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Overview
For some, the idea of an Islamic state serves to fulfill aspirations for cultural sovereignty and new forms of ethical political practice. For others, it violates the proper domains of both religion and politics. Yet, while there has been much discussion of the idea and ideals of the Islamic state, its possibilities and impossibilities, surprisingly little has been written about how this political formation is lived. For Love of the Prophet looks at the Republic of Sudan's twenty-five-year experiment with Islamic statehood. Focusing not on state institutions, but rather on the daily life that goes on in their shadows, Noah Salomon’s careful ethnography examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst.
Salomon investigates Sudan at a crucial moment in its history—balanced between unity and partition, secular and religious politics, peace and war—when those who desired an Islamic state were rethinking the political form under which they had lived for nearly a generation. Countering the dominant discourse, Salomon depicts contemporary Islamic politics not as a response to secularism and Westernization but as a node in a much longer conversation within Islamic thought, augmented and reappropriated as state projects of Islamic reform became objects of debate and controversy.
Among the first books to delve into the making of the modern Islamic state, For Love of the Prophet reveals both novel political ideals and new articulations of Islam as it is rethought through the lens of the nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400884292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
For Love of the Prophet
An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State
By Noah Salomon
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8429-2
CHAPTER 1
Of Shaykhs and Kings
The Making of Sudanese Islam
The very life of the people of Sudan has rested on the efforts of the righteous and the good among the Islamic scholars, jurists, and Sufis who have served as a focus (qibla) for the people and been to them a refuge. Such righteous figures give knowledge and guidance to the people of Sudan and they provide them with abundant sanctuary in times of misfortune, war, and disturbance, presenting whatever nourishment they can in periods of drought and famine. Because of this, [these shaykhs] are exalted in the memory of the people and extolled in their emotions. But how many people remember any of the kings who have appeared across the length and breadth of Sudan?
— Awn al-Sharif Qasim (Qasim 2006: 8)
Histories of religion are plentiful in contemporary Sudan, both popular and academic. In a country that has wavered between Islamism, communism, pan-Africanism, Arab nationalism, and World Bank-driven liberal capitalism, the question of the origins and the subsequent development of religions has had very real consequences within the continuing struggle over national vision (Deng 1995; Lesch 1998). The debates occasioned by this struggle are, however, in no sense new to Sudan, as since its first recorded history, religion has had a tense, if often productive, relationship with various political orders, giving the stories told about its origins — native or foreign, civilizer or conqueror — considerable stakes. Presently, in a period when the Islamic state project of the ruling regime is particularly unsettled, these histories seem again open for debate, as if the history of Islam in Sudan might help Sudanese to re-envision its future as a mode of national belonging. Notably, in such debates, the "state" in the Islamic state equation is taken for granted, or even understood to have an Islamic genealogy that predates what otherwise might be seen as an obvious colonial heritage. In such debates, it is only the manner in which the resources of the Islamic tradition — be they scriptural, ritual, or historic/paradigmatic — might fuel the progression of the existing state that is up for discussion. The state itself remains unanalyzed as an undeniable fact of political existence.
The debate over the "Islam" in the Islamic state is, in great measure, the subject of this book. In this chapter, however, I will take a brief look at the other half of this convenient phrase, the history of the state in Sudan, and in particular its myriad interactions with the diverse and plural religious landscapes into which it has intervened, and out of which it sought to manufacture a productive partner for its governing efforts. A history of the state, I will argue, occasions a new kind of history of religion, as the "Islam" that emerges as both the means and the object of the Islamist interventionist projects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has a clear genealogy in Sudan's political history, in particular in the colonial period when the first attempt at creating a modern nation-state was made. This version of Sudanese history is rarely recognized because twenty-first-century concepts of religion and state are often anachronistically projected onto the deep past where projects in Islamic state-building seek their legitimacy (as the postscript to this chapter discusses). Yet, the agenda of "religion-making" forwarded by the Inqadh regime has important precedents, ones that are both direct precursors to its project and heuristically useful parallels for our own understanding of the peculiar governmentality of the modern state when it comes to organizing religion, in Sudan and beyond. While histories of religion in Sudan often obfuscate or ignore political histories — those forgotten kings referenced in the quote with which I began this chapter — if we are to understand how religion developed and became such an important point of contention in contemporary Sudan, recognizing its emergence as a category of political intervention is crucial. While the present regime claims to offer a break with Sudan's recent past by constructing a "modern" Islam that will erase the scars of colonialism, in significant ways its project in managing religion is the continuation of an effort that began nearly one hundred years ago under a very different banner: as an attack on an Islamic political order rather than an effort to establish one.
