by Steve Howard
Sincerely, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.8
The increasingly shrill campus Islamic politics of the time drew a proportional response from Ustadh Mahmoud.
Asma Mahmoud remembered her involvement in the recruitment of women, calling the objective the “women’s movement” (haraka-t-al-mar’a). “We felt that we had a program aimed at women. I talked to women about their problems and how the Republican ideology would address those problems. I talked to women who had been beaten by their husbands or fathers, even to women who were beaten for thinking about joining our organization!” She also mentioned that they were successful in recruiting some women from the Sudan Communist Party, more than women from other political or religious organizations. The SCP and the Republican organization both encouraged women’s activism more than the other groups. There was never, however, a great concern in the Republican Brotherhood about recruitment in terms of increasing the membership of the organization. “The world will understand what we have here some day, and they will come to us” were often-repeated words of Ustadh Mahmoud. Recruitment was always a process that allowed the individual Republican the opportunity to test his or her knowledge of the group’s ideology, improving that knowledge whether the recruitment was successful or not.
The Republican sisters approached the controversial issue of Muslim women’s dress in a practical and symbolic manner. Their collective identity was marked by the white taub, a gauzy, sari-like garment that was also the uniform of women office workers and teachers, also mourners in Sudan. The taub was loosely wrapped around the body and over one’s dress, covering the hair only partially and generally falling below the knee. Today’s taub was nine meters of imported polyester, but it was an update of the classic hand-loomed cotton garment worn by rural women in Sudan. The Sudanese convention was that women dressed modestly, but the internationalization of Islam in the country fueled campaigns to cover women up more thoroughly, despite the desert heat of northeast Africa.
The business-like simplicity of the white taub resolved the conflict between women’s desire to work, to go out, and the need for modesty. The conflict is clear in the wide variety of clothing that passes for zei Islami, “Islamic dress,” in Sudan and throughout the Muslim world. Women can be seen today in the close fitting, hair-covering head-gear known as hijab—sometimes in bright colors and/or fastened with glittery jewelry—or a tightly tied scarf around the head, or very loose garments that cover head to toe in an effort to hide body contours. Some women have adopted the totally black covering that also hides the face completely, associated with Gulf mores. The taub-a-Sudani would be the only indigenous garment on this list, another reason for its adoption as the Republican sisters’ uniform. There was a sense of virtue about wearing it as well; that wearing the taub fulfilled the requirement of Islamic modesty while serving the need for practicality in the life of a busy modern woman. But for the Republican sister the taub’s contribution to a woman’s modesty was secondary to her virtuous and conscientious behavior.
The taub’s significance to the women’s movement became clearer to me years later while talking to a Republican sister resident in Doha, Qatar, where a dozen or so Republican women were working and/or accompanying their husbands. I asked Naziha Mohamed el-Hassan why the sisters in Doha were wearing colorful taubs, more associated in Sudan with either at-home wear or what non-Republican women might wear on the street. She replied, “The white taub represents something to us; it is symbolic of our ties to each other as Republican sisters. But here in Doha, its meaning is lost—people would not know why we were wearing white and would not get the point.” In fact, Qatari women generally wear long black robes and tight-fitting head gear in public. That the meaning of the Sudanese white taub was lost even in nearby Cairo was evident when I witnessed Republican sisters shouted at by Egyptian men with cries of “here come the brides!” as they walked through the city in Republican white. I was particularly amazed that the Republican Sisters walking through Cairo dressed in their white taubs drew more attention from Cairenes than I did as I walked alongside them. For the Republicans, the whole issue of zei islami was little more than narrative diversion from the vital work of reforming Muslim society and the place of women in it.
The presence of teams of these white-taubed women on the streets of Khartoum selling Republican books, attending a Republican lecture at a university en masse, marching in a funeral procession, or joining the dhikir chanting with the brothers in front of the home of Ustadh Mahmoud was a strong message of solidarity. As the sisters developed in knowledge and practice of the Republican ideology and confidence in speaking about it, honed through meetings at the sisters’ house or in jelsat (plural of jelsa) with the general Republican congregation, Ustadh Mahmoud gave them more responsibility in representing the movement. Nowal Fadl remembered the first time Ustadh Mahmoud took sisters with him on one of his speaking campaigns, to the northern city of Atbara. As the young women stood behind their teacher during his presentation, he was heckled from the audience with, “Why do you drag your daughters around the countryside? It is shameful!” And Ustadh Mahmoud replied, “I know where my daughters are; do you?”
Although this incident was from the late 1960s, the visible presence of women in public and particularly in an organization with a design for Islamic revival was always a highly sensitive aspect of the women’s movement in Sudan. The issue of women covering themselves, of veiling, extended to women’s voices in conventional and conservative understanding. The voice of the woman is one “of which one ought to be ashamed” or awra, in conventional Islamic understanding. This essentially means that women’s voices were to be considered as requiring as much covering up as the rest of their bodies. Ustadh Mahmoud’s encouragement of the sisters to speak in public, even publicly chant the spiritual poetry for which the Republicans were known, deliberately fought that convention. But this concern for public perception did have a collective impact on the sisters. Their intense circumspection in their public persona led to a certain stiffness or caution which was not found among the brothers. It was clear that the Republican women were sent out in public as examples to some extent, demonstrating what was possible for women, as in the Uncle Fadl funeral march. But they were deeply proud of the opportunity as well. The women’s voices were always the loudest in communal singing or communal reading of a Qur’anic verse. As Asma Mahmoud told me, “We needed to be carefully representing ourselves as Muslim women in public because the wider society was not used to seeing women like us.”
