Modern Muslims

by Steve Howard

  The urban wedding party in Sudan outside of Republican circles had become a very expensive and noisy affair featuring a required “cocktail” meal of snacks and a big-name singer and band for a party that often lasted until dawn. The Republicans kept the focus on the spiritual elements of the ceremony, eliminating all of these trappings except for light refreshments served to the guests as they arrived, an hour or so before the time of the sunset prayer. Glasses of fresh lemonade were passed around as well as a tray of dates as symbols of Sudanese hospitality.

  The bride and groom themselves actually had very small roles in the wedding ceremony. Wedding ceremonies in Islam are essentially signings of a contract binding the two families. Guests were seated with men on one side and women on the other—more out of convention than any strict segregation. It was important that as many Republicans as possible attend in order to show support for the couple and because in many cases family attendance might be low due to opposition to the Republican ideology or form of marriage. Brothers who had developed the art of Qur’anic reading in the lyrical Republican style—generally a crowd pleaser—started the event off. Then, the mazoun, the person from the Republican leadership who would actually perform the ceremony, would call the event to order and read from the document that the representatives of the two families would sign. This was usually preceded by a Republican leader in attendance explaining the process to the guests. Representatives/witnesses were usually fathers or some other senior male relative, signing the document that provided details on Republican marriage, including the wife’s rights to divorce and that the husband would not take another wife. Then the symbolic dowry, one Sudanese pound, was given by the groom’s representative to that of the bride. The Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur’an was communally read, hands were shaken and then there might be several odes sung from the Republican repertoire of Sufi-derived poetry. The ceremony concluded with taking down the canvas screens and using them as giant prayer mats for the communal sunset prayer. The newlyweds then set out on their new life together without new clothes or fancy honeymoon. In fact, I heard many stories or witnessed myself how on their first evenings together new couples would immediately go out and sell prodigious numbers of the Republican publications on the nightly book-selling campaigns. A post-wedding trip often included visits to Wad Medani to see senior Republican leader Ustadh Said el-Tayib Sha’ib and/or to Rufa’a to see Ustadh Khalid El Haj and the large numbers of brothers and sisters who lived in those two towns and who might not have had a chance to attend the wedding.

  It was common to share impressions of the wedding at that evening’s jelsa at the home of Ustadh Mahmoud. It was frequently reported by brothers or sisters sharing impressions at the meeting that the non-Republican guests marveled at the simplicity, efficiency, and spirituality of the ceremony, which was in stark contrast to the loud neighborhood block parties characteristic of urban weddings in Sudan. So the public Republican wedding was also good public relations for the movement. A well-known story from the era when I was an active witness to these weddings was that a non-Republican woman told a brother that she was very impressed with the wedding because during it even the “Christians [she was referring to me] read the Fatiha.”

  The largely middle-class phenomenon of Republican marriage was in many ways a response to the hyperinflation that had affected weddings and dowries in Sudan. The oil boom in the Gulf countries from the mid-1970s onward fueled tremendous demand for workers of all types in those countries, with small internal labor markets to supply the demand. These countries looked to the poorer Arabic-speaking countries (Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan) to staff schools, banks, radio and television stations, airlines, hotels, and even working-class occupations such as in the huge irrigated farming schemes being set up to feed the newly wealthy Gulf residents. With the opportunity to make a significant amount of money in five or six years of employment in the Gulf, the price of a bride in Sudan rose substantially, often to the equivalent of $15,000 or more, which often did not include the expected suitcases full of clothing, taubs, gold jewelry, and household goods. Sudan government policy over the past twenty-five years has responded cynically to this opportunity, creating new programs of study in universities and technical colleges like medical technology or computer studies and encouraging the graduates to migrate to the Gulf for the badly needed remittances instead of using their skills to develop Sudan.

  Ustadh Mahmoud’s niece, Batoul Mukhtar, who had led the Republican sisters during the active years of the movement, took the radical step of going beyond the “steps to marriage in Islam” by considering herself “married in Islam” through a ceremony she described in her own words in a 1989 newspaper article:

  A few days ago in Khartoum North, a revolutionary marriage took place between Mr. Imad El Din Ali Idris of the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Miss Batoul Mukhtar Mohamed Taha of the Graduate College, University of Khartoum. The peculiar aspect of this marriage established on the original thought of Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was conducted with respect to complete equality of rights and duties between the couple. The contract which divests guardianship of the other also permits the respective [member of the] couple to execute divorce at their initiative with each partner having the right to the moral provisions of the wedding contract. The new requisite precautions and disciplines are not exempted from the force of law.

  Batoul went on to describe how the marriage took place simply between her husband and herself, with no dowry, no guardians present, and with guarantees for the wife of equality in every aspect of the marriage. She said that there was no dowry because “no man could put a price on a woman.”

