by Steve Howard
But Taha’s use of the term “message” is actually well understood among erudite Muslims, who divide the Prophet’s period of messengerhood into two phases. It is noted, even in English translations of the Qur’an, during which phase of his prophecy the particular verse or text of the Qur’an was revealed. The first phase took place in the Prophet’s home town of Mecca, where he began to receive revelations of verses of the Qur’an from the Angel Gabriel in 610 CE. These revelations continued for thirteen years until the hijira, or migration of the Prophet and his first followers to Medina, to escape persecution for their new beliefs. The Prophet continued to receive revelations through the Angel Gabriel in Medina, and these revelations are thought to be characterized by a more strident or social regulatory tone than those revealed in Mecca.
It was easier to understand the sense that Mahmoud Mohamed Taha had of the “First Message” in the context of what he called the principal dictates of its times, in the Prophet’s community of Medina. The elements he uses to illustrate the First Message represent transitional stages to human freedom that were part of the historical record of that era. Jihad, slavery, capitalism, gender inequality, polygamy, divorce, veiling, and gender segregation were given in Taha’s book as examples of principles from the Qur’anic verses revealed during the Medinan period of Mohamed’s Prophecy, a time when al-muh’minun (“the believers”) were not capable of “properly discharging the duty of freedom.”4 Five of the principles above (gender inequality, polygamy, divorce, veiling and gender segregation) restrict women in some manner, speaking to Taha’s lifelong concern for the improvement of women’s status in society, and were the themes that brought so many women followers to his movement. At the same time, these restrictions were from the Medinan phase of Muslim society, which had conferred some progress on humankind from the time prior to revelation of the Qur’an. For example, the First Message had improved the status of women relative to their pre-Islamic circumstances, or jihad had provided means to spread the faith in a hostile era. But social restrictions still existed at this Medinan transitional stage, requiring the enforcement procedures developed in sharia law. Slavery was another example of an existing Arabian institution in which improvement of the conditions of slaves was made by the dictates of the First Message. The Qur’an’s First Message made provisions that moved those enslaved toward emancipation, but the ancient institution itself could not be extinguished, in Taha’s phrase, “by a stroke of the pen.”5 The point was that the believers of the Medinan community did not have the capacity to “discharge properly the duties of their freedom, [so] they lost this freedom, the Prophet was appointed as their guardian until they came of age.”6 Sharia law was introduced during the Medinan period, which reflected “a descent in accordance with the circumstances of the time and limitations of human ability.”7
Although the details of Taha’s Islamic theology may appear arcane, they diverged deeply from mainstream orthodoxy, particularly on the issue of sharia. For his evolutionary stand on sharia, Ustadh Mahmoud was vilified by television preachers throughout the region as a “heretic”; he was subjected to the enmity of pulpits from Cairo to Khartoum, and twice put on politicized trials for related charges ending with his capital conviction for a concocted accusation of “apostasy” in 1985.
The 1985 trial was precipitated by the publication of a stern but respectfully worded leaflet by the Republican Brotherhood on December 25, 1984. Distributed by hand all over the Khartoum area and titled “Either This or the Flood” (see appendix), the document was a rallying cry for the repeal of the so-called “September laws.” These laws were imposed with great fanfare by the regime of Sudan President Jaafar Nimiery in September 1983 and were essentially Nimeiry’s version of “Islamic Law,” that is, the new laws only partially followed conventional sharia. The announcement of the laws was marked by a great celebration that included the dumping of thousands of locally manufactured and imported bottles of beer and “sherry” into the Nile at Khartoum. These were tense times in Sudan. The war in the South had been rekindled by the government’s imposition of these religious regulations even in Christian-dominated parts of the country, and the drumbeat leading up to the September 1983 laws had brought the Republicans out beginning in May 1983 to speak against the idea of the laws’ imposition. About seventy of the Republicans including four of the sisters were arrested while engaged in their speaking platforms and thrown into jail. The Nimeiry regime had been under pressure from Islamist forces in Sudan, the Muslim Brotherhood led by Dr. Hassan al-Turabi in particular. From the regime’s point of view, locking up the Republican brothers and sisters, despite their nonviolent protest, was a way to both appease those forces and make an example of a small group that posed little threat. The Muslim Brotherhood, bitterly opposed to Ustadh Mahmoud’s ideas, represented the leading edge in Sudan of the conservative wave beginning to overtake the Muslim world.