Recognizing this fact raises the question of whether the distinction between Islamic and secular states is as sharp as is commonly alleged in the literature on politics in the Muslim world. By questioning such a distinction, I do not mean to call the Islamic state unremarkable, or disingenuous, using a mask of religion for political ends. The chapters that follow should allay such a suspicion, as the creative synthesis of state logics and Islamic moral authority is revealed. Rather, I seek to trouble this distinction because the materiality of the state is often forgotten in the over-determined arena of modern politics in which Islamists and secularists are understood to be upholding two polar-opposite political positionalities (Agrama 2011; Marzouki 2012; Zeghal 2013a).
This chapter will examine the early efforts of British colonialism as it sought to undo the Mahdist Islamic political order that had taken over Sudan in the early 1880s and to replace it with the institutions of a modern secular state. By both institutionalizing its religion and "civilizing" (Boddy 2007) its population, the British hoped to pull Sudan into an emerging global order, one to which the Inqadh regime responded nearly a hundred years later, not by rejecting its categories, but rather by seeking to instill in them the ethical values of Islam. Highlighting Sudan's colonial past at the outset of this book deprovincializes the history of Sudan's Islamist present, locating it as part of a much longer struggle to define the relationship of religion to the modern state. This is a struggle that cannot be reduced to a secularism versus Islamism dichotomy, precisely because it spans them both.
Colonialism as Religious Reform
In many ways, the colonial project in Sudan that began with the British victory in Khartoum in 1898 could be read as an archetypal attempt at establishing secular governance. Indeed, it is often referenced by proponents of the Islamic state in the present as such a powerful episode of secular state-building that its legacy still poses a challenge to the success of contemporary Islamist projects in freeing religion from its limited domains. The British conquest came under the mandate of transforming the Sudanese state from an Islamic theocracy into a secular republic. The British had entered Sudan to rid it of the Mahdist regime, a seventeen-year period (1881–98) of rule by a messianic figure (and later his successor) who overthrew the Turkish-Egyptian overlords, shepherding Sudan into what then seemed to be a rapidly concluding eschatological drama (Holt 1958). This figure, who called himself "the Mahdi" (the rightly guided one), was the bearded Muslim fanatic of the Western fantasies of his day, and the British not only feared for the fate of Sudan under his rule, but worried that his unique mix of religion and politics could spread to other countries in the region in which they had interests, in particular to Egypt.
Yet, the sudden takeover of the country by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1898, though it successfully eliminated the Mahdist forces, did not herald the retreat of religion from politics. On the contrary, the British, fearing a repeat of the Mahdiyya, were greatly preoccupied with molding and reforming religion in their new territory, a process they saw as central to their governing strategy. Suppressing both neo-Mahdist and Sufi organizations — both of which the British understood as having potentially destabilizing effects, the former because they enacted the next scenes of the apocalypse, the latter because Sufism had been the breeding ground of the Mahdi in the first instance — became a priority of the British leadership, and they undertook this effort in several different ways. While the British did try to marginalize the influence of these groups over the Sudanese public through direct persecution (Ibrahim 1979), a more robust component of their project was an attempt to supplant their influence by importing and giving patronage to a class of Egyptian religious scholars and officials (Voll 1971; Warburg 1971: 95–106). The goal of this move was to establish something akin to an Islamic orthodoxy, or perhaps in British officials' minds even "Islam" itself, since they judged the Sufism and neo-Mahdism present in Sudan as debased forms of spirituality, quite distant from anything that could properly go by the name of religion.
