by Steve Howard
I regularly walked from my house on the campus of the University of the Gezira to visit with Ustadh Saeed and the brothers and sisters who gathered at his home in the oldest neighborhood of Medani, particularly to see visitors from other regions of the country who would stop and pay their respects to this hospitable man. Medani was on the routes to Khartoum from points east, west, and south in Sudan. I was not surprised one day when he asked if I would go into the center of town with him to meet someone. We went into his office, where he had worked as an accountant for years, and there he introduced me to Hajja Hafza, a woman of about fifty, who looked like she had been through some very difficult times.
Ustadh Said left me alone with her in his office, and I extended my hand in greeting, which she received by covering her hand with her worn-looking taub. This was meant as a gesture of respect from a woman, although I had usually interpreted it as a conservative practice indicating she did not want to break her own “purity” by touching a man. The Republican sisters did not do this; they always shook men’s hands forthrightly, so I was not used to her old-fashioned custom.
As she started to talk, eyes downcast, and adopting a pleading tone that sobered me, I realized with a shock who she was. The last time I had seen Hajja Hafza she had not been wearing a taub but the khaki green uniform of an officer of the national security agency. She was the policewoman who had interrogated me on my first arrest for “being in the same house as Republicans” during the crackdown five years earlier in 1983. Hajja Hafza had kept insulting the brother who had been arrested with me, asking him repeatedly if he was in fact Sudanese. “Hajja Hafza” was, in effect, her nom de guerre, and it seems that all the political prisoners knew her by that name.
After the fall of the Nimiery regime in 1985, Hajja Hafza had fallen on hard times; she was relieved of her position in the security police agency, and she lost her husband. She asked me in a resigned tone if I could arrange for her a contact with the US embassy to see if she could get a visa to travel to the United States, exiling herself and looking for better opportunities. I explained to her, and later to Ustadh Said, that I was not an employee of the embassy or the US government and had no wasta (influence) there.
When the two of us left the office and found Ustadh Saeed out in front waiting, she looked very tired and like she had absorbed so much disappointment there really wasn’t room for more. Ustadh Saeed looked down at me—he was also very tall—with an expression as if he had been testing me, gently. He did not push the issue. And when I told him that I had recognized her, he simply explained her difficult circumstances and that he had wanted to see if there was anything I could do for her. And that was the end of the discussion about Hajja Hafza between the two of us.
However, when some of the brothers heard about this interview they were almost as surprised as I was. We must have been the cadre of the brotherhood not very evolved in our understanding of the need to let go and act in a conciliatory manner at all times. I was overwhelmed by the extension of Ustadh Saeed’s generous spirit to this woman who had been an official responsible for his arrest and detention as well as that of the other brothers and sisters in prison. Al-muamalat, “good acts,” in Republican thinking were not limited by who should receive them, because their primary function was to strengthen the believer’s strides on the Path of the Prophet.
I had had a similar revelation about the Republican ability to try to see things in the most positive light a few years earlier while finishing up my doctoral studies at Michigan State University. I had returned to East Lansing from Sudan feeling bereft of Sudan and Republican Brotherhood connections, but I quickly found that there were a number of (non-Republican) Sudanese studying at MSU at that time. I started to attend some of their communal weekend suppers—definitely of the azaba (bachelor) variety—which helped keep my Sudanese Arabic in shape. The food that they prepared for themselves must have triggered nostalgia in these guys by its very shape, because the flavor certainly did not remind me of their mothers’ cooking. One evening as we ate, one of these Sudanese graduate students mentioned that he thought so-and-so was “luuty.” In my usual vocabulary-development mode I asked what that word meant. Everyone stopped and looked at me in surprise. “It means homosexual,” one of the guys offered. Their surprise was in the fact that Sudan’s vice president under Nimiery had been rumored to be homosexual; whether true or not, such an accusation was a distinct insult in that culture. All of these Michigan State Sudanese knew of my connection to the Republican Brotherhood, and that the then vice president had been in charge of the persecution of the Republicans. I knew from the brothers that the vice president had been responsible for the assault on the Republicans. But that no Republican had ever shared the rumor of his sexuality in my presence, despite the great harm that the vice president was doing to the brotherhood, was another mark of their live-and-let-live orientation.