  Batoul Mukhtar here demonstrates the mission orientation of the Republicans, always conscious of example and seeking didactic ways to communicate those lessons to the wider society. Her writing and sending the radical “wedding announcement” to a newspaper, a liberal one that would publish such a piece, was characteristic of Republican pride in the event-quality of their activities. It was also characteristic of Batoul Mukhtar’s leadership style. As a leader of the organization, deputized by Ustadh Mahmoud in a sense, she made an important point of implementing all of the rights suggested in The Second Message of Islam. Gender segregation was not an “original precept” of Islam, as Mahmoud Mohamed Taha wrote, and Batoul led the way in gender integration. She was always forthright in starting conversations with men, pointing out to Republican brothers that they should be doing this or that, or speaking up about where the movement should be headed; I am sure she also corrected my Arabic a number of times—all while conducting herself with dignity. The other sisters followed her example in varying degrees and the cumulative impact was social change.

  Batoul’s leadership illustrates the limitless possibility contained in Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s postcolonial spiritual development thinking. Her act of “marriage in Islam” was a controversial one, causing her to be labeled elsewhere in the Khartoum press as having “joined her uncle in his apostasy” or as now “living in sin” with her husband in that no dowry had been exchanged. Batoul’s marriage came at a difficult time for the Republicans, just four years after the execution of their teacher and two months prior to the coming to power of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated military regime. Batoul Mukhtar’s step was also bold in that the Republican Brotherhood had not engaged in public activities since the execution. But she had been a Republican all her life and was not going to back away from what she perceived to be steps in her own human development. She challenged her society to look carefully at what she perceived was possible for women.

  The Republican sisters participated in creating and building institutions in which they could see themselves and in which they could thrive. These were not institutions established exclusively for women but rather were developed in consideration of women as part of the ummah, the Muslim community that confronted a modern world. The experience of the Republican sisters raises the possibility of re
ligiosity as a sustainable foundation for development. The Republicans understood that spiritual links to education opened the mind and soul simultaneously and powerfully, an opening that was hard to close. This was religiosity with a built-in orientation toward progress, tying social change to advancing spiritual knowledge, one carefully applied to the other. The sisters learned what knowledge and skills were needed to fully participate in a very dynamic community, a community facing challenges to its very existence. The organization learned from the sisters and learned how to put that knowledge and those skills to use to everyone’s betterment. The sisters felt confident to take on the challenges of al-duniya, (the material world) provisioned with a methodology that lead to inner peace and security in their identity as Muslims, and an articulate perspective on their rights. They spoke frequently of how their work outside of the movement with colleagues in schools, nongovernmental organizations, and in government service heightened their identity as Republicans because they could now see the integrity in their own practice of Islam. The greatest dawa or mission that the sisters served was to conduct themselves as modern Muslim women in these professional settings. If much was to be taken from the sisters in that regard, much was given as well by their association with the Republican Brotherhood in terms of dignity, self-respect, equality, and the promise of freedom.

  5

  Communicating Islamic Reform

  Small Media, Big Ideas

  On the east bank of the Blue Nile is the village of Hilaliya, not far from the region in which Ustadh Mahmoud was raised. We visited the tomb of a holy man there, a wali, who was celebrated for the miracles he performed that attracted followers to his maseed, a Sufi school for Qur’an study. We saw the site of his best-known miracle, the ghar, an underground cell, which he constructed for his long periods of fasting and contemplation of God. To get to this underground cell is a feat unto itself. You crawl through a hole in the dirt floor of a room above the cell, and then descend down a rickety steep and narrow staircase. In an act that I suppose could be called “Sufi tourism,” we climbed down into the cell and listened to one of the disciples of this wali’s tariqa explain that he was able to endure longer and longer passages of time in the cell, eventually reaching ninety days, without food or water—nothing but God. While I might have referred to this visit facetiously as “Sufi tourism,” neither Ustadh Mahmoud nor his followers would have used that term. The intention of our visit was not to “enjoy ourselves” but rather to appreciate the intense spirituality of men who lived close to God in this region in the past.

  When we climbed down the staircase to the cell we found a simple angareb rope bed, where the holy man would lie during his periods of seclusion. There was also a tube to provide air from the upper reaches of the building to the cell, through which the holy man could breathe. The performance of miracles like this attracted adherents to the maseed in Hilaliya and came at a time of nineteenth-century Islamic revival in Sudan—and the great competition for the souls of Sudanese.

  Everything else about this phenomenon we left to Allah aa’lim, “God knows best.” The Republican perspective on these exploits of the Sufis was that the old Sufis’ focus was far more on the actions of devotion than on ideas. My own view of the practices of these old Sufis was that their efforts to recruit followers in this manner were the origins of Sufi method, an exuberant or rigorous illustration of a path to God’s knowledge. But Khalid El Haj told me on that visit to Hilaliya, “These were static views of ibada, what one had to do in the performance of religious duties, rather than on making progress in the performance of that ibada.” Nevertheless, other Republicans on our group visit to Hilaliya that day voiced the view that the approach of these old Sufis was basic to the development of Republican thought. The intensity of prayer, the strict focus on God, the attention to one’s practice of Islam, were all components of what became the Republican idea. “These were our roots,” one brother told me, indicating why Republicans—for the most part—demonstrated respect for the awlia, the holy men of the past. But many also dismissed this kind of Sufi activity as dhikir bidun fikr (“remembering God without much reflection”). Some viewed this activity as an indication of how the Republicans understood that their contemporary practice of Islam and their following of the path of Prophet was in fact in continuity with the Islam around them rather than a break with it. There was great need of reform, as they pointed out without rest in their talks, lectures, books, and discussions, but it was still all about getting as close to God as possible.

