ate in some degree of silence, or rather I ate and he watched me: it was a late hour for a farmer’s breakfast. Finally he escorted me to the place where I had entered his village and he pointed in the direction of Um Magad, where I headed, most likely for another breakfast.
When I reached Um Magad after a short walk I was subjected to a logical and silent interrogation from villagers—very conventional Sudanese Muslims all—that I never experienced with any Republican brother. The old men of this Blue Nile village wanted to know how “Muslim” I really was. A few of them made a gesture miming the cutting off the tip of the index finger with the other index finger—and then gesturing “so?” with both hands as they anticipated a positive response from me. The Prophet’s sunna, or personal practice, required that men be circumcised, and while this was standard practice for all Sudanese males, it was not an initiation question on the Republican list. The miming of the delicate question by the old village men rather than asking me directly was also an indicator of the sense that the questioners felt it was a somewhat rude question to begin with. The earnest desire of these older villagers to see me Muslim was confirmed by the frequency with which they would quietly stuff a Sudanese one-pound note into my shirt pocket or squeeze one into my hand discreetly. This was their way of congratulating me on my decision to embrace Islam; more baraka than I felt worthy of.
I remember that weekend in the Gezira as also getting me into more trouble as I tried to figure out customs related to the traditional garments that Sudanese men wore. The clothing that men wore under the jellabiya, the arage long shirt and baggy pants sirwaal, were also appropriate for sleeping and/or just hanging-out around the village. I visited this village, Um Magad, at the torrid height of the hot season, and the men invited me to join with them as they took a quick afternoon swim in the Blue Nile. As we reached the river bank, I noted with dread that everyone was swimming in their boxer-short-type underwear. I guess I thought of the long cotton billowy pants as underwear, so that was all that I was wearing! I gave my Arabic a good workout by trying to explain my dilemma to one of my hosts as we stood on the bank of the river, who of course calmly said “mafi mushkila,” no problem, and told me just to swim in the pants. So I floated along the Blue Nile with my pants inflated as water wings.
Although my Arabic vocabulary improved in interesting ways from that experience, I returned to my research focus and to getting to a point in the language where I could do interviews. An American friend who was teaching at the University of Khartoum where I was a research affiliate told me about a marvelous Sufi chanting, or dhikir, she had recently attended in Omdurman, the old city across the Nile from Khartoum, and how much I might enjoy that cultural exposure. She introduced me to Abdalla Ernest Johnson, an American who taught English language at the university and who had been a Republican Brother for several years. He took me to the dhikir that week before sunset on Thursday, when the Republicans gathered for one of their major meetings of the week at the home of their leader, Ustadh (teacher) Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.
Abdalla joined the semicircle of brothers and sisters who stood chanting the name of God in the declining sun outside of the house. The dhikir was intense, led by a brother with a big voice who had been appointed by Ustadh Mahmoud, and followed by the rest of the group of about fifty, strongly repeating over and over, some swaying in rhythm to the act of remembering the name of God, the meaning of dhikir. Others stood straight in intense concentration of the simple phrasing, as if repeating and absorbing the name of God might instantly transport them somewhere else. I stood off to the side barely resisting the rhythm, behind Ustadh Mahmoud who oversaw the group of chanting brothers and sisters standing next to the blue door to his house made of jalous, the mud construction material common in this region by the river Nile.
The chanting ended with a resounding Allah! and with Ustadh Mahmoud blessing the whole group with the phrase, Allah yafizkum (may God keep you) just before the call to the sunset prayer, al-mughrib. Like the chanting ritual, the Republican call to prayer had its own modernist and dramatic riff. In my few months in Khartoum of trying to get to a point where I could converse in Arabic, I had discovered that the azan, or call to prayer, was a most useful language teaching tool. Azan is called out from mosques all over the city five times a day, the same ancient, prescribed pledges over and over (except for the early morning azan, which includes the wonderful line, “prayer is better than sleep”). And the azan’s words are clearly enunciated in song. I found that by figuring out the meaning of the words to the azan, I could begin to take the sentences apart and string them into other contexts. So, for example, while weaving the first early morning azan phrase “prayer is better than sleep” into conversations would only produce amusement, there were infinite uses for my new knowledge of the comparative grammatical construction “better than” (kheirun min . . . ).
As my Arabic improved, I noticed a sharp increase in my own invocation of the name of God. There seemed to be an expression praising the Almighty for everything from completing a bath or haircut to starting a car, or commencing or finishing a meal. God was more ever-present in my life as it was voiced in Arabic than He had ever been in English.
Back at my first dhikir, the Republican Sisters filed inside Ustadh Mahmoud’s house for the sunset prayer while the brothers rolled out long straw mats on which to pray in the empty lot to the west of the building. Abdalla presented me to Ustadh Mahmoud, who said something about inviting me to lunch in a couple of days. He was not a tall man, but stood very straight for a man of seventy-something, dressed in the simple white cotton arage shirt and sirwal pants that were the comfortable everyday standard. I participated in the sunset prayer, went through a round of warm handshakes while collecting some new Arabic greetings, and then made my way back across the Nile to Khartoum where I stayed in a flat that Michigan State University had rented for medical researchers. I stayed there for free as the well-educated night watchman.
I was excited to return to Omdurman as soon as possible for my meeting with Ustadh Mahmoud, so Abdalla arranged for us to lunch with him two days later, on Saturday afternoon. We arrived at the blue door, and I was ushered into the ordinary and small house that was crowded with a multigenerational group of brothers and sisters performing a variety of tasks for the organization, or just wanting to be near their teacher. We met with Ustadh Mahmoud in his small bedroom/study, containing a single angareb, a bed of rope and wood, and several bookcases crowded with tomes in Arabic and scientific artifacts, like smooth stones and seashells. There were decorated verses of the Qur’an on the wall and a small table and two chairs. Ustadh sat on the bed and we took the chairs. He asked me to explain what I was looking for in Sudan, and I gave him a quick and simple half English/half Arabic review that primarily focused on my research and why I had selected Sudan for my study. I didn’t say to him, “I want to be a Sufi,” but that was what I was thinking as I told him of my spiritual interests in Sudan. Over our lunch of the thin flat sorghum crepe-like bread kisra and a vegetarian version of the wild okra stew um rigayga (“mother of the thin hair” for its stringy-okra consistency), his most memorable words to me that afternoon were, “We have no formal initiation ceremony in the Republican Brotherhood, and you are welcome to join us and see what we are about.” I found this significant in that my reading about some Sufi orders had taught me about the recruitment and elaborate induction processes that included pledging obedience and loyalty to the sheikh and other rituals. He was not effusive with me, but certainly cordial and interested. I thanked Ustadh Mahmoud for lunch—he was a teacher to his followers, not a Sufi sheikh—and returned to Khartoum to think about how involved I wanted to get with Ustadh and his followers.
When I first met Mahmoud Mohamed Taha in early 1982 he had been focusing on his work to spread his idea of an Islam for contemporary times for more than forty years. He transmitted a message of tolerance and equality that he felt was the only way for Islam to be practiced under the conditions created by a modern, changing, and dangerous world. Sudan in Africa was the locus of his life’s work. Omer El Garrai remembered Taha saying, “I am an African. I like the night, the scent of buhur (incense), the hot weather.” In his book Religion and Social Development Taha wrote, “Africa is the first home of Man. In it his life appeared at the beginning