What fascinated me was not so much that no Republican had shared this rumor with me, but that they did this as a natural matter of course—that it did not require “plotting to keep secrets from Steve.” They were simply carefully following the adab, good manners or behavior that had been modeled and taught by Ustadh Mahmoud. Gossiping was not consistent with good manners. And these good manners are also to what I credit the lack of much “salty vocabulary” in my Sudanese Arabic; the only swearing I know is a strong wallahi! (my God!). These examples were further evidence of the Republican approach to life: Everything was religion and religion was everything. Each was a vital extension of the other, and if life and religion did not move in concert, the struggle to be a good Muslim did not have much meaning. And although politics was far down the list of priorities of the Republican Brotherhood, this position on religion and life needing to stay in sync was also their foundation for democracy. Behaving in this socially conscious manner was “being democratic with oneself” in the Republican view, the necessary initial starting point for implementing democracy in the wider society. Hypocrisy has been a concern of the Muslim ummah since the revelation of the Qur’an. Honest democracy with oneself was the antidote to hypocrisy with strong roots in the Republican Brotherhood’s project for life.
A third incident that confirmed my sense of the wider society’s consciousness of what had occurred in its midst with Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and the Republican Brotherhood took place in Aswan, Egypt, while I was on a 1994 sabbatical from Ohio University. I had traveled to Egypt hoping to get to Sudan, which I had not visited since the 1989 coup. Aswan was in many respects the next best thing in that its proximity to Sudan meant that Sudanese Arabic was the lingua franca—not that Egyptians would admit they were speaking Sudanese Arabic. The Nile’s bluffs and islands, the High Dam, and the nearby astonishing monuments to Pharaoh Ramses on Lake Nasser, which could only be visited when accompanied by an Egyptian army convoy because of recent attacks on tourists, were only part of the drama of my stop in Aswan. I had gone to see Yassir Shukery, an Aswan lawyer and longtime Republican Brother whom I had met on an early trip to Atbara in my first months with the brotherhood.
Yassir’s visit to Sudan was about a dozen years before my trip to Aswan. He brought with him on his Sudan trip a colleague of his, a fellow lawyer, who had said that he wanted to learn more about Ustadh Mahmoud and his approach to modern Islam. Yassir’s colleague actually received a lot of good-natured ribbing during his trip to Sudan because he clearly had been “out of shape” vis-à-vis his religious practice, something that had been very obvious to everyone in a deeply religiously observant society.
In the year that followed Yassir and his colleague’s visit to Ustadh Mahmoud and the Sudan Republicans, there was of course the government crackdown on the movement, the arrests of many brothers and sisters, and the execution of al-Ustadh. In Egypt, where government surveillance of the activities of religious organizations was far more rigorous than in Sudan, brother Yassir was arrested and thrown into jail for his membership in this Sudanese group, despite his minimal proselytizing on behalf of t
he Republican movement. It turned out that the colleague he had brought with him to Sudan was an informant for the Egyptian religious police, and he had turned Yassir in.
Although I knew that Yassir had been in jail for his link to the Republicans, I had forgotten the details. He also took me around to meet the handful of other Republicans in Aswan, including a remarkable man who had also served time in prison for his Republican affiliation despite the fact that he had never traveled to Sudan or met Ustadh Mahmoud. I told him how much I admired his faith. Yassir then took me to his Lawyers’ Syndicate in Aswan to meet his colleagues, which I felt was as much about showing me off as the “Arabic-speaking Muslim khawaja,” as anything else. But then as we sat sipping tea and chatting, a disheveled man came into the room and slowly approached me at the large wooden table in the Syndicate’s hall.
