anti-government vernacular press and propaganda. In this case it was very bad luck that Mohammed Mahmud Taher [sic], the fanatic leader of the Republican party [sic] and bitter opponent of the female circumcision reforms should be living in the very town where the first trial of an offence against the circumcision laws happened to take place. The case [i.e., against the woman] was quashed on no other grounds than lack of evidence.8

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, his political organization and subsequent spiritual movement and followers, opposed the ancient pre-Islamic practice of female circumcision and did not practice it in their families for the most part. Taha’s point in organizing the Rufa’a pro
test of the woman’s arrest for circumcising her daughter was that the British could not legislate Sudanese morality and that such laws were unsustainable in a country where women were not given access to religious training, education, or social status that would empower them to end the practice themselves. Taha made his point that the arrested woman who had performed the circumcision stood for all Sudanese women by referring to her in the Rufa’a demonstration as “our sister, our mother, our wife”; this was a spiritual test for Ustadh Mahmoud. Ironically, Mohamed Mahmoud (not related to Taha), writing in 2001, continues to miss Taha’s point and demonstrates how difficult it has been over fifty years for Taha to reach his countrymen and women with his message that their understanding of Islam must change. Mohamed Mahmoud wrote, “Taha’s act of defiance against British law in this incident contributed the single greatest damage to the welfare of Sudanese women”;9 that is, Mohamed Mahmoud perceived Mahmoud Mohamed Taha to be demonstrating in support of female circumcision. Sudan today continues to have one of the highest rates of female circumcision in the world despite decades-old laws banning the practice. The Sudanese human rights lawyer and activist Dr. Asma Abdel Halim pointed out to me in 2003 that the sayyidain, the two leaders of the largest traditional political organizations in Sudan, the Ummah Party and the Democratic Unionists, did nothing to urge their many followers to heed the British law of the 1940s, did not say anything about it in public, or even stop the practice in their own families. Taha’s own campaign against female circumcision could be perceived as counterintuitive, if we were to rely solely on liberal Western analysis and postcolonial hindsight. But the incident does provide an example of the quality of the long-term spiritual goals that were central to Taha’s movement: difficult to implement and not immediately or unanimously adopted by his followers, but highly principled and consistent with his overall thinking about how human society could and should evolve. Taha was at once taking a stand against colonial imposition of cultural authority and for improving the status of women through education so that they might speak up on their own behalf against such “dangerous traditional practices.”

  As pre-independence politics developed, it became clear that an independent Sudan would be ruled by one of the sectarian parties, either the Umma Party of the Mahdists or the Democratic Unionist Party of the Khatmiya Sufi tariqa-Mirghani family. When he was released from prison after two years, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha retreated from politics to his home region of Rufa’a, a market town on the east bank of the Blue Nile in the heart of Sufi Sudan. There he continued with the khalwa, the self-imposed spiritual retreat ritual that he had started in prison. Taha’s brother-in-law Ali Lotfi told me in 1999 that Ustadh Mahmoud practiced the samadi fast in prison for twenty-nine days, which is a total fast from eating and drinking. According to Ali, the British authorities did not believe that anyone could actually fast so completely so they weighed his bath water before and after to see if he was drinking the water. Taha emerged from his isolation in 1951 and rededicated his political organization to Islamic revival renaming it the New Islamic Mission (al dawa al-islamiya al-jadida). The Republican Brotherhood (al-akhwaan al jumhoureen) became the group’s popular label, a name that also acknowledged the continuity of the spiritual message that had been part of Taha’s political party. I’ll note that the gendered concept of “brotherhood” in Sudanese Arabic does incorporate both men and women, where it is also common for a woman to address a mixed group as “akhwan,” that is, brothers and sisters in faith.

  On January 1, 1956, Sudan became an independent republic under Prime Minister Ismail al-Azhari of the National Unionist Party. The original Republican Party itself was dissolved along with all other political parties by the coup of Jaafar Nimeiry in 1969.

  Ustadh Mahmoud and his followers prayed deeply and sincerely, held fast to the Prophet’s Sunna, worked hard to make their country better, and cared for each other. Although this may not appear at variance with accepted Sudanese Islamic norms—the country is full of people being “good Muslims”—the Republicans lived their lives in a modest manner and in a public atmosphere, in earnest demonstration of what effort it took, what discipline was required to lead a life moving progressively closer to God, achieving unity (towhid). While the goal was to insert a love of God deeply within them, the station en route to that destination was a public manifestation of Islam’s possibilities. Their devoted work to demonstrating to their country and the world that Islam could be a modern spiritual experience was—most importantly—strengthening their own personal convictions of that goal. Their understanding of the Qur’an’s message is what the Republicans called “new,” not the knowledge itself. They expressed that understanding with the expression, “kalam gadim, fahm jaded” (old words, new understanding).

