“Keep These Women Quiet:” Colonial Modernity, Nationalism, and the Female Barbarous Custom
Identifieur interne : 006702 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 006701; suivant : 006703“Keep These Women Quiet:” Colonial Modernity, Nationalism, and the Female Barbarous Custom
Auteurs : Abdullahi Ali IbrahimSource :
- Hawwa [ 1569-2078 ] ; 2011.
English descriptors
- KwdEn :
- Abusharaf, Advisory council, Archive, Asian studies, Barbarous, Barbarous custom, Black book, Boddy, British crusade, Circumcision, Civil secretary, Colonial, Colonial administration, Colonial government, Colonial knowledge, Colonial modernity, Colonial nonsense, Colonial schools, Colonial state, Colonial sudan, Colonial women, Colonialism, Colonialist, Colonizer, Congress graduates, Daly, Delay tactics, Demonstrator, Deng, District commissioner, Elite nationalism, European women, Fanon, Female circumcision, Feminism, Feminist, Former governor, Gender, Gordon college, Hasahisa, Hawwa, Ibrahim, Ibrahim hawwa, Imperial feminists, Imperial framework, Indirect rule, Interiority, Interiority concept, Islam, James robertson, Khartoum, Khartoum authorities, Khartoum university, Mahmoud, Modern elites, Modernist, Muhammad, National culture, National resistance, Nationalist, Northern sudan, Northern sudanese, Osman, Other hand, Oxford university press, Pea, Pharaonic, Pharaonic circumcision, Precolonial traditions, Princeton university press, Republican brothers, Robertson, Saad, Sharia, Sharia courts, Sharkey, Sudan, Sudan agent, Sudan union, Sudanese, Sudanese nationalism, Sudanese women, Sudaneseonline, Taha, Women bodies.
- Teeft :
- Abusharaf, Advisory council, Archive, Asian studies, Barbarous, Barbarous custom, Black book, Boddy, British crusade, Circumcision, Civil secretary, Colonial, Colonial administration, Colonial government, Colonial knowledge, Colonial modernity, Colonial nonsense, Colonial schools, Colonial state, Colonial sudan, Colonial women, Colonialism, Colonialist, Colonizer, Congress graduates, Daly, Delay tactics, Demonstrator, Deng, District commissioner, Elite nationalism, European women, Fanon, Female circumcision, Feminism, Feminist, Former governor, Gender, Gordon college, Hasahisa, Hawwa, Ibrahim, Ibrahim hawwa, Imperial feminists, Imperial framework, Indirect rule, Interiority, Interiority concept, Islam, James robertson, Khartoum, Khartoum authorities, Khartoum university, Mahmoud, Modern elites, Modernist, Muhammad, National culture, National resistance, Nationalist, Northern sudan, Northern sudanese, Osman, Other hand, Oxford university press, Pea, Pharaonic, Pharaonic circumcision, Precolonial traditions, Princeton university press, Republican brothers, Robertson, Saad, Sharia, Sharia courts, Sharkey, Sudan, Sudan agent, Sudan union, Sudanese, Sudanese nationalism, Sudanese women, Sudaneseonline, Taha, Women bodies.
Url:
DOI: 10.1163/156920811X578494
Links to Exploration step
ISTEX:CEF1D085BB6837E53CD215B69A543A341586A871Le document en format XML
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<p>© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920811X578494 Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 9 (2011) 97–151 brill.nl/hawwa “Keep These Women Quiet:” Colonial Modernity, Nationalism, and the Female Barbarous Custom Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim University of Missouri ibrahima@missouri.edu Abstract This paper revisits the Rufa’a revolt/riot (1946) in the Sudan led by Mahmoud M. Taha, the elderly Islamic, modernist reformer executed by President Nimerie in 1985, to abolish legislation against female circumcision imposed by the British. Although revered as a mar- tyr for his courage facing death for his beliefs, Taha has been unrelentingly castigated for opposing a measure that intended allegedly to rescue women from this barbarous custom. Not even Taha’s subsequent unprecedented labor for women’s rights took the edge off this criticism of his stand on female circumcision in 1946. The paper will argue that this conflicted view about Tahas’ feminist legacy arose from a sorrowful dichotomy in scholarship about the Sudan. The culturally sensitive feminist writ- ings about female circumcision in the country failed to influence the narrative of Sudanese nationalism. In this narrative colonial modernity’s claim to civilize the “natives” (like rescu- ing colonial women from their male oppressors) has been widely accepted. Worse, this rescue mission is currently missed and nostalgically remembered as a golden past by both scholars and laymen who were turned off by the disarray of independent Sudan. Drawing on postcolonialism, the paper will seek to bridge the gulf between Sudan femi- nism and nationalism scholarships to rehabilitate the feminist outlook and praxis of Taha, a consummate, different nationalist. The colonial rescue concept, or modernity, will be viewed as a form of a “colonial nonsense” as developed by Homi Bhabha. This nonsense is an evidence of the sterility of colonialism, an alleged modernist project, torn between the demands of the metropolis raised in the custom of democracy, and the administrative con- straints of the colony mired in the custom of power. Keywords colonialism, colonial modernization, imperial feminists, civilizing mission, post-colonial- ism, colonial nonsense, colonial knowledge, indigenous practice, modern and tradition, other nationalisms, gender, female circumcision, Marxism</p>
<p>98 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 Taha: A Martyr and Reactionary This paper intends to suggest an “imperial framework” (Sinha 2004, 183) to better understand the anti-circumcision revolution of Rufa’a (February 1946), a small town on the Blue Nile lying 120 kilometers south of Khar- toum, which protested a colonial law making female circumcision a pun- ishable crime (Yusuf 2004). A Rufa’a woman was apprehended and charged for violating the law by circumcising her daughters. People were provoked by seeing one of their womenfolk incarcerated perhaps for the first time in their experience. They mobilized under the leadership of Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, the renowned Islamic reformer (1910/11–1985), and challenged the government. Modernists have been periodically revisiting this revolution to criticize Taha for opposing a benign, colonial culture interference to rescue women from nation. These modernists, and especially those with Marxist background, hold a contradictory image of Taha, the leader of the Rufa’a revolution. Follow- ing his execution by President Nimerie for opposing his Islamic laws and subsequent martyrdom in 1985, the man has been revered. His unfailing smile showing white, serene, complete teeth on the scaffold became a met- aphor for unbending courage on the path for truth. The anniversary of his execution—the 18th of January—was monumentalized as the Arab Human Rights Day. Yet these very same modernists persistently view him as anti-modernist because of his Rufa’a revolution. In holding to this his- torical, disapproving view of the man, his critics were not persuaded to give him the benefit of the doubt. Neither did his numerous pleas for them to better appreciate his position (Institute of African and Asian Studies, 1975; Republican Brothers, 1981) nor the spotless, feminist project he developed later helped to remove this “black spot” from the 40s (Ibrahim 2008, 287–288). This anti-modernist image of Taha surfaces in cycles. Said M. Ahmad al-Mahdi, a legal scholar and Marxist, wrote in remembrance of the event in 1968. He was not present in Rufa’a at the time of the revolution, but he joined the town’s intermediate school later and recalled “people were talk- ing about Mahmoud Mohammed Taha’s revolution for which he was jailed for leading people to march from Rufa’a to Hasahisa [the district headquarter across the Blue Nile from Rufa’a]. Although this revolution was a reactionary [my emphasis] one, for supporting female circumcision, it was a potent revolution against colonialism” ( al-Sahafa November, 30, 1968). Incidentally, Hasan al-Turabi, who is a different modernist with</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 99 axes to grind with Taha on points of reform in Islam, was a student at Rufa’a intermediate school when Taha led the town against the circumci- sion law. He participated in it but lived to repent it. He told me in 1996 that he had been ignorant and did not know the negative implications of the revolution. The latest cycle of censuring Taha for his backward revolution occurred in 2002 prompted by a column published by Kahlid al-Mubark, a profes- sor of English language, dramatist, and journalist of Marxist background, in al-Rayaam daily (November 19, 2002). A rebuttal of al-Mubark’s views was published by Omer al-Qarrai, a Republican Brother of Taha’s follow- ers ( Sudanile December 5, 2002) on the internet. A reply to the rejoinder by al-Mubark was published in Sudanile in December 20, 2002. Numerous rebuttals of al-Mubark were published by various Republican Brothers. These writings and the archive of Taha’s Rufa’a revolution were carefully put together by Abdalla Osman, a Republican, and published on Suda- neseonline , a popular Sudanese site on the internet. I will cite this source in the remainder of the article as (Osman, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). In his column, al-Mubark argues the standard position of the modern- ization theory: 1) for permitting awful practices such as female circumci- sion, national culture should not be treated as a sacred cow. Nationalists need to distinguish between its disposable aspects and the durable ones; 2) colonialism, a bad system as it were, must be credited for putting into action some humanitarian measures that took the dispossessed of a colony to heart. Al-Mubark judged Taha’s position as backward and reactionary in the face of a modernist, forward-looking, courageous, correct decision. In al- Mubark’s view, Taha committed various grave mistakes based on bad judgment. His leadership of the Rufa’a revolution was one; he unwisely represented the law to an unassuming public as an unequivocal British insertion into Sudanese inner culture. The British, in Taha’s instigation, went overboard that time by meddling in the “v” of their girls. Rufa’a revolt, al-Mubarak continues to say, is not part of our legacy of resisting colonialism. Instead it is the one act of which we should feel ashamed. The blame for it falls fairly and squarely on Taha. Worse, Taha had never openly revised this political reaction masquerading as social protest, or justified his revolt after the independence of the country in 1956 (Osman, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). Revulsion from Taha’s revolution resurfaced as recently as 2008. Fath al-Rahman al-Qadi criticizes Taha in al-Sahafa paper for making pharonic</p>
<p>100 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 circumcision a taboo thanks to his revolution against it in 1946. Al-Qadi is not interested in Taha’s reason for leading the revolution. The man could have been a genuine believer in this traditional practice, or he could have used it to bolster the nationalist cause. The result however was the same: No one ever dared to touch the practice for fear of a reaction mod- eled after Taha’s revolution (Osman, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). On the academic level Taha’s negative image found its fullest expression in Mohamed Mahmoud (2001). It is suggested in this work that Taha acted in bad faith opposing a progressive law irrespective of the legitimacy of the originating authority. It is clearly suggested that he was using this sensitive issue with its “highly emotive appeal” to agitate the public in circumstances of “deep-seated hostility against the colonial government with the accompanying mistrust of its intentions and legislation” (2001, 72). Taha is singularly blamed as the one who dealt a “deathblow” to this progressive issue for the long haul. Not even postcolonial governments, in Mahmoud’s view, enforced the law for fear of provoking memories of the Rufa’a revolution and facing the consequences. Intimidated by Rufa’a’s reaction to the 1946 colonial law, social and political movements, the Republican Brothers included, shied away from combating the prac- tice. These movements “have never treated female circumcision as a press- ing social issue that need consistently to be brought to the forefront” (2001, 73). Thus, they all became accomplices to a “consensus of silence” on the issue (2001, 73). To his consensus he attributes the ease with which the sanction against the practice, redundant as they had been, was removed from the penal code in Nimerie’s Islamic September laws (1983) (2003, 73). The damage caused by the revolution was irreparable. Taha, Mahmoud states, won the battle against colonialism by forcing it to shelf the law against the practice. He lost the war for progress and national diversity though: But in winning this battle in the name of the “honor” of Sudanese women, Taha had inadvertently contributed the single greatest damage to the welfare of Sudanese women. Circumcision had never been a “Sudanese” tradition in the sense that all [emphasis in the original] Sudanese practiced it; Taha’s opposition served the interests of those sections of the population who adamantly clung to the practice, refusing to see its harm and brutality (2001, 72).