THE INSECURE RENDEZVOUS BETWEEN ISLAM AND TOTALITARIANISM: THE FAILURE OF THE ISLAMIST STATE IN THE SUDAN.

• Author: Gallab, Abdullahi A.

THE EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND the rise, disintegration and eventually fall of the current regime in the Sudan, which might be obvious to some observers for a variety of reasons, is among the most complicated. This puzzle is reflected in a number of situations and forms for the last eleven years. This article begins by exploring the engagement between totalitarianism and the state the Sudanese Islamists have established. They have been in power from June 1989, when the military coup instated them in power, till the late 1990s, when Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of and ideologue behind the movement and the regime, was expelled from power by President Umar Ahmed al-Bashir on 12 December 1999. From June 1989 to December 1999 real power in the Sudan rested with Dr. Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi [1] who became the political and religious reference for the regime, the Speaker of the National Assembly in 1996, and the Secretary General of the National Congress the ruling party in 1998. On 12 December 1999 al-Bashir declared a t hree-month state of emergency, dismissed al-Turabi, and disbanded the National Assembly. On 6 May 2000 al-Bashir expelled al-Turabi from the ruling National Conference party. Since 20 February 2001 al-Turabi has been arrested and kept in detention for "conspiring with the rebels [the SPLA] to topple the government," according to his former disciple and the current government spokesman Ghazi Salah el-Din. (AP 2001)

Under the uncontested leadership of al-Turabi, the Islamists in the Sudan have tried their very best to keep the totalitarian regime intact since they assumed power. The demise of Hassan al-Turabi does not mean the end of the totalitarian state in the Sudan, though it demarcates the first decade of the Islamists' project and provides one instance from which one can investigate and appraise the practice, disposition, and consequences of the regime. However, for reasons to do with the complications of welding Islam and totalitarianism and for other factors that will be addressed in details in this article, the regime started to retreat leaving behind clear signs of disintegration. In many ways, the dismissal of al-Turabi represents a significant retreat as it has swept aside the religious and political references to "the Leader", the Sheikh, and his loyalists. Gradually, as the influence of the totalitarian system began to decline, the need for the leadership of al-Turabi as the political and religious referen ce -- the Sheikh -- of the regime also dwindled in importance. During the period between 1989-1999 the theory of the regime's protagonists and approach to governance was addressed to a single paradigm: al-hal al-Islami, the Islamic solution, in which they systemically and methodically pursued different types of coercive measures and totalitarian designs. The ideology and strategies of this one-dimensional conception of state power has been most closely affiliated with al-Turabi and his brand of Islamism. This essay addresses al-Turabi's concept of the state and considers how it relates to totalitarianism.

It is important, however, to begin the discussion of these transformations in relation to al-Turabi's theory of state by the following general comments:

First: It is important to address the term 'state' with care, understanding its historical and existential underpinnings, and with a high degree of awareness to its different definitions. For this study the state means an institution more than a government. It is the overarching apparatus that includes the ideological, administrative, bureaucratic, legal, and security systems that act in certain degree of coherence to structure and administer relations within different levels of a particular territory. The way the state deploys and restrains its different patterns of authority, power, communicative capacities, and other means of domination determines its character. On the other hand, relations between the state's spheres of power and control and society's provinces of activity differentiate between governing systems. (Offe and Ronge 82, Held 91, Mann 88) The primary function of the state-directed regime, according to the Islamists model, is to operate in a manner that attempts to demolish or converge in thei r system other autonomous institutions that normally act independently within the spheres of the civil, religious and the political societies. This is an important representation as the totalitarian setting attempts to deploy the state power to eliminate and demolish all civil and political societies, spheres and institutions. Within this approach to power, the Islamists in the Sudan, their strategists and allies tried very hard to establish such a state.

Second: As socio-political life in the Sudan has never been and will never be static, the mode of major recent developments in the country seems to be more complicated than any previous time. Currently, there are many serious developments, speculations about where the regime is heading, presumptions, and theories in circulation, as well as many explanations at work. These developments have for the most part been the subject of considerable debate. Most of that debate is addressed to a basic question: has the Islamist totalitarian state in the Sudan been laid to rest? Is the country now at a threshold of a genuine change toward a democratic multiparty system? In a number of different forms and forums Sudanese and non-Sudanese scholars, intellectuals, journalists and politicians, who share an interest in and a concern for the politics of the country, have tried to provide interpretations, analysis and reflections on the present situation in the Sudan. However, it is not necessarily that they all agree on how t o address and explain these developments. At the same time, it is true and equally important that certain aspects of power relations, individual and class conflict, changing communication and the state realities have rarely been given serious consideration in most studies that address this issue. Up to this time, the most crucial element is that most observers, researchers, journalists and writers have been looking at the existing system in the Sudan as an ordinary Third World military regime. Thus the absence of much attention to the phenomenon "for itself," its power structures and its internal and external relations, its ideological, political and economic undercurrents, have made it extremely difficult to understand the complexity and the complications of the on-going developments in the Sudanese scene. To grasp the theoretical, ideological and substantive modes that produced the phenomenon, one needs to look at the patterns, understand the project on its players and detractor's terms, its internal and ex ternal factors rather than typifying the experience or blaming one single factor for such a complex process.

Third: Virtually in all political life of African, Middle Eastern, and other Third World countries, the military represents an enduring factor and an attendant party in the house of power. The capacity of the army to disrupt any democratic political process and instate controlling authoritarian or dictatorial regimes is derived from the sources of power the military institution provides thin the power relations in the field of local, regional and international politics. Many Sudanese political entities and individuals from the elite have learned that one of the short cuts to power comes by collaborating with the army. However, it is also true that those military politicians, who function within the same class power as their civilian associates, have learned to develop a military discourse that legitimizes their role in staging coups and governing the country. It is true that research and academic studies in this field, military sociology and other military studies in the Sudan are almost missing. Moreover, t he intellectual agenda in the country still addresses the issue of the military and power from a very angry and simplistic stand.

Fourth: Today it is clear that the crisis of the regime is terminal. The Islamist model in the Sudan has clearly run out of steam and now the entire experience is open to a certain type of concerns and analysis from different schools of historians, social scientists, and journalists. The significance of the Sudanese experience, however, must not be belittled. The Sudanese Islamist movement introduced the first major experimentation of political Islam in the Sunni world within the closing end of the second millennium. Legitimacy, genuineness, proficiency, and adherence to the true tenets of Islam have endlessly been disputed by Sudanese, as well as other Muslims, the fact that the NIF has survived for more than eleven years merits serious study. The Sudanese Islamists and their benefactors inside and outside the country had expected the emergence of a model that could reinstate a certain version of political Islam as an alternative ideology and example after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of East European socialism. Al-Turabi himself advocated that the Sudanese Islamist state model would act as a launching point for "pan-Islamic rapprochement... proceeding from below ". He expected that the model "would radiate throughout the Muslim World." Hence, al-Turabi explains that, "if the physical export of the model is subject to Islamic limitations in deference to international law, the reminiscence of the classical khalifat and the deeply entrenched Islamic traditions of free migration (hegira) and fraternal solidarity would make such a state a focus of pan-Islamic attention and affection" (al-Turabi 1992).

Now, as most Islamists in the Sudan and elsewhere have started to grapple with the painful realities of the total failure of their project, several questions come through seeking competent answers. Does the demise of the Islamists project in the Sudan mark the leading process of the collapse of Islamism as an...