The First Islamic Republic

On 30 June 1989, General Omar al-Bashir of the Sudan overthrew the democratically elected government of Ṣādiq al-Mahdī (b. 1935) and declared an Islamic republic, the first in the contemporary Sunni Muslim world, which lasted until 12 December 1999 when al-Turābī, its principal ideologue, was dismissed. The First Islamic Republic is an account of the socio-political narratives of that decade of Sudanese Islamism in its local, regional, and global contexts. Chapter 1 (pp. 15–33) illustrates the formation of power blocs in modern Sudan in the context of its socio-historical realities. The two opposing movements in the political process of the Islamist Republic are clearly illustrated—one advocating complete Islamization of the polity, the other advocating northernization through pragmatic integration and liberalization (cf. Abdel Salam Sidahmed and Alsir Sidahmed, Sudan [London: Routledge–Curzon, 2005]). Chapter 2 (pp. 35–54) highlights the history of Islamic revivalist organizations from the 1940s and explains the role of Ḥasan al-Turābī, the éminence grise of Sudanese Islamism (John O. Hunwick, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa and the Wider World of Islam: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’ in David Westerluns and Eva Evers Rosander (eds.), African Islam and Islam in Africa: Encounters between Sufis and Islamists [1997], 43) as the most prominent political and ideological leader of the movement from 1964–99 (p. 39). Chapter 3 (pp. 55–75) analyses how the 1964 civil unrest created spheres of authority for young Sudanese in the military and polity, and shows how new political ideologues, some of whose biographical notices are given, emerged from the 1960s. Chapter 4 (pp. 77–96) discusses how the deployment of economic models such as Islamic banking helped to endear the Islamist agenda to the populace and how most of the policy decisions made in the name of the governing instrument, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), were actually those of al-Turābī and his political aficionados and acolytes. Chapters 5 (pp. 97–114) and 6 (pp. 115–28) examine al-Turābīʾs ideology on the basis of his background, writings, and speeches and his concept of al-daʿwa al-shāmila (comprehensive ecumenism) as a socio-economic, political and religious project in relation to local and global jihād. Chapter 7 (pp. 115–48) examines the difficulties faced by al-Bashir after the removal of al-Turābī in whose shadow he had lived hitherto without any real authority. The concluding chapter (pp. 149–64) examines the transition from the end of the first Islamist republic in 1999 to the beginning of the second in which al-Bashir had a three-tier political elite behind him and called the shots

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