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 101 Mahmoud and other critics of Taha may have overstated the consequences of the Rufa’a revolution on the welfare of the Sudanese women. I will discuss some of these exaggerated statements first before turning to develop a broader theoretical framework to better understand the fallout of these sensible Sudanese modernists with Taha. This line of investigation will bring us face to face with the colonial knowledge influencing these mod- ernists. We will see that even a revolutionary philosophy like Marxism, which some of them espoused, has no original theory for national resis- tance of colonialism as a legitimate quest for freedom. Furthermore, we will see how the Enlightenment, which these modernist made their point of reference, was the one that encouraged (or overlooked in the best of cases) the colonial enterprise. Let us begin by taking care of the overstatements of Taha’s critics. First, these critics disapprove of the social and political movements in the Sudan for giving up on the abolition of the practice. In fearing a reaction of the magnitude of the Rufa’a revolution, these movements gave up on cam- paigning against the custom. But this conclusion on the inactivity of the social movements in view is based on incomplete sources. On the author- ity of Sondra Hale (1996), Mahmoud mentions specifically the Sudan Women’s Union (SWU), influenced by the Sudan Communist Party (SCP), for shrinking from the “the task which never became a major Women’s Union and Communist Party agenda item” (2001, 73). But Hale’s conclusions leave a lot to be desired. She consulted the literature of neither the SCP nor the SWU. The few writings familiar with this litera- ture did not fail to find some interest in the practice in these leftist circles (Mahmoud 2002, 272; 2008, 89, 146–147; al-Haya 18 August, 1957). Various communities have been fighting the custom. The medical com- munity was, and still is, fighting against the tradition (Modawi 1974; Baashar, 1979; Abu Bakr 1977; El Dareer, 1979, 1980, 1982; Osman (Awatif) 1980). Sanderson (1981) acknowledges the tireless work of vari- ous organizations to abolish female circumcision in the decades that followed the passing of the law in 1946: the Red Crescent (1981, 101); Family Planning Association (1981, 102–104); Sudan Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology, (1981, 103); Faculty of Medicine at Khartoum University (1981, 104–105); Sudan Fertility Control Association (1981, 105); Babiker Bedri Scientific Association for Women’s Studies (1981, 104–108), Ahfad University College (1981, 105). The contribution of individual journalists like Awatif Sid Ahmed has been noted (1981). One of the crusaders, Dr. Muhammad Omer Abu Shama, began this fight since</p>
<p>102 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 the 1930s and remained a concerned professional in abolishing the custom as we will see shortly. Second, I found Mahmoud’s specific suggestion that a tradition con- fined to a particular community in the Sudan such as female circumcision should not qualify as “Sudanese” rather stiff. All traditions in the country deserve of course to be called Sudanese let alone a tradition that happened to be adopted by the northern Sudanese, a community that has been defin- ing, for better or for worse, what the Sudan and Sudanese are. We will see shortly how certain British administrators decried the custom because it had been picked up by certain communities the British had wanted to stay away from the northern Sudanese. Third, Taha can hardly be accused of male chauvinism. He might have misjudged a situation or two but those were the honest mistakes of a man whose first articulation of his vision for the Sudan future in 1946 had a place for women. In this early formulation he states that the “the failure to tackle it [the women’s question] would have dark consequences and would lead to an endless moral degeneration.” He suggested educating women to prepare them “to carry out their responsibilities in their special sphere.” Mahmoud might have judged Taha rather unfairly in saying that this conser- vatism remained with him throughout despite adopting “progressive and generally equalitarian stance on women” (2007, 15). Taha’s advocacy for women’s changed over time and to the better. He stands out as perhaps the only public scholar who took the fight for women liberation into the sharia bureaucracy. His party petitioned the government at various times to dis- band this institution for a true liberation of women (Ibrahim 2008, 287). Marx and Colonialism as Redemptive Project: “One Destructive, the other Regenerating” Having discussed these overstated positions of Taha’s critics, I will turn now to elaborate the imperial framework suggested earlier to better under- stand the broader Western and colonial knowledge underlying the world- view of these critics. It is worth noting that this imperial framework is suggested not only as a tool of analysis of the situation on hand but also as a form of resistance, in Obioma Nnaemeka’s words, “against an imperial process whereby other peoples are appropriated and turned into objects. . . . exhibited, viewed and</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 103 silenced” (2001, 172). Viewed from this vantage point, female circumci- sion is a “decontextualization and banalization” of the life of African women (2001, 175). If it did not exist, argues Nnaemeka, “Western femi- nists would have invented it” anyway. Westerners have had always a prob- lem with us. We don’t seem to have gotten it right. In 1810, Europe put a Khoi San (Bush) woman, Sara Baart, in a Paris exhibition for people to see her immense buttock. In our time it is the African vagina that is on display. “To this body part Alice Walker dedicated her book, Possessing the Secret of Joy ” (2001, 179). Colonialists are the least studied in the colonial venture. In focusing on colonial exploitation and national resistance, colonial studies gave the least attention to the colonialists themselves (Paul Rabinow quoted in Abush- araf 2006, 212). A comparative study of other colonial crusades against barbarous customs like sati (widow burning) in India is indispensable to the creation of this imperial framework (2006, 221). If this line of investi- gation is followed through, one can hardly attribute a civilizing mission to the British because they themselves conflicted over its desirability. Various British identities will be seen working at cross purposes. Abusharf rightly points to the role of imperial feminists, enabled by suffrage in their own countries, in these crusades to rescue colonized women (2006, 221). The clash of these ardent feminists with the slow-paced colonial administra- tions in delivering reform, their “moral magisterial drama,” will become clear later on in this work (Abusharaf 2006, 223). In her treatment of the anti-circumcision law and nationalists’ reaction to it, Abusharaf has already suggested “situating [colonial] feminist prac- tices within the context of empire” (2006, 221). This approach will reveal a moral mission to colonialism rarely explored in depth. Imperialism, if this line of thinking is followed through, will be shown to be “a sentiment rather than a policy, its foundations were moral rather than intellectual” (W.M. Macmillan quoted in 2006, 223). Colonialists insisted in their crusade against the custom to present their case in emotional terms. Descriptions of it send “a shudder of horror and disgust” in the reader. The statistics of its occurrence did not only surprise the British but made them “without exception horrified and revolted” (2006, 217). The anti-circumcision confrontation will thus prove to be a clash of emotional- ity in a colonial situation with its “asymmetrical power relations” (2006, 210). Outlawing savage customs was not taken up to alleviate indigenous suffering. It was rather dictated by the desire “to impose what they [the</p>
<p>104 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 colonialists] considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject population, that is, the desire to create new subjects” (Talal Asad quoted in 2006, 214). An imperial framework is not necessarily confined to colonialism. A Western-based revolutionary theory like Marxism will be seen contribut- ing to the Western civilizing mission in its own special way. Naturally, a Marxist would see nothing basically unsavory with colonialism. In endors- ing colonialism as a liberating force, Marx seems to have no place for nationalism. Marx was doubly firm on the idea “that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution.” He sym- pathized with the Asian “idyllic village communities” and expressed his sickening seeing them disintegrating and “thrown into a sea of woes” by the British colonialists (Said 1978, 153). But he cuts this sympathy short when he realized that these village communities “had always been solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies . . . whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing out that [modernizing] revolution” (1978, 153). Marx apparently did not theorize for a passionate, nationalist quest for freedom. Not unlike European Orientalism, Marx conceived Oriental “humanity either in large collective terms or in abstract generalities . . . neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals” (Said, 1978, 154). And it is regrettable that it was Marx, who broke with Hegel precisely on free- dom and collectivity, who would disapprove of a nationalist like Taha’s capacity for freedom. Whereas Hegel saw that freedom is granted to indi- viduals as embodiment of the Subject, the law of the Spirit, absolute truth, Marx wanted to see these individuals as “particular and empirical individu- als.” Hence, he views freedom as “self-realization” meaning “that people are free not because they realize themselves, but because they have the faculty to do so; not for the particular goals of their productive decisions, but because they themselves decide their own goals. Unlike in Hegel’s concep- tion, in that of Marx it is essential that the subjects of freedom are defined as concrete individuals, that is, as historically determined agents who decide the goals of their actions, and not as embodiments of a self-realizing Spirit or Human Species” (Screpanti 2007, 97). Taha’s revolution was not specifically about female circumcision as his modernist critics made it appear. It was rather about self-realization and</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 105 who would call the shots in making it happen. In opposing the law against circumcision, Taha wanted, as it will become clear later on, to effect a change he had determined its larger goals. He did not want to be on the receiving end of a freedom dictated by a tyrant and dished out in piece- meal. This would deny him the faculty to be free—a crucial prerequisite in Marx’s conception. Thus, Taha could have been the best candidate for Marx’s kind of freedom as self-realization in a twofold enterprise referring to a “capacity and to an activity: the capacity to decide the goals of action and the activity of creation in pursuing the goals.” In blaming Taha for opposing the circumcision law, Mahmoud appar- ently denies Taha the right to choose an end for his quest for freedom. But “the individual is free not because he realizes a determined end, but because he himself can choose his ends” ( 2007, 98). Taha was not an advocate of female circumcision. He only begged to differ with the British on whether the law was the way to go in fighting the practice. He argued that the tradition “was so deep-rooted that it had to be eradicated through a gradual educational process” (Mahmoud 2001, 71). Mahmoud of course cedes to Taha the importance of consciousness- raising. Yet, he insists that “legal sanction is a vital measure that should be called upon to wage an effective struggle against circumcision” (2001, 74). If one understands Taha correctly, consciousness-raising is not merely waging campaigns against a social problem; it is an investment in freedom as the paramount pre-condition for self-realization including deciding on sanctions to combat evil practices. Ironically, some of the ardent British crusaders against the practice seemed to have allowed this much freedom to the Sudanese. Prominent crusaders like Hubert Huddleston, a former governor general of the Sudan (1940–1947), and Ina Beasley, controller of Girls’ Education in the Sudan, 1942–1949, assumed a capacity in the Sudanese for freedom to imple- ment change unaided. Beasley criticized a pamphlet published by the gov- ernment in 1946 to raise awareness of the harm of the practice for failing to “emphasize strongly enough that such operations are useless as a means of promoting chastity, a virtue which can only be implanted by proper moral education and maintained by the individual’s own conscious effort” (Boddy 2007, 286). This investigation into the imperial framework of the Rufa’a revolution takes us to a crucial, if not fully explored, connection between liberalism and colonialism. Taha’s critics are great believers in Western liberalism. They want to appropriate this product of the Enlightenment, advertized as</p>
