(dark blue) by the Sudanese, and he bore the traditional facial scars of his Rikabiya ethnic group, a people with origins in the far north of the country. Although the African and Arab heritage of Sudan has been a significant factor in Sudanese politics, one Republican friend told me that Taha had said, “We are black or Negro. We are not Arab but our Mother Tongue is Arabic. We inherited values from both Arab and Negro.” This kind of thinking was also trouble in Sudan, roiled by its complex Afro-Arab identity issues. The quarters opposing Ustadh Mahmoud, it occurred to me, were also the ones engaged in the suppression of Sudan’s African identity. Taha’s work as a religious reformer was preceded by his participation in the effort to secure Sudan’s political independence as a republic, a period of time in which he also became known to the British colonial authorities as a troublemaker.
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha did not have a rigorous religious education. In the 1930s Taha studied engineering at Gordon Memorial College, which until 1944 was Sudan’s only government secondary school, later to become the University of Khartoum. Young men studied at Gordon College in order to provide skilled manpower for the colonial administration. He was employed by Sudan Railways for two years, working for various lengths of time in Kassala and eastern Sudan, and Atbara. He also joined the Graduates Congress, the Gordon College alumni group that was the crucible for Sudan’s independence struggle.
The Graduates Congress was established in 1938, two years after Taha’s graduation, with an idea of the Indian Congress in mind, according to Ahmed Khair, one of its early leaders.2 The Graduates Congress stimulated the nationalist activism that fueled the move to independence from the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium that ruled Sudan. Political parties were spawned by the Graduates’ efforts, with many of them maintaining ties to either colonial patronage or the traditional Sufi sects. Taha’s vision at that time was of the establishment of a Republic of Sudan, a political entity not yet existing in an Arabic-speaking country. Other Sudan parties pushed for either integration under the Egyptian crown or hereditary religious rule under the Mahdi family. Taha and ten colleagues, all employees of the colonial government, founded the Republican Party in October 1945 to work toward an independent republic. Taha was elected chairman at its first meeting.3 While the group considered its small size and discussed forming a coalition with one of its rivals, the Ummah Party of the Mahdists, a vote was taken and the consensus was against such a move. Omer El Garrai had told me that Ustadh Mahmoud had explained to him that initially the majority had wanted to join the bigger party, but the discussion yielded a decision to the contrary. El Garrai said that Ustadh Mahmoud told him, “If we had decided otherwise, you wouldn’t be here with me today.” Ustadh Mahmoud’s point was that if the much larger Ummah Party had absorbed the Republicans their identity would have been lost.
The small group that had rallied around Ustadh Mahmoud’s principles decided against making other alliances because they felt that neither political Islamism nor secularism were solutions for Sudan’s problems. The Republican Party manifesto, Ghul: Hathihi Sibeeli (Say: this is my path!), a title with a distinctly Qur’anic ring, detailed a civil society rooted in Islam and the Qur’an.4 The large parties, the Ummah and the Democratic Unionists—both had religious roots and overtones in their rhetoric, but no specific Islamic agenda at that point in the independence struggle. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha wrote a letter describing his politics in 1963 to then Harvard doctoral researcher John Voll that was prescient with concerns that would overtake Sudan decades later.
My own party was “The Republican Party.” It built its ideology on Islam. We opposed the tendencies of some of the political parties towards an Islamic state because we were sure they did not know what they were talking about. An Islamic state built on ignorance of the pure facts of Islam can be more detrimental to progress than a secular state of average ability. Religious fanaticism is inalienable from religious ignorance. . . . The Republican Party was the most explicit party in outlining a program for the formation of an Islamic state—only we did not call it Islamic. We were aiming at universality, because universality is the order of the day. Only the universal contents were tapped.5
Ahmad Khair of the Graduates Congress wrote about the Republican Party in the midst of Sudan’s struggle for independence. “The men of the Republican Party proved their true will and the strength of their belief, and that is why they enjoy the respect of all. Their leader proved to have sincerity, power and resilience. It is perhaps these reasons, in addition to their different objectives, that caused them to stand alone and in isolation.”6
In 1946 Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and several members of his party were arrested by the colonial administration for unlawful political activities—they had been handing out anticolonial leaflets—and were sentenced to one year in prison, becoming Sudan’s first political prisoners of the independence movement. Republican Party members agitated for their colleagues’ release, and the group left prison after fifty days. Taha was back in prison after two months for leading a demonstration to protest the arrest of a woman, Alminein Hakim, in Rufa’a for the circumcision of her daughter, Fayza, an incident which became an emblem of Taha’s spiritual philosophy of human development and its implications for women; it was a story that was told to me many times by many different Republican brothers and sisters. And it was a story with implications for Taha’s intentions of putting his ideas into action.
In response to a markedly paternalistic public outcry in Britain, the colonial authority “added Section 284A to the Sudan Penal Code forbidding the practice of a severe type of female circumcision known as Pharaonic circumcision.”7 My own reading of the colonial documents was that the public attitude in Britain was driven more by the sensational aspect of the cultural practice than by any genuine concern for women’s and girls’ health. And all over colonized Africa, the “native question” was debated with conflicts over legal actions taken by colonial governments and the perception of the colonized as to whether the prohibited activities were in fact their legitimate rights. Yusif Lotfi, one of the younger brothers of Taha’s wife told me that he had understood from Ustadh Mahmoud that the British had imposed the law to bring to the world’s attention how “primitive” Sudan was, not yet fit for independence. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha organized his historic protest after Friday prayers in Rufa’a, his hometown, an incident reported by a District Officer of the British colonial government:
The Hassaheissa-Rufa’a disturbances, of which we have not yet received full reports, came as a complete surprise. They were indicative, however, of what is to be expected when a few fanatics find grounds for stirring up an irresponsible town population which is already undermined by anti-government vernacular press and propaganda. In this case it was very bad luck that Mohammed Mahmud Taher [sic], the fanatic leader of the Republican party [sic] and bitter opponent of the female circumcision reforms should be living in the very town where the first trial of an offence against the circumcision laws happened to take place. The case [i.e., against the woman] was quashed on no other grounds than lack of evidence.8
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, his political organization and subsequent spiritual movement and followers, opposed the ancient pre-Islamic practice of female circumcision and did not practice it in their families for the most part. Taha’s point in organizing the Rufa’a protest of the woman’s arrest for circumcising her daughter was that the British could not legislate Sudanese morality and that such laws were unsustainable in a country where women were not given access to religious training, education, or social status that would empower them to end the practice themselves. Taha made his point that the arrested woman who had performed the circumcision stood for all Sudanese women by referring to her in the Rufa’a demonstration as “our sister, our mother, our wife”; this was a spiritual test for Ustadh Mahmoud. Ironically, Mohamed Mahmoud (not related to Taha), writing in 2001, continues to miss Taha’s point and demonstrates how difficult it has been over fifty years for Taha to reach his countrymen and women with his message that their understanding of Islam must change. Mohamed Mahmoud wrote, “Taha’s act of defiance against British law in this incident contributed the single greatest damage to the welfare of Sudanese women”;9 that is, Mohamed Mahmoud perceived Mahmoud Mohamed Taha to be demonstrating in support
