Social Science Research Council

Manichaean Delirium: Decolonizing the Judiciary and Islamic Renewal in Sudan, 1898-1985 by Abdullahi Ibrahim.
Few have written in detail about the key institution of the Sudan Judiciary, its corps of professional judges, its management of the courts whose role has been the implementation of the laws of Sudan, whether colonial, post-independence, or Islamist.
The most [...]

It’s an unfortunate reality that books on Sudan by Sudanese authors—even those who have a wonderful English writing style, and who deal with their subject matter in a way that combines insight with accessibility—rarely get the attention they deserve. We should take a close look at Abdullahi Ibrahim’s recently-published history of the Sudanese judiciary: Manichaean [...]

Abdullahi Gallab’s book has taken me back in time. Writing nearly twenty years ago I thought that Sudan could not be governed by any ideologically driven regime, and this book clearly shows both one such attempt and its failure. The question then is why not?
In part the answer lies in the nature of ideological rule [...]

I recall reading in the 1960s for a wise man who said we keep staging failed revolutions because of the bad books we keep reading about rebellions. On the near-20th anniversary of what Abdullahi Gallab calls the “Islamist Republic” (1989- ) (in its various phases) in Sudan, whose impatient enemies predicted its downfall melting [...]

The term “Islamism” has two common uses in the study of contemporary Sudan, what I will call “the descriptive” and “the analytical.” Descriptively speaking, Islamism refers to the historical phenomenon of what is called in Arabic al-haraka al-islaamiyya (the Islamic Movement, that is, the plethora of groups which trace their genealogy back to Muslim [...]

Abdullahi Gallab recalled in his posting of June 18 that the term “post-Islamism” was coined by the sociologist Asef Bayat. Bayat used the term in his now famous 1996 article “The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society” to characterize a new historical phase into which he saw Iranian society transitioning following the death of Khomeini in [...]

I thank Alex de Waal, Carolyn Fluehr Lobban, Heather Sharkey and Neil McHugh for reading and for your appreciated responses to my book: The First Islamist Republic and for your insightful comments.
The book as its title, The Islamist Republic, indicates and as Heather has rightly characterized is about “Hasan al-Turabi’s decade in power” 1989—1999, which [...]

Posted by Neil McHugh.
Abdullahi Gallab’s book The First Islamist Republic is rich in conceptualization and historical perspective, and there are a few major themes that run through it. I will address one of them – violence.
Gallab refers to violence as verbal as well as physical. Various political groups have, since Sudan’s independence and especially since [...]

Posted by Heather Sharkey

In this careful and engagingly written analysis of Hasan al-Turabi’s decade in power, Abdullahi A. Gallab concludes that the experience of Sudan during the “first Islamist republic” (1989-99) serves as a warning against “ideological entrapments” of all kinds, and leads to the “realization that Islamism, like all other isms, can be and [...]

Islamism and Post-Islamism
Islamism has been defined as ‘political Islam’ or a ‘politicized Islam.’ It emerged as the major Western diagnostic reference for ‘extremism’ in Muslim nations after terms such as Islamic “revival,” “resurgence,” or “militance” were generally abandoned. Oliver Roy (1992) argued that Islamism– defined as the populist and often revolutionary ideology with the [...]