Modern Muslims

by Steve Howard

  The washing of Am Fadl’s remains and the preparation for burial took place in a room just off the main entrance to the house. The Republicans took pride in maintaining these religiously required rituals, and they had been concerned enough about sustaining the knowledge of the details that they had published a book on the proper steps and prayers in this ritual, which became a Republican best seller. Some of the younger brothers were invited inside to observe and learn the washing ritual and prayers themselves as the body was shrouded and placed on a new angareb, the traditional woven sisal bed with ornately tooled legs painted bright red.

  Meanwhile, a quickly growing crowd of brothers and sisters was gathered inside the house, spilling out from the saloon to the verandas of the house and finding seats on mats on the floor if not beds that had been moved from around the house to provide seating for as many as possible. They sang the Republican hymns, inshad, whose words covered both the theology and the theological heritage of the movement—with different brothers and sisters, both those with significant musical chops and those with a great deal of soul, taking turns at leading the group. All of the assembled mourners joined in the chorus.

  Finally the jenaza, Am Fadl’s shrouded remains, was brought out lying on the angareb. Four brothers took the legs of the bed, hoisted it onto their shoulders, and carried it out the gate and on to the street as pallbearers. The wailing outside of the gate reached its apex while the Republicans inside looked stoic or deeply saddened. The house emptied of the Republican mourners, who fell in line three or four abreast behind the lofted angareb. During the discussions among the movement leadership that had taken place while the body was prepared for burial, they made a historic decision that the sisters would for the first time join the procession to the cemetery. Women in Sufi Sudan spent a great deal of time in cemeteries visiting the tombs of saints and their own departed family members, but custom effectively forbade their attendance at burials. This custom was an extension of the idea that men and women did not pray together, a major requirement of the actual burial—women being seen as an unacceptable distraction to men at prayer.

  Women’s full participation in all of Islam’s obligations was one of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s most important goals in establishing his movement. He moved to accomplish these goals by instilling in his followers the confidence that this was the reality deigned by God which required us to actualize it; it was not something to strategize about. The method was to follow in the Prophet’s path and to assert the right to focus on that lofty road was the only permission required.

  But that is not to diminish the courage demonstrated by the sisters in joining the Republican men in the masira, the procession to the cemetery. The women followed discreetly, bunched together in their flowing white garments at the end of the line, careful not to mix with the men and at an appropriate distance from them. We had to walk through the narrow streets of neighborhoods en route and one of the brothers began the dhikkir chant of Allah! Allah! effectively pacing the marching mourners as they made their way through Omdurman. Children were always attracted to this type of event, an everyday occurrence in densely populated Omdurman with its many cemeteries. But usually funeral processions moved quietly and quickly through the streets, the only words being spoken by those seeking the baraka/blessing of taking a turn bearing a leg of the angareb as it was otherwise passed silently among the male mourners. In this case the spectacle of the chanting men and women marching together drew people out of their houses or stopped them on the street to stare, laugh, or glare at the women’s flouting of convention.

  It was the hottest part of an August afternoon when the procession reached the Hammad a-Nil cemetery, a mile or so from Am Fadl’s home on Mourada. Particularly in urban Sudan, cemeteries are closely surrounded by neighborhood housing, and it is not uncommon to walk through the dusty burial ground to get from one part of the neighborhood to another. These sites are not maintained with any special care, a perspective linked to concerns of idolatry that were banished by Islam’s revelation in the seventh century. Many cemeteries in Sufi Sudan, including this one, feature at least one qubba or Turkish-style tomb of a wali, a Sufi teacher of a particular sect whose teachings are remembered as keys to a good spiritual life and heaven’s gate. But as we spot a sun-blanched femur or hip bone in the dust we are reminded of our limited time on earth.

  Men readied the burial place for Am Fadl as the angareb was brought to rest in an open spot reserved for the salat-a-jenaza, the communal prayer that immediately precedes burial. A bladed tool was swung back and forth by two men to open a grave in the dusty earth. Ustadh Mahmoud had been driven to the cemetery and now stood beside his late shrouded friend, trying to protect him from the sun by holding his white shawl as a shade over the body. The brothers lined up facing the qibla, the direction of prayer, and in an unprecedented move, the sisters lined up behind the men at some distance to join in the prayer.

  Unless they are husband and wife, men and women generally do not pray together in Islam, and particularly not at a burial. The sisters joining in the salat-a-jenaza was a provocative act and yet one that was a somewhat restrained statement. There were not many people near the cemetery on that hot afternoon, and the burial prayer does not feature prostration. The mourners stand in their shoe-clad feet as the basic prayers are recited. The important role that Am Fadl had played throughout Ustadh Mahmoud’s career meant that he did not want any member of the Republican family to be excluded from the community event marking the end of his friend and colleague’s life on earth.