The offending leaflet was a unique document, a flyer that summarized the Republican position against the imposition of sharia and the promotion of the revival of the Prophet’s Sunna, and a plea to end the war in the South. The Republicans had long held that imposing sharia in a country with a significant non-Muslim minority (between 30 and 40 percent) would rip the nation apart. The leaflet blended Republican theology with a specific political agenda, an unusual stance for the usually nonpartisan Republicans. This led to the trumped-up treason charges resulting in Ustadh Mahmoud’s arrest at the end of 1984. An operative paragraph of the leaflet read, “We call for the repeal of the September 1983 laws because they distort Islam, humiliate the People and jeopardize national unity.” Mahmoud Mohamed Taha stood for the moral freedom represented by the verses of the Qur’an revealed to the Prophet in Mecca. By imposing a crude version of laws extending from the Medinan texts of the Qur’an, Taha felt strongly that Nimeiry’s government was demeaning the hard-fought-for modernity of which Taha had been a champion since the struggle for Sudan’s independence. The penultimate sentence of the pamphlet (see appendix) was “Religious fanaticism and backward religious ideology can achieve nothing for this People except religious upheaval and civil war.” The war with the South in fact did not end until the signing of an uneasy peace agreement fifteen years later.
The Second Message of Islam was the curriculum that guided the Republican movement, an appropriate tool for a group of people with a high state of consciousness of their responsibilities as Muslims. In my “preliterate” state in Sudan my initial attraction to the movement was in what I could glean of its apparent Sufi heritage and what I learned through conversation and observation of its progressive position on a range of social issues.
I found it hard to distinguish where Sufism began and the hospitable Sudanese personality ended. Or to put it another way, were my new Sudanese friends so welcoming because of the heritage of Sufism in the Republican ideology? Among the Republicans there certainly was a strong effort to be lateef, a word that could be quickly translated as “nice” but which really refers to the range of behaviors around gentle, kind, friendly, graceful, mild. The Prophet was always thought to have been lateef, and lateef is an attribute of God. Lateef behavior was operationalized in the performance of tasks usually associated with what boys and young men were charged with doing around a household: serving guests and sharing space and resources, hauling dishes and so on back and forth between kitchen and eating place, for example. Women and girls were essentially assumed to be lateef as a matter of course.
But obviously the practice of Sufism has a deeper spiritual purpose, and the effort to be lateef indicated that one was consciously adjusting his behavior in order to travel the path of the Prophet Mohamed. Older men, even after they had acquired families and sons to do these many tasks for them, often continued with this behavior and were noted for it. According to Ustadh Mahmoud, the Prophet lived his life as a conscious role model for the rest of humankind for the rest of time.
The relationship between Sufism and the members of the Republican Bro
therhood was a somewhat ambiguous one. One could say that Sufism was viewed as the movement’s heritage but that its members had moved beyond that spiritual phenomenon. Sufism was the primary instrument of Islam’s spread across Africa, so one could say fairly conclusively that all of the Republicans had Sufism in their families’ past, if not their own practice of Islam. Ustadh Mahmoud himself and his generation were thoroughly steeped in it, particularly in the sense of the community atmosphere of almost obligatory membership in a Sufi tariqa, or sect. The sects themselves were founded by different Sufi teachers, and this was Sufism’s structure: built on the relationship between a Sufi teacher and student. The particular Sufi path was passed from teacher to student, going back to great teacher-philosophers of the past, like Abdel Gadir al-Jailani of Baghdad, the eleventh-century founder of the Gadaria Sufi sect and related groups common in Sudan.
