The new Muslim woman: Sudan's national Islamic front and the invention of identity

Muslim World

Volumn 86, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 176-199

  Hale, Sondra ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 26444496160     PISSN: 00274909     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-1913.1996.tb03284.x     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. I am referring to Antonio Gramsci's work on state hegemony. It may be useful here to describe a concept of the "state," which I interpret as a cluster of interrelated institutions organized by the ruling class (whether this is ruling class by election as in bourgeois democracies or by self-appointment) for the purpose of controlling the subordinate population and disseminating the ideology of that class. State apparatuses of control are, of course, the military, police, militia, intelligence units, the courts, immigration and citizenship laws, and the like. Often less obvious, but just as relevant to this research, are some of the apparatuses for the dissemination of the dominant group's ideology, e.g., the media, the arts, the educational system, social welfare departments, religious institutions, and the like. Liberals or bourgeois democrats forward the concept that the state is an institution to which the people have access perhaps through the apparatuses I have just mentioned. But I try to turn this concept on its head in the same way, perhaps, that some have turned the model of patron/client on its head [in reference to Michael Gilsenan, "Against Patron-Client Relations," in Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, eds. E. Gellner and J. Waterbury, (London: Duckworth), pp. 167-83]; and present the state as functioning to give itself (ergo, the ruling class) access to the people and their resources
2. It is not the purpose here to enter into the debates on the nature of the state, e.g., whether or not the pre-capitalist state was an autonomous entity separate from its class base or is an extension of the ruling class. It should be clear that I am using a revisionist approach to the latter, one which derives from the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971)
3. Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977)
4. and Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978)
5. but borrows from others, e.g., Nicos Polantzas, "The Problem of the Capitalist State," in New Left Review. 58 (1969), pp. 119-33
6. As for state apparatuses, I have used ideas from Gordon Clark and Michael Dear, State Apparatuses: Structures and Language of Legitimacy (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984)
7. especially a section on "State Apparatus and Everyday Life" (pp. 60-82)
8. Virginia Sapiro stated: "Regarding women as the carriers of both culture and morality but, at the same time, as having an essentially weaker grasp than men on culture and morality may appear a logical contradiction at first blush, but it is no cultural contradiction. It is a cornerstone of the views of women found in diverse pillars of cultural explanation, in Islamic, Christian, and Jewish theology, in Aristotle, and in Freud." "Engendering Cultural Differences," in The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism, Crawford Young, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 52
9. I further elaborate on the positioning of women by men to serve parties or movements on both the Left and the Right in my forthcoming book, Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism Socialism and the State (Boulder: Westview). Elsewhere I concentrated on the Sudanese Communist Party and its affiliate, the Sudanese Women's Union, "Transforming Culture or Fostering Second-Hand Consciousness? Women's Front Organizations and Revolutionary Parties-the Sudan Case,' in Judith Tucker, Arab Women: Old Boundaries New Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 149-74
10. For a closer analysis of identity politics and the state in the Islamic movement in Sudan see, Sondra Hale, "Gender Politics and Islamization in Sudan," South Asia Bulletin, Vol. XIV, No. 2 (1994), pp. 51-66
11. There is a long discussion of national and ethnic identity and the literature on Sudan in my unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, The Changing Ethnic Identity of Nubians in an UrbanMilieu: Khartoum, Sudan, 2 vols., University of California, Los Angeles, 1979
12. John Sommer, The Sudan: A Geographical Investigation of the Historical and Social Roots of Political Dissension Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1968
