Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (2009) by Mahmoud Mamdani. Verso, London, New York "The debate over what to call the violence in Darfur turned on two issues: identity and numbers. Genocide is the slaughter of another people. To slaughter one's own kind may be a "crime against humanity", but it is not genocide. To be guilty of genocide, the accused must be guilty of killing a different people or expressing the intent to do so," extrapolates Mahmoud Mamdani, author of this seminal work on Darfur, in particular, and Sudanese politics in general. The eclipse of Arabism in Sudan, with the upsurge in southern Sudanese political self- assertion and the escalating violence and attendant humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur, seems inevitable, and is unlikely to be reversed. The most plausible outcome is that Sudan will split into rival states with competing ideological dispensations. Many in Khartoum and other Arab capitals tremble at the implications. Mamdani, whose previous books include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Citizen and Subject, and When Victims Become Killers, reveals a great deal about his real vision for Sudan and African- Arab relations in contemporary Africa using with exceptional proficiency and perspicacity his historical insights. He is, after all, a Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, and a member of the Department of Anthropology and Political Science and the School of Public and International Affairs at Columbia University. He divides his time between New York and his native Uganda. Militant Islamist dogma threatens to saddle Uganda, Sudan's southern neighbour, with terrorism. Darfur is not that far off from Uganda, however it is cursed by the incessant incubus of genocide. For Mamdani to understand what it means to live in war-torn Darfur, in Islamist Sudan, we must first look back to pre-colonial, predominantly non-Arab, indigenous African Muslim states such as Funj and Darfur. "The community of Muslims in both central and western Sudan, from Funj to Kordofan to Darfur, came to be organised in Sufi tariqas (brotherhoods). The origins of Sufi orders lies in initiatives taken by migrant religious men who were able to use land rights (hawakir) granted them by the sultans to support a specialised following and to nurture educational institutions through which they reproduced as well as refined the knowledge that became the basis for a special class of Islamic teachers called fuqara. Most of these institutions later developed into Sufi orders." Mamdani contends that to play around with Islam in a political context would be to throw a match on a ready-made bonfire. The latest attempt to suggest the partition of Sudan derives from the failure of the international community at large to take note of the historical aspect of the religious framework of the Sudanese in a historical context. It also smacks of the callous, cruel and calculating cynicism of the Sudanese ruling clique to come to terms with the true nature of Islam in Sudan and its historical development in the country over many centuries. Even though Sudan has suffered ruinous civil wars and coups, the long-suffering Sudanese people have fell victim to the entire gambit of conflicting religious ideologies and the disparate strands of contemporary political Islam. "Three Sufi orders in particular became popular over western and central Sudan, from Darfur to kordofan and the funj. These were the Qadiriyya, the Khatimiyya, and the Tijaniyya. Each was introduced from outside, but none was an imposition." This is a critical notion that needs further elaboration. "These migrant religious scholars were also reformers. They combined Islamic learning with Sufi mysticism. Their emphasis was more on miracles (Arabic: karama), magic, and hereditary spiritual charisma (Arabic: baraka) than on the law and its institutions. A Sufi was said to possess baraka, blessing or goodness believed to emanate from a holy man, and he was believed to act as an intermediary between man and God." Today, the Sufi, an integral part of Sudanese Islam, is treated as the enemy of Islamist militancy, of pristine unadulterated Islam. This was not so in the historical context of the country. "The Sufi holy men did not come into a social and spiritual vacuum. The fuqara were very much like the spirit mediums or diviners who continue to operate in such parts of the Nilotic Sudan, as the southern Gezeira near the Ethiopian frontier or the Nuba hills of Kordofan. They resembled the spirit mediums both in the functions they fulfilled and in the styles of ritual and the symbols they employed." Mamdani takes us way back in time when chirography is curiously a euphemism for ethnic and cultural identity. "The difference in the routes by which Islam came to the Funj Sultanate and to Darfur is clear from the