  But there were other currents—knowledge of the actions of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha—which led Republicans to believe they were in the presence of a man who had progressed far down the Path of the Prophet. For the most part, these were narratives reported in very respectful tones by Republicans, almost always concerning Ustadh Mahmoud’s intense spirituality, not an aspect of his everyday interaction with his followers. And these narratives were generally being reported second- or thirdhand in that few were witnesses to this level of Ustadh Mahmoud’s spirituality—his followers believed in that spirituality. Osman Bashir Malik said to me, “If you see something, tell us all,” in reference to observations such as these, or dreams, mystical visions that one might have. Although Ustadh Mahmoud did not want these events to be the public focus of his work, the brothers and sisters were accumulating overwhelming evidence that they were being guided along the right path. Osman’s own vision that he was telling me about was observing a light emanating from around the brothers’ and sisters’ feet during a session of dhikir (chanting) at the home of Ustadh Mahmoud.

  Brother Hashim told me a story over a winter breakfast in Omdurman, on one of my visits to Sudan in the last few years. Hashim, who was trained as an English teacher, said that one morning he was selling Republican books in one of the hospitals in Omdurman. He went from ward to ward primarily focusing on book sales to friends and family members visiting patients. He came across a man very sick from cancer lying in a bed, and spoke to him, realizing that he knew him. “Aren’t you so-and-so of the Republican Brotherhood?” Hashim asked. “Yes, I am,” the patient replied. It was odd to find any Sudanese alone in a hospital, particularly a Republican. Visiting the sick was a major social duty of everyone; not to mention that visitors always provided the badly needed supplements to the food served by the hospital. But Hashim raced back to the home of Ustadh Mahmoud to report what he had learned. When he told Ustadh, the latter was elated and replied, “God bless you! You found him!!” And the clear implication was that Ustadh Mahmoud knew all about the brother in the hospital but kept his own counsel and directed the brothers in other spiritual ways, particularly brothers and sisters whom he felt were receptive to this form of communication. That it was Hashim who found the sick man was significant. Some would say that this was Hashim’s reward for his attention to praying deeply, for “getting inside prayer.” He had made solid progress along the path of the Prophet and therefore his knowledge of God was strengthened.

  These internal forms of communication, between Ustadh Mahmoud and his followers, were not something that would be relayed to the wider public as characterizing the Republican view of Islam. This was an element of the contradiction, the tension between the deeply mystical roots of the brotherhood and the democratic/socialist/observant Muslim face of the organization that everyone wished to convey to the wider society. The Republican Brotherhood was in reality both of these aspects, which is why in their efforts to communicate who they were to a wider Sudan, their point was always that “my effort in conveying this message is primarily about deepening my own understanding of it.” On my part, I did not know how to react to stories like the one of Hashim above. I tried hard to appreciate them from the perspective of a believer working on his faith. However, I did arch an eyebrow when told the story of an elderly senior brother, Hassan Hijaz, who was devoted to his teacher, Ustadh Mahmoud, and to the weekly chanting at his house. Hassan was running late and could not find a taxi to get him to the pre-sunset
dhikir, yet nevertheless appeared there just in time for the start of the chanting.

  This kind of memory of Ustadh Mahmoud and the aura around him was very common and frequently shared among the brothers and sisters, reinforcing the idea that they had experienced a unique human being. These accounts were not secrets, but some of the brothers were very sensitive to the idea that their approach would be dismissed as nothing more than Sufi mysticism if the focus had been on these events. The collective Brotherhood was working hard to represent a “modern” view of Islam, an “Islam for today,” as some styled it. An example of the Brotherhood’s concern was the tale spread, not by them, but by the Khartoum rumor-mill during the 1983–85 crackdown on the Republicans. It was reported that the reason why President Nimeiry had imprisoned Ustadh Mahmoud and virtually all of the leadership was that Nimeiry feared that if Ustadh Mahmoud ordered it, his followers would burn Khartoum to the ground.

  Mystical knowledge was a component of Sufi Islam, and it characterized the faith wherever it spread on the African continent. It contrasted with a legalistic or theological approach to Islam, and it could be associated with charlatans as well. The sensitivity about mysticism arose from the notion of shirik, which could be translated as “idolatry.” One of the most fundamental precepts in Islam is that there is no person or amulet or spirit between the believing Muslim and God; the believing Muslim did not need anyone or anything to intercede on his or her behalf with God. The Sufis would talk about how their odes, their visits to the awlia, or other esoteric practices demonstrated respect for those who seemed to have understood how best to worship God. It was a way to learn their methods of approaching God. And the “anti-Sufi” Islamic revivals, like Wahabism that arose in nineteenth-century Arabia to wipe out this type of practice in Islam, were adamant in a strict, and eventually state-enforced in some cases, conviction that practices of Sufism could constitute the sin of shirik.