  Much of what I learned and remembered from the brothers and sisters about Ustadh Mahmoud and his teachings was in the form of stories. One story illustrates the personal transformation that was central to the Republican approach to Islam. A Sufi follower of Ustadh Mahmoud visited a wali, or holy man, in his tomb in the eastern Gezira village of Tundub, a well-known center of Sufi learning that was a dusty speck on the wide butana (plain). The Sufi told the wali that he was on his way to visit Ustadh Mahmoud in Omdurman and asked if there was anything that the wali would like to present to Ustadh. A hand quickly came out of the tomb holding a sibha, a set of carved wooden prayer beads common to Sufi practice, which the Sufi then took as a gift to his teacher in Omdurman. When he presented the beads to Ustadh Mahmoud, the teacher said, “This is a wonderful present, but take the beads back to your wali and tell him that Ustadh Mahmoud wants something greater.” The Sufi dutifully returned to Tundub with the beads, went directly to the tomb, and when he told the wali of Ustadh Mahmoud’s request, the hand came out and snatched back the beads, with nothing to offer in their place.

  When the Sufi reported what had transpired in the wali’s tomb to Ustadh Mahmoud, the latter replied, “Your wali has not replaced the prayer beads with a superior gift because he knows that you now follow the Republican ideology and that there is nothing greater than that.”

  My experience at the front line of Islamic social change was often contextualized through these stories. As Republicans recount tales such as that of the Sufi gift, they are describing for me the intimate understanding that Mahmoud Mohamed Taha had of his followers’ spiritual origins and what he had to do to nudge them gently down an improved path, the meaning of Sunna. The cumulative impact of these stories constitutes a form of contemporary hagiography of this Sudanese Islamic leader. In the story reported above Taha recognizes the wali’s role in the Sufi’s life and used it to reorient the Sufi’s spiritual goals, what Ustadh Mahmoud did in effect every day with his followers at their meetings. The several versions of this Sufi gift story that have been told to me—each with a slightly different pedagogical point—represent the willingness of Ustadh Mahmoud’s followers to make intelligent responses to their teacher’s guidance, to engage in dialogue with his teachings. His followers fell on a continuum of attachment to their Sufi pasts—every Muslim Sudanese has some connection to Sufism either through family or direct practice. When I asked one brother if he had a version of this particular story he told me, “We have the original guy [in Ustadh Mahmoud]. Why should I bother with that darwish [i.e., a follower of a traditional Sufi master]?” Mahmoud Mohamed Taha subjected Sufism to a critical review, but he did not dismiss it violently, accepting what was strong within Sufism. An obvious point though in this story is the symbolism of the sibha. Prayer beads, while very common to Sufi religious practice, are in fact considered by some contemporary Muslims to be bida, or an innovation emerging in Islam after the life of the Prophet. In other words, the prayer beads themselves represent an Islam that was not part of the Prophet Mohamed’s own personal practice or Sunna.

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s unwavering consistency, from his perspective on the female circumcision issue which he said would be resolved only through the elevation of t
he nation’s consciousness of women, through his forty-year steadfast position opposing the proposal to unify Sudan with Egypt, to the damning leaflet that condemned President Jaafar Nimeiry’s “Islamic laws” as “distorting Islam, humiliating the People and jeopardizing national unity,” which led to his execution in 1985—all characterized Taha’s link of Islam with freedom and personal development in a unique contemporary African context. His consistency was also the natural result of his complete lack of hypocrisy.

  In a lecture at Ohio University in 2001, the Sudanese journalist and scholar Abdalla Gallab suggested contrasting this Republican focus on an educated mission to revive Islam with their most significant rivals and the most dominant political force in Sudan for the past three decades, the Sudan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brothers drew their strength in Sudan from their commerce and trading activities and their international ties, their taking advantage of the new wealth brought on by the early 1970s oil boom in the Gulf, and from the black market currency trade. The Republicans’ focus was on the intellectual development of its membership and on maintaining a Sufi-influenced modest lifestyle. The Republicans tended to sacrifice material gain for mind-expanding pursuits—education, degrees, learning, travel, and spending time with each other—all of which better prepared them to absorb Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s complex theology.