Modern Muslims

by Steve Howard

  Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s independence project was a spiritual one. Since the days of his Republican Party at the end of colonial Sudan, he had focused on independence as self-transformation, making a blatant effort to disrupt the continuance of tradition advocated by the bigger rival parties, the Ummah Party of the Mahdists and the Democratic Unionist Party tied to the Khatmiya Sufi sect. Both of these parties in fact were founded by traditional Sudan Sufi organizations. Transforming Sudan into an independent republic, all of whose citizens would learn to be democratic and form a democratic society, was Mahmoud’s goal. Mahmoud’s originality was in evidence from the beginning of his public career. “Freedom for us and for everyone,” was the motto he gave to his Republican Party. It was a freedom that one worked on oneself, transforming oneself through prayer. But one needed an atmosphere of freedom to do that, not one compelled through sharia. The imposition of sharia in Sudan would be very much the dhikir bidun fikr (remembering God without really thinking about Him) line that the Republicans had always used against traditional Sufism.

  On this my second visit to security police headquarters, which ironically was located across the railroad tracks from the American Club where I would occasionally scarf down my own comfort food—a hamburger with fries—the police released me in the middle of the night and left me on my own to find transport back to Thawra. I reached the blue door of Ustadh Mahmoud’s house late and knocked softly. The brother who opened the door ushered me in, and we sat with a small group who listened to my latest tale of interrogation. I also learned that Ustadh Mahmoud himself had been arrested a few hours after Dali and myself, June 9, 1983, and had been taken off to detention. I left the house sadly and wondered where I could stay next; I still had my research to do.

  One of the brothers who had been at the home of Ustadh Mahmoud when I got back from the security police told me to come and stay at his house, not far from that of Ustadh Mahmoud. I accepted his natural and generous offer gladly, while also remembering he had a wife and three small children with a fourth on the way. He had been an officer in Sudan’s military and a Muslim Brother, so his own life as a Republican was one of remarkable transformation. I remember so many conversations with him over the two to three months I stayed in his house. He and other brothers were concerned that I was wavering from the Republicans, given that I was foreign and had been subjected to various recent indignities by Sudan’s government. One close friend came by the house to sit with me to make sure I was okay physically as well as spiritually. As he left, he looked at me straight in the eye and told me in no uncertain terms, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Republican ideology.” I was not sure that he wasn’t trying to convince both of us.

  Many of these conversations were in the evening in the dark, sitting in the courtyard trying to catch a cool breeze since the electricity was out for weeks at a stretch in Khartoum. Problems were caused by the summer rains silting the electricity-generating Blue Nile dam at Sennar. The man who had taken me in taught me the amazing trick of making cool water to drink by pouring it into the shallow aluminum tray that was used to carry food from the kitchen to where it was to be eaten. We worked on my transformation while watching the cooling power of evaporation.

  The brothers checking on me did not seem to realize that in fact if anything my solidarity with them had been strengthened through my bit part in their life-altering drama. I had come to Sudan seeking total immersion in a Sufi community, and I found it. I could not be sure that the government wouldn’t look for me again, but I also very much understood that I, unlike my brothers and sisters, could leave Sudan any time I wanted to, or as soon as I applied for a new passport. I personally felt safe there—it was my friends that I was very worried about. The Sudan government showed me that its right hand did not know what its left hand was doing. After receiving a new passport at the US Embassy, where I had explained that I had lost the old one, I had no problem getting a year’s extension on my research visa from the government of Sudan.

  In addition to applying for a new passport and assuring everyone that I was solidly with them, I also tried to keep busy during this time by continuing to collect data and conduct interviews with the tailors, metalworkers, and carpenters who were the subjects of my dissertation. Apparently no one recognized me from my appearance at gunpoint in the back of a security police pickup truck. My research assistant Shams and I went out to the markets every day to do this work, but it was hard because we were anxious about what might happen next and sad to have so many of the brothers and sisters in prison. The reports we received from the prisoners were very positive, however. We heard that they were all kept together, sharing a Republican compound as it were, in the political section of Kober (named after British colonial official “Cooper”) Prison in Khartoum North. Sudan had a long history of jailing political prisoners, but also of releasing them, many of whom would then move back into positions of power in the country.

  The brothers in Kober reported that they could cook their own food and have meetings featuring inshad, and they reported that their prison guards would stop by to listen to the singing. Virtually all Sudanese are from Sufi backgrounds, so the guards would appreciate the Republican medeh, the common term for inshad. Some of the best Republican inshad singers were in the prison group, in addition to most of the leadership of the organization. The prisoners reported elation in their cause and that the movement was now moving quickly to fulfill its dream of the end of the Nimeiry regime and his sharia, and the coming of a thousand years of peace on Earth. We frequently heard that the brothers in prison said that they were far happier than those of us on the outside. Their families, however, were starting to suffer from the absence of breadwinners among them. The four sisters in prison reported satisfaction with the work they were doing there, despite the fact that the women were not in a comfortable political section. They were in detention in the Omdurman Women’s Prison with the prostitutes and illegal beer-brewers.

