ABSTRACT
Sudan offers the specificity of having been governed by an Islamist party from 1989 until April 2019 (longer if we include the government of Sadig al-Mahdi between 1986 and 1989), until the regime of Omar al-Bashir was overthrown in April 2019. The political representation of Islam in Sudan has been multifaceted and older than what is generally called ‘modern Islamism’. There was initially no clear ideological difference between the Sudanese ‘traditional parties’ (Umma, Unionist Democratic Party) and the Muslim Brotherhood Party. The latter transformed into the Islamic Charter, then National Islamic Front, the National Congress Party, and eventually Popular Congress Party. This chapter discusses the Brotherhood’s transition from an ideological movement to a political party as a result of pragmatism, which helped the Islamic movement become flexible enough to maintain its coherence and its position in the Sudanese political scene regardless of its political stances. I thus go back to the transformation from an ideological movement to a political party and more specifically on the period from the 1989 coup d’état until the marginalization of the ideologist of the movement himself, Hassan al-Turabi, at the end of the 1990. Eventually, it offers some reflections on the Islamic movement since the December Revolution (2018–2019).
