Sudan

Sudanese Islam is organised through Sufi brotherhoods to a degree unusual anywhere, and the leading families of those brotherhoods are simultaneously political dynasties. The Khatmiyya, led by the Mirghani family, and the Ansar, descended from the followers of the Mahdi, have supplied the two poles of Sudanese politics for more than a century, with parties attached to each. A Sudanese election has often been, in part, a count of tariqa allegiance.

The Mahdiyya is the central event. Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi in 1881, built a movement that took Khartoum in 1885 and killed Gordon, and established a state that lasted until Omdurman in 1898. His tomb in Omdurman remains a focal point, and the Ansar are still a mass organisation.

Before all of that, the middle Nile was Christian for some eight centuries. The Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia adopted Christianity in the sixth century and maintained an ecclesiastical culture in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian, with cathedral churches whose wall paintings survive: the frescoes recovered from Faras before the Aswan flooding are now divided between Warsaw and Khartoum, and Old Dongola remains one of the most important Christian archaeological sites in Africa. Islamisation came gradually through migration and trade rather than through conquest.

Traditional practice continues in the Nuba mountains and among other peoples of the peripheries, often alongside Islam or Christianity rather than instead of them, and it was those peripheries that bore the worst of the wars.

In September 1983 President Nimeiry imposed sharia as the law of the whole of Sudan, including the largely non Muslim south, by presidential decree. The September Laws introduced hudud penalties, and amputations and floggings were carried out publicly. The decision reopened the civil war that had been settled in 1972 and is generally regarded as the single act that made the eventual separation of South Sudan inevitable.

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese engineer, independence activist and religious thinker who led a movement known as the Republican Brothers. His argument, set out in The Second Message of Islam, distinguished the earlier Meccan revelation, which he read as the universal and permanent message, from the later Medinan revelation, which he read as legislation for a particular society at a particular time. On that reading the specific legal provisions applied in the name of sharia were historically bounded rather than eternal, and a modern Islamic society should be governed by the Meccan ethic instead. He opposed the September Laws directly and publicly.

He was tried, convicted of apostasy and hanged in Khartoum in January 1985, aged seventy six. Nimeiry fell three months later. Taha's execution remains the reference case in Sudanese arguments about religious freedom, and his work continues to be read.

The apostasy offence, carried into the 1991 criminal code, was repealed by the transitional government in 2020 as part of a wider package that also ended public flogging for certain offences and allowed non Muslims to consume alcohol. The coup of 2021 and the war that followed have left the standing of those reforms unsettled.