form of Arabic adopted by each: While those in the Funj Sultanate adopted the standard Arabic calligraphy, those in Darfur followed the Andalusian or Saharan handwriting which was current all over the Maghreb. Similarly, the dominant Sufi orders in Darfur -- notably the Tijaniyya -- came from West Africa, though they were of North African origin." Mamdani highlights the Pan-African aspects of Sudanese Islam and directly relates the contemporary conflict in Darfur to an underestimation of the Pan-African character of Sudanese Islam. He also sees the hidden agenda of foreign forces intent on distorting the true picture, the realities on the ground and the downplaying of the remarkable resilience of the people of Darfur. "That Muslims have a special responsibility to fight oppression in their midst is a massage often conveyed by New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof chides Muslims and Arab peoples, and the Arab press in particular, for lacking the moral fiber to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because the violence is inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims," Mamdani observes. First, he clarifies certain prevalent misconceptions. "If 'Arab' became identified with power in riverine Sudan, the opposite was the case in Darfur. Whereas Arabs of the Nile Valley are sedentary groups, those of Darfur are nomadic: In southern Darfur, they are camel nomads (the Baggara), and in northern Darfur, they are camel nomads (the Abbala). The political life of nomads is defined by an ambivalent relationship to political power. While they have no desire to pay the tribute that sultans ask of them, nomads are nonetheless dependent on the merchants and settled peoples for some essential goods." And, Mamdani delves deep into the damaging content of ascribing Sudanese Islamist militancy to "Arab" roots. The entire exercise is sordid propaganda and a sinister myth of make-believe. "Genealogies were typically compiled by heads of tribes or groups, from the time of the early Funj period in the sixteenth century, and were then adopted by their members or by new entrants to the group. They were later elaborated into generational pyramids and set in formal verse for memorization." Some of the leading families of Sudan's ruling cliques are implicated. "Take, for example, the line of descent claimed by the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmed. Though born of a humble family of boat-builders, the Mahdi claimed to be Ashraf, a direct descendant of the Prophet, a claim he elaborated through a generational ladder: Mohamed Ahmed, son of Abdallah, son of Fahl, Abdel-Wali, Abdallah, Muhamma, Haj Sharif, Ali, Ahmed, Ali, Hasb Al-Nabi, Sabr, Nasr, son of Abdel-Karim, Hussein, Awn-Allah, Nejm Al-Din, Osman, Musa, Abu Al-Abbasm Yunis, Osman, Yaqub, Abdel-Gadir, Hassan Al-Askari, Ulwan, Abdel-Baqi, Sakhra, Yaqub, son of Hassan Al-Sibt, son of Al-Imam Ali, himself the son of the Prophet's paternal uncle." Moreover, Mamdani is skeptical of the empirical claims of genealogists. "Three major trade routes linked Darfur with the outside world. The first was the famous "Forty Day Route", the Darb Al-Arbain, which had long been a difficult desert path to Asyut in Upper Egypt. The sultans built a caravan route along it at the same time they created a authorized settlement for foreign merchants from the north in the permanent capital at Al-Fasher." The account, and historical treatise, is fascinating in itself. "The second great trade route that went through Darfur was the west-to-east pilgrimage route. It connected the western Bilad Al-Sudan to Mecca and Medina and had probably been in use since around the eleventh century, which is when Arab sources first begin to speak of royal pilgrimages and annual pilgrimage caravans from West Africa." The prickly question of slavery crops up. "Slavery was the pivot around which state power centralised. Whether as military commanders or as administrators, slaves provided sultans with a counterweight to check the aspirations of a kin- based or territorial nobility." However, Mamdani is careful to distinguish the characteristic aspects of the institution of slavery in the Sudanese sense. It is markedly different from slavery in the Americas. "Slaves proved a great asset for sultans who wanted to tame pastoralist subjects at the periphery or ambitious chiefs at the centre. The challenge of rule led the sultans to create new institutions of control." The traditional rulers of Darfur, the Sultans, thrived on manipulating slaves to serve the interests of state. "The more sultans tried to centralise rule, the more they preferred o appoint commissioners over local areas rather than acknowledge local clan leaders and thereby rule through them." Egypt emerges as a key influence in the development of Darfur's economic potential and in the formation of Darfuri