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Sudan
Index
Islam made its deepest and longest lasting impact in Sudan
through the activity of the Islamic religious brotherhoods or
orders. These orders emerged in the Middle East in the twelfth
century in connection with the development of Sufism, a mystical
current reacting to the strongly legalistic orientation of
orthodox Islam. The orders first came to Sudan in the sixteenth
century and became significant in the eighteenth. Sufism seeks
for its adherents a closer personal relationship with God through
special spiritual disciplines. The exercises (dhikr)
include reciting prayers and passages of the Quran and repeating
the names, or attributes, of God while performing physical
movements according to the formula established by the founder of
the particular order. Singing and dancing may be introduced. The
outcome of an exercise, which lasts much longer than the usual
daily prayer, is often a state of ecstatic abandon.
A mystical or devotional way (sing., tariqa; pl.,
turuq) is the basis for the formation of particular
orders, each of which is also called a tariqa. The
specialists in religious law and learning initially looked
askance at Sufism and the Sufi orders, but the leaders of Sufi
orders in Sudan have won acceptance by acknowledging the
significance of the sharia and not claiming that Sufism replaces
it.
The principal turuq vary considerably in their
practice and internal organization. Some orders are tightly
organized in hierarchical fashion; others have allowed their
local branches considerable autonomy. There may be as many as a
dozen turuq in Sudan. Some are restricted to that country;
others are widespread in Africa or the Middle East. Several
turuq, for all practical purposes independent, are
offshoots of older orders and were established by men who altered
in major or minor ways the tariqa of the orders to which
they had formerly been attached.
The oldest and most widespread of the turuq is the
Qadiriyah founded by Abd al Qadir al Jilani in Baghdad in the
twelfth century and introduced into Sudan in the sixteenth. The
Qadiriyah's principal rival and the largest tariqa in the
western part of the country was the Tijaniyah, a sect begun by
Ahmad at Tijani in Morocco, which eventually penetrated Sudan in
about 1810 via the western
Sahel (see Glossary).
Many Tijani
became influential in Darfur, and other adherents settled in
northern Kurdufan. Later on, a class of Tijani merchants arose as
markets grew in towns and trade expanded, making them less
concerned with providing religious leadership. Of greater
importance to Sudan was the tariqa established by the
followers of Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris, known as Al Fasi, who died
in 1837. Although he lived in Arabia and never visited Sudan, his
students spread into the Nile Valley establishing indigenous
Sudanese orders, the Majdhubiyah, the Idrisiyah, the Ismailiyah,
and the Khatmiyyah.
Much different in organization from the other brotherhoods is
the Khatmiyyah (or Mirghaniyah after the name of the order's
founder). Established in the early nineteenth century by Muhammad
Uthman al Mirghani, it became the best organized and most
politically oriented and powerful of the turuq in eastern
Sudan
(see The Turkiyah, 1821-85
, ch. 1). Mirghani had been a
student of Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris and had joined several
important orders, calling his own order the seal of the paths
(Khatim at Turuq--hence Khatmiyyah). The salient features of the
Khatmiyyah are the extraordinary status of the Mirghani family,
whose members alone may head the order; loyalty to the order,
which guarantees paradise; and the centralized control of the
order's branches.
The Khatmiyyah had its center in the southern section of Ash
Sharqi State and its greatest following in eastern Sudan and in
portions of the riverine area. The Mirghani family were able to
turn the Khatmiyyah into a political power base, despite its
broad geographical distribution, because of the tight control
they exercised over their followers. Moreover, gifts from
followers over the years have given the family and the order the
wealth to organize politically. This power did not equal,
however, that of the Mirghanis' principal rival, the Ansar, or
followers of the Mahdi, whose present-day leader was Sadiq al
Mahdi, the great-grandson of Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd
Allah, al Mahdi, who drove the Egyptian administration from Sudan
in 1885.
Most other orders were either smaller or less well organized
than the Khatmiyyah. Moreover, unlike many other African Muslims,
Sudanese Muslims did not all seem to feel the need to identify
with one or another tariqa, even if the affiliation were
nominal. Many Sudanese Muslims preferred more political movements
that sought to change Islamic society and governance to conform
to their own visions of the true nature of Islam.
One of these movements, Mahdism, was founded in the late
nineteenth century. It has been likened to a religious order, but
it is not a tariqa in the traditional sense. Mahdism and
its adherents, the Ansar, sought the regeneration of Islam, and
in general were critical of the turuq. Muhammad Ahmad ibn
as Sayyid Abd Allah, a faqih, proclaimed himself to be Al
Mahdi al Muntazar ("the awaited guide in the right path," usually
seen as the Mahdi), the messenger of God and representative of
the Prophet Muhammad, not simply a charismatic and learned
teacher, an assertion that became an article of faith among the
Ansar. He was sent, he said, to prepare the way for the second
coming of the Prophet Isa (Jesus) and the impending end of the
world. In anticipation of Judgment Day, it was essential that the
people return to a simple and rigorous, even puritanical Islam
(see The Mahdiyah, 1884-98
, ch. 1). The idea of the coming of a
Mahdi has roots in Sunni Islamic traditions. The issue for
Sudanese and other Muslims was whether Muhammad Ahmad was in fact
the Mahdi.
In the century since the Mahdist uprising, the neo-Mahdist
movement and the Ansar, supporters of Mahdism from the west, have
persisted as a political force in Sudan. Many groups, from the
Baqqara cattle nomads to the largely sedentary tribes on the
White Nile, supported this movement. The Ansar were
hierarchically organized under the control of Muhammad Ahmad's
successors, who have all been members of the Mahdi family (known
as the ashraf). The ambitions and varying political
perspectives of different members of the family have led to
internal conflicts, and it appeared that Sadiq al Mahdi, putative
leader of the Ansar since the early 1970s, did not enjoy the
unanimous support of all Mahdists. Mahdist family political goals
and ambitions seemed to have taken precedence over the movement's
original religious mission. The modern-day Ansar were thus loyal
more to the political descendants of the Mahdi than to the
religious message of Mahdism.
A movement that spread widely in Sudan in the 1960s,
responding to the efforts to secularize Islamic society, was the
Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan al Muslimin), founded by Hasan al
Banna in Egypt in the 1920s. Originally it was conceived as a
religious revivalist movement that sought to return to the
fundamentals of Islam in a way that would be compatible with the
technological innovations introduced from the West. Disciplined,
highly motivated, and well financed, the Muslim Brotherhood,
known as the Brotherhood, became a powerful political force
during the 1970s and 1980s, although it represented only a small
minority of Sudanese. In the government that was formed in June
1989, following a bloodless coup d'état, the Brotherhood exerted
influence through its political expression, the National Islamic
Front (NIF) party, which included several cabinet members among
its adherents
(see
Political Groups
, ch.
4).
Data as of June 1991
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