their lives or what identifies them as “Islamic.” The Republican Brothers and Sisters constructed a comprehensive social system that both allowed them to hone their practice of the teachings of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and to turn inward in a limited fashion from a society that viewed those practices with some degree of suspicion or incomprehension. The Republican way of life during the era of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s leadership was an application of his intense search for the meaning of the Qur’an—revealed to the Prophet Mohamed in the seventh century—in today’s world. I focus on the mundane details of their lives here in order to give a sense of the everyday, plodding quality of the work of reforming Islam. This work has never proceeded in a linear fashion in Sudan, but rather in halting steps. In the Republican case, those steps were directed out of spaces of their familiar headquarters for thinking, discussing, and engaging in spiritual life and making a contribution to the understanding of and practice of human rights in their country.
The intention of this memoir is to shed light on social change promoted through the vehicle of a modern Islamic movement dedicated to its members’ understanding of the pursuit of peace. That social change can be a product of tension between religious orthodoxies and “new understandings” of faith is my central interest while experiencing the impact each has on the other. The Sudanese roots of this movement were deep, so although describing its membership as representative of Sudan would be misleading, the brothers and sisters were leading Muslim lives guided by a theology of indigenous provenance. The members of the Republican Brotherhood were determined—in the face of Islamic extremism of which they themselves were victims—to provide an example of what they believed an Islamic community should and could be. They joined this movement and built its identity out of a hopeful view of the future, not out of rage, discontent, or grievances against the ruling regime. They had no political agenda except that democracy and human rights were central to their movement’s message and practice in every forum that they organized. The Republican view was always that societal-level human rights or democracy could be sustained only when their source was one’s personal practice.
My memoir is in part motivated by the fact that the Republican Brotherhood and the work of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha have been largely relegated to footnotes in contemporary studies of Sudan and Islam and/or to unflattering portrayals in a few books and the media. For me, the Republican Brotherhood represents an indigenous expansion of the Islamic intellectual project that drew strength from both opposing colonialism and from the initial colonial investment in education for Sudan’s “modernity.” Mahmoud Mohamed Taha’s fresh understanding of the texts of Islam revealed possibilities for the Sudanese nation. The postcolonial expansion of primary, secondary, and higher education made Taha’s progressive message attractive and accessible to people at a variety of social levels.
My title for this memoir, Modern Muslims, might raise eyebrows across the Muslim world at the suggestion that I may be perceiving many Muslims as outside of this rubric. In fact, my title reflects the growth of my observation over years of interacting with the Republican Brothers and Sisters, of the intense link between the theology and movement of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and their role in the struggle to secure a place for Sudan in a postcolonial and just world. The modern state of the Republic of Sudan is in the very name the Republicans gave to their movement. The movement’s emphasis on women’s rights, human justice, an educated populace, and democratic governance constituted an impressive twentieth-century agenda for an organization dedicated to Islam. But my primary intention with the selection of the term “modern” for the title was to emphasize the dedication that Taha and his followers had to the idea that Islam had always been modern and contemporary. They saw their task as helping society catch up with that fact.
The members of the Republican Brotherhood never contested elections or attained any political office; their only tools were moral suasion based on their understanding of the word of God and their intense effort to serve as a model community dedicated to peace and human equality. They developed a philosophy of living and applied it to marriage and family, birth and death, and every human possibility in between. They invited all to see how they lived their lives or to listen to and read about their philosophy, their fikr (ideology) in books, lectures, hymns, and newspapers. They were harassed and imprisoned for their principled stands for political liberty and freedom of conscience. And they organized themselves to divide the labor of the movement and develop special skills to run it, valuing everyone who wanted to participate, while reaching out and speaking to women and young people particularly with their message. The Republicans tried to treat each other, as Khalid El Haj, who was an important movement leader, reminded me, with a-sadiq, al-muhubba, wa al-ikhlas (truth, love, and charity). These values were always very much in evidence in the solidarity that characterized the movement; these were people who eschewed ties to their own families in some cases, in favor of spending all of their time with fellow Republicans. And they found reflections of their teacher, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, in those that they loved.
After many years of reflective frustration, I finally decided to compose a personal account of my experience living with the Republican Brotherhood, trying to avoid putting the movement in an academic box, while telling their story as a respectful, engaged observing participant. I want to describe how I learned to live as a member of this group of Brothers and Sisters, and what I learned about life in doing so. I feel that this book is my responsibility to those who shared their lives with me, perhaps a testament to the care in their instruction. My philosophy as an academic researcher has always been that “we are part of what we seek to understand,” and this memoir is my most forthright expression of that. I witnessed Republican weddings and all-night and pre-dawn meetings, tried to learn their hymns, ate too much of their food, slept in their houses and in the courtyards outside their houses, visited them in prison, greeted their newborns, listened to their stories, and attended their burials. I have been a privileged witness to the dramatic era of change in which they have lived, and it is time to offer an account. Much of my narrative here is in effect an oral history passed down to me from brothers and sisters who took time to tell me what they knew of Ustadh Mahmoud and/or relate their own personal interactions with him and with each other. Although I sometimes heard a variety of versions of the events I describe here, I have tried to present a consensus view. And this interpretation is my own, of course.
In the chapters that follow I provide a perspective on the history of this movement and details of its members’ efforts to organize family and movement life against the backdrop of a Sudan at the beginning of the era it is still mired in today, of intolerant rule by an Islamist state. The execution of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha by the Nimeiry regime on January 18, 1985—for trumped-up charges of “apostasy”—signaled in many respects the beginning of the Islamist era that envelops Sudan today. I will describe here the events leading up to that sharia-defying act and its impact on Taha’s followers. An injunction from the Qur’an—that there should be “no compulsion in religion”—was taken by the Republican Brotherhood as one of its mottos or inspiring principles. And this Qur’anic verse was violated by the government of Sudan and the Islamist organizations that supported it in the act of executing Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. That fundamental conflict is at the heart of this book.
1
Unity
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909–1985) was the founder, leader, and guide of the Republican Brotherhood movement. He is at the center of any description of the Republican Brotherhood, and he plays an important role in this one as well. But for me, as I tell my story from the rear guard of the movement, Taha is high on a pedestal, and I understood him best through the voices of the brothers and sisters in Sudan and in exile who invested their lives in trying to follow his guidance. They taught me about his training as an engineer in the 1930s and his membership in the Graduates Congress, the intellectual movement that led Sudan’s independence struggle. He started his own political party to participate in that effort, called the Republican Party, which he then transformed into an Islamic social reform movement in the early 1950s. He wrote and spoke in public about his vision for a modern and peaceful Muslim world, and attracted followers from all over Sudan who became his representatives in disseminating the