13. For example, Muhammad Bashir Sa'īd, The Sudan: Crossroads of Africa (London: Bodley Head, 1965)
14. For example, William Y. Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977)
15. For example, L.P. Kirwan, "Nubia - An African Frontier Zone," The Advancement of Science, Vol. 19, No. 80 (1962), pp. 330-7
16. J.S. Trimingham, Isiam in the Sudan (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 18
17. For example, the colonial version by H. A. MacMichael. A History of the Arabs in the Sudan, 2 vols. (London: Frank Cass. 1922)
18. the Sudanese nationalist version by Yūsuf Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. 1967)
19. Bruce Trigger. History and Settlement in Lower Nubia. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 69 (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1965)
20. "New Light on the History of Settlement in Lower Nubia. In Contemporary Egyptian Nubia Robert Fernea, ed. (New Haven: Human Relations Area files, 1966)
21. and Under the Pharaohs (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976)
22. Robert Fernea, ed., ibid.: Nicholas B. Millet, "Some Notes on the Linguistic Background of Modern Nubia," in Fernea, ed., ibid.: Peter Shinnie, Meroe: A Civilization of the Sudan (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967)
23. George Armelagos, Paleopathology of the Archeological Populations from Sudanese Nubia: Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, 1968
24. William Y. Adams, "A Re-appraisal of Nubian Culture History," Orientalia, Vol. 39, No. 2 (1970), pp. 277-88
25. and Bryan Haycock, "Some Reflections on W.Y. Adams' 'Continuity and Change in Nubian Culture History," Sudan Notes and Records. Vol. 52 (1971), pp. 116-18
26. Robert Fernea, with George Gerster, Nubians in Egypt: Peaceful People (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 9
27. MacMichael, op. cit., pp. x-xi
28. See my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Changing Ethnic Identity of Nubians in an Urban Milieu: Khartoum, Sudan. University of California, Los Angeles, 1979
29. I have written about the Nubian/Arab "core culture" elsewhere. See Sondra Hale, "The Ethnic Identity of Sudanese Nubians," Meroitica, 5 (1979), pp. 165-72
30. and "Elite Nubians of Greater Khartoum: A Study of Changing Ethnic Alignments,' in N. O'Neill and J. O'Brien, eds., Economy and Class in Sudan (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988), pp. 277-90
31. Arthur L. Lowrie, ed., Islam, Democracy, and the State and the West: A Round Table with Dr. Hasan Turabi (Tampa: The World and Islam Studies Enterprise, Monograph No. 1, 1993), pp. 46-7
32. See Hale, "Feminist Method, Process, and Self-Criticism: Interviewing Sudanese Women," in S. Gluck and D. Patai, eds., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 121-36
33. and my essay, "Transforming Culture or Fostering Second-Hand Consciousness? Women's Front Organizations and Revolutionary Parties-the Sudan Case," in Judith Tucker, ed., Arab Women (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1993), pp. 149-74. In the former I analyze my interview with Women's Union Head, Fatma Ahmed Ibrahim; in the latter I critique the relationship of the Sudanese Women's Union and the SCP
34. Zeinab el-Bakri, Unpublished manuscript, pp. 25-6
35. Sudan Socialist Union (n.d., 1980?)
36. I obtained this typed registry in July, 1988, from the Ministry of Social Welfare in Khartoum (n.d., probably 1985-1988)
37. Ministry of Social Welfare (n.d.: 5)
38. See Sudanow (September, 1985: 14)
39. See Sudanow (November, 1984: 12)
40. With women at the center, Ellen Gruenbaum gives us a taste of the fear and intimidation that have pervaded Sudan since 1989, in "The Islamic State and Sudanese Women," MERIP Middle East Report, No. 179 (1992), pp. 29-32
41. Elsewhere I have offered a critique of the Women's Union in the form of its relationship to the Sudan Communist Party. See my "Transforming Culture or Fostering Second-Hand Consciousness?", pp. 149-74
42. See Taha (Al-Sahaafa May 16,1988: 8). The Republicans [formerly Republican Brothers) have spent years in court trying to prove the unconstitutionality of sharī'a. Written interview with Taha. August 3, 1988
43. Interview in Khartoum, July 14, 1988, with a professional woman with a Ph.D. in Public Administration
44. Both quotes are from Al-Sahaafa (May 3,1986: 10, italics mine)
45. Interview in Khartoum, July 12, 1988. Nagwa Kamal Farid was interviewed separately as well at her home in Khartoum, July 4, 1988
46. Lowrie, ed., Islam, Democracy, and the State and the West, pp. 46-7