The contributions of Sufism to Republican thinking were deep and rich. But the Republicans were wary of contemporary Sufi organizations in that Sufis were often accused of practicing shirik. The Arabic root of the word shirik is related to that of the word for “partner,” which leads to the definition of shirik as placing various idols as “partners” to God. Idolatry contradicts the fundamental monotheistic principle of Islam, that there is no God but God; God has no partners, no equals. And Sufis have been accused of the Islamic offense of shirik in their emphasis on ritual, the visitation of saints, and the close relationship between the Sufi sheikh and follower. Sufis and the Republicans would counter that they are not “worshipping” sheikhs or saints, but simply following closely in the path of those who served as role models of faith.
I liked to visit my good friend Hamad-a-nil in Abu Haraz, not too far from Rufa’a on the east bank of the Blue Nile. A considerable portion of this small town was given over to sprawling ancient cemeteries, which were dominated by the qubbab, tombs, of some of the founders of Sudan’s Sufi sects. The founders commanded the best views in town from their tombs perched on the highest points of the cemetery. The domed architecture of these domed tombs was the heritage of Sudan’s occupation by the Ottoman Turks in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Today they are painted in pink, blue, yellow, and, of course, the Prophet’s green in bright contrast to the surrounding dun color of the dusty savannah. The tombs attracted adherents of the particular sheikh, or simply people who collected all the wisdom of those who had gone before them. My friend knew the life story of each of these “saints,” and the lore associated with his tariqa. My favorite saint, however, did not have a tomb over his burial site, just rubble of Blue Nile red bricks. On our visits Hamad-a-nil would always quote a rhyming couplet associated with this sheikh, “al ma indu biniya, ma be-du tahiya?” (“Just because I don’t have a tomb, you’re not going to salute me?”), in a sense signaling the physical-spiritual connection visitors made with those buried in this vast place of rest. In an earlier day of the movement, Ustadh Mahmoud would also lead groups of brothers and sisters to the cemetery at Abu Haraz in appreciation of the Sufi knowledge of the past, and perhaps with a picnic lunch. One of the great pleasures inside the domed tombs was to listen to the Republican munshid, someone who could sing the hymns associated with the teachings of the particular holy man, with the sound reverberating off the tomb’s dome and all around the cemetery. I tried this once on a visit to Karen, Eritrea, not far from the Sudan border, in the tomb of a saint related to the Mirghani family of the Khatmiya Sufi tariqa. I had given a talk at the University of Asmara the previous day and then traveled to Karen with my friend Ghirmai Negash. I asked him to come inside with me, but instead he waited outside while I paid my respects to the holy man. For some reason the atmosphere inspired me to sing the Khatmiya-related qaseeda (ode), “For the Sake of God, Ya Hassan!” which had been a very popular hymn among the Republicans. When I came out of the tomb Ghirmai thought that there had been a crowd with me inside, but it was just me and my echo.
Hamad-a-nil’s exuberance in these visits to the saints of Abu Haraz extended to his crawling under the canopied grave site to take up a handful of cool sand, which he would pour on my bare feet. “Baraka,” he would say as a blessing from the particular saint. The world of Islamic orthodoxy would frown on all of the behavior related to visits of the saints as shirik, in this sense charging that one was seeking intervention with God through the saints. But Hamad-a-nil and the Sufis would maintain that they knew very well how to approach God directly, and their investment in respect for the saints was simply appreciating the lives of their fellow Sudanese who had trod the path of the Prophet before them and appeared to have established closer connections to God. These were practices of warmth and intimacy shared among brothers.
A gnawing question for me was if Sufis had so much in common with the thought and practice of Ustadh Mahmoud and the Republicans, why were there not more Sufis joining Republican ranks? The explanation lies both in the historical Sudanese multigenerational attachment that those devoted Sufis had to their ancestral tariqa and in the educated consciousness that most often produced new recruits to the Republican ideology. Abandoning rote ritual for a deep critical discussion of faith was a difficult transition, but certainly not impossible as shown by the many Republicans who joined Ustadh Mahmoud directly from Sufi turuug (sects). The Republicans were highly conscious of the separation they had from the Sufi focus on ritual. They referred to the general Sufi approach—somewhat jocularly—as dhikir bidun fikr, or “remembering God without reflection,” a performance of ritual that does not promote spiritual progress.
