An abridged version of this piece appeared in a volume published by Locale.
The first generations of Sudan’s politicians and literati, categories that often fuse into one, were keen writers of autobiographic memoirs, a preoccupation born out of their sense of purpose and mission. These accounts of men and their times are written as a succession of anecdotes and commentaries in the easily recognisable style of the newspaper column extended into the essay format. The factuality of these fragments of the historical record, often narrated in hype and drama, is sometimes challengeable but their truth, not unlike the accounts of Sudan’s holy men is on occasion timeless.
The autobiographies of the literati cum politicians cum state functionaries occupies a place of dominance in the historical record of the Sudans but its genealogy does not reach particularly far and is largely coincident with the colonial state and its offices. The major progenitor of the genre is arguably Babiker Bedri whose three volumes ‘My Life’ is an intimate and often surprisingly forthright account of the Mahdiyya and the early colony as experienced by a believer from the riverine heartland who developed a figh of indigenous modernisation for an emergent elite.
The broken gubba
Unlike the effendiya proper who were schooled in the ideology of the coloniser, Babiker Badri’s homegrown modernisation theology evolved out of the choreatic disorientation that followed on the demise of the Mahdiyya and its state, a moment he succinctly captures with reference to the destruction of the dome of the Mahdi’s tomb, the iconic gubba, by Kitchener’s cannon fire:
“People were aghast when the big crack in the gubba appeared, they were dumbstruck, even horses’ neighs fell silent. I didn’t hear the takbir of the Maghreb prayers and I am not sure if anybody else heard it” (1).
Babiker Badri was puzzled by his own disorientation, a dyed in the wool Ansari who had fought fearlessly alongside a handful of surviving men in the abortive campaign against Egypt that barely bruised the Egyptian border before it was decimated by British and Egyptian troops early August 1889. His account of disillusion and escape from the battlefield of Omdurman on 2 September 1898 is transparently frank and a rarity in the genre of the modern Sudanese memoir:
“I ask you to believe, dear reader, that I had risked my life against the steamers. I who had never feared to meet the enemy, I who had started out to take Halfa with only eight companions. Today, I rubbed my face into the sand trying to bury my head into it, thoughtless of suffocation. So distracted I was by the fear of death which in dangers no less acute than this I had sought so eagerly. Then Babiker Mustafa, the man on my right, was wounded in the left hand, and I came to my senses at last and remembered what I promised my comrades. I slipped off my turban, smeared it in my neighbour’s blood and bound it around my left arm; then I called on my companions, ‘Now two of us are wounded!’ They jumped up from cover, and four of them carried back each one of us, and we got away” (2).
In an earlier segment of his memoirs, Babiker Bedri describes his principled belief in the promise of the Mahdi in irrefutable spiritual terms. Badri recounts that he knew the Mahdi before the declaration of his mission, from the time when the latter used to visit his relatives in Badri’s hometown Rufa’a.
“We once bought a watermelon and found on each of its seeds lines that read ‘la ilaha ila allah’ on one side and on the other broken lines but you could read out of them the name ‘Mohamed’. I took the seeds to our sheikh the faki Mohamed al-Izeirig. He read the lines on the first side and then turned to the other side. ‘What is this’?, he asked. I said this reads ‘Mohamed’. ‘And the rest’, he queried. I said ‘of course it would be the Mahdi’. ‘And why should it not be ‘the prophet of Allah’, he questioned. I said ‘the prophet does not require a miracle in the lands of Islam” (3).
Whether one accepts or refutes the factuality of Babiker Badri’s anecdote of the miracle watermelon seeds is beyond the point, knowing of course that Babiker’s memory reaches as far back as the delicious taste of his mother’s breast milk (4). The terms of Babiker Badri’s argument with the faki al-Izeirig resonate with the confrontation between the Mahdi and his detractors among the religious authorities of the establishment. The Mahdiyya was a movement intent on upending the entire social system and hence faced stiff resistance from several quarters with vested interest in the maintenance of the turkiyya state and its order.