<p>106 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 the single age of light, no matter what. If an oppressive regime such as colonialism would deliver the goodies of the Enlightenment, it would be a small price for the general good. This position that something good could have come from colonialism is only tenable in the absence of a critique of colonialism that seeks a deeper understanding of its association with liber- alism. Colonial cultural interventions were of course premised on the “civ- ilizing mission” of Western liberalism. But this critique has been hard to come by. Uday Singh Mehta (1999) maintains that this relationship has “scarcely been considered in recent times by political theorists” (1999, 5). Mehta’s work “attempts to redress the indifference of modern and histori- cal scholarship to the extended link between liberalism and the empire” (1999, 8). Mehta points to the contradiction implied in this situation: a democracy, England, holding a “vast empire that was, at least ostensibly, undemocratic in its acquisition and governance” (1999, 7). Although not specifically detained by closely examining this contradiction (1999, 7–8), she brings us closer to Homi Bhabha’s concept of “colonial nonsense” that we will turn to shortly. Mehta views the pieties of progress (exemplified by the British work to abolish female circumcision) as “liberal justification of the empire” (1999, 2). Colonized liberals sacrificed their freedom to these highly selective reforming schemes. They had to put up with a democratic empire that denied them the rights enjoyed variously in the metropolis (1999, 2). Taha’s anti-modernist image his critics held him in because of his Rufa’a revolution is informed in great part by the colonial/Western knowledge highlighted in this section of the paper. The crusade to abolish female circumcision, flaunted to advertise the colonial mission to save colonial women from their tradition and men, can hardly be appraised without a good grip on this pervasive knowledge. Taha’s Side of the Story The existing English narrative of the Rufa’a revolution, even in works not particularly addressing Taha’s disavowal of modernization (Abusharaf 2006, 223–225; 1 Boddy 2007; 299–302), is almost exclusively constructed from colonial records ( Mahmoud 2007, 16–17, 229 n 13, 230, n 17 1 Abusharaf (2006) used a story from al-Rayaam newspaper which she quoted from Mahmoud (2001: 225).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 107 and 18). 2 The narrative used neither the newspapers reports on the evolving revolt at the time nor the detailed explanations of Taha’s involvement in the revolution provided over the years by Taha and his Republicans (1975 and 1981 republished in Osman, Rufa’a Revolution, Sudaneseonline ). In ignoring these testimonies, modernists judged Taha by a narrative constructed from a colonial “guardians of memory” (Comaroff and Cama- roff 1992, 34). Taha is not only misrepresented by his adversaries but also faulted for never accounting for his ill-advised revolution. Khalid, as we have seen earlier, blames Taha both for leading a revolt against modernity and for never reconsidering his action (Osman, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). Mahmoud, on the other hand, blames Taha for doing the greatest disservice to the cause of modernity and women. His “emotive,” nationalist outburst chilled all future discussions of pharaonic circumci- sion (2001, 72). From these colonial (mis)representations, drawing largely on the Sudan Political Intelligence Summaries, Taha emerges as your typical nationalist rabble-rouser “stirring up an irresponsible town population/” or mob. Even before the incident in Rufa’a he was said to have been “briefly impris- oned and called a political martyr” for distributing “a highly seditious and dangerously inflammatory pamphlet against the Government.” The law against circumcision, according to the colonial civil secretary, was unfortu- nate in being enforced in the wrong town at the wrong time. The law was used by “few fanatics” who found ground to lead riotous mobs against the government. He went on to say: It was very bad luck that Mohammed Mahmud Taher [ sic ], the fanatic leader of the Republicans party and bitter opponent of the female circumcision reforms should have been living in the very town where the first trial of an offense against the circum- cision law happened to take place (Boddy 2007, 300). The modernists’ version of Taha’s misguided revolution is becoming pub- lic knowledge with a moral: resisting colonial modernity is backwardness. A journalist wrote a story about efforts to eradicate female circumcision in 2008. To frame his story in history he wrote: “In Rufa’a town a girl suf- fered a hemorrhage because she had been circumcised by a midwife. As a result the British administration ordered the stopping of the practice. But 2 Gruenbaum discussed the revolution briefly with some Rufa’a people who proudly called it “our revolution” (2001, 206–207).</p>
<p>108 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 Rufa’a people demonstrated against the law for being too invasive and scornful of their culture. This opposition dealt the British efforts to stop the practice a severe blow. The innocent girl, the future renowned actress Faiza ‘Amasayb, became a symbol of the body harms society inflicts on women. ( al-Ahdath May 21, 2008). The reader can check this moral story against Taha’s side of it detailed below to see that the facts of the affair no longer count. The modernist message is what matters. It is regrettable that Taha’s side of the story has not been told in English although he had been carefully explaining it in the clearest terms. In 1981, his Republicans published Ma’alim fi Tariq al-Fikra al-Jumhuriyya (Sign- posts on the Road of the Republican Idea) in which they compiled local press stories on the revolution, Republican testimonies including their first leaflet opposing the law, Taha’s defense before the court, and Taha’s letter in 1951 to the editor of al-Sha’b in which he put the revolution in the perspective of his religious awakening. Taha’s most intimate discussion for his role in the revolution however occurred at a panel organized in 1975 by the Sudan National Movement Project of the Institute of African and Asian Studies of the University of Khartoum. Rufa’a incident was not an opportunity seized by Taha, the ardent nationalist perceived to be, to raise nationalistic hell against colonialism. In his view, Rufa’a was a bend in his path to reconnect with his people’s culture. Taha was careful from the beginning not to confound his resistance to the law with condoning the tradition it delegalized. In his first leaflet he stated clearly that his opposition to the law should not “make us look like defending pharaonic circumcision. We are not going to be detained here by analyzing the circumstances that led the Sudanese to adopt the habit, or the imperatives that caused it to remain a Sudanese custom to date” (Osman, Ruf ’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). Instead, he protested the colonial timing of the promulgation of the law mischievously chosen to show that the Sudanese did not deserve to be independent because of their barbarous custom. He also complained of the various forms of colonial moral injury (Basil Davidson in Ibrahim 2008, 13; 42–43) the law had caused the men and women of the nation: For God’s sake could anyone tell me what a man would like to be infamous for snitch- ing on his neighbor’s ‘ard (honor) [for performing pharaonic circumcision on his daughters]. What kind of a man who causes the daughters of his neighbor or friend to be sent to physicians to examine them for circumcision! What unprecedented thing</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 109 you came up with you who set this law! Is it part of justice and good conscience to humiliate us with this law! Do you think you do justice to a girl by sending her provider to prison? ( Al-Sha’b January 27, 1951 in Osman, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). 3 In his trial Taha pursued this line of protesting colonial injury. He told the court that the Rufa’a woman as he spoke was in the prison of Medani, the province headquarters. He told from his experience in the same prison about the kind of women incarcerated in it: twenty-three women; four of them suffer from mental illnesses and their language was foul. The rest came from public houses (he gave the literal Arabic translation of the Eng- lish word) and tried for brewing alcohol. “Is this a place,” he protested, “where you imprison a young, free Muslim, masuna (protected) woman in charge of raising orphan girls and boys whose father died a month ago? Is the solidarity of her kin and her brothers and sisters in Islam and country what you call a riot and sedition?” (Osamn, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). Taha’s presentation at the Institute of African and Asian Studies in 1975 was candid, non-apologetic, and pointed. In the discussion follow- ing his talk he addressed the question raised about his role in the revolu- tion. He said he had been free from prison after spending 50 days of a sentence of two years for opposing the law against female circumcision. He went to Rufa’a, his hometown, preceded by his reputation as a nationalist, 3 Al-Rayaam daily raised the same concern about the government that stealthily took the woman at that odd hour of the day (see pp. 14–15). The editor wrote: In this first applica- tion of the law it is clearly seen that the manner by which the woman was arrested was provocative and beneath the honor of the government and the judiciary. Snatching the woman from home in her bedtime gown in the wee hours of the night, and smuggling it across the river to Hasahisa was uncalled for. It was mere provocation that looks good on host-taking gangs, not on governments . . . What is really sinister in the law, and this needs to be emphasized, is that free, honorable Sudanese women, shielded as they are in the fam- ily context, have never been exposed to imprisonment. The law as it stands incriminates circumcision and honorable women would be found guilty of this crime. These honorable women, who hold to a deeply entrenched customs, do not see circumcision as a crime. They would practice the custom and infringe on the law. Throwing these women into jail, irrespective of the agony this will cause husbands and kin, would be detrimental to their reputation and honor from a purely social stand. It is difficult not to concede that an hon- orable woman, who would go through ill-suited jails, would come out with intact reputa- tion or that society would comfortably reintegrate her into it. Punishing such women by sentencing them to terms of imprisonment defeats its purpose of reform and correction. It would also fail to deter others, on whom the custom has an unrelenting hold, from being jailed. Jailing these women is the shortest way to corrupt their morals and undermine their well-being in society (Osman, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ).</p>
<p>110 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 political jail-bird. In the town, and while attending a wake, the family of the woman arrested for violating the circumcision law asked him for advice. He described her as a widow who came out of habs (sequestering a widow long enough to make sure that she is not pregnant from the deceased) few days ago and circumcised her daughter. An informer reported her action to the authorities. Taha told them that he would write a letter to the district commissioner asking to discuss the matter with him. Local party leaders asked to sign up for the meeting. He agreed. They assembled in front of the markaz (the district commissioner’s office) in order to meet with the commissioner. The commotion resulting from this assembly rein- forced by numerous onlookers, unnerved the government official. He pan- icked and ordered the woman released from prison until the appeal of her sentence was considered. Behind the scene he had been in contact with the governor who apparently instructed the district commissioner to rearrest the woman. Taha guessed that the governor might have had a very low opinion of Rufa’a people and thought of them as bluffers who would con- stitute no harm to the government when push came to shove. The com- missioner complied. People reported this development to Taha who told them that his Friday sermon would dot “i”s and cross (t)s. His sermon led people, already hurt by the insensitivity of the govern- ment on this intimate social issue, to organize a march on the prison. They set the woman free and sat in the jail instead. The sub-mamur of Rufa’a (a junior administrator under a commissioner who was in charge of Rufa’a from his office in Hasahisa) was in contact with the commissioner in Hasa- hisa reporting the latest developments. The commissioner directed him to ask the people to go home and take no further steps regarding the woman. Rufa’a demonstrators were persuaded to evacuate the prison. This was happening on Friday afternoon. The governor of the province was obviously privy to all these develop- ments. Taha continued to say: It was he, I presume, who ordered the rearrest of the woman at mid-night and ferrying her to Hasahisa and eventually to Medani, the province headquarter. Some towns- people or the local native administration had been in contact with the brother of the accused woman and warned him that he stood to lose by this emerging situation sur- rounding his sister. They advised him to turn her to the government to serve her sen- tence and put an end to this turmoil. They arranged for him to take her stealthily to a designated place at mid-night where he would find a car that would take her to the</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 111 authorities. 