He nervously shook my hand, bent down, and then hugged me tightly. He was Yassir’s colleague who had turned him in to the police during the Republican crackdown. He cried, asked my forgiveness over and over again, and demonstrated deep shame for what he had done.
I was overwhelmed, of course, particularly by the idea that I was to receive these apologies and condolences on behalf of all the Republicans, in that I was the only one “from Sudan” whom this man had met since his trip to Omdurman. His remorse seemed genuine, and apparently he had lost both his lawyer job and his connection to the Egyptian government as these events unfolded on both sides of the border. I was struck once again by the evidence of those outside the Republican circle regretting their behavior toward it in the past.
Although I have never made a point of seeking a spot on the lecture circuit with talks about my experience with the Republican Brotherhood, I have many times accepted invitations from a wide range of groups of Sudanese people living in the United States to talk about the era of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. I always adamantly stress my lack of expertise as a theologian or even a historian, but I think that the Sudanese have felt isolated from the world by the behavior of their government over the past four decades or so; that reaching out to someone who might have something positive to say makes them feel better about themselves. It has also been clear to me that Sudanese in exile are fascinated about being able to converse with a blue-eyed khawaja in Sudanese Arabic, another example of African people feeling that there isn’t much room in the world for their language when faced with the overwhelming hegemony of English. I remember in 2004 going to the Sudan Embassy in Washington to seek an entry visa and meeting the visa official who was sufficiently impressed with my command of his mother tongue to insist that I meet the ambassador. I was not very happy with this idea in that I had my own personal policy of avoiding Sudan government contact as much as possible after the persecution of the Republican Brotherhood and the execution of Ustadh Mahmoud. But I was in their embassy.
The ambassador asked me to sit down, offered tea, of course, and we had a pleasant conversation. He, in effect, interviewed me about my feelings about Sudan, and although I was as circumspect as possible, given the continuing atrocities in Darfur and the South, he did elicit from me a statement that I felt “safe” when I visited Khartoum. I was astonished a couple of weeks later to learn from friends in Khartoum that “American professor feels safe in Khartoum” appeared as a large newspaper headline, complete with my picture. So I became a propaganda tool in the midst of the Khartoum government’s brutal crackdown on insurgents and noncombatant villagers in the western region of Darfur, described by world governments as genocide.
The brutality and the simple lack of opportunity in their home country have cast an enormous Sudanese diaspora out into the world, covering every corner of the Middle East and Europe, and my own specialty, the United States. Many in this community achieve great success abroad, doing better perhaps than they would have in Sudan. And many have led lives as survivors, driving taxis, working as security guards, or delivering pizza, trained with bachelor’s degrees and beyond. My own interactions with them have covered the range of both of these groups, feeling a bit myself like part of the diaspora.
Republicans living in the United States have sought ways to remember their teacher, particularly around the anniversary of his execution, January 18. These events have become remarkable reunions for those living in the United States for years and orientation sessions for those either new to the movement or on brief trips to this country. We have held the memorial event twice in Athens, Ohio, where I live. The first time was when Ustadh Mahmoud was recognized by Ohio University’s African Students Union as its African Hero in 2000, an annual event commemorating Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa. And the second time was in 2009 when we organized a conference entitled “100 Years of Progressive Muslims” to mark what would have been Ustadh Mahmoud’s 100th birthday.
A few years prior to the latter conference I had been browsing in a large bookstore, and came across the latest essay collection from Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (2004). Glancing at the index, I was astonished to discover several references to “Taha, Mahmoud Mohamed.” I bought the book and immediately asked Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im if he had introduced West to the thought of Ustadh Mahmoud, but he was as surprised as I to learn of what West had written. I of course knew of Cornel West’s intellectual power and his extensive writings on racism in the United States, but I could not trace his interest in the work of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. At the beginning of a year’s worth of preparation for our “progressive Muslims” conference, the Republican community in the United States in effect dared me to go after Cornel West for the conference keynote. I approached the challenge in a guileless manner, figuring that the worst he could say was (and that his probable response would be) “no, thanks.”