At the onset of his movement the young faki Mohamed Ahmed al-Mahdi, whom Babiker Badri first met in Rufa’a, sent letters to the major Sufi sheikhs and lords of the day propagating his message and calling on their support. The Khatmiyya declared him a heretic, and the Samaniyya scholars, among whom he graduated, praised his steadfastness and faith but dismissed his claim to the title of the Mahdi. The most dedicated opposition to the Mahdi and people like Babiker Badri, the miracle-inspired Ansari, came from representatives of ideological state apparatuses (5), the Sunni judges and scholars on the pay-roll of the turkiyya state (6). The coordinates of this confrontation were already set before the Mahdi’s time, during the Sennar era, between state-sponsored scholarly Islam, the ideology of an emergent class of merchant capitalists (7), and everyday or popular Islam.
The paradigmatic text of Sudanese pre-colonial historiography, kitab al-Tabaghat (8), written during the half century of Sennar’s decay before the turkiyya conquest, offers a gentle record of this confrontation in the language of secrets and miracles as opposed to laws and dictums. The author of the Tabaghat, Mohamed al Nur wad Dayfalla, was a scholar of Maliki law and a practicing shari’a judge. His composition is in the tradition of historical and biographical literature in the Islamic world and his motivation involved the goal of placing the kingdom of Sennar within the universal history of Islam.
Flying sheikhs
The Tabaghat is a compilation of 270 orally transmitted biographical entries on 281 individual sheikhs, scholars and holy men. Despite his own training in canonical shari’a, wad Dayfalla remained faithful to the dictates of traditional Islamic historiography and recorded the anecdotes he could collect without judgement on probability, however bizarre or out of this world. Wad Dayfalla allowed the flying sheikhs to rule the skies, many on the busy air routes to Mecca.
The faki al-Izeirig was probably right in factual terms; the motley lines on Babiker Bedri’s watermelon seeds probably did not spell the name of the Mahdi but he was nevertheless wrong in terms of historical truth, they did. Anecdotes like Babiker’s demand interpretation in light of the meshwork of their emergence, often a particularly tasking effort.
Babiker Badri would live to the gentle age of almost a hundred years but not long enough to see the British depart the holy city on the Nile or to witness the end of time in keeping with Mahdist doctrine. He passed away in 1954, two years before Sudan’s independence. Babiker’s modernisation theory, a concordat between a foreign state apparatus and an indigenous religion, would survive in the dull ideology of the graduates, an eclectic mix of meritocratic self-indulgence, elite nationalism, claims of racial superiority, default patriarchal mores and the colonial “civilisation mission” rebooted.
Heretic effendiya
The heirs of the colony were too secular to believe in the mysteries of watermelon seeds but would nevertheless claim the Mahdi as their own and interpreted the Mahdiyya in the language of their own brand of ‘nationalism’. Abd Al Majid Abu Hasabu’s account is arguably paradigmatic:
“I think there were several reasons, religious, social and political, that motivated the Mahdi to carry out his revolution. He experienced the suffering and oppression of his people and he experienced how they had deviated from the righteous path and from Islamic and moral values. The Mahdi must have thought long and hard about the best way to awaken the people from their slumber, motivate them to shrug off the dust of subordination and push them towards jihad for the sake of Allah and the homeland. Sudan was a country that had not achieved national unity and the Sudanese society, divided along tribal and sectarian lines as it was, was unresponsive to nationalist appeals. Moreover, Sudan is home to disparate origins, its an Arab, Negroid mulatto country; the only issue that unites the majority is the shahada [lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāhu muḥammadun rasūlu llāhi] (9).”
The implicit assumptions of Abu Hasabu’s reading of the Mahdiyya constitute the basic tenets of an effendiya ideology, a sense of purpose and mission sustained by the claim that the ‘people’ are in slumber and must be awakened to act, a notion of nationalism subverted by the reality of racial incohesion and a conception of history where agency is the preserve of gifted leaders while the people are nudged into action by ideological sleights of hands much as children are enticed to behave appropriately by their omniscient guardians.