  Despite these justifications, the sight of women joining in the cemetery burial prayer did provoke a small group of men, some of those non-Republicans who had been preparing the burial site itself, to climb up into the bed of a pickup truck and begin to lob stones at the line of praying women, more to disturb them than hurt them. The seriousness of this affront to women at prayer may be measured by the lengths to which one Muslim will not interfere with another who is engaged in the act of praying. People are careful to walk behind a person at prayer so as to not disturb him or her, and would certainly never try to speak to a person praying. The concept of hudur, “presence” or intense concentration, defines how prayer is best performed, and how it is its most beneficial to the believer.

  My own hudur at prayer was obviously broken by this violent act; otherwise, I would not be reporting it here. But the sisters did not flinch as they performed what they saw as their duty as believing Muslims, and when I asked various participants about it later, no one would confirm my story. But no one denied it had happened either. Ustadh Mahmoud taught his followers that Republican fikr (ideology) was to be put into practice not for the purpose of public demonstration, but to strengthen one’s own spiritual capacity. And this was certainly neither the first or last time that Republicans’ manifestations of their spiritual perspectives were met with violence.

  To be a Republican Sister was to validate the premise of gender equality that was the core teaching of The Second Message of Islam: “Islam’s original precept is complete equality between men and women,” as he wrote in that book. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was consistent and unwavering on this position, from Sudan’s late colonial period through the coups and rare democratic regimes post-independence, through the national experiments with various development schemes, and the absorption of Sudan into the trends of global Islam. The women of the movement demonstrated with courage and enthusiasm in their daily lives that they were included in Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s claim that Islam would achieve freedom for every human being, and that the sisters in fact were the ultimate examples of the Republican ideology under the circumstances of Sudanese patriarchy. The sisters were not an auxiliary to the men’s movement or a parallel organization, but rather, they traveled together with the brothers on the Path of the Prophet. Equality for Muslim men and women was a central goal of this Islamic revival movement rather than a by-product. Women’s counting less than men in social or legal terms was not a possible outcome in t
he fulfillment of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s promise; the sisters’ experience provided the best opportunity to implement Taha’s effort to “evolve sharia.” As Republican Sister and University of Khartoum student leader Awatif Abdel Gadir told me, “We were the reason for this movement; we owned the issue.” The Republican women would not be denied their identification as fully engaged modern Muslims, and the entire Republican organization was dedicated to that cause. The development of women, in Taha’s view, began with the development of their souls through egalitarian engagement in reviving Islam.

  To be a modern woman from a Republican perspective was to be a Republican Muslim woman, on a path to self-realization. Many times Republican sisters told me in interviews that the Republican ideology helped them “find themselves.” Some of the leaders who were sisters tried to explain to me that to be modern was to have the capacity to reach so far inside prayer that the answers to life’s dilemmas became clearer; that the capacity for humans to unravel the meaning of the Qur’an was within reach. And then one could begin to address those problems as they affected the community, as the Prophet Mohamed was said to have done. Achieving equality with men was only the beginning of that modernity, but an important first step. The religious training and immersion in an Islamic intellectualism were keys to achieving that goal, keys that provided the sisters with both the spiritual and temporal sense of progress through human history. It put the sisters in an odd place in the context of Sudan societal expectations of women.

  The traditional view of women’s spiritual life in Sudan is fixed on the expectation that women will obey God and essentially not interfere with men’s practice of their religion. The religious restrictions placed on women, about modesty in dress, where they may worship in mosques, where their voices may and may not be heard, women’s obligations in marriage, and so on are more about assuring that men not be distracted from their spiritual lives than about cultivating that spirit in women. It seemed to me that the general view of women in Sudan was that they were more superstitious than religious.

  Sudan’s modernity gap was brought into focus for Mahmoud Mohamed Taha by female circumcision, a practice fueled by women’s lack of access to education. The ancient custom allowed the British to label colonial Sudan as “primitive and backward” in Taha’s view in order to stall the move toward the country’s independence, which I discussed in chapter 1. Victorian images of Muslim women as oppressed and in need of liberation had been commonplace during the early British occupation of both Sudan and Egypt and served in part to justify colonization. The elimination of female circumcision was so central to Taha’s vision of modern Sudan that he wrote about it in the Republican Party’s “First Booklet,” published in 1945, the only pre-independence party manifesto at the time to mention female circumcision, and indeed, Taha’s only mention of violence in a long life of struggle. The pamphlet’s rhetoric said, referring to the British colonizers, “We will defeat you with blood and sparks.”1 Equality between men and women was consistent with Taha’s anticolonial idea of equality among all the peoples of the world as the solution to oppression. His campaign to eliminate female circumcision was characteristic of his search for sustainable approaches to evolve Sudanese culture and society. As religion could not be imposed on people, nor could social change; it had to come from within.

  A Women’s-Rights Culture

  It could be said that Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s most significant contribution to twentieth-century African social history was his linkage of the elevation of the status of women to the political, cultural, and religious development of the continent. That Mahmoud Mohamed Taha could found and lead an organization in which the women members could feel included in its mission, while its male members understood that the promotion of a women’s-rights agenda was part of men’s liberation as well as their religious obligation, ibada, was another remarkable achievement. On a visit to Athens, Ohio, Republican sister Ikhlas Himet told me that Ustadh Mahmoud had said, “There was never a religious society for women before the Republican community; women had neglected their human/religious potential, and Sharia won’t let women progress.” The task of total inclusion of women in the Republican project was a tremendous burden for the entire movement, in that religious inclusion ran counter to the wider society’s views on women and religion. I often noted that the goal of inclusion was not necessarily embraced with vigor by all of the Brothers with the same degree of enthusiasm as their Sisters. It was a learning project for the men as well, who were making a huge adjustment in their worldview. As the entire Republican organization resisted the imposed authority of Islamic orthodoxy, the Republican women resisted the imposition of authority on them by their male colleagues in the struggle to support Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s strong position.

  The Republican position on women’s rights in Islam was frequently the target of everything from fatwas (legal opinions) from Sudanese and Egyptian ulema, to annoying harassment and insults in the streets of Khartoum that included the sisters having their hair and clothing pulled. But Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and his followers remained committed to their agenda with relentless energy and a deep understanding that to leave women behind was not possible in their quest for absolute individual freedom. If women were not free, no one could be free was the consistent pledge of Ustadh Mahmoud’s teaching.

  I think it is useful to try to explain here the philosophical points developed by Ustadh Mahmoud that were what the sisters and brothers were trying to live up to in their lives. The situation of women in society was a core value of Taha’s work in his book The Second Message of Islam. He wrote, “Social philosophy throughout the ages, up to and including contemporary communism, has failed to appreciate the relationship between the individual and the community. It has assumed if the individual found the opportunity to exercise his freedom, his activity would go against the interest of the community. As the community was considered to be greater than the individual, then its interest deserved to be put before those of the individual. Hence, the freedom of the individual was curtailed in the interest of the community whenever it appeared that the two were inconsistent.”2 The individual, of particular interest here despite the gendered possessive pronoun, is woman. In the sense of Islam’s “first message” community of Medina, women were not yet ready to accept the responsibility of their freedom, according to Taha. They had been granted equality with men in the Meccan revelations of the Qur’an, but these “original precepts” as Taha calls them—rights to divorce, equality with men, no polygamy, no gender segregation, and no required veiling—were withdrawn in the “transitional stage” of human development represented by the Prophet’s community at Medina. Freedoms were curtailed during the Medinan stage of Mohamed’s Prophecy because as Taha wrote in The Second Message of Islam, the “prevailing circumstances” of the unsettled and violent Medinan epoch required more social control.

  The crucial verse of the Qur’an revealed during the Medina phase of Mohamed’s Prophecy is from the chapter titled “The Woman”:

  a-Nisa: Men are the guardians and maintainers of women, because God has endowed one with more [strength] than the other, and because they spend of their means [on them]. Therefore the righteous women are obedient, guarding in secret that which God would have them guard. As to those to women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them and banish them to separate beds, and beat them. Then as they obey you, seek not a way against them. For God is exalted, Great. (4:34)

  The verse is well known for its use of the term “guardian” and in Arabic, al-giwama continues today as the term to code male-female relationships in Islamic societies, the scriptural justification for gender inequality. When Muslim men today speak of their wives obeying them as part of women’s “ibada,” this verse is the source of that understanding. The verse was revealed during the time when women, in Taha’s words, were not “ready to properly discharge the duties of freedom,” although he continues, “Early Islamic legislation was, in fact, a great leap forward
for women, in comparison to their previous status. Nevertheless, it was far below Islam’s ultimate objective [of complete equality between men and women],”3 which is represented in the Meccan verses of the Qur’an, that is, the “second message” of Islam. Progress, in Taha’s interpretation, is made through engagement of the texts, a process in which he carefully included his women followers. He taught them to emulate the Prophet’s practice, which he believed would lead to complete equality between men and women.

  Women were making their way in the modern world, in Taha’s view, and he pointed out the irony of their continued oppression by the sharia observed as law by many Muslim societies. He wrote, “We have today in Khartoum a female judge in Shari’a law with her degree from the Faculty of Law in Khartoum. This means that she will take care of the application of the Islamic Shari’a for those who ask for her decision, and she has a right to do this in the same way as those who graduated with her. But the same Shari’a rules say that if this female judge should appear as a witness her testimony would count only half of the testimony from any man in the street. Is this sensible talk? No indeed! This absurdity is not part of religion. The absurdity comes from those brains that refuse to see the contradiction in this, who refuse to understand that there is a cause, a very simple cause. The cause is that the Shari’a law of our fathers had as its mission to serve community in a certain period as a transitional instrument, and it is unable to function in front of the needs of modern times.”4 He continued, “When they [women] have attained the level of self-control and self-protection the guardianship of men will be revoked and cancelled, as it will be left to themselves under the guidance of God to take care of their own matters, under the guardianship of the law.”5