national identity as distinct from riverine Sudan. "The great period of the Darfur-Egyptian trade, 1750 to 1850, coincided with the emergence of a centralising sultanate in Darfur, and slavery was key to its expansion and centralisation.Slaves could be found in a hierarchy of positions, parallel to those in the society at large." Slavery lies at the heart of the current crisis in Darfur. Darfur is hostage to its own horrific history. "First slaves were a part of the bureaucratic and military elite and acted as concubines to noblemen. As recruits for the royal army, they comprised small bands of heavily armed cavalries used to collect taxes, put down inter-tribal disputes, and awe peasants." The sordid saga continues unabated. "A second category of royal slaves were war captives who were settled around the capital as its defenders; they served the sultan both as producers of wealth and as defenders of his power against ambitious territorial nobles." The Sudanese ruling clique divides Darfur at its own peril. "In sum, then, pre-capitalist slavery in the Sultanates of Funj and Darfur was not the benign institution its apologists sometimes portrayed it as, with slaves integrated into families as kin." "The split in the Islamist elite occurred at two levels: national and provincial. Wheras the national crisis split the ruling party, the provincial crisis ignited rebellion in Darfur." The past instantly metamorphoses into the present, and perhaps into the future. "The second split divided the National Islamic Front into two ethnically polarized groups: the Quraish as the symbol for Arab tribes and The Black Book as the symbol for non-Arab -- increasingly called African tribes. The leadership split between Al-Bashir and Al-Turabi ultimately took an organized form in 1999, with Al-Bashir heading the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and Hassan Al-Turabi heading the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP)." Al-Bashir's demand that Turabi halt his backing of Darfuri armed opposition groups in the name of Islamisation as opposed to Arabisation fell on deaf ears. The advice may sound plausible in ruling Arab circles, but following it would be another matter. The claim by Al-Bashir and his ilk that Arabism and Islamism are synonymous is a preposterous notion as far as Darfuri insurgents are concerned. "For many, Turabi symbolized the interests of Darfur in contrast to the NCP and riverine Arabs," Mamdani puts it bluntly. "The Turabi faction's claim to stand for the people of Darfur was based on the presence of a prominent Darfuri in its ranks: Dr Khalil Ibrahim, who had been the minister of health before the Al-Bashir-Turabi split -- even more significant, a leader of the brutal counter-insurgency in the south -- and would subsequently become the leader of one of the two main rebel movements, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)." The ruling Sudanese clique's interests make partial disengagement with the armed opposition groups in Darfur unwise at this historical juncture. The NCP of Al-Bashir is courting several of the Darfuri political parties and militias. The tragic irony is that the Islamist NCP-led government in Khartoum is waging its own war against the equally Islamic fundamentalists of Darfur on racial, rather than religious grounds. "The Black Book was full of information illustrating the extremely narrow base from which Sudan's governing class had all along been drawn, beginning with the first independence government in 1954." Rarely do statistics come closer to touching the soul of a nation. Mamdani exposes the Arab political stranglehold on Sudan. His revelations extracted from The Black Book are tantamount to an eye-opener. It is not just about socio-political data. The ruling "Arab" clique of Sudan has put its own accent on policies to deal with the resurgent "Africanisation" of the sprawling and culturally and ethnically heterogeneous country. "Table after table showed that with only 5.4 per cent of the nation's population, the northern region was home to the bulk of Sudan's political elite: 79.5 per cent of those holding central government positions in 1986, 59.4 per cent of ministers and 66.7 per cent of representatives in the Revolutionary Command Council in 1989, 83.3 per cent of those in the presidential palace, 60.1 per cent of holders of federal cabinet posts, 56.2 per cent governors, 51.1 per cent of commissioners, and 47.5 per cent of all state ministers in 2000 -- not to mention 67 per cent of all Sudanese attorneys general and 76 per cent of all representatives in the National Council for Distribution of Resources." These are damning statistics that prove beyond doubt that power rests in the hands of the Arabised elite of Sudan. Moreover, minority rule exposes its cruel flaws. Arab monopoly of power in Sudan is no less brutish than the horrors of