I came to know the Republican movement I was quickly disabused of the idea that I, as a foreigner from the West, might have any privileges of position or representation. I internalized this message a few weeks into my joining the group while returning to Khartoum as a member of my first wafd, or “delegation,” to the northern city of Atbara. The Republicans took these missions all over Sudan to spread their message of the possibilities of a new direction in Islam and distribute their books on the subject. Our group of about eight brothers had spent ten days in Atbara, a city on the Nile about six hours north of Khartoum by slow-moving train. The Sudanese knew Atbara as the “city of fire and steel” in that it had been a railway terminus and an industrial center of sorts, dedicated to small-scale manufacturing. It remained a working-class city at the junction of the Nile and Atbara Rivers. Our return journey had been tough, riding while perched on our suitcases in a crowded third-class car, eating the dust that blew in from the open windows as the train crossed the August desert. When we reached the station in Khartoum North I anticipated the usual rush of Sudanese hospitality, a shower and a well-deserved hot meal to follow our arduous progress from Atbara. But to my surprise we were taken from the train station immediately to the home of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha in our sorry sweaty, dusty state. I tried unobtrusively to shake the dust that was caked in my hair as we sat in Ustadh Mahmoud’s saloon, the main room of the house, waiting to report on our trip. I wondered as I listened to the speakers if a grimy appearance was a required part of the Sufi ritual of this reporting session.
My next surprise was my position in the Atbara trip report lineup. Again, I thought that, as a guest, I would have been given an opportunity to speak early in the program. Of course, the leaders of the delegation spoke first, describing how many lectures were given in Atbara, how the crowd received us, how many Republican tracts were sold there, and importantly, how the brothers treated each other during the trip. But then Ustadh Mahmoud continued to call on members of the Atbara delegation to speak to the brothers and sisters assembled in his house to listen to us and our impressions. Again a surprise as some of those called upon were actually younger than I was, a graduate student from the United States! Finally, I figured it out. Brothers were called to speak in the order of their seniority in the movement, an order that was created by Ustadh Mahmoud’s sense of the individual’s capacity to understand, live, and model the Republican ideology, the path of the Prophet Mohamed. As for me, I was a weeks-old newcomer, mustajid, and was not ready to take an early place in the reporting line. But also I realized then that I was no longer considered as a guest.
The doctoral dissertation that finally made its way out of the Sociology Department at Michigan State University, “Social Strategies in Petty Production: Three Small-Scale Industries in Urban Sudan,” was what I had come to Sudan to research. While serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in neighboring Chad I came up with the idea that I would pursue academic African Studies when I returned home. Chad gave me an appreciation of the cultures of the Sahelian/Sudanic belt that crossed Africa from Senegal to Eritrea, and my Michigan State adviser recommended that I add an African language to my skills in planning a career as an African Studies professor. Arabic seemed like a good choice to go with the French-language skill I had developed in teaching high school in Chad, and Arabic combined with my interest in the Sahelian belt identified Sudan as a site for my dissertation research. I had also developed an interest in Sufism, an aspect of Islam often thought of as its mystical orientation, which further intensified the logic of going to Sudan. I considered Islam’s presence in Africa to be rooted in Sufi teachings and organizations, no matter how far African Islam may have strayed from those roots, and Sudan had a rich Sufi history. As I learned more Arabic and prepared to go to Sudan, I decided that once there I would become a Sufi, although at the time I was not actually sure what that might entail. My time teaching at a lycée in rural Chad had left me feeling that I wanted a deeper experience in Africa, and that Sufism could be its vehicle.
This young man had so many agendas as he set out for Sudan! But the luxuries of youth, of having that generous Fulbright-Hays dissertation grant, of wanting to savor an African experience and not being in any particular hurry, meant that I was not anxious about the ordering of those agendas. I did have some anxiety, however, about my lack of proficiency in spoken Arabic, despite two years of study as part of my graduate course work. In fact, the greatest stomach cramp I have ever had grabbed me as my plane circled Khartoum Airport at the end of 1981, ready to deliver me into a land where I felt that I could not speak the language. And me with all those agendas.
My first few months in Sudan were spent observing work in Khartoum’s small-scale industrial sites—where I intended to collect sociological data—and trying to learn Arabic. I discovered that Sudanese hospitality was a great help to my research in that the artisans in the workshops of my study—tailors, carpenters, metalworkers—had no objection to my hanging out in their shops, despite the fact that I was unable to tell them clearly what on earth I was doing there, and they usually offered me tea. These workshops were generally found in the “industrial sites” at the margins of the growing cities, housed in everything from sophisticated shops with showrooms to portable sewing-machine tables that could be moved from backs of trucks to the shade of a large tree. Any of these shops, particularly tailor shops, could also be found in residential areas. Tailors who specialized in women’s clothing had shops that were convenient to their customers and accommodating to women’s culture that restricted their movement beyond home to a great extent.
Studying the sociology of the urban worker did not necessarily offer me a chance to see where and how these workers lived in their homes, so when a tailor whose shop I had been hanging around invited me home to lunch I quickly accepted; I was also busy sampling Sudanese home cooking when I could. But I had woken that day feeling somewhat queasy and decided to carry on with my research figuring it was the heat getting to me. At lunchtime I walked with the tailor to his house nearby, and he sat me down in the saloon to wait. When the large tray was brought out by one of his younger brothers, other men in the family gathered around to share the meal. I crouched down with everyone and picked up a piece of bread to dip into one of the many sauces in front of me. I eyed the bread and noticed a small insect baked into it, hardly unusual but it did set my stomach off. I excused myself, ran out to the courtyard, and immediately vomited all over the entrance to the family toilet.
It turned out that I had malaria, which often announces itself with severe headache and vomiting. The sympathetic family put me to bed, where I stayed for a day or two, getting to see more of the inside of a tailor’s house than I had planned.
In my spare time I had also begun my quest to find Sufis who would allow me to live with them and teach me how to become one. These encounters sometimes ended in disaster, usually the result of my still-developing Arabic. One Sufi group that invited me with an offer of a place to sleep became my standard of what to avoid. I sat on the bed that had been assigned to me in the corner of the housh, or courtyard, of the sheikh’s house and watched as the small group of maybe six followers of this sheikh prayed the final three of the five daily prayers at one time so that they could commence an evening of drinking aragi, the home-brewed gin of choice in the area. The Qur’an warns that one should not pray while drunk, so these guys felt that they were sticking to the letter of that revelation while fulfilling a basic Muslim obligation.
Whatever their disposition toward Islamic principles, I was in awe of the unexpected hospitality offered by all these Sudanese willing to take in the wandering American. My first solo bus trip out of Khartoum was an excellent illustration of this welcome. I had wanted to make a weekend visit to a small village in the Gezira called Um Magad, to start to get a better idea of the rural roots of my urban workers. The village was on the west bank of the Blue Nile as it rushed north out of Ethiopia’s highlands, joining the languid White Nile at Khartoum to make the main Nile. But because all of these mud-walled hamlets looked alike to me from the road, I mistakenly got off the bus one village south of my destination. I walked into the warren of walled compounds and asked the first man I saw if this was Um Magad. He didn’t really answer me but gestured that I should follow him to his house. He sat me down in his saloon and disappeared, returning quickly with a large aluminum tray featuring a breakfast of foul