  Ustadh Mahmoud was treated reasonably well in detention, kept separate from the other brothers in a small house near the security police compound. He was allowed to have food brought to him daily from his own home by one of the brothers, and he was taken for medical and dental appointments to the military hospital in Omdurman. The remarkable Sudan-style informality of the security process meant that brothers and sisters on the outside occasionally had opportunities to see Ustadh Mahmoud as he was driven to one or another of these appointments, because someone on the inside had given them the heads-up about his schedule. I believe notes between him and some of his followers were exchanged as well during this time.

  I decided to seek the relative peace away from the capital and take a break in Rufa’a. But there I found anxiety and sadness as well among the Republican families whose sons and daughters were in jail. My peace was broken there too when the security police arrived to arrest my dear friend, Mowtasim. He was a prominent citizen of Rufa’a, farmer and former teacher, and lifelong Republican whom we called omda (mayor) because of his leadership in the community. He was taken to the prison in Wad Medani, the district headquarters, and was the sole Republican held there. Mowtasim was the only brother I had a chance to visit in prison. The informality outside of Khartoum apparently extended to allowing foreigners to visit political prisoners. I think we just sat together mostly in sad silence during my visit. I remember the high whitewashed walls of the courtyard where we sat. The only part of the outside world visible to us was the blue sky.

  As the months of detention wore on, the Republicans began to make efforts to bring this situation to the attention of the world. The arrests were not reported in the government-controlled media in Sudan, but short pieces appeared elsewhere in Arab media. An appeal was made to Amnesty International to adopt Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and the imprisoned Republicans as Prisoners of Conscience. And a senior leader in Kober Prison, Ustadh Abdel Latif Omer, who had had a long career at one of Khartoum’s newspapers, was recognized by the Committee to Protect Journ
alists in New York.

  Using my status as a Fulbright Scholar (although my dissertation research grant had ended by this time), I managed to get a brief stand-up-in-the-hallway meeting with US Ambassador Hume Horan. He was aware of the repression and arrests of the Republican Brotherhood by the Sudan government, he told me, and he had had a meeting with a few other representatives of Western countries in Khartoum about the case. But the US government was also more interested in Sudan’s stability because of an enormous refugee population, the world’s largest at the time. There were refugees and displaced persons from severe drought in the region, and in the west of Sudan from rebellions in Chad. There was a huge group of refugees in Sudan’s eastern regions from the long conflict over Eritrea’s struggle for independence from Ethiopia.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, after eighteen months in detention, Ustadh Mahmoud and all of the brothers and sisters were released in mid-December 1984, days after I had left Sudan. Little time was spent celebrating, however. Within days of their release, the Republicans had written and published a one-page statement, “Either This or the Flood” (see appendix), which they then distributed by hand all over the Khartoum area.

  The pamphlet was politely worded, referring to itself as “genuine and honest advice.” It was a plea that essentially echoed the talks on the street that had resulted in the imprisonment of the brothers and sisters, calling for an end to Nimeiry’s September Laws. And it summarized Republican critique of these laws—which included ancient punishments like severing the hand of a thief—as (1) an insult to all of Sudan’s people, further damaging the relationship with the South, and (2) a technically flawed document in terms of its Islamic understanding, which would make it inoperable.

  The government’s reaction was swift. It arrested Ustadh Mahmoud again along with four of the brothers who had been distributing the document. They were now charged under Islamic law with the capital crime of apostasy (rida). It was hard to imagine five people less guilty of this crime. Apostasy was a Muslim’s repudiation of his or her faith. Once a Muslim, always a Muslim. The previous period of detention had not involved any charges, but the Sudan government had now organized itself to make a proper example of Ustadh Mahmoud and his followers, manipulated the definition of the crime to fit its purpose, including the “violation” of the now-imposed September Laws, and quickly brought the alleged apostates to trial.

  The trial took place at the beginning of January 1985, shortly after Sudan’s independence day holiday. The brothers and sisters organized themselves to march to the courthouse in Omdurman the day of the trial in national dress, white jellabiyas and turbans for the brothers and the sisters in their white taubs. This was a video-recorded show trial. Ustadh Mahmoud represented himself with calm dignity, stating essentially that his accusers had no Islamic grounds to charge him with this crime. The only witness for the government’s prosecution was a police officer who had arrested one of the brothers for distributing the flyer. Taha and his four disciples/co-defendants were convicted after a less than two-hour trial, with the verdict pronounced the next day. Under the arcane rules of apostasy convictions in sharia law, the convicted is generally given an opportunity to recant his “beliefs.” Mahmoud Mohamed Taha would not recant, stating that all he had written and said was true. President Nimeiry declared him to be an “unrepentant apostate.” He was taken to Kober Prison to await his sentence.

