Munichaean Delirium: Decolonizing the Judiciary and Islamic Renewal in the Sudan, 1898-1985.

• Author: Jones-Pauly, Christina
• Position: Book review

Munichaean Delirium: Decolonizing the Judiciary and Islamic Renewal in the Sudan, 1898-1985. By ABDULLAHI ALI IBRAHIM. Islam in Africa, 7. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. Pp. xx + 428. $184.

Legal dualism lies at the heart of African legal systems. In this book the setting is North Sudan. Like other former colonialized countries, the country is tasked with treating the traumatic legacy of colonialization and decolonialization. The author is a social anthropologist/historian/former activist journalist with deep personal political ties to Sudan and personal experience with the Shari'a legal system. Unusual for an academic but most welcome from the perspective of critical acclaim, he consciously weaves his own political, philosophical, and religious transformations into the analysis of what the Islamic legal revolution was all about in the North and its responsibility for the civil war with the non-Muslim South, which is comprised of a plurality of traditional African religions.

This is a work unlike many other legalistic works on legal dualism. It does not make reform recommendations, rather it offers deeper understanding of the psychic, personal, and political forces that intertwine in a tale of instability and rivalry in the dualistic judiciary. It places the characters of the drama in a setting rarely used. It takes the Manichean Delirium theory as the stage for two discrete bureaucracies--the Ministry of Justice and the Judiciary, both installed by the colonializers. Further, it uses language imaginatively and poetically, drawing the foreign reader into a world much maligned by the descendants of the colonializers, that is, the expatriate legal reformists who come into a post-independence, post-conflict state armed with a mandate to reform but without deep understanding. Another attraction of the book lies in its addressing the ex-colonialized--the Sudanese who become alienated from their own culture and search for authenticity.

The book is unusual in legal studies, for it applies the psychological and anthro-political concept of the Manichean Delirium to the concept of legal dualism or pluralism, which I would define as a system of competing, even contradictory, legal principles and cultures. It is an appropriate match. The Sudanese penal code imposed by outsiders was "exotic" and in disharmony with the values of the invaded society, allowing e.g. brothels, adultery, public gambling (p. 189). The author lays out in detail why he matches the Manichean theory with the contours of the legal system. The term "Manichean" stands for a bipolar world between the poles of darkness and light, bad and good. For the followers of Mani, the purpose of life was to identify the bad and move towards the light of the good. The term has come to mean in psychology a disconnect between interior subjectivity and exterior structures. When applied to the colonial scheme bent on "modernizing" the Sudanese legal system in the image of the British system, the term means that a system was created whose values were external to the existing culture.

The system reflected largely the subjective legal values of the invading colonials and was super-imposed on the subjective legal values of the invaded peoples. The colonial structure established civil courts applying the invaders' laws, but running parallel to the indigenous courts and qadi courts applying the Shari'a or customary (volk) Shari'a. A pernicious split developed. The yardsticks for evaluating whether any one of the applicable legal systems was fair or just became schizoid. The colonial yardstick pronounced the indigenous subjective legal values inferior, or bad, and the invaders' subjective legal values were asserted to be superior. The result was a moral bipolarity that became institutionalized with the creation of a dualistic court system, in which the "modern" "superior" courts were given more supervisory power over the "inferior" indigenous tribunals and not vice versa. The impact on the politics of law and the legal system was disastrous. Politics here is used in the sense of discriminatory policies relating to the salaries, pensions, and prestige or status of staff and judges attached to the "superior" "modern" system and the "inferior" indigenous system. The consequence is a legal system where all the actors invest their energies mainly in sustaining or expanding their political power and...