But after a year of back-and-forth with West’s agent and a last-minute drama involving President Obama’s first inauguration (West was, in early 2009, a big fan of the president’s and had been invited to a pre-inaugural breakfast; we had to change the time of West’s keynote to accommodate his need to get to Washington for that event), Professor Cornel West indeed keynoted our conference on “progressive Muslims” and earned a loud ovation from a standing-room-only audience in Ohio University’s Baker Center Ballroom.
We had made a short documentary about the life of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha for the conference and included in the film some of what West had written about Ustadh Mahmoud: “Taha conceives of Islam as a holistic way of life that promotes freedom—the overcoming of fear—in order to pursue a loving and wise life” (Democracy Matters, 140). The crowd gathered for the keynote went wild, and West asked me for two copies of the film, one for his mother. In his thundering talk Cornel West elevated Mahmoud Mohamed Taha to the Pantheon of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, which was certainly not news to the Republican brothers and sisters gathered for the event. But this did provide better context for my many students and colleagues in attendance than I had ever managed to produce in one of my lectures. Cornel West understood what the Republicans admired most about Ustadh Mahmoud—his love of freedom—something he shared with Gandhi, King, and Mandela. I most recently heard Cornel West invoke the name of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha while a panelist in 2015 on the Bill Maher Show’s confusing “attack and defense of Islam and Muslims” discussion about the current “Islamic State” violence in Syria and Iraq. It reminded me of my awkward conversation with Ustadh Mahmoud that afternoon in 1982 when I asked him naively for more “freedom” from the obligations of attending all of the many meetings of the brotherhood. His response was to tell me that some day people all over the world would come to the Republican idea. I’m just beginning to understand what he meant.
I was asked to speak to a meeting of the Sudanese ja’alia (community living abroad) in Philadelphia in early 2013. I read them sort of a half-English, half-Sudanese Arabic translation of the first chapter of this book. They were doctors, pharmacists, taxi drivers, teachers, and store clerks gathered in the basement function room of an
anonymous motel in North Philly, determined to keep in touch with each other in the big American city. They were not Republicans but they got my Sudan jokes, were moved by the tender details, and nodded knowingly at the Sufi stories. They reacted to the humaneness and realized that they had missed something or not paid attention in their past lives as workers or university students in Khartoum. They made the bitter contrast with the state of Sudan today, determining that extremism had driven their country to ruin. This group of forty to fifty middle-aged Sudanese men and women who had exiled themselves to chilly Philadelphia for economic and political reasons now saw some relevance in the work of Ustadh Mahmoud. Nostalgia was there, of course, as exile’s companion. But they also expressed pride in Taha, seeing him now as a national hero.
Transcendent brotherhood was the life-giving agar that fueled the Republicans’ positive outlook and brought them together. It was a focus on oneness as a goal of humanity, rather than on difference—either among Muslims or between Muslims and other faiths. It was a destination on the Path of the Prophet. Ustadh Mahmoud illustrated it beautifully in a remarkable interview he had in the early 1960s with John Voll. Voll is a well-known American historian of Sudan who had been conducting his dissertation research on the history of the Khatmiya, a Sufi order founded in the Kassala area. Sayed al-Hassan, the founder of this order, was a mystic revered by Republicans for his adherence to the Path of the Prophet. Voll had asked Ustadh Mahmoud about Islamic reform efforts, and he gave Voll a response redolent of the early space age: “The age-old dream of the human caravan is not to send astronauts in their orbit in the outer space. It is to send its individuals, every single individual, in his orbit of self-realization. It is high time that this dream be thus reinterpreted. It is also the sacred duty of every man and woman to help to intelligently reorientate [sic] human endeavor towards the culmination of this pilgrimage” (Republican Brotherhood pamphlet, “Questions and Answers,” page 8).
