For Love of the Prophet

An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State

Noah Salomon

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400884292
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

For some, the idea of an Islamic state serves to fulfill aspirations for cultural sovereignty and new forms of ethical political practice. For others, it violates the proper domains of both religion and politics. Yet, while there has been much discussion of the idea and ideals of the Islamic state, its possibilities and impossibilities, surprisingly little has been written about how this political formation is lived. For Love of the Prophet looks at the Republic of Sudan's twenty-five-year experiment with Islamic statehood. Focusing not on state institutions, but rather on the daily life that goes on in their shadows, Noah Salomon's careful ethnography examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst.
Salomon investigates Sudan at a crucial moment in its history—balanced between unity and partition, secular and religious politics, peace and war—when those who desired an Islamic state were rethinking the political form under which they had lived for nearly a generation. Countering the dominant discourse, Salomon depicts contemporary Islamic politics not as a response to secularism and Westernization but as a node in a much longer conversation within Islamic thought, augmented and reappropriated as state projects of Islamic reform became objects of debate and controversy.
Among the first books to delve into the making of the modern Islamic state, For Love of the Prophet reveals both novel political ideals and new articulations of Islam as it is rethought through the lens of the nation.

Itineraries

CHAPTER THREE

Rebuilding the Muslim Mind

Epistemological Enlightenment and Its Discontents

The more than two decades since the establishment of the Inqadh regime have been remarkable less for the changing modes of statecraft they present than for the space they opened up for specifically Islamic modes of deliberation. While the formal state structures the Inqadh employed look quite similar to those of the period before the Salvation Revolution, and even to those of the colonial state (as we saw in Chapter 1), the opening up of matters of public concern to Islamic discourse was unprecedented. To argue that the new modes of Islamic deliberation that resulted are merely the workings of an emergent Islamic public sphere (e.g., Salvatore and LeVine 2005) into which the state entered, and rather late in the game at that, is to ignore the explicit efforts at structuring and engineering this domain that have been a chief objective of the state. The Islamization of academic and intellectual culture through the establishment of think tanks, journals, fora, and even new universities, of print and televised media, of public space through mosque construction, dress codes and billboards, and of the workplace through Islamic associations and opportunities for Islamic learning, was a conscious effort by the regime to lay the basis for an intricate web of Islamic publicity. Even those who rejected major components of the regime’s project (as we will see in the case of the Sufi groups we meet below), ended up getting caught in its web, unable to wiggle out of the discursive frame of the Islamic state even as they took issue with the particular iteration of it that the regime put forward. It is by training our gaze toward actors like these that we can begin to see the emergence of the public sphere that we identified in the introduction to this volume, a space that is neither of the state nor entirely distinct from it.

As a revolution of intellectuals, albeit instrumentalized by military forces, the Inqadh understood its project as taking aim at the very epistemological foundations of public culture. Its leaders argued that in order to build this web of Islamic publicity, its projects could not merely focus on the reform of public practice, but had to go much deeper, to reform the “Sudanese mind” as well. It was for this reason that the government began to promote a very particular epistemological stance, exploring what new ways of life could emerge out of a synergy between the methodologies of empirical science and the products of revelation. The regime instigated this project to further what it understood to be ethical practice, wherein it was the assumed valuelessness of the way scientific knowledge had been deployed that had led to the horrors of the modern age, Sudan’s troubles clearly among them. From very early on in the Inqadh endeavor, state intellectuals argued that if the Islamic movement was to steer Sudan right, it must “put at the head of its priorities work on the rebuilding of the Muslim mind and the rebuilding of the Muslim nation, as two inseparable operations” (Hamid 1994: 7, my emphasis). With such a proclamation as its rallying cry, a project to reconstruct “the Sudanese mind,” to instill within it certain knowledge derived from the fruits of science and within the ethical parameters of revelation, began in earnest. Though the project was relatively consistent in its efforts, it took on several names over the long duration of Islamist rule: fundamentalization (al-taʾṣīl), the Islamization of knowledge (aslamat/islāmiyyat al-maʿrifa), epistemological enlightenment (al-tanwīr al-maʿrifī).¹

If the European Enlightenment had been about the shedding of the constraints of religious dogma and the triumph of secular reason, this new epistemological enlightenment was about shedding the constraints of secularism, inherited through colonialism, which, though British forces had left more than half a century ago, continued to lay claim to the Sudanese mind. While intellectuals across the Muslim world had debated the merits of such a project for several decades,² the political context of a state that devoted considerable efforts to support and implement it in the construction of its institutions makes the case in Sudan quite unusual.³ Through the institutional reforms mentioned above, and by introducing the principles of the Islamization of knowledge into the practice of Sudanese governance, the Inqadh regime placed Islamic knowledge at the center of a variety of modern disciplines and organizational practices that were not traditionally tied to it. In doing so, the regime took aim not only at modern institutions and disciplinary forms, but at Islamic knowledge itself, which was asked to perform all sorts of new kinds of work in order to serve as a firm and certain foundation on which these projects could proceed.