4 Back in the custody of the police, she was taken to Hasahisa. When the people knew about this double dealing in the morning they came to my house in al- Daym (a suburb of Rufa’a). They told me that the omda (a native chief ) of Rufa’a was the one who smuggled the woman out of the town on orders from the commissioner and the governor. I went to the marketplace and mobilized the people and students to go to Hasahisa. The river was in full flood; the famous 1946 flood. We found that the commissioner had ordered all boats taken out of the river and immobilized on the Hasahisa bank of the river. No sooner than people realized that the district commis- sioner rendered the river uncrossable, demonstrators who filled three trucks drove to al-Daym to untie the boats on its shore to float down the river to Rufa’a. These boats enabled the people to cross to Hasahisa. The arrival of the demonstrators in hot pursuit of the woman was reported to the governor. His deputy, Guy Pease, came accompanied by the police commandant at the head of a police force. 5 Pease ordered the commandant to fire at the demonstrators. We were later told that the commandant did not obey his orders because the police man-power could not have contained and disbanded the demonstrators. Luckily, the tear bombs were not in use then. Sticks and palm leaves shields could have done the police no good in the face of the demonstration. The police could have only been helped with fire power. The demonstrators laid siege to the markaz in which the assis- tant governor, the commissioner, and the police commandant were stationed. I was a member of the delegation that went to discuss the matter with them. They ignored me. Pease even told me to leave Shaykh Lutfi, my uncle and father-in-law, to speak on behalf of the delegation. They thought that a senior of the stature of Lutfi would calm down the young men dominant in the movement until things cleared up. To stop this delay tactics, we talked to the demonstrators to stand firm. Pease was hoping that by 2 O’clock [the end of work day and lunch time] the demonstrators would disperse of their own out of sheer fatigue. But they were indefatigable. They even took away the water and coffee Pease had ordered for his guests. Pease started to get irritated. Demonstrators cut niem tree 6 branches and began striking windows, doors, glass panes, and office cabinets. A commotion occurred. Pease gave up and 4 Ali Abu Sin was struck by the paradox of the Rufa’a event. It was the notabilia, the traditional elites, who supported the campaign to suppress female circumcision and the law that made it a punishable crime. Contrary to expectations, the modern elites reneged on the fight to abolish the barbarous custom (1997, Vol. 2, 229–230). Abu Sin is speaking from a family memory since he belonged to the dynasty of native rulers of Rufa’a and its surroundings. 5 Guy Pease, who served in the Sudan from 1946 to 1955, was not your typical Oxonian or Cambridge graduate believed to have given the Sudan Political Service its enduring good name. He was a young officer with no education. To make up for this lack of proper educa- tion, James Robertson, the civil secretary (1945–1953), was planning to send him to the Jerusalem Arab Center to study and “[t]his ought to take the place of such [lack of a degree] to some degree,” James Robertson to N.N. Allen, SAD June 20, 1946. 6 This is why the Rufa’a revolution is still remembered as the “Neim Revolution.” The name takes a lot of the sinister implications the colonialists imparted to the event.</p>
<p>112 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 called the prison warden and instructed him to personally accompany the woman to his office. That happened Saturday at 2:30 pm. We took the woman back. The governor did not leave it at that. He asked for a Sudan Defense Force contin- gent to besiege Rufa’a. A police force would then be set loose on the town to arrest a list of 12 men. The list included some coffee-houses guys 7 to suit the colonial design to describe the Rufa’a movement as a” riot” by way of slighting it. I do not want to belittle the contribution of these young men to the movement, but over representing them in the list of leaders was mischievous. Arresting the leaders of the movement happened on Sunday morning. Kangaroo trials began and I was sentenced to spend two years in prison. For others the range was from a year to six month (Osamn, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). Taha put his finger on the colonial arrogance surrounding the Rufa’a event. This is something we will turn to shortly. His line of defense during the trial was to uncover this administrative haughtiness. He said to the court he did not incite the people of Rufa’a to rise against the government. The government was the one that did that to itself unaided. He only criti- cized a bad law. He argued that the whole episode resulted from a series of mistakes committed by the administration. Challenged by the people who stood up to it, it hastened to defend its honor and authority. In taking pride in their repeated mistakes, the British kept tripping endlessly in them with no end in sight. Little did they know that two wrongs do not make a right? The truth of the matter was that the administration kept hitting the people of Rufa’a. “They screamed after the first blow,” he said, “and they screamed after the second blow, and they screamed after the third blow. The administration was mad beyond itself for seeing her victims showing all this pain. This is the reason why I am standing trial before this court. Had we possessed the tools of power at the government’s disposal, we would be the ones who could have put it on trial” (Osamn, Ruf ’a Achive, Sudaneseonline ). Taha: A Nationalist Apart Evidently there is more to Taha in the Rufa’a revolution than using tradi- tions to make a nationalistic point. He was a nationalist apart. He was a product of the radicalization of nationalism that occurred in the post- 7 These riff-raff would have been called by James Robertson, the civil secretary, “cornerboys and suk (market place) rats,” James Robertson to R.C. Mayall, the Sudan Agent in London, SAD 521/11/21.</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 113 World War II era. He was a member of the Graduates’ Congress, a plat- form of nationalists consisting of the graduates of colonial schools, that claimed to speak on behalf of the nation at large beginning in 1938 until 1945. The Congress developed, in the words of James Robertson, the civil secretary, an anti-“notiabilia” 8 (the class of religious and tribal notables) for holding to traditions that caused the fragmentation of the nation and led to colonialism (Mahmoud 2007, 10). But the Congress did not live up to its anti-sectarian platform. After its major split in 1945 its two main fac- tions formed separate parties sponsored by the leading notables of the Sufi Brotherhoods. Even before the Congress’s disavowal of its modernist secularist com- mitment Taha was critical of its leaders for being prone to partisan poli- tics; good only as rabble rousers for lacking a clear social philosophy to galvanize the public (Abd al-Qadir 1952 Vol. 3, 153). Disenchanted, he formed the Republican Party in 1945 whose publications reflected a strong modernist Islamic orientation. For Taha had always believed that Islam holds the key to a world muddled by capitalism and communism (Taha 1987, 3; Abd al-Qadir 1952, 153). After a period of reflection and discus- sion of the national issues on hand, the party began engaging in popular action against colonialism. Unlike the graduates who wanted to reach the masses via the sponsorship of the popular Brotherhoods, Republicans were determined to find an independent route to the common people by addressing them in mosques, movie theatres, and cafes. Taha might have differed from the modernist Congress graduates of his ilk in more than political practice. The Congress elites were generally called “effendis” referring to modern, secular graduates of colonial schools that prepared them for employment in the colonial administration. Taha’s spiritual path was unique and had been attempted by none of his genera- tion of modern elites. Maturing on this path, he became the undaunted, controversial figure who paid with his life for what he believed in. Unlike Congress graduates who accepted their “self-alienation,” defined as seeing one’s local tradition “as synonymous with stagnation” (Davidson 1992, 50), Taha wrestled with it, in Chinua Achebe’s words, to “reestablish vital inner links” with the culture of his people (quoted in 1992, 291). For renouncing the effendi cultural habits, Taha is best described as a counter-effendi (Ibrahim 2008, 331–332, 349). His two prison terms in 1946 (Taha 1967/1987, 3) made him outgrew the effendi worldview. He 8 James Robertson to R.C. Mayall, SAD 523/2/86–78.</p>
<p>114 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 came out of his first imprisonment a changed man: “he grew a beard and was remarkably serene” (Bashary 1981, 371). He redefined the party as having a message of spreading true Islam, and asked the members to swear an oath to him as the one entrusted with delivering this true religion. He also asked them to pledge to stop lying, illicit sex, drinking or indulging in any of the immoral acts in order to endear themselves to him (1981, 371). After the Rufa’a revolution he served a two-year sentence followed by a self-imposed period of seclusion in his hometown. In these periods of soli- tude Taha took a rigorous program of mediation, prayer, and thinking that he ultimately articulated in his The Second Message of Islam (1967/1987). When he emerged in 1951, Taha presented the party with his new religious message. Again, members of secular inclinations left the party. Those who remained transformed the party into a vehicle for the propagation of Taha’s unique vision (Taha 1967/1987, 3–5). His enemies attribute to this period of isolation what they saw as his delusion and false prophecy. He is even rebuked for allegedly calling this period of seclusion the ‘Hira Period,’ Hira being the mountain Prophet Muhammad frequented for contemplation and meditation before announcing his prophecy (al-Muti’i 1986, 100). In choosing this counter-effendi spiritual practice, Taha was walking in the shoes of Muslim Sudanese, traditional scholars shunned by modern elites. In local scholarship this seclusion is called “ dakhal khalwa ” (isola- tion of one’s self for study and mediation). Taha revealed the nature of this pre-modern “sabbatical” in the letter he sent in 1951 to the editor of al- Sha’b newspaper. In the letter he said that his involvement in politics prompted him to deepen his knowledge of Islam” (Mahmoud 2007, 17). His voluntary retreat, he said, was not for the purpose of accumulating knowledge. Rather he had been digging to find his lost soul under a heap of lies and falsities. “I wanted to find it and I wanted to share its truths with others,” he wrote, “ I wanted to live in peace with it before calling other people to be good Muslims. The rule of thumb is: one cannot share what he does not possess” (Osamn, Rufa’a Archives, Sudaneseonline ). He later described his period of self-imposed seclusion as an “intellectual revo- lution” a changer, in which he wanted to combine “ ilm (knowledge) with ‘amal (action, practice)” (Mahmoud 2007, 40) to free himself from “his ignorance, his intellectual prejudice, and his fears” (2007, 39). This tradi- tional intellectual encounter, deftly described by Mahmoud (2007), speaks to an array of Islamic concepts, authorities, epistemologies, and subjectivi- ties foreign to his modernist colleagues. The latter’s prejudice against the “yellow books” of tradition caused them not only to fail to link with the</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 115 spiritual and rhetorical resources of the people but also to despise these resources as emblematic of “primitiveness” as they were repeatedly instructed by the denizen of the colonial mission. In the Footsteps of Gandhi Taha’s nationalism has more to it than being anti-colonial as usual. Tradi- tions, in Taha’s praxis, are not mere artifacts to mobilize against injustice but are vehicles of self-discovery. His nationalism was not consumed by merely resisting a foreign occupier; it was a rendezvous with renaissance. Taha’s pastoral retreat indicated earlier is worthy of a discussion in this context. This retreat is Gandhian in Ashis Nandy’s understanding of the man’s legacy. Not unlike him Taha was a wanderer (Nandy 1992, 127). Effendis of Taha’s class were static pinned to their junior colonial jobs for which they had been put through education in the first place. Like all visionaries, Taha “left the city behind . . . to insist upon a vision of things” greater than he was. He walked the visionaries’ walk “in search of other possibilities” (1992, 127). I still remember him scanning these pastoral horizons in my single visit with him to the domes of the awliyya (saints) of rural Khartoum in 1963. After a short gaze at the open sky of the village he said to himself softly, “Here God speaks to the world unclouded.” In being a bicultural colonial revivalist like Gandhi, he was “at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha 1994, 123). Not only did he develop an extremely controversial vision of Islam that his enemies denounced as worse than communism but also attacked the culture of the West. His nationalism did not lie in merely opposing the colonial political authority but also its myths and pieties of progress” (Prakash 1995, 3). This was what Taha called madhhabiyya (Islam-based outlook, methodol- ogy) (Mahmoud 2007, 14). The Congress graduates had none of it. In internalizing the superiority of the West, these modern elites could only deny the West (by opposing female circumcision, for example) “through intellectual cultural subterfuges” (Nandy 1992, 130). They could not be genuinely in opposition of the West attacking “the basic elements of the culture which held together the modern West” (1992, 145). The Rufa’a revolution was thus a momentous bend in Taha’s road of self-discovery and self-realization. Not even Marxism endorsed this colo- nial quest for freedom. What a nationalist called freedom Marxism would dismiss as obstructing the “unconscious tool of history,” colonialism.</p>