  On Friday, the traditional day for Islamic executions, just two days after his conviction, Ustadh Mahmoud was led to the gallows in the courtyard of Kober Prison, which was filled with thousands of people. He refused a final statement, and as the canvas bag was slipped over his head, he had a smile on his face. On January 18, 1985 in the name of sharia, sharia law was violated by the execution of an elderly man, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, aged seventy-six. His body was placed in a canvas body bag and hauled onto a helicopter that had landed in the prison courtyard. The helicopter flew off, and a crew of Kober prisoners buried his body in the desert, so that no funeral could be held, no construction of a memorial shrine. The story was reported on the front page of the New York Times the next day. Many of the Republican brothers and sisters, entire families, were rounded up by the police as the execution was taking place and held behind bars in extremely crowded cells in local police precinct offices. They were devastated by the loss of their most beloved teacher, and now they were jailed for several days. The four brothers who had been convicted with Ustadh Mahmoud were forced to recant his teachings on national television the Sunday after the execution. The tape was a difficult one to watch.

  Seventy-six days later, April 6, President Jaafar Nimeiry was overthrown in a popular uprising that had filled Khartoum’s streets with every description of worker and citizen. Sudan’s 1985 intifada was led by a coalition of the forces that wanted to see peace in the South, as well as an end to Nimeiry’s repression, and which had also opposed Taha’s execution. Nimeiry at the time was visiting President Ronald Reagan in the White House, who was thanking Nimeiry for his assistance in securing the safe passage through Sudan earlier in the year for the Felasha Jews from Ethiopia to Israel.

  During Sudan’s intifada government, which followed, lasting until 1988, Asma Mahmoud, the daughter of Ustadh Mahmoud and a lawyer by training, brought a case to Sudan’s Supreme Court. She won her case, overturning the apostasy conviction of her father, returning the property to the family, and restoring the marriage of her mother to her father. As Ustadh Mahmoud was a convicted apostate, his wife had been automatically divorced from him, as a Muslim woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim man. The post-Nimeiry Supreme Court had of course confirmed that Mahmoud’s conviction as an apostate was not lawful.

  Memory is an incomplete and complex phenomenon in Sudan. Trying to complete memory is the dominant mode of discourse among Republicans following the execution of their teacher. One will say, “Do you remember when Ustadh Mahmoud said . . . ?” and the other fills in the blanks, elaborates, revises. During a visit with Republican brothers and sisters in Ustadh Mahmoud’s home town of Rufa’a in 2006 I attended a meeting where a letter was read containing remarkable detail of his execution, detail I had not heard in the twenty years previously. The letter was from a Kober Prison guard, relating his impressions of that day. He described how Ustadh Mahmoud’s lifeless hand had fallen out of the body bag into which he had been placed after being removed from the scaffold. The guard had placed it gently back in the bag before it was lifted onto the helicopter. The small audience listened to the letter in stunned silence of grief or wept softly as the guard’s recounting completed what had been the most horrific memory of all of the listeners’ lives. The thought which was not given voice was of the astonishing news of the last person to have physically touched their teacher before he was taken from them. Their “grammar of pain”1 did not include the words to describe that sense right then. But their futures were filled with conversations that sought the right word, making them and the man ever more complete.

  Epilogue

  Freedom

  God is with the patient ones.

  When Ustadh Mahmoud received visitors at his home he would often send them off with a handful of dates, always in an odd number. Not four or six; it was usually seven. Odd numbers have more power than even numbers; there is a saying of the Prophet that makes this point. Aspects of ablution are in threes—washing the hands or face three times, for example. And the night prayer, raka’a, a set of bowing and prostrating, is done in odd numbers. Odd numbers are off-center, less expected, raise questions. When we find an odd number of something, we humans might add one to restore balance. Odd numbers are incomplete, unfinished, suggestive of possibility. Ustadh Mahmoud’s every action was full of meaning.

  As this book developed into chapters at six-even, I saw the need for a seventh, an epilogue, in keeping with my theme here of listening to an unexpected voice out of Africa. An epilogue also allows me to scan the lives of the Republican brothers and sisters in the aftermath of the teach
er’s execution. I mentioned in an earlier chapter my own devotion to traveling to see my brothers and sisters in Sudan and almost wherever else they have landed: Egypt, the Arab Gulf, locations in Europe, and across the United States, of course. In many cases, under the circumstances of global economic and political change, I have managed to see some Republican families in multiple countries as they struggled to settle where they could find work and peace. I could certainly do another book on the Republicans’ collective efforts to maintain their footing on the Path of the Prophet, to remember and savor every moment of the days of the movement, and to pass what they knew of Ustadh Mahmoud on to their children. This is a community of men and women whose lived experience of the rise of intolerance from within the Muslim ummah has intensified their awareness of the next spot on the globe that could erupt with the violence of ignorance, opportunism, or expediency.

  But in 1988, three years after the execution of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, I could not stay away from Sudan, so I took a leave of absence from my new job at Ohio University and accepted a Fulbright visiting lecturer position in the Department of Rural Development, University of the Gezira in Wad Medani. I chose this location because of my own interest in African socioeconomic development, the focus of this new university, and because I could be close to the brothers and sisters in Medani. And Medani is a bit upstream on the Blue Nile from Rufa’a, the small town I considered to be my spiritual home. The Republican community in Medani was led by Ustadh Saeed Sha’ib, a large man with a generous laugh who had a warm hug for everyone. With Ustadh Mahmoud as the Republican Brotherhood guide and teacher, Ustadh Said was considered to be the head of the organization, although he had not been designated as Ustadh Mahmoud’s successor or spiritual heir.