The Islam of al-Azhar University that British officials had encountered in Egypt, and the scriptural tradition about which they'd read in their field training courses, seemed a far cry from the kinds of spiritual practices that confronted them in Sudan. In a classic example of what religious studies scholars have referred to as "religion-making from above" (Dressler and Mandair 2011: 21–23; Peterson and Walhof 2002), the British sought to produce a singular Islam out of the crowded and diverse spiritual landscape of Sudan. Manufacturing a "civilized" religion that would not only play by the rules of the modern nation-state, but would also help Muslims respond flexibly to issues of public concern, became a major agenda of the colonial government. This is an agenda that we will see taken up again in 1989 with the coming of the Inqadh regime, which also saw the state as the most effective tool for modernizing Islam and the encouragement of an Islamic public sphere as the best way to do so. Both the colonial and Inqadh governments understood private religious practice and its institutions as detrimental: to the individual (for its ritual distractions from matters of import), to the community (for its tendency to fragment allegiances), and potentially to the state as well (for its ability to serve as an alternative locus of sovereignty). Thus, in both the secular state-building project and the Islamic state, those in charge sought to force religion out of the shadows and to normalize it under the watchful gaze of the state.
While in the fields of law, government, and commerce the British administration aimed to replace a theological order with one based on the secular liberal tradition of common law, representative government, and market capitalism, it did not thereby seek to marginalize Islam, as the much problematized secularization thesis might assume (cf. Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and Van Antwerpen 2011). "If the secularization thesis no longer carries the conviction it once did," argues anthropologist Talal Asad, "this is because the categories of 'politics' and 'religion' turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought, a discovery that has accompanied our growing understanding of the powers of the modern nation-state" (Asad 2003: 200). Indeed, in the case of the British in Sudan, secular governance is distinguished more for its promotion of certain modes of religiosity than for its separation of religion from government. Such a concern with religion represents not a failure of secularism, or a tension inherent to its unfolding, but rather, in this case and others, seems to be the very paradox that sustains it (Agrama 2012: 71; Fernando 2014). Indeed, here and elsewhere it seems clear that secularism relies on the production of a category of religion in order to ensure the conceptual distinctness of its domain, particularly when existing spiritual practices on the ground lend no respect for such boundaries (a process scholars of secularism have referred to as "differentiation" [Casanova 1994]).
Examining the case of Sudan from the year of its conquest by Lord Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1898 until the beginning of World War I affords a clear vision of the manner in which religion was produced and mobilized to support a form of governance that has lasted in Sudan until the present day, that of the modern nation-state. Though on the outbreak of the First World War, the British abruptly changed their strategy from one of reforming religion from above toward a favors-for-patronage model in which the only requirement was loyalty to the crown (Holt and Daly 2000: 111), the seeds they planted in these early years, in terms of the particular relationship between religion and state they established, reemerged at various points in Sudanese history and have seen their full flowering under the present regime. While the partisans of the Islamic state claim to be offering a break with Sudan's recent past in manufacturing a "modern" Islam that will aid the progression of their state, in significant ways they are continuing a project that began nearly a hundred years earlier, but under a very different banner: as an attack on an Islamic political order rather than as its establishment. Understanding the history of the state in Sudan, in its myriad interactions with religion, is not only essential to any project that claims to be a study of the Islamic state, but will help us also to avoid the common tendency to overemphasize the Islamic side of that equation while ignoring the problems such a political model shares with myriad other efforts at modern state-based governance.
From Private Practice to Public Religion: Establishing Orthodoxy in Sudanese Islam
From the very first months of the British occupation, there was a concerted effort to cleanse Sudan of any trace of Mahdism and to reform the Sufi orders from which it had arisen. One of the first acts the British undertook was the destruction of the Mahdi's tomb. Shortly after the occupation of Khartoum, Lord Kitchener, the head of the British-led Egyptian army, and the first Governor-General of the Sudan, telegraphed Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General of Egypt (and Kitchener's direct superior since Sudan was officially under joint Egyptian and British "condominium" rule), to inform him of the decision and its execution. Kitchener wrote:
I thought it was politically advisable, considering the state of the country, that the Mahdi's tomb, which was the center of pilgrimage and fanatical feeling, should be destroyed. ... When I left Omdurman for Fashoda I ordered its destruction. This was done in my absence, the Mahdi's bones being thrown into the Nile. The skull only was preserved and handed over to me for disposal. No other bones were kept, and there was no coffin.
