Islamism

On 23 November 2004 at 6:00 a.m., the village of Adwa in South Darfur was attacked by the Sudanese army and the Janajaweed militia. Most villagers were still asleep, or had woken up for the morning prayer, while two helicopter

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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

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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

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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

Read the rest of On the Limits of Ideology in Ruling Sudan »

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-

Read the rest of Post al-Turabi Islam: Don’t Kill the Message »

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

Read the rest of Post Islamism? Questioning the Question (Part 2) »

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

Read the rest of Post Islamism? Questioning the Question (Part 1) »

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,

Read the rest of The Islamism Debate — Abdullahi Gallab Responds »

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

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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

Read the rest of The Islam and the “Ism” in Sudanese Islamism »