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s quest was to the state of absolute individual freedom. Tariq Mohamed, the path of the Prophet, was a methodology well known to Sufi adherents. For Mahmoud’s critics, the superficial Sufi-tariqa elements of his movement were easy targets—derisively referring to Mahmoud Mohamed Taha as “Sheikh Mahmoud,” for example. This also meant that the potential Republican was required to look deeply into the movement’s ideology and theology before making the commitment to join. But Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was of the school of thought that maintained that the Prophet was the original Sufi, and that the Prophet’s approach, his ibada, was what would lead to human perfection. The Prophet’s practice was the highest standard to which all humans should aspire. One could learn to follow the prayer of the Prophet with greater and greater concentration, the clearest manifestation of his practice, until more of the Qur’an’s knowledge was revealed through this process of prayer. Ahmed Dali, who led the Republicans’ public speaking campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, recalled a Qur’anic verse that pointed to the daunting aspects of this task: “One cup of ink could be used to write the revealed portions of the Qur’an, but to write the hidden portions would require more ink than would fill the ocean.”
In an important sense Mahmoud Mohamed Taha engaged in dialogue with classical Sufi practice. He studied the Qur’an deeply, and a tome by the eleventh-century Sufi master, al-Ghazzali, Reviving Religious Studies, was always an important reference for him. The book detailed the method of prayer. Sufi practice was clearly the source of Ustadh Mahmoud’s deep understanding, but he was constantly aware of the need to find a way for Islam in the modern world, and Sufism, particularly in Sudan, represented something “folkloric” to him and many of his followers, and Sufism is always local in practice. “Today’s Sufis have lost their way,” a follower remembered Taha saying. Ustadh Mahmoud did not cite any silsila or chain of knowledge from sheikhs of the past to bolster his authority, common among Sufi leaders; he simply shared his interpretation and assisted his followers in understanding it as the Path of the Prophet. His critics would label this “esoteric knowledge,” rarely seen and beyond most Muslims’ understanding. Taha viewed knowledge as the product of appropriately intense prayer, available to all sincere travelers on the Path of the Prophet.
In traditional Sufi practice, one isolated oneself to attain this state of awareness, the khalwa notion mentioned above. Another Prophetic saying went, “Be in this world as a
stranger, or as a passerby.” But Ustadh Mahmoud’s perspective was that the contemporary world could not afford to have its most spiritually aware people retreat from it. After his own intensive retreat at Rufa’a in 1948–51, Taha never again sought to exclude himself from his society. His followers learned from him that we must see improving the world we live in as part of a spiritual project. And the follow-up to this was that we cannot immerse ourselves in prayer if the broader sociocultural context is not in order, if there is no food on the table or the children are in need of care. If the conditions are right, then immersing yourself in prayer is a retreat from the world around you, momentarily. Achieving this hudur, intense concentration in prayer, was a difficult challenge in the modern world. But Ustadh Mahmoud stood as the role model for his followers. My friend Mohamed al-Fatih told me, “Ustadh Mahmoud’s life was at the level of practice—100 percent—he was beyond theory. He lived the theory. While we followers were mostly at the level of theory. We could talk about it, yes, but were we living it?”
Although the great historical frame for Republican practice was Sufism, its contemporary grounding was in women’s rights, human rights, social justice, and other elements of the progressive agenda. As Ustadh Mahmoud saw it, social progress and Sufism came together in al-mu’amalat (social transactions). He wrote in The Second Message of Islam, al-mu’amalat “regulate the relationship between one individual and another in the community.”8 These are good acts, the acts necessary to keep society moving and noble. Mohamed al-Fatih remembered the way Ustadh Mahmoud made this point at a group meeting, taking it to the plane of absolute individual freedom: “There are some things to be in a hurry about, other things not to hurry you. Prepare for al-duniya [this world] as if it would never end. Prepare for al-akhira [the next world] as if it will come tomorrow.”