While the Islamization of knowledge has most often been studied as an oppositional discourse to a hegemonic secularity in the sciences (e.g., Stenberg 1996), in Sudan it became the hegemonic discourse to which a variety of parties responded. Sudan’s twenty-five-year experiment with Islamic governance thus not only offers the researcher a unique site to observe Islamist interventions in practice, grappling with real-world challenges not imagined by theoretical models, as we did in the previous chapter, but also allows us to observe how these policies are consumed within the diverse publics to which they attend, which will be the goal of the present chapter. When discussing my research, I am often asked: Has the Islamic project of the Inqadh been a success? To what extent has the government of Sudan accomplished its goal of instilling its Islamic program in the citizenry? Are new Muslim subjects emerging out of the era of National Salvation, or was the Inqadh period largely one of slogans that bore little fruit among the masses? A study of the regime’s project of epistemological enlightenment offers us one way of answering these questions. By tracing first the nature of the regime’s Islamic epistemological project and then turning to observe how it was both inhabited and contested by the Sudanese to whom it was directed, we will get a better a sense of the impact of the Islamic state. In doing so, we will come to see both its indelible presence in Sudanese public life and its inability to be enclosed within the agenda of its makers.

DISCOURSES OF CERTAINTY

We have spoken for many years about the situation of all the many sciences—cosmic, social and human—in the frame of Islam. We were saying from the podiums of Sudanese universities since the 1970s that if we want to present to humanity a useful cosmic, human or social science, then it is necessary that this knowledge stems from the [Islamic] religion first and foremost. But the circumstances were not favorable [for the implementation of this project] at that time: Sudanese state and society and the foreign presence were the thing[s] with influence in Sudan, [and the people influenced by them] did not care about Islam, indeed most of them were hostile towards it…. As for the international community, it was going by the opposite of what we called for: [it was] dazzled by secularism and it was giving its intellectual leadership to it and increasingly abandoning religion…. [Yet today] the Islamic epistemological project (al-mashrūʿ al-islāmī al-maʿrifī) finds in Sudan a state that is convinced by it, and organizations that are implementing it and that are nourished by what it produces. So the state is opening all the doors of all its organizations so that the scholar (al-ʿālim) and the researcher can enter, [each] carrying his ideas and his theories that are emerging from the sources of Islamic knowledge—the Qurʾan, Sunna, and the [material] universe—in order to devote [him/herself] to its application and to reexamine it so as to fix it or increase its depth or comprehensiveness.

—Ibrahim Ahmad ʿ Umar, “Islamic Knowledge on the Path of Construction” (ʿUmar 1995: 1–2)

In the early 1990s, not long after its rise to power, the new Sudanese government established an office within the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research with a rather curious name. The office was called the Administration for the Fundamentalization of Knowledge (Idārat Taʾṣīl al-Maʿrifa), and shortly after its founding an advisor to the president was appointed under the same heading, with the title Advisor on Fundamentalization Affairs (Mustashār al-Raʾīs fī Shuʾūn al-Taʾṣīl). The term taʾṣīl (fundamentalization) was a neologism, up to this point more or less unknown outside Islamist intellectual circles (al-ʿAlwani 1994). At once embracing the notion of “fundamentalism” (al-uṣūliyya), and referencing the classical mode of Islamic jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh [Hallaq 1999]), the term is derived from the Arabic root aṣl (root, source, fundament), and means something akin to “going back to the sources.” Both offices with this term in their titles were tasked with undoing what their creators called the “positivist epistemological domination” (al-haymana al-maʿrifiyya al-waḍʿiyya)⁴ (Muhammad Khayr 2008: 11) of the human and natural sciences, law, economics, and government by secular principles and the subsequent degeneration of revelation as a valid source of knowledge encouraged by Western actors and those Sudanese who were said to be mimicking them. An intellectual writing in the project’s chief journal contended:⁵

This simple premise under which a group of Muslim intellectuals have been proceeding since the beginning of this hijrī century [i.e., approximately 1979 CE]—which sometimes goes under the title of the Islamization of Knowledge (islāmiyyat al-maʿrifa) and sometimes under the name of al-taʾṣīl—was not born in an intellectual vacuum. [Rather,] it was born under the circumstances of an epistemological siege (almuḥāṣara al-maʿrifiyya) that the Muslim intellectual feels when, every time he wants to listen to and comprehend revelation, the sensory empiricism (al-tajrībiyya al-ḥissiyya) and the logical positivist (al-waḍʿiyya al-manṭiqiyya) methodologies reject him on the pretext that there is an absolute division between the information of revelation and the facts of material reality. (Hamid 1994: 7)

The founders of the Islamic state project understood that their goal of reducing Western influence over Sudan could not be achieved solely by resisting the West’s political priorities for the region or by standing up to the demands of the World Bank (indeed, despite their bombastic rhetoric, they did very little of either). Rather, they contended that Sudanese must confront the far more pervasive and effective domination that the West exhibits: its control over the Muslim mind.

