the midst of his own speaking tour across the country in the 1960s. Taha’s point of view was that the debate on the future of Islam needed to be engaged; otherwise, the forces of extremism would be ceded all ground in the face of the Muslim world’s general complacency. Ustadh Mahmoud’s writings were the source both of his followers’ understanding of Islam and their inspiration in the conduct of their lives. His writings led them to their fundamental insight that there was very little to value in Islam today if not for the modern approach proposed by their teacher. But Ustadh Mahmoud’s writings were also an important source of the wider society’s views of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha as everything from unbalanced Sufi sheikh to heretic to apostate, even kaffir, “unbeliever.” Apparently Taha recognized this problem. He told an interviewer from an Arabic-language magazine, Al-Awdaa a-Sudaniya, “My approach is so new that I have become a stranger among my own people.” Ustadh Mahmoud and his followers attempted to present their position within mainstream Islamic discourse and learned through verbal and physical abuse that ideological diversity was unwelcome in this arena in Sudan.
Violence never deterred the members of the Republican Brotherhood from their determination to demonstrate that Islam was the path to human freedom. They were shouted down in public and denounced from the pulpits of mosques by extremist ideologues and their representatives. They were beaten up while trying to give public lectures. At the same time they did have a strong consciousness of how the wider society was reacting to their message, and they spent time listening to those opposed to them. I remember during the days leading up to President Nimeiry’s 1983 crackdown on the group, how the Republican leadership sent delegations of brothers out to mosques in the Khartoum area to listen to the Friday sermons, which had been containing more and more government-sanctioned invective against the Republicans. I participated in this investigation, but only in the protective way that the brothers organized my activities. My assignment was to go to Tuti Island’s mosque to listen to the Friday sermon with one of the brothers who had family there. Tuti was a lovely garden spot in the middle of the Blue Nile, a cooling ten-minute ferryboat ride in those days from Khartoum (there is now a fancy bridge). We took a pleasant boat ride, attended Friday prayers at the relatively calm mosque in Tuti, enjoyed lunch and returned to Omdurman with the intelligence we had gathered. I think the brothers thought I deserved a little “island vacation” from the tension that was developing quickly as Nimeiry tried to crush any opposition to his planned implementation of sharia law in the country.
Many Islamic reformists of the moderate-liberal-progressive spectrum have captured the imagination—and hope—of the West by describing a “peaceful Islam” or emphasizing the etymological connections between the words for Islam and peace (salaam). The Islamic elephant in the room, so to speak, appears to be sharia law and how it fits into Islam’s current and future practice. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and his colleagues tackled this issue head on and it has always been the centerpiece of controversy about the Republican Brotherhood.
The debate over sharia is essentially one of how the Qur’an is to be operationalized. Islamic polemicists such as Sayid Qutb (1906–1966), the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood stalwart who was a contemporary of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, promoted what could be called a static approach to sharia, stressing that sharia must be observed as they believed it was described in the Qur’an. Taha called his own approach “evolutionary,” one that would move humankind to the level of Islam practiced by the Prophet Mohamed. Taha wrote in the introduction to the fourth edition of The Second Message of Islam,
Muslims seem unaware of the need to evolve Shari’a. They continue to think that the problems of the twentieth century may be resolved by the same legislation that resolved the problems of the seventh century. This is obviously irrational. Muslims maintain that the Islamic Shari’a is perfect. This is true, but its perfection consists precisely in its ability to evolve, assimilate the capabilities of individuals and society, and guide such life up the ladder of continuous development.1
The texts of the Republican Brotherhood, the books written by Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and the books, tracts, and odes written by other members of the organization were critically important to my understanding of the social life of the Brotherhood. These works provided the philosophical backdrop for all Republican activities, from their meetings with Ustadh Mahmoud and each other, to public presentations of the movement’s ideology, to the pleasure the brothers and sisters derived from singing the contemporary hymns created out of odes on Republican themes.
The Republican ideology stood opposed to the political Islam of Osama bin Laden or Sayid Qutb. The Republicans viewed the Islamist perspective as an opportunistic use of the Qur’an’s message to seventh-century members of the Prophet’s community in Medina, to further contemporary political aims. The “reforms” promoted by Islamists are to accept the parts of that seventh-century revelation deemed useful to political objectives today, such as the infliction of cruel punishments instead of addressing poverty or the subordination of women. Iran, Sudan, and some of the states of northern Nigeria have been selective in the aspects of sharia that these “Islamic states,” have applied in their criminal codes, in effect, “revising Shari’a,” or “cherry-picking” Islamic law, in the American idiom.
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