European settler colonialism in apartheid South Africa two decades ago, or the barbarous repression of Palestinians by Israelis today. Except that in Sudan there is a greater conceptual need to define who precisely is an "Arab" and who is "Arabised". The term "Arab" as applied to Sudan is more related to political orientation than it is to ethnic or tribal affiliation. Most of the so-called "Arabs" of Sudan are not exactly ethnic Arabs. They might have an "Arab" ancestor, but they are overwhelmingly "black" in racial terms and culturally they are "Arabised". Moreover, not all the Arabised tribal grouping of Sudan are members of the exclusive club of rulers and power holders. Three Arabised tribal monopolise power in Sudan -- all three have Nubian, or African roots. "The narrow clique that has ruled Sudan since its independence comes mainly from three ethnic groups; the Shaigiya (Ex-President Sir Al-Khatim Al-Khalifa, current Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha), the Jallayeen (President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir), and the Danagla (Ex-President Jaafar Numeiry, Ex-Prime Minister Sadig Al-Mahdi), and Ex-Vice President Al-Zubair Mohamed Salih Al-Zubair)." The three Arabised tribal groups have desperately tried to work out an explication to resolve the imperfect outcomes of Sudanese democracy, or the lack of it, even though the solutions they conjure up have evaded some of the best minds of their own intelligentsia for more than five decades since Sudan attained independence in 1956. "This group gained an awareness of sharing a common interest as early as 1976 when a Kordofani army officer -- someone not from their ranks -- nearly succeeded in organizing a coup against the Numeiri regime, the clique responded by forming an organization called KASH (Kayan Al-Shamal, or the Northern Entity), otherwise known as Al-Thalouth (The Tripartite Coalition), which has ruled Sudan since independence." For different reasons all power games developed to meet the inherent unfairness have proved flawed. Islamists have distanced themselves from old-fashioned Arabism. Islamists ideologues such as Turabi has openly reprimanded those who confuse Arabism with Islam. Sudan's influential Islamists today insist that the policy of Arabisation will have to be reversed. The non- Arab peoples of Sudan are not about to vanish. Justifying the Tripartite Coalition to appease domestic critics is difficult and unjustifiable. But with the probable Balkanisation of Sudan, the secession of southern Sudan is on the cards, and the violence in Darfur has not subsided and other regional conflicts threaten to escalate, the Tripartite Coalition will have to find a way out of the Sudanese political morass. The danger for the powers that be in Khartoum, according to Mamdani's conclusions, is that non- Arab jihadists seize power in Khartoum. JEM jihadists came close to overrunning OmDurman, the traditional twin capital on the western bank of the Nile facing Khartoum proper, two years ago. Preventing that outcome is the paramount concern of the ruling clique in Sudan. "In March 2004, the government arrested ten middle-ranking officers, all from Darfur and neighbouring Kordofan, on suspicion of plotting a coup. Days later, it detained Turabi, along with six top PNC political figures, accusing them of inciting regionalism and tribalism in Darfur. It was testimony of how deeply the split in the ruling Islamist group was beginning to affect Darfur." "The conflict in Darfur began in the mid-1980s as a civil war. It was known as the Arab-Fur war. For the first time, all Arab tribes came together under a single banner known as 'The Arab Gathering', that being the signature to a letter sent to Prime Minister Sadig Al-Mahdi demanding affirmative action for the Arab tribes of Darfur." Arabism and Pan-Africanism, Islam and secularism curiously amalgamate in the conflict in Darfur. "There were two kinds of responses to Arabism as a state-imposed national project. The first was Islamist and the second Africanist." "When the Sudanese political class coalesced around an 'Arabization' project on the morrow of independence, it built n deep-seated assumptions that had driven intellectual pursuits throughout the colonial period. The key assumption was that civilization in Sudan had been mainly an exogenous affair, narrowly a product of 'Arab' immigration and intermarriage and broadly an outcome of 'Arabization' of the indigenous population of Sudan." Mamdani's conclusions might not appeal to all and sundry. "Africanism in Sudan had deep intellectual and political roots in all parts of the country. A recent history of artistic and political expression in Sudan traces the Africanist assertion to debates inside the first literary society formed by young graduates in northern Sudan." Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