<p>116 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 Rehabilitating Nationalism To begin to introduce the indicated imperial frame to understand the Rufa’a revolution one needs to rehabilitate nationalism as a rightful pur- suit of freedom and happiness. It must be emphasized that the nation, whatever havoc it wrought in individual nations and in the world at large, is a compelling form of human experience. It is still regrettably true what Martin Delany said in the 1850s: “the claims of no people are respected until they are represented in a national capacity” (quoted in Davidson 1992, 48).The injustices to which women and other minorities are sub- jected, although demeaning, are no basis for discounting the nation as the only legitimate form so far for packaging populations. The collapse of the nation-state in Africa recently showed us “the horror, the horror” that befalls nationless peoples. R. Radhakrishnan has thoughtfully suggested this rehabilitation. He calls in no uncertain terms for dealing with it “earnestly rather than dis- miss it outright as a failed and flawed phenomenon: the history of nation- alism is not easily bypassed just because it has been a history of a failure” (1992, 82). Feminists are ill-advised to see their project as “its own pure signifier”. Instead they need to commit to “to the production of a critical history that has to acknowledge ‘realities’ [such as nationalism] in the very act of challenging and discrediting them” (1992, 82). In considering nationalism as an activity in mere pursuit of power, fem- inism reduced it to another hegemonic discourse battling colonialism over the body of colonized women. But nationalism was more varied and con- flicted to lend itself to such a reduction: “The historical agency of national- ism has been sometimes hegemonic though often merely dominant, sometimes emancipatory though often repressive, sometimes progressive though often traditional and reactionary” (1992, 82). In his program to rehabilitate nationalism, Radhakrishnan seeks to revolutionize it to tran- scend its “schizophrenic vision” (1992, 84). This vision stems from a loss nationalism suffers “on both fronts:” the outside front and the inside front. In defending the inside, it ended up suppressing its interiority; women. Little did the nationalists know that they, in driving a wedge between the ideas of the Enlightenment and their women, they fell short of liberating their own rank (1992, 85). Radhakrishnan seems to suggest that the problematic of nationalism is too insidious and subtle to be a matter of mere condemnation by the prev- alent feminist writings. Such a deep groping of the problematic will take</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 117 us beyond equivalences feminists make between nationalism and colonial- ism. What this inquiry calls for is coming to grip with colonial modernity. Unlike modernity in Western national contexts, which “re-roots and con- firms a native sense of identity,” the modernity served to former colonized people was made to appear as a forced choice before nationalists “between being themselves and becoming modern nations” (1992, 86). This rehabilitation of nationalism picks up especially from the debate about Fanon’s position on feminism and nationalism. Marinlina Sinha credits Fanon for drawing attention “early to the gendered dimension of both colonial and anti-colonial politics.” Although missed by theorists of nationalism, she continues to say, “his pioneering insights on gender and national politics are finding new currency in contemporary scholarship” (Sinha 2004, 182). Madhu Dubey (1998) is instructive in showing that not all nationalisms are terribly beholden to identifying women with the purity of tradition. She defends Fanon’s feminism against its detractors, who view it as nationalism as usual in which modernist nationalists looked ahead to a modern future while holding their women as the symbol of a pre-colonial tradition. Dubey disagrees and points out the “flexibility of women’s symbolic functions in decolonizing nationalist projects” (1998, 3). Using Partha Chatterjee, she argues that nationalist projects “introduced an entirely new substance to these terms [tradition and modernity] and effected their transformation. . . . Bengali bourgeois nationalist discourses assigned women a new identity which distinguished them from both Western women (models of corrupt modernization) and native peasant women (victims of backward precolonial traditions.” This is what Chat- terjee calls “how to become modern without being Western” (1998, 4). In Dubey’s view: “Fanon’s work escapes the limitations of most decolonizing nationalist discourses precisely because of his rigorous refusal to resolve this contradiction” (1998, 3). Home, for Bengali nationalism, “far from being preserved as the spiritual and traditional core of nationalist identity, was itself subjected to radical material transformations intended to mod- ernize this sphere. The application of typically bourgeois virtues such as thrift, hygiene, and accounting to the domestic realm brought this realm under ‘new’ and modern systems of discipline (1998, 5). They “called for reforms that rationalized indigenous traditions and customs” in their “effort to counter imperialism” (1998, 6). Likewise, in Algeria women’s participation in the nationalist movement caused the nationalists in the 40s to campaign “for women’s rights to vote, encouraged the integration of women in political parties, and established two women’s organizations. . . .</p>
<p>118 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 which initiated women’s entry into the political arena” (1998, 7). Women became “subjects of history” and “traditionally conceived feminine roles began to disintegrate. For the first time, there emerged an image of mod- ern woman, appraised and legitimated historically” (1998, 7). The inside-outside dichotomy, the basis for feminists’ criticism of nationalism, reifies tradition and modernity. In holding to pristine, pre- colonial traditions, it is argued, the nationalists did a great deal of harm to their women. Worse, women were not allowed to benefit from colonial modernity such as the prohibition of female circumcision. Yet Fanon has already shown that this dichotomy of tradition and modernity is falla- cious. In his discussion of national culture in The Wretched of the Earth , Fanon refuses “to dichotomize tradition and modernity” (Dubey 1998, 8). He aligns himself with the feminist critique of nationalism for his “refusal to center national identity around a static cultural tradition located in the precolonail past” (1998, 8–9). And these are the traditions that have “car- ried the most overtly constraining consequences for women” (1998, 10). Fanon sees these traditions as an “untruth taught by colonialism” (1998, 8). The search of the nationalists to base their identity on their precolonial traditions, according to him, was not only “catalyzed by colonialism” but also “doomed to failure” because it is undertaken in the “borrowed light of the colonizers’ culture” (1998, 8). Hence, Fanon sees the Algerian nation- alist bourgeoisie as “latecomers to their own culture” in the sense that they attempt to base their nationalism on cultural forms “which are already condemned to extinction” (1998, 9). Additionally, he makes a distinction between two cultures and two nationalisms, namely, cultural nationalism and national culture. The former only grasps the reeds of “custom” defined as “mummified fragments” of precolonail culture resulting from a colonial culture that stymied the colonized culture. National culture, on the other hand, “germinates and renews itself in the arena of political action.” The culture generated in these political milieus “becomes fundamentally unsta- ble.” Hence, Fanon sets national culture apart from cultural nationalism in that the former “takes concrete political struggle as its condition of pos- sibility” (1998, 9). Thus, Taha’s alleged defense of female circumcision was not a defense of a custom but of national culture whose possibility rests on concrete political struggle.</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 119 Sudanese Nationalism: The Birth of a Terrible Beauty Rehabilitating Sudanese nationalism as a pursuit for freedom and happi- ness for both men and women runs against serious scholarly hurdles. I will highlight below these scholarly difficulties that militate against a positive understanding of the gendered dimension of Sudanese nationalism. Studies of Sudanese nationalism in English have been partial and rather underdeveloped in a variety of ways. In them this nationalism has been narrowly defined and studied as a movement led exclusively by the [Gordon College] Graduates’ Congress (1938–1945) and the political parties and regimes that emerged from it (Abd al-Rahim 1969; Woodward 1979; Abu Hasabu, 1985; Abdin 1985; Khalid, 1990; Hag al-Safi 1989; Lesch 1998; Sharkey 2003; Warburg 2003). Subaltern nationalisms are either appended to this Graduate’s grand national narrative (Beshir, 1974), or treated meaningfully but separately; the working class (Fawzi 1957; Taha 1978; Sikainga 1996, 2002); sharia judges (Flueher-Lobban 1987); hamish (mar- ginal) nationalisms (Mawut 1983; Wai 1981; Malwal 1981; Alier 1990). The weight given by scholars to elite political, national acts is dispropor- tionate. For example, the nationalist grand narrative dwells at length on the 1931 strike of the students of Gordon College against a government proposed cut in graduates’ starting salaries. The working class strikes in Jabal Aulia Dam over wages in 1943, the Egyptian workers’ strike at the Dam in the same year, the five-day-strike of tram-drivers and conductors in the same year, and the 1936 strike by workers at the Port Sudan dockyard (Cross, 1997, 236) have left little trace in the nationalist grand narrative. What also militates against rehabilitation of nationalism is a cultural politics of nostalgia for the good days of colonialism prevalent among the Sudanese elites and the country at large (Sharkey 2003, 137–141). A pres- ident of the Sudan is reported to have told a former British official of the Sudan Political Service that “[t]he Sudan is not as efficiently and compe- tently run as when you British were here” (Sharkey 2003, 137). Hit hard by the “religious right,” as usually described, and in total disarray, the modernists endorsed colonial modernity as their reference point. Except in “Islamic revival” circles, nationalism, albeit repellent and distorted, has very little political purchase. Sudan nationalism scholarship is not helping in revitalize nationalism either. Unlike colonial studies influenced by Orientalism which argue that that the former colonies still live with colonialism, Sudan colonial studies assume that colonialism had come and gone. Scholars of colonialism in the</p>