This new administrative body at the Ministry of Higher Education was tasked with “building [both] the sciences and educational curricula on Islamic foundations … to effect a radical reform (iṣlāḥ jidhrī) [that can] pull [them] out of intellectual dependency and correct some of the secular trends that still rule over many educational issues” (al-Jazuli 1998: 37). With this goal in mind, the Qurʾan and Sunna were to be reexamined both at the upper echelons of research and in national educational curricula for what they revealed about the natural sciences (e.g., Taha 1994, “On the Foundation of Fundamentalization in the Field of Natural Sciences”), agriculture (e.g., al-Khalifa 1995, “Plant and Science Agriculture among the Muslims”), economics (e.g., ʿAbbas 1995, “Islamic Economics: A Psycho-Ethical Paradigm”), politics (e.g., ʿIlwan 1997, “Leadership Characteristics in the [Qurʾanic] Story of ‘The Two-Horned One’”), philosophy (e.g., Imam 1996, “Toward the Fundamentalization of the Teaching of Logic in the Islamic World”), media studies (e.g., Musa 1996, “Towards a Vision of Fundamentalization for the Media”), historiography (e.g., Salih 1995, “The Writing of History among the Muslims”), and literature (e.g., Mahjub 1994, “[Religious] Commitment in Islamic Literature”), to name but a few of the disciplines this project boldly sought to reevaluate.

Although the Administration for the Fundamentalization of Knowledge section at the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research was phased out prior to the signing of the CPA, the agenda of al-taʾṣīl has retained its importance at the highest echelons of government to this day. Until the latter years of his life, Prof. Ahmad ʿAli al-Imam (d. 2012) served as the Advisor to the President on Fundamentalization Affairs, counseling not only the presidency, but “all apparatuses of the government” (Mawqiʿ al-Sūdān 2008) on how best to bring the knowledge on which they rely, and indeed all of their activities, in line with the fundamentals (al-uṣūl) of Islamic jurisprudential reasoning (al-Imam 2005: 6). Today, governmental or quasi-governmental think tanks such as the Epistemological Enlightenment Center (Markaz al-Tanwīr al-Maʿrifī) and the Renaissance and Civilizational Communication Forum (Muntadā al-Nahḍa wa-l-Tawāṣul al-Ḥaḍārī), the latter run by former Minister of Guidance and Pious Endowments and current head of the government Fiqh Council of Sudan (Majmaʿ al-Fiqh al-Islāmī), Dr. ʿIsam Ahmad al-Bashir, continue its mission.

Though the framework of identity politics and cultural authenticity has been a common model for understanding interventions such as the epistemological enlightenment project, it is clear that the taʾṣīl approach was not merely a rejection of Western sciences to be replaced with “Islam” as the only valid source of knowledge. Rather, something more complex was at stake than the “invoking of a disputed heritage” deemed misleadingly monovocal “for ideological and political purposes” (Abaza 2002: 23). For example, the advocates of the Islamization of knowledge accepted the Western taxonomy of disciplines, even as they critiqued their reliance solely on positivist empiricist knowledge: “The approach to the discipline more than the discipline itself needed to be cast in a more Islamic frame,” argued one international proponent of the Islamization of knowledge (Ahmed 1995: 426). Western achievement was celebrated in this literature (and indeed often cited as an achievement that would never have been possible without Arab genius), but it was revised to take into account the lessons of revelation and their moral centering. Its intellectuals made the argument that if Sudan was to succeed, it could not return to some ideal past, but rather had to evaluate by Islamic standards those knowledges and disciplines that have been misidentified as exclusively Western.

“[Among] the culture that fills our brains [in the Islamic world],” wrote Iraqi-American intellectual Taha Jabir al-ʿAlwani in one of the first issues of al-Taʾṣīl, “is Western knowledge that we find in the universities in the social sciences and the humanities. It is true [however] that much of ‘Western knowledge’ is [in fact] human heritage, but the Western man subjugates it to his [own] heritage and his intellectual and social standards” (al-ʿAlwani 1994: 55). With this understanding in mind, al-ʿAlwani’s Sudanese colleagues attempted to deprovincialize Islamic reform, placing it within the collective project of humanity, heretofore hijacked by the West and its secularist agenda.⁶

The argument stood that reliance only on goals that could be measured materially had led to a de-moralization of the sciences, which must now be reoriented to God’s goals for humanity and the spiritual development of man. Positivism was thus critiqued not solely for ignoring revelation, but also for placing of objectivity over morality. The taʾṣīl project aimed at harmonizing modern “Western” regimes of knowledge, frameworks of understanding, and modes of governance (that “human heritage” whose origins were in fact plural) with the moral foundations of Islam. Dr. Hasan al-Turabi perhaps best defined this project when he wrote of the necessity for a “unification of Knowledge” (tawḥīd al-ʿilm) with the commands of God:

And it is not possible for the scientific renaissance to be realized in our country unless we mobilize behind it faith-based concepts (al-maʿāni al-īmāniyya) and [unless] we [avoid] leaving [science] only [to] technical and positivist knowledges…. We can only guarantee that we don’t use knowledge for the oppression of man or for evil if we employ natural science for p...