Abu Hasabu’s reckoning with the Mahdiyya ends prematurely: “[The Mahdi] united the Sudanese around Islam, and his revolution assumed a religious nature. However, I am convinced that people were driven to revolt by their sense of injustice and oppression more than their religious feelings. In any case the two complement each other” (10). The contradictions of the Mahdiyya in Abu Hasabu’s mind are brushed away in a whiff of complementarity as an “any case”. The underlying rationale is not of historical enquiry but of ‘nationalist’ myth making, watermelon seeds without watermelons.
Born to be a minister
Abu Hasabu was a minor hero of the Nationalist Unionist Party (NUP). He was born 1921 in Khartoum to a wealth family of merchants and went on to attend Gordon Memorial College. Ismail Al Azhari, scion of the Graduates Congress and later chairman of the NUP, was at the time a mathematics teacher at the College and Abu Hasabu fondly recalls him as a patient educator who preferred persuasion over physical punishment (11). Like many of his generation, Abu Hasabu was deeply influenced by Egyptian culture and aborted his studies in Khartoum in 1936 to continue his education in Cairo where he acquired a law degree.
In Egypt, Abu Hasabu was initially drawn into leftist circles and joined the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation in the company of the first generation of Sudanese communists, Mohamed Amin Hussein, Izz al-Din Ali Amir and Abd al Wahhab Zain Al Abdin (12). In 1946, the newly wed Abu Hasabu hosted Abd al-Khaliq Mahjoub, at the time a dismissed high school student, at his Cairo residence (13). Abd al-Khaliq’s stay in Cairo was short-cut by illness and possibly political calculation; the precocious leader of the Sudanese communist movement returned to Omdurman in 1947 to become a full-time revolutionary.
Abu Hasabu’s career in the communist movement ended in 1947. He was appalled by the Soviet Union’s support of the United Nations (UN) partition plan for Palestine and the decision of the Egyptian communists to align with the Soviets. Abu Hasabu drew the conclusion that communism calls for internationalism and rejects patriotism and nationalism and obliges its adherents to support internationalist communist interests at the expense of national considerations (14).
Upon his return to Khartoum in 1949, Abu Hasabu was welcomed in the executive bureau of the Azhari-Khatmiyya faction of Al Ashiqqa Party, remodelled in 1951 as the National Unionist Party under the chairmanship of Ismail Al Azhari. Abu Hasabu was keenly aware that the NUP was a political machine designed by Al Azhari and his colleagues but directed by Khatmiyya lords around Sayed Ali Al Mirghani. The patricians retained the last word. Sayed Ali Al Mirghani effectively monopolised the decision making process regarding the composition of the first post-independence NUP cabinet, overwriting the will of the party’s executive committee, he stated. “In the party’s circles we were surprised every new day by a request from Sayed Ali to amend membership of the executive committee in favour of a Khatmiyya majority” (15).
Abu Hasabu asks in his reader’s name: “Why did we accept this situation”? He offers an answer akin to his aforementioned complementarity doctrine regarding the Mahdiyya, with rhetorical obfuscation: “We suspended all our feelings and our dignity in that sensitive period in order to overcome its challenges peacefully and successfully. Our dignity and our feelings come second to the nation’s dignity. All the other non-political [religious] orders – and they were many – supported the party and its men given their patriotic record. For the same reason, intellectuals, workers and students all supported the party but we did not wish to jeopardise the future of the country and preferred silence and acquiesced to Sayed Ali’s demands in order to overcome that stage” (16).
And overcome he did. He was a rotating cabinet minister in Sudan’s second parliamentary period (1965-1969). He held the portfolios of works, mineral wealth and justice and the portfolios of justice, culture and social affairs in Prime Minister Mohamed Ahmed Al Mahjub’s first and second governments respectively. Abu Hasabu resented the fact that Prime Minister Sadiq Al Mahdi did not invite him to join his short-lived cabinet in the period July 1966 to May 1967, in between Al Mahjub’s two cabinets.
He elegantly explained his eagerness for a ministerial position as flowing out of a fountain of love and devotion. “My relations with the late Imam Al Sideeq Al Mahdi were consolidated during the reign of the military [Abboud government], he was head of the [opposition] National Front and I was a member… and I loved him more than anyone of his family or [Umma] party”. “When he passed away, I felt a great debt towards him, and decided to settle that debt in the person of his son [Sadiq Al Mahdi] and to treat him as my own son. I had only my counsel and my experiences to offer” (17), he wrote. “My enemies in the Umma Party warned him against me and raised doubts about my sincerity and he distanced himself from me, and I excuse him, they are the closest to him. I was not in a position to do anything but to recoil from him” (18), he added in the tone of an injured admirer.