<p>120 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 Sudan believe that we moved away far enough “from colonial trauma” (Collins and Deng 1984, xvi; Deng and Daly 1989, 1) to better appreciate the human factor of living under colonialism. This living is supposed to have gone “far deeper than military occupation and administrative domi- nation” (Collins and Deng 1984, xvii). What remains is taking stock of its positive and negative aspects. Although colonialism has been universally condemned as “kindred to slavery,” Collins and Deng would rather look at the “more positive aspects of the colonial experience” (1984 xv; xvii). When scholars recognize colonialism for what it was an argument is made that colonialism in the Sudan had been an exceptional encounter; they would rather name it the “Sudan experience” (Deng and Daly 1989, 7). British colonialism is viewed in these studies as a conquest that “brought relief to the people of both north and south.” Missions were said to be judiciously barred from doing work in the Muslim north, but they were encouraged “to play a civilizing role” in health and education. The “Closed District” policy, believed to be at the root of the long, intermittent civil war in the country run by the northern nationalists, is praised as “allowing people of the South to evolve along their own indigenous lines, insulated and protected from the supposedly corruptive influence of modernity or the unscrupulous exploitation of the Arab north” (Deng and Daly 1989, 3–4). Scholars credit colonialism for bringing “calm and stability” (Collins and Deng 1984, 137; Deng and Daly 1989, 4) to the country knowing very well though that the colonial state differs from the national state. The former had “presumed no consent; as a piece of a larger empire, it was ultimately maintained by the coercion of its administrators, with the finan- cial and strategic interests of the distant metrapole in mind” (Sharkey 2003, 141). The nationalist state has had to reach consent to rule, or be condemned. Thus the colonial state had it easy. What militates further against restoring Sudan nationalism to respecta- bility is the infamous record of the northern elite nationalists in the gover- nance of the independent nation. Graduates’ Congress nationalism has done itself a disservice by its perceived racial and cultural bigotry by which these Arab, Muslim nationalists wanted the country to take its “territorial shape from the colony, but its culture from themselves” (Sharkey 2003, 11). Researchers found their insistence to define the nation in terms of its selected tradition, Arabism and Islam, deplorable. This encouraged the rise of activist scholars who have been doing politics for the submerged Suda- nese by other means. Sometimes this scholarship would slouch toward ambulance-chasing monographs. A number of the writings about the bigotry</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 121 of the northern nationalism have had ill-omened titles like Requiem for the Sudan (1995); Death of a Dream (1990); Short-Cut to Decay: The Case of the Sudan (1994); Calamity in Sudan (no date). Manuals of do- it-yourself- conflict-resolution became common (Deng and Gifford 1987; Ahmed and Sorbo 1989). The need to reinstate nationalism as a valid quest for freedom is made evident by Sharkey’s profiles of the Sudanese nationalists of Taha’s genera- tion. Sharkey makes it clear that many northern Sudanese nationalists’ impetus to oppose colonialism had very little to do with pursuing the freedom of their country. This impetus stemmed largely from their disappoint- ments for being denied a promotion or raise. Sharkey took the word of the colonial archive on these nationalists for it. Their personnel files deposited at the National Archives in Khartoum lent itself to a “psychotically profile” of disgruntled employee (2003, 193–196). 9 Although she is to be com- mended for this breakthrough in understanding the job life of these nation- alist, her use of these unquestionably prejudiced source precluded her from giving weight to other crucial sources on the lives of these nationalists. The nationalists Sharkey represented in her book are therefore pitiful. Arafat Muhammad Abdalla, the editor of al-Fajr , the recognized vehicle par excellence of Sudanese nationalism in the 1930s, emerges from her profile as a disgruntled junior clerk driven into nationalism solely to nurse “wounds of professional embitterment” (2003, 103). He begged the British for a better job in a letter written in “flawless, flowery English” (2003, 103). A physical disability determined by the British, unquestionably accepted by Sharkey, barred him from a classified job in the government. In landing in this unpensionable and impermanent lowly post, he was denied mobil- ity. Even a British official sympathized with Arafat for languishing in a job that “did not draw upon his exceptional English skills, and that required little initiative and intelligence” (2003, 103). Her profile of Twafiq Salih Jibril, a veteran of the clandestine rebel soci- eties of the 20s, shows the limitations of her source-material. She describes him as fitting “the profile of the embittered government employee” (2003, 110). She reflects briefly that he might have been ill-treated for his politics. He was denied promotion beyond the sub-Mamur job he had held from 1923, the year of his appointment, until he retired in 1952. But she quickly dismisses his anti-colonialism as a relevant explanation for his plight. In 9 Sharkey researched the personnel files of 24 nationalists to put together profiles of their lives and activities against colonialism (2003, 193–196).</p>
<p>122 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 truth, she says, and as made clearly abundant by his British supervisors, “he was unsuited in temperament to his job.” A British saw his failings as “con- stitutional and are not due to any deliberate laziness or vice” (2003, 110). Jibril’s file was not all woes though. There were those among his seniors who recommended him for promotion praising his “tact, trustiness, and gentlemanly manners” attributed to his “ ‘poetic contemplative bent of mind’ that made him a kind man but an inefficient sub-Mamur” (2003, 110). Although Jibril, in Sharkey’s estimate, was “an accomplished and highly respected poet” in literary circles, he appears in his personnel file “lacklus- ter to superiors” (2003, 110). His poetry was one of the outlets to his “professional unhappiness” (2003, 110). Sharkey however accessed this archive of “his contemplative mind” rather sporadically (2003, 110–111). She could have been a bit fairer to Jibril had she told about his on-the-job secret activities to undermine the colonial regime; activities that could not have endeared him to the watchful British administrators. She especially admits that “on-the-job resistance . . . was probably more common than the British officials knew” (2003, 111). Nationalists are known to take such risk and suffer as a result. But the view on the nationalist enterprise should not be judged purely in colonial terms. Nationalism or “Nationalisms!” The mistake scholars make is that they overlook that Sudanese nationalism is a layered enterprise in which a range of nationalisms came together, or conflicted, depending on the situation. For examples, working class national- ism did not see eye to eye with elite nationalism on a variety of issues. The Workers’ Affairs Association of the Railway System, which arose as a trade union of strong nationalist overtones in 1947, did not accept the colonial wage system that had favored graduate effendis. The Association “made much of the contrast between the conditions of the labourer working in the intense heat of the workshop and the clerk sitting under his fan” (Fawzi 1957, 135). Again, workers were very critical of merchants, a vigorous con- stituency of elite nationalism, for their shady, black market dealings in the post-war years. The railway union had to petition the government in 1950 to control all commodities “to bring the cost of living” to the pre-war time. 10 10 James Robertson to R.C. Mayall, SAD 522/8/27, February 28, 1950.</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 123 Not all nationalisms, on the other hand, planned to build the nation on the basis of the elite tradition of Islam and the Arabs. Ahmad Sikainga has insightfully brought the politics of subaltern nationalisms to bear on the degree of acceptability of this selected tradition by the generality of the northern Sudanese. He argues that the close link between the working class and the SCP holds a potential to a better understanding of Sudanese nationalism. “In the first place,” he says, “it defies the essentialist notions that Muslim societies can only be understood through the prism of reli- gion.” (Sikainga 2002, 6). The underdeveloped state of scholarship on Sudanese nationalisms may also be attributed to the political economy of the Sudan scholarship in English. This scholarship has been in a state of hibernation for the past twenty years since the coming of the al-Bashir junta in 1989. Various American and Western sanctions made research in the country unafford- able. It was either because money transfer to the country was mostly denied, or that funding agencies would not like to be seen doing business with a pariah state, or for consideration of the safety of expatriate scholars living in a rouge country. Other research options opened before expatri- ates who had been largely responsible for defining the image of the country as well-endowed scholars and supervisors of Sudanese researchers. In addi- tion to indulging in vigorous activist scholarships alluded to during the long years of al-Bashir regime (1989–), scholars switched their focus to either study the Sudanese in the diasporas or to study neighboring coun- tries such as Eritrea or Somalia. So far we have been discussing what we may call the “quantity” aspect of scholarship on Sudan nationalism in English. The “quality” of the schol- arship is what irks most. For it is unfortunate that this crisis in Sudanese studies coincided with the exciting scholarly times in which novel concepts emerged to nuance the analysis of nationalism: Ronald Robinson’s col- laboration (1972); Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978); Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger “invention of tradition” (1983); Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” (1983); Homi Bhabha’s “hybridity” (1994). These concepts took us beyond national resistance and cultural purity to see nationalists as “collaborators,” “mythmakers,” “hybrid,” and “mimics.” In not engaging in this subtle discussion of nationalism, scholarship, rightly protesting the shoddy job of the northern nationalists in nation- building, resurrected the resistance and purity paradigm all over again (Wai, 1981; Deng 1995; Jok 2001; Harir and Tvedt 1994).</p>
<p>124 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 As a result scholarship on Sudanese nationalism did not make the con- vergence of nation and gender that became common in recent studies. We have seen how female circumcision stood in the way of bringing about this meeting of the two concerns. In its advocacy for women in the throes of the endless Islamic regimes in the Sudan since the 1970s, scholars, in Sinha’s words, neglected the nation (2004, 182). In emphasizing female circumcision, a form of denial of citizenship, scholars seem to believe that Sudanese women can do without the nation just like Western women. Enraged by her alienation from the nation, Virginia Woolf wrote: “[A]s a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” ( in 2004, 182). Third World women, who contributed in the anticolonial fight that gave birth to the nation, cannot afford dismissing “the salience of the nation and nationalism for the his- tory of both women and feminism” (2004, 182). Women need the nation like the need of poor people for the government as wisely said by Kenneth Galbraith. Privileging gender in appraising the nation is a disservice to women. Their plight would only make sense if consideration is paid to a gendered nation that is “simultaneously constituted by other axes of differ- ence” (2004, 184). And these axes are not “only mutually constitutive, but also differently [emphasis in the original] constituted: that is, they are nei- ther equivalent nor identical” (2004, 185). Sinha thus “cautions against privileging gender, even when it incorporates divisions of class, race, eth- nicity, and so on, over other forms of organizing difference in the produc- tion and reproduction of the nation” (2004, 185). It is ironical that female circumcision, viewed as a reason for women to abandon the nation, has been attracting the most advanced and sensitive writings in Sudanese scholarship. Janice Boddy (1989 and 2007), Ellen Gruenbaum (2001), Rogaia Abusharaf (2006), and Asma Abdel Halim (2006) are on top of the paradigms revolutionizing our understanding of cultural national practices. Insights gained from these prevalent paradigms led scholars to have faith in self-modernization in areas generally believed to be indefensible, revolting, and embarrassingly calling for European cul- tural interference such as female circumcision. Gruenbaum argues that in discussing female circumcision, as gruesome as it is, what one strives to is to engender “productive dialogue and mutual understanding” and not to speak from an “elitist and ethnocentric” position (2001, 17). What one seeks to achieve is to explore “possible route toward change” (2001, 30). “[S]trongly stated moral judgments,” she says, belong to the “pedagogy of missionizing” (2001, 35). She criticizes the view that the practice is</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 125 “simply an irrational tradition” for suggesting that the “practitioners are somehow less rational than people in ‘modern’ societies and justifies a heavy-handed approach that strives to teach (or preach to) people who are seen as ‘ignorant’” (2001, 16–17). Boddy’s work has revolved around restoring agency to women in the act of female circumcision. In seeing women as subservient to men “who would surely obey their betters [men],” the crusaders for the abolition of the practice denigrate women: “Thus women’s behavior was seen as reac- tive [emphasis in the original] and their agency reckless at best. Women’s commitment to ‘odious’ ideals was not, then, reasoned and informed, but sprang instead from their ‘backwardness’ and ‘superstition’ mental states that, in a circular way, their circumcision had induced” (2007, 287). From an analysis of the gender hierarchy in the Sudan compared with the British one, she concludes that women are not mere spectators of the act. In her view this hierarchy is “organized around gender-complementary domains of interest and authority that women and men reciprocally embrace, nego- tiate, embody, and experience in age-specific ways.” Yet, “[r]elative sex segregation sets limits to male domination, while the moral authority of male and female elders tempers gender ascriptions and roles. By this view, Sudanese women are actors, who, like men, maneuver within specific social and cultural constraints” (2007, 288). There is therefore no magical bullet to relieve women from the heinous practice before the nation is shaken and reeducated. Women engage female circumcision not as a “superstition” or “ignorance” “but from reason within the parameters of cultural knowledge: they sought to create prop- erly gendered moral persons” ( 2007, 288). The moral of the story: “For the campaign against pharaonic circumcision to succeed on its own terms required no less than a sweeping transformation of local gender logics, domestic relations, and embodied personhood” (2007, 288–289). Bodies Up for Grab This untenable alienation of women from the nation rests on the argument that nationalists valued tradition at the expense of their women. Scholars pursuing this line identify tradition with women who represent the purity and interiority of the nation. Sharkey’s study of nationalism as a solely male elite phenomenon maintains that nationalists traditionalized women to use their archaic customs as a “rationale for Sudanese nationalism . . . for</p>