The tomb was a major pilgrimage site in Sudan, for the Mahdi, like the founders of the Sufi orders, was revered in a manner similar to a saint. Kitchener's brutal disregard for the cult that surrounded the Mahdi can be read as the inaugural step in a sixteen-year campaign to stamp out Mahdism and encourage a new type of Sunni orthodoxy. (And I can't think that it is mere coincidence that the Muslim boogeyman of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Osama bin Laden, met the same fate as the Muslim boogeyman of the late nineteenth, his body likewise deposited in a watery grave to avoid the potential of religious fervor rising up around a terrestrial burial site. However, in the twenty-first century case, the souvenir of the Mahdi's skull, rumored to have sat on Kitchener's desk for many years thereafter, has been replaced by the more civilized stuff of DNA.) In addition to destroying the tomb of the Mahdi, the British banned the Mahdist outfit, the patched jibba (a sign of membership in the Mahdist order and of ascetic poverty), and sent those caught wearing it into work gangs. Further, they disallowed Mahdist prayer meetings and public recitations from the ratib, the Mahdist prayer book (Daly 1986: 121). The British campaign used many different tactics to combat Mahdism, from physically crushing the active supporters of the Mahdi, neo-Mahdis, or other suspect Sufi groups (Ibrahim 1979; Warburg 1971: 100–106), to trying to install Islamic institutions that could produce a "truer" and, not coincidentally, more governable form of Islam (Warburg 1971: 95–106, 129–33; Voll 1971).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from For Love of the Prophet by Noah Salomon. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ixAcknowledgments xi
A Note on Transliteration and Translation xvii
Introduction:In Search of the Islamic State 1
Interventions
Chapter One: Of Shaykhs and Kings: The Making of Sudanese Islam 29
Chapter Two: Civilizing Religion: Observations on the Architectureof Late Islamism 56
Itineraries
Chapter Three: Rebuilding the Muslim Mind: Epistemological Enlightenmentand Its Discontents 97
Chapter Four: The Country That Prays upon the Prophet the Most: The Aesthetic Formation of the Islamic State 125
Chapter Five: Politics in the Age of Salvation: Reimagining the Islamic State 158
Inquiries
Epilogue: Escaping the Islamic State? 199
Bibliography 217
Index 231
What People are Saying About This
"Noah Salomon has written a rich ethnography of contemporary Sudanese Islamism that will be welcome to anyone trying to understand what ‘the Islamic state' means in the world today. For Love of the Prophet contains valuable description and critical insight of a high order. It will find the appreciative interdisciplinary readership it deserves."—Talal Asad, Graduate Center, City University of New York"This erudite—and often moving—book describes the astonishing cultural production that has emerged in Sudan in the wake of an effort to create an Islamic state, and at the same time offers a sophisticated intervention into the ethnography of the modern state more broadly. Salomon throws down the gauntlet before those critics of Islamist politics who exclude the possibility of acknowledging the intelligence, humanity, and dignity of those in whose name they claim to speak."—Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom"Through close ethnographic work, Salomon shows the conflicting ambitions and projects mobilized by an Islamic state. He delves into its intrinsic vulnerability to a variety of sociopolitical forces, and the forms of sociability, resistance, and religious devotion it foments. At a time when the idea of the Islamic state has become equated with extremist violence, this erudite and careful book is essential reading for anyone interested in the variegated nature of its lived reality."—Saba Mahmood, author of Religious Difference in a Secular Age"Noah Salomon's timely and impressive book explores the nature of the long-lived Islamist state in Sudan. Revealing with exceptional clarity the complex relationship between politics and religion in Sudan, For Love of the Prophet is a brave and humane contribution from an outstanding scholar at the vanguard of his field."—Janice Boddy, author of Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan"Challenging received wisdom about Muslim politics, Islam, and the public sphere, as well as Islamism's relationship with Sufism and Salafism, Noah Salomon succeeds brilliantly in uncovering the ways in which Islamist policies have changed and shaped the religious landscape of Sudan. This innovative, inspiring, and important book will have a strong impact in the fields of Islamic studies, Sudan studies, and the anthropology of religion."—Rüdiger Seesemann, University of Bayreuth"What would we learn if we studied the Sudanese state as a modern political entity and not just as a political failure? This well-researched and well-written analysis examines the efforts by the Sudanese state to reform its society and to shore up its legitimacy in Islamic terms. This book places itself squarely in the center of current debates about the possibility of an Islamic state."—John Bowen, author of On British Islam