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Sudan
Islamic Movements and Religious Orders
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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