<p>126 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 how else could one justify a separate Sudanese state within colonial bor- ders if there were no specific cultural practices to distinguish it?” (2003, 130). The nationalists opposed the law against female circumcision to stop the colonialists from prying the interior of their culture and to reinforce their struggle “to extricate themselves from colonial rule” (Boddy 2007, 273). 11 Colonial cultural interventions, in the perspective of the concept, challenged nationalists into defending this interiority. Women’s bodies, the subject of colonial reform, became “the principal vehicles through which that ‘tradition’ was expressed” (2007, 282). “Contesting” these bodies by the colonized and colonizers became the standard metaphor in feminists’ take on colonialism and nationalism. The “bodies of local women came to symbolize emergent nationhood” (Boddy 2007, 242). Beyond describing a drama of conflicting colonized and colonizers in the most general sense, the interiority concept leaves a lot to be desired. It apparently faults both nationalists and colonizers for contesting the body of colonized women. In blaming both sides equally, it shortchanges nation- alism. It does not only object to nationalism for ill-treating its women but also concedes to colonialism a savior role that goes against the grain of nationalism. The nation, in the logic of nationalism, is unsharable. The Manichaean struggle between colonialism and nationalism, in Fanon’s words, is irreconcilable, “for of the two terms, one is superfluous” (1968, 30). In siding with colonized women against colonizers and colonized men, the concept sounds neutral. But this is misleading for it feeds off deep-set colonial Western traditions of debating civilized and savages. In these traditions a colony is a “no woman’s country,” to invoke a title of a book about the Sudan published in 1954. 12 The right of the colonizer to appropriate the women of the colony rested on the belief that colonized men were either too protective of, or too brutal, to them. Colonizers held up “a society’s treatment of women . . . as evidence of its degree of 11 A better formulation of the interiority argument is provided by Nnaemeka. Although critical of invoking tradition to put down the women of the nation, Nnaemeka denies the colonial saviors any claim to cultural intervention in the colony. She maintains that African women were doubly victimized “first from within [their culture] and second from without” (2001, 174). 12 The writer of this book calls female circumcision the “disagreeable operation.” He agrees that much had been done in Sudan under British rule, but much more needed to be done “to remove the impression that this is the most disagreeable country in the world in which to be born a woman” (1954, 18–19).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 127 civilization” (Levine 2004, 6). In becoming an “index and a measure less of themselves than of men and societies,” (2007, 7) women were removed from the nation and made a subject of colonial rescue. In shunning both colonizer and colonized men, the concept of interiority drags all this colo- nial knowledge to the debate. Boddy does not see interiority as an exclusively male concern. Certain categories of women had had a horse in the race. In giving interiority a political content implicating both men and certain categories of women, she engenders interiority and the nation in a more challenging way. Both the British and the colonized nationalists, in Boddy’s view, wanted to take advantage of women sexuality and fertility. 13 She says: Government wanted a native population in satisfactory numbers, health, and outlook to secure the colony’s fiscal well-being and show-case imperial benevolence; Sudanese sought morally connected decedents and affines, the basis of man’s (and ultimately a woman’s) power, wealth, and prestige. To both, women’s bodies were resources to be controlled, and not only by men but by [older] women too. The regime’s plan to abol- ish infibulations contained both a threat to elder’s jurisdiction over female sexuality, and a promise to make women more prolific and improve their physical health. Edu- cated Sudanese did not reject European concepts of body, self, and society; indeed they embraced them, phrasing their concerns in the discourse of Western medicine and social theory. Yet they also expressed anxiety over potential erosions of family integrity and indigenous male authority (2007, 273). Elder women are evidently implicated in the politics of interiority. Yet tradition and purity were not a consensus even with elite national- ism. Nationalists, one need to be reminded, were not of one mind on these issues to lump them all indiscriminately to one side in contesting their women’s bodies with the colonizers. Viewed closely, Sudanese elite nation- alists had been openly engaging and debating the interiority of the nation in a variety of ways. Boddy rightly describes the 1942 discussions about female circumcision at the Khartoum Culture Center, 14 in which nationalists took opposing sides on the issue, as a debate “over whether to “indgenize modernity” or to “modernize indigenity” (2007, 283). The progressives 13 Abusharaf puts it like this: “From a nationalist standpoint, women have to be con- trolled to make the nation possible—just as, from a colonialist standpoint women’s power must be circumscribed, their bodies governed, to inscribe colonial rule” (2006, 224). 14 Incidentally, the membership of the Center was open to the British of the colonial service in the country. Holding a debate on this most sensitive national cultural issue of the nation in such a place, questions the reality of the interiority argument.</p>
<p>128 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 among them recognized that not all traditions were good for the nation. They knew that they had bad tradition, identified commonly as ‘adat dara (harmful customs), and were made the target of their criticism. Reference to these customs included pharaonic circumcision as evidenced by what “Ibn al-Sudan,” a pen-name, wrote in al-Nahda (Renaissance) (November 29, 1931), a cultural renaissance forum, criticizing the practice among a range of customs including shulukh (marks for the beautification of cheeks) and washam (tattooing of women’s gums and lips) (Saad 1976, 130). It is important to emphasize here that the nationalists who called for the emancipation of women acknowledged in no uncertain terms that the West and its rationalism, not necessarily Islam, as their point of reference. Mahmud Ali Hamdi, a physician, poet, and advocate of women’s rights, argued that rationalism and progress would sweep the Sudan “stupid cus- toms” repressing women into the bin of history (El-Amin, 1982, 194– 196). The model of the West was irresistibly attractive to these Congress graduates. Muhammad Abd-al-Halim, a physician and a literati, published a lecture he gave at Gordon College in al-Fajr (The Dawn), a forum for imagining the nation in the 1930s, in which he frankly stated that they had been stuck with the West: “We aspire like Westerners for the same higher ideals, we think similarly and we possess feelings and sensi- tivities they also possess. We may even exceed them in this respect. We see how advanced they are and we wish we had covered the same distance” (Saad 1976, 236). Similarly, opponents of British cultural intervention like Amin Babiker had other than Islam as a point of reference. Nationalisms in other places gave them food for thought. Boddy thinks Babiker’s position of adopting a modified pharaonic circumcision sounded “much like Kenyatta—whose book Facing Mountain Kenya (1938), he may have found in the [Khartoum Cultural] Center’s library” (2007, 271). He is quoted making reference to Kenya in forewarning against the “social consequences of introducing European ways” (2007, 272). These Western-ward elites were not shy in advocating their liberalism no matter what. Al-Nahda before al-Fajr was even more daring in discuss- ing women’s rights in 1931–1932. A heated exchange on women’s rights took place on the pages of the magazine between Hamdi, the impassioned rationalist referred to earlier, and his own father who used a pen-name: “A Reactionary.” This reactionary took his son and his ilk to task for wrongly and provocatively exposing too much of the interior of the nation. The editor was persuaded to terminate the debate when it was feared that it</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 129 might have gotten out of hand, and he did. But the progressives would not be censored lying down. Abu Shama, a physician, wrote that the editor had wanted us to stop debating matters pertaining to half the nation. Men’s issues, he maintained, if discussed in isolation of those of women, would be mere empty talk (Saad 1976, 272). Discourse genres mattered in debating the interiority of the nation. In the self-examination the Sudan underwent under British colonialism, the use of the proper genres to criticize tradition is critical to the efficacy and durability of the enterprise. Poetic or artistic license was employed to make the attack on tradition palatable. Insightfully, Mahasin Saad (1976) brings in the genre concept to gauge the involvement of liberal nationalists in the fight for the liberation of women. As early as the 20s, Khalil Farah, a nationalist singer and poet, protested sequestering women: You who have been overprotected Rise up, shake your slumber Girls from other countries have raced past you taking the prize you deserve most In the express train that just sped past you Fearing censorship, these elites resorted to writing stories to debate their cause by other means. The fictional resources of a story suited their pur- pose. Saad specifically discusses a short story titled “A Disappointment” published in al-Nahda (15 November, 1931) by no other than Abu Shama whom we have seen protesting closing the doors of the debate on women’s emancipation. In the story, a young man, who desires to marry a woman he loved, ends up marrying his cousin according to the established tradi- tion of “covering one’s plate,” that is, marrying into one’s family, the closer the better. Abd al-Halim Muhammad, the physician and strong supporter of ending female circumcision, also wrote stories by way of continuing promoting the cause of women’s liberation. A young lover in one of his stories is surprised by the small love talk his loved one exchanges with him. Not expecting this skill from a tradition-bound girl, he asks her from where she got all this flirting. She says, “I learned my love from sitting under the shinning moon. If you [men] succeeded in denying us every right, you surely failed to prevent both breeze and its intelligent tunes from wafting past us. You cannot stand in the way of both the lightening and its dazzling shine, or the pitch blackness to envelop us. These elements teach us how to love under the shining moon” (Saad 1976, 278).</p>