But having been granted the freedom by Ustadh Mahmoud’s teachings to be Muslim women in public was also the cause of their most careful adherence to ibada. I remember talking to two Republican sisters at the Faculty of Education of the University of Khartoum about how their classmates and roommates in the residence halls of the campus were astonished to find that the Republicans would not perform their ablutions in the bathrooms of the dorm, as was the expeditious practice of most, but took an ibreek container filled with water outside to prepare for prayer. “It isn’t an inconvenience,” one of the sisters told me. “It’s what God wants us to do.” The sisters were experiencing the power to fully exercise their faith for the first time and approached that power with care, and tried to take good care of it. Awatif Abdel Gadir said, “I loved his freedom,” when I asked her why she was devoted to the teachings of Ustadh Mahmoud.
Modern Marriage
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha wrote in The Reform and Development of the Islamic Personal Law, “There is something that we can call the real, true marriage. And then we have marriage in Shari’a. In the real, true marriage your wife is the twin for your soul, or a sister. She is an emanation or manifestation or yourself, outside yourself.”9 Taha goes on to make the dramatic point, “We might understand the relation of the wife to her husband implying the same as a man’s relation to his God. The wife is the first outpouring of emanation from existing unity to duality.”10 “Relationships with Ustadh Mahmoud were about love,” Republican si
ster Nowal Awad told me. The Republicans developed a comprehensive plan for reform of the basic institution of marriage out of the writings of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. He frequently spoke of the relationship of marriage as being the most important in society, and the brothers and sisters had him and his wife Umna (our mother) Amna Lotfi, whom he married in 1939, as role models. He wrote, “The criterion of social equality is that marriage [the most fundamental and intimate relation] is possible between any man and any woman. This is the accurate test of social equality.”11 With this philosophy in mind Republicans devised a simple marriage ceremony with a significant impact that eliminated polygamy, frowned on divorce, and almost eliminated the dowry payment. Republican marriage gave women equal rights in the relationship, working toward complete elimination of the guardianship of verse 4:34. It was in the position of marriage that the Republican sisters exercised the full power of the equality they learned in the teachings of Ustadh Mahmoud. The institution of marriage had to be secured as one in which men and women had equal rights if any other element of the Republican ideology was to succeed. In the Republican view the democratically run family as the foundation for a democratic society has been an overlooked element in African and Middle Eastern political theory. As the late Republican Brother Tijani Sadiq told me, “I respect my wife; that is democracy.”
The Republican view of marriage was first described in two books by Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, The Second Message of Islam (1967) and Reform and Development of the Islamic Personal Law (1971). Consistency continued to be the dominant aspect of Taha’s methodology in reviving Islam, which meant that the institution of marriage, the foundation of a stable society, had to be an instrument of human freedom for both husband and wife. The Second Message of Islam outlines the differences in the dictates of the First and Second Messages of Islam in regard to polygamy, dowry, and divorce as they pertain to the institution of marriage. Those three elements of spousal interaction were “transitional” in Taha’s view but are aspects today of sharia as derived from the Medinan texts of the Qur’an—the revelations of the transitional stage of humanity’s embrace of Islam. Because the most important function of sharia courts in Sudan is in the area of family law, including issues regarding polygamy, dowry, and divorce, the Republicans had to be careful in changing the rules. Moving too far from sharia even today could render marriages invalid, leading to formal charges of fornication and leaving children illegitimate.
Nevertheless, in his writings Mahmoud Mohamed Taha emphasized the historical context of the Qur’an’s revelations about polygamy, that it was not “an original precept in Islam,” and that it conflicted with the goals of women’s complete equality with men. In Reform and Development of the Islamic Personal Law he wrote about polygamy, “It is not acceptable!”12 There were a few polygamous men, already married, in the formative years of the Republican Brotherhood, and they were welcomed on the grounds that it would be unjust to have them divorce their wives just to conform to Republican standards. There was also a seldom followed principle that taking a second wife was acceptable in cases of infertility, again calling divorce an unjust solution for the barren wife. Some have suggested the Qur’anic injunction that a man could take more than one wife as long as all wives were treated equally, to be in itself forbidding multiple wives in that everyone understands that it is absolutely impossible to treat two (or more!) women equally.