Stellar achievements
Abu Hasabu would have plenty of time to ponder over these political choices when Nimayri and his Free Officers snatched power in 1969 with the declared aim of abolishing sectarian politics once and for all. Abu Hasabu and others were whisked into political detention, where he began writing his memoirs. He is dearly remembered by Khartoum’s literati for his event management skills as Um Kalthoum’s enthusiastic host when she visited Khartoum in 1967. He recounted among his accomplishments as minister: “I invited [to Sudan] the famed intellectuals Suhair Al Ghalmawi and Bint Al Shati, and the poets Nizar Gabbani and Abd Al Rahman Al Khamaysi as well as the great Algerian scholar Malik ibn Nabi. I also invited Dr. Taha Hussein but he declined due to health reasons”.
“And then came Um Kalthoum and that was the apotheosis of our cultural success”. Abu Hasabu narrated that Ismail Al-Azhari, chairman of the Sovereignty Council at the time, was apprehensive. He was concerned that the Sudanese would not welcome Um Kalthoum as due to her standing because they were not accustomed to her swooning style and long songs and prefered shorter energetic tunes. The Sudanese are prone to ennui, argued Al Azhari (19).
The revenue of Um Kalthoum’s concerts was dedicated to the Egyptian and Arab war effort against Israel. The Khartoum government at the time was engaged in its own war against southern Sudanese rebels, a devastating conflict conspicuous by its absence in Abu Hasabo’s memoirs. The minister at large was more at ease in the snug homes of Egyptian cultural celebrities than he was in the harsh political geography of his precarious homeland.
Like his mentor Al Azhari, Abu Hasabu had his own doubts about the people he governed. He concludes his memoirs with the damning remarks of an external examiner: “The Sudanese society is a strange society indeed. National cohesion has not been achieved and the only unified structure it has is the tribe. It is a society commanded by sectarianism and traditions and dominated by ignorance” (20). The fidgety Sudanese had betrayed his faith. He lived to experience their revolt against Nimayri in 1985 but died shortly thereafter.
(1) بدري، بابكر. تاريخ حياتي، الجزء الأول. بدون تاريخ. ص ١٧٩
(2) المصدر السابق، ص ١٨٠-١٨١
(3) المصدر السابق، ص ٢٦
(4) المصدر السابق، ص ١٧
(5) Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’ [1970] in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 2001. 85-126
(6) إبراهيم، عبد الله علي. الصراع بين المهدي والعلماء. دار نوبار للطباعة، ١٩٩٤
(7) For an eloquent and incisive discussion of class formation in Sennar see Sidahmed, Abdel Salam Mohamed. State and Ideology in the Funj Sultanate of Sennar 1500-1821. MSc dissertation, University of Khartoum, 1983
(8) ضيف الله، محمد. كتاب الطبقات في خصوص الأولياء والصالحين والعلماء والشعراء في السودان. تحقيق د. يوسف فضل حسن. دار جامعة الخرطوم، ١٩٩٢
(9) أبو حسبو، عبد الماجد. مذكرات عبد الماجد أبو حسبو: جانب من تاريخ الحركة الوطنية في السودان، الجزء الأول. دار صنب للنشر والتوزيع، الخرطوم، ١٩٨٧. ص ٢٤
(10) المصدر السابق، ص ٢٤
(11) المصدر السابق، ص ١١٦
(12) المصدر السابق، ص ١٠٣
(13) المصدر السابق، ص ١٠٥
(14) المصدر السابق، ص ١٠٧
(15) المصدر السابق، ص ١١٣
(16) المصدر السابق، ص ١١٣
(17) المصدر السابق، ص ١٩٧
(18) المصدر السابق، ص ١٩٨
(19) المصدر السابق، ص ٢٥٧
(20) المصدر السابق، ص ٢٧٤
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