<p>130 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 A cursory look at other Sudan nationalisms will show that interiority is a non-issue in these movements. In them, the nation was turned inside out for all and sundry to see. In a neighborhood in Omduramn town, al- Sayyid al-Makki, a den of illustrious nationalists such as Ismail al-Azhari, Abdalla Khalil, and Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub, poor women worked as hair braider, Zar officials, beer brewers, food makers, and prostitutes 15 . Nation- alists did not claim these poor women’s bodies to protect the inside of the nations as assumed by the critics of colonial nationalism. Contrary to the interiority concept, working class women unabashedly embraced colonial modernity. A famous woman folksong of the 40s derides traditional life calling village “a son of a bitch” in praising a certain town for showing them the light of modernity. These women wanted to join their husbands who had migrated to towns because village life was tough. For example, they brought water from the river or wells. Worst of all, in the absence of a husband, a woman was dominated by a mother-in- law. The songs of these women, “who looked back in anger” to tradition, equate going to town with liberation from village routines: O Son of my aunt (husband) If you really want my comfort and happiness Send me the vouchers for a ticket to join you [In town] I will pour drinking water from the tap Cook in a pot that has a lid And go to Khartoum and rest And every Friday we pay homage to our saint’s tomb (Ibrahim 1996). Women bodies, like men bodies, were up for grab as long as the colonial government was the largest employer in the country. As an employer, the government referenced women bodies in determining wage scales. For example, colonialists paid women 4/5th of what they paid to men on the excuse that their productivity was lower than men. They also subjected them to the musahra (monthly contract) by which a working woman would be categorized as “unclassified” (on temporary, monthly contract) on her pregnancy. This would have denied her rights to retirement benefits (Sudan Women’s Union 1978, 60). A woman employee, whose family 15 From Fatima Mahjub Osman’s unpublished memoirs growing up in this neighbor- hood. In 1968, Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub Osamn, her brother and the communist leader, told me that he kept his distance from a watch group that had wanted to remove these public houses from the neighborhood.</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 131 depended on her, has to sacrifice either work or marriage ( Sawt al-Mara January 1961, 24–26). Furthermore, the interiority thesis will find it hard to explain the par- ticular configuration of contestation over wages. In negotiating wages, workers were not only willing to negotiate their wives’ bodies with the colonialists as employers but also they stood to benefit if the British had negotiated in good faith. Women workers, teachers and nurses, sought the help of male workers in redressing their bad terms of service. Congress nationalists, the ones specifically concerned with tradition as purity, did not address this unequal payment until way into the independence period in 1968 under pressure from women unions and trade unions. Impor- tantly, women graduates were not subjected to this injustice at all (The Sudan women’s Union 1978, 60). It was working people’s organizations of leftist persuasion that battled this discrimination. The mushara was only abandoned in 1962 thanks to the unrelenting work of the Women Teach- ers’ Union supported by the Sudan Workers’ Trade Union Federation. Sawt al-Mara , the forum of the SWU, had uncovered this injustice in various stories and was jubilant for the removal of the policy from govern- ment books ( January 29, 1960, 29). Women bodies unraveled down to their lingerie in these wage negotia- tions. In determining rates of pay, the government used a cluster of “fam- ily baskets.” For fixing the salary of an unskilled laborer, the government used a yardstick of the worker, his wife, and two children at a “conven- tional level of subsistence based on budget inquires” conducted in the capital city, Khartoum, in 1950 (Fawzi 1957, 138). Interiority did not withstand this probing of the domestic sphere. The family basket for 1952 detailed the needs of a worker’s wife down to qurqab (a cheap, poplin fabric covering a woman’s body from the waist down) and firka (a qruqab - like lion, a night gown of a sort evocative of sexual symbolism in everyday discourse). Workers nationalism did not find this “lingerie” talk offensive (Abd al-‘Aal 1999, 62). Additionally, working class nationalists were not ashamed parading their women bodies in support of their cause. “The first women to demonstrate in the Sudan were nurses from Khartoum hospital who took part in a silent protest of workers during a general strike on 26/8/1951” (Cross 1997, 253n). The concept also fails miserably to explain cases in which the colonizers were called upon to arbitrate a dispute between the colonized over the body of their women. Robertson, the British civil secretary of the governor general of the Sudan, wrote in September 29, 1950 about a labor dispute</p>
<p>132 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 in which it was the colonized men rather who had been at loggerhead over their women’s body. Dr. Muhammad, whom we have seen calling for the emancipation of women in the 30s, punished a nurse dresser “very severely and rather illegally.” Although admitting irregularities in disciplining the nurse, Muhammad was not “ready to climb down, as this would destroy the discipline in the hospitals and would result in several Sudanese Doc- tors resigning because they had not been supported” by the department of health. The nurses’ union, dominated by male nurses, protested this unjustly treatment and wanted the punishment rescinded. The union decided to go in strike in protest against these disciplinary measures. 16 The interiority thesis will also be hard put to explain why the colonizers themselves did not see eye to eye relevant to negotiating the bodies of colonized women. Representing this national contestation as a drama of two, colonized and colonizer men, not only does not account for colonial women’s interest in the same bodies but also why was that interest at vari- ance of their men. Truthful to their feminism, the imperial feminist cru- saders did not see colonial men as eligible to negotiate with the nationalists the body of colonized women. Elaine Hills-Young, who wrote a report subtitled “Surgical Seal of Chastity,” did not expect much from the British men in the Sudan administration for “males could hardly be expected” to view the matter “with the same sympathy and sense of urgency as women” (Boddy 2007, 277–278). She saw colonized and colonial men bonding and ganging up to put down the women of the colony. The case of the French women’s jealousy of “rescued” Algerians discussed by Fanon is illustrative of this complex contestation over colonial bodies. Fanon says that European women shunned “saved,” (1965, 42) unveiled Algerian women and felt “a certain uneasiness in the presence of these women” (1965, 44). In being threatened by these bare-faced, native women whose unabashed bodies had “lost all awkwardness,” the European women had no “choice but to make common cause with the Algerian man” who allegedly despised the depravity of his unveiled woman. These European women would ally with the devil itself for being “challenged on the level of feminine charm, of elegance” (1965, 44) by these native competitors. Furthermore, those who hold to the notion of interiority do not seem to be interested in differences in the forms and desires colonized and colo- nizer men bring to this contest over the female body. In analyzing the dreams of the colonialists, Fanon found that the “rending of the veil,” the 16 James Robertson to R.C. Mayall, SAD 522/11/65, September 23 and 29, 1950.</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 133 rescue operation, was always followed by rape: “a double deflowering” (1965, 45). He also notes that a colonialist never “dreams of an Algerian woman taken in isolation. . . . [He] always dreams of a group of women, suggestive of the gynaeceum, the harem—exotic themes deeply rooted in the unconscious” (1965, 46). This reconsideration of the interiority concept promises to open up the field for a study of Sudanese nationalisms (with a small “n” ) that will rec- oncile feminism to the nation. The Anti-Circumcision Crusade as Colonial Nonsense In their pious faith of the “silver lining” of the colonial mission, 17 modern- ists never stopped to question if the colonial state could have put this cul- tural mission into effect. They seem to have taken the word of the empire for it. This is the reason why they are convinced that the progressive, anti- circumcision law could not have failed except through nationalist agency or sabotage. Yet, scholars who examined the potential of the colonial state for missionizing concluded that it was too circumscribed to effect the changes it had advertised. They argue that its grave limitations were so restricting that it had to eventually give up on its alleged civilizing mission. Far from imputing bad faith to the colonialists for not following moder- nity through in the colonies, Gyan Prakash argues that the colonial state was basically not prepared for such a mission. As a state derived from a modern modality in the metropolis, it was seen by the colonialists as too good for the colonies. It therefore had to compromise its “pieties of prog- ress” on the grounds of the expediency and the exceptional circumstances of the colonies (1995, 3). Mahmoud Mamadni picked up from this hiatus between administration and culture to flesh out his concept of “colonial moral surrender.” The concept describes a shift in colonial perspective and practice that occurred in the colonial state substituting the civilizing mis- sion with a law-and-order administration (1996, 109). A former district commissioner in the Sudan put this shift in colonial perspective in sharp relief. In a reflective mood at a conference in 1982, 17 Lata Mani argues that “even the most anti-imperialist amongst us has felt forced to acknowledge the ‘positive’ consequences of colonial rule for certain aspects of women’s lives, if not in terms of actual practice, at least at the level of ideas about ‘women’s rights’.” She concedes that colonialism was “a partial modernizing force” and we should be warned from seeing it as a narrative of progressive modernization (1992, 120).</p>
<p>134 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 Eliot Balfour, a member of the Sudan colonial service (1932–1954), con- fessed that the colonial regime in the Sudan exhausted its mission in 1926. This was the year when the regime finished building the Sennar Dam which facilitated the irrigation of an extensive cotton scheme in the coun- try. After that, he said, there had been a hiatus. “Nobody really knew; the task has been done,” he said, “we were carrying the same old thing and not quite certain where we were going” (in Lavin 1991 Vol. 1, 32). The political irrelevance of the colonial state led J.C. Heesterman to call it a “facsimile of a state.” His (1978) is devoted to laying bare the basic disabilities of this state. Its original sin, according to him, was that it had been taken out and set apart from society (1978, 54). Instead, it created in India a situation in which Indians and British impinged on each other but they had their being in different worlds. Their encounters were incidental and limited to specific activities and only for the duration of the activity (1978, 54). To preserve itself from the run-away effects of involvement in society, the colonial government refused to work with Indian influence networks and their leaders. Instead, it dealt with categories and legal abstractions. In the cases where it had to widen or deepen its dealings with the society, it did so by reducing total situations—the fluid and multidi- mensional web of relations that is the substance of society—to abstract models amenable to impersonal rule and regulations (1978, 53). Conse- quently, the society became more parochial and fragmented because it lost much of its diffuse but effective coherence (1978, 54). I will use these various analyses of the predicament of colonial gover- nance to argue the futility of the faith modernists have in the colonial state and its ability to deliver on its campaign against pharonic circumcision. In overlooking this governance difficulty of the colonial state, modernists tend to be selective, or rather arbitrary, in their endorsement of the mod- ernizing practices of colonialism. For of all the gendered policies of the British in the Sudan, modernists have been fond of the anti-circumcision law blinded to other facets of these policies. But this law to rescue colo- nized women will be better judged in light of other laws that did not take women’s interests to heart. Elsewhere (2008), I discussed the discourse of custom at the heart of indirect rule to which the British in the Sudan made a dramatic turnabout after the elite-led, nationalist revolution in 1924 (Abdin 1985, 84, 98–103; Kurita 1997, 45). Indirect rule was arguably a moment of colonial remorse, dubbed a “colonial moral surrender” by Mamdani as indicated earlier,</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 135 when colonialists scurried to reverse the changes they had begun to effect on the communities under their sway. The injustices “tribal” women suffered under indirect rule have never been brought to bear on