Political issues

The commitment of Northern parties to an Islamic state

Sadiq al-Mahdi, the leader of the Umma Party, once had a reputation in the West as a liberal Muslim politician but was fully committed to the establishment of an Islamic state in the Sudan long before the fall of Nimairi. His articulation of this position was in direct opposition to the secular state Nimairi presided over up to 1983. Before Nimairi's fall in 1985 Sadiq advocated the inevitable Islamization and Arabization of the southern Sudan through the manipulation of differences between Southern leaders, and through the activities of Islamic scholars and merchants. In public statements made in Saudi Arabia shortly after Nimairi's fall, and in Iran shortly after he became Prime Minister, he aligned himself with an international expansionary Islamic policy.

In public statements after becoming Prime Minister in 1986 Sadiq offered no real compromise on the issue. He criticised Nimairi’s September Laws for being an affront to Muslims needing to be replaced by laws based on sound Islamic principles. He announced himself in favour of ‘the full citizen, human, and religious rights’ of non-Muslims, but he also declared ‘non-Muslims can ask us to protect their rights – and we will do that – but that's all they can ask. We wish to establish Islam as the source of law in Sudan because Sudan has a Muslim majority.’

His coalition partner, the Khatimiyya-backed DUP, adopted an even harder position: any concession to regional autonomy or federalism in the South undermined a future Islamic state. The National Islamic Front (the party of the Muslim Brothers under Sadiq's brother-in-law, Hassan al-Turabi) was committed not just to an Islamic state, but to a particular interpretation of Islamic law that included the death penalty for apostasy. The NIF did accept that in a regional or federal system individual regions could choose whether or not to be governed by shari‘a, but this concession was qualified in two ways. Firstly, shari‘a would apply (as in fact it did then apply) to non-Muslims living in the North. Secondly, the NIF was by no means willing to see the old Southern Region reconstituted. Rather, it preferred to see the maintenance of the three separate regions of Upper Nile, Bahr al-Ghazal and Equatoria, and calculated that Muslim governments could be established in the first two regions within a relatively short time.