ABSTRACT
Introduction The politics of Sudan, even in the non-Islamic fundamentalist sense, has developed as a religious affair. Antagonism to the pseudo-religious influences on politics became a main feature of Northern Sudan politics and added an infectious dimension to the country's crisis. It also provided in the post-independence era an added impetus for political agitation in the South. But the influence of religion over politics until the mid-1960s was of a very special character in view of the unique nature of Sudan's popular Islam. Sudan's brand of Islam evolved as a blend of Islamic normative ideals tempered by the cultural essence of tribal Africa. It has often been said that the Sudanese have taken Islam and adapted it to their own circumstances. This owes a great deal to the way the indigenous tribes were Islamized in the North, Le. Nubia and Beja land. Over centuries Muslim nomads, traders and holy men, migrated from Arabia into Sudan either for preaching purposes or seeking greener pastures. Through those migrants the Islamic empire was able to achieve peacefully what it failed to achieve militarily when its attempt to conquer Dongola was foiled. The migrants - particularly traders and nomads - moved further south into the more verdant and water-rich riverain Sudan where they implanted their language and culture, leaving behind them areas closer to home across the Red Sea (Beja land) and Egypt (Nubia). This explains why the Nubians and Beja managed to keep intact their indigenous cultures and languages. It also accounts for the spilling back of Arabo-Islamism from the centre to its points of entry, rather than flooding out from the north and east to the centre. In the riverain North, however, migrant Arabs did not overthrow the socia-cultural structure, as they had indeed 'turned it inside out,.l Arabic language became the
lingua franca that enabled disparate ethnic groups to communicate with each other and trade with the outside world (which was at that time mainly limited to Egypt and Arabia). It also put them in the way of reading and understanding the Qur'an, the holy book of the new faith. Inescapably, with language came value systems and cultural patterns. Moreover, Arab migrants married into, and lived among, Nubian communities and embedded Islamic values and rites into the culture of those communities, though they left the core communal values intact. In the process, Islam supplanted traditional cultures, but by no means did it efface them. Soup~ons of those cultures that are easily traceable in enduring practices of Muslim Sudanese, clearly indicate that Islam was cast in a mould other than that of the Middle East. In a manner, Sudanese popular Islam was virtually paganized by Hamitic and Negro-Hamitic traditions to the extent of claiming that there was a lot in it that was decidedly non-Arabic, sometimes non-Islamic.2