Muslim marriage as outlined in Islamic sharia is actually a very simple relationship of which dowry is a standard regulated component. As such, it was marked for elimination by Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s understanding of the Qur’an. “Islam’s rejection, on principle, of the concept of dowry was based on the fact that the dowry represents the price of a woman at a time in history when women were taken in one of three ways: as spoils of war, by kidnapping, or by purchasing them. As such, the dowry is a mark of women’s inherited insignificance that must be discontinued when women’s dignity and integrity are realized through the implementation of Islam’s original precept.”13 However, there was also a need to keep in conformity with sharia in Sudan so that Republican marriages were legal. Their dowry payment was thus “one Sudanese pound,” a small sum thought to be equivalent to what the Prophet had offered as dowry in his day. Of course, as the dowry was greatly reduced, the woman did receive many rights in the marriage contract which were not necessarily a part of Sudanese convention. As frequently as the topic of marriage came up among the (single) brothers in my house, the suggestion of one brother pushing another to marriage by opening his wallet and offering to lend him a pound for the dowry came up as well.
Divorce was the final component of Republican guidelines for modern marriage. Taha wrote, “Islam’s original precept is the continuity of the relationship between spouses. Thus, a man’s wife is his corresponding part, the manifestation of his self outside himself. She is the totality of outward signs corresponding to the man’s self.”14 But compassion and practicality reigned with the Republicans as well, and divorce was understood as giving people a “second chance” if the first marriage did not work out. Their point was that the wife would not suffer the stigma of “repudiation” and would have equal rights to divorce in Republican marriage. In other words, the Republicans held to the Prophet’s hadith that said divorce was “the worst ‘halal,’” that is, the most terrible of things acceptable to God.
The key elements of Republican marriage were summarized in an important booklet published by the organization in 1971, Khutwat nahw ala zowaj fil islam (A Step to Marriage in Islam). The notion of “steps” covered the obligations of sharia in force in Sudan, assuring that couples marrying under these rules would be compliant with Sudanese law. The points were included in a certificate that was the pullout of the booklet. It was taken to the marriage ceremony and signed by the parties to the marriage there. Marriage in Islam itself was seen by Mahmoud Mohamed Taha as the ultimate goal, the complete elimination of guardianship of man over woman. All of these rights, Taha said, would be realized when the Path of the Prophet is followed to the second message of Islam.
One of the ways in which the Republican movement was propagated was through Republican brothers marrying women who were not yet members of the organization but who became so through marriage and raised their children as such. Occasionally, Republican sisters would marry non-Republican men as well. And there were also frequent pairings from within the community, men and women having a chance to hear what each other had to say in one of the jelsa—meetings at the home of Ustadh Mahmoud—or witness each other’s religiosity at a dhikir. Of course, both of these activities provided informal opportunities for chatting before and after so that people could get to know one another, opportunities that were fairly hard to come by otherwise. Many brothers and sisters told me how their lives in the brothers’ or sisters’ houses had prepared them for the cooperative aspects of marriage.
The Republican marriage ceremony showcased the movement’s values and principles on the public stage. The prospective bride and groom first sought a meeting together with Ustadh Mahmoud to tell him of their intentions. With his blessing he would urge that the wedding ceremony be scheduled within a few weeks of their meeting with him and would also announce the engagement at a jelsa the same day. The verse of the Qur’an that says, Keep themselves chaste, until God gives them means (24:33) would seem to dictate the rapidity of the process from engagement to wedding. And in that there was not a large dowry to save for there seemed to be no other reason to delay the ceremony. It was the selection process—whom shall I marry?—that often delayed marriage more than anything else. And this was always a major topic of discussion over lunch in the brothers’ houses.
Republican ceremonies for the life cycle, weddings, funerals, and infant naming (simaya)—all had the same basic outline in keeping with the Republican de-emphasis on ritual. Men and women shared responsibilities in all of these ceremonies; there were no special ceremonies reserved for men or women. The Republican ideological foundation for this
principle was that women were excluded and secluded when their knowledge and intelligence were not as developed as men’s. Now women are men’s equals and all activities are open to them. Reading of Qur’an in the Republican style, singing of spiritual poetry, inshad erfani, and light refreshments were presented at all of these ceremonies. No animals were slaughtered at these events, counter to Sudanese tradition. The nonviolent/socialist/vegetarian elements of Republican thought came together in the idea that the Prophet had engaged in animal (goat, sheep, camel) sacrifice that sufficed for eternity and for all of humankind. Republican children when asked by their young friends if they had had a sheep sacrificed at their house over this or that religious holiday could be heard saying with pride, “I am Republican; the Prophet sacrificed for me.”
The wedding was the most public and important of all Republican ceremonies in that it involved the signing of a contract of equality between husband and wife, extending Republican spiritual authority further into the community. At the home of the host, usually the bride’s family but sometimes the groom’s or some other family member’s if one or another branch was opposed to Republican-style weddings, the siwan decorated canvas screens that are ubiquitous to urban Egyptian and Sudanese street celebrations, would be rented along with chairs and erected in the street outside the family house. These screens represented the tents that were parts of everyone’s distant past. Police permission was sought for the day’s disruption of traffic by the erection of the street-blocking screens. Many marriage contracts in Sudan actually take place inside mosques, often after the Friday congregational prayer. But in that Ustadh Mahmoud was regularly denounced from the pulpits of mosques, and that only men could attend the contract signing in the mosque, the setting of the family home was much more appropriate—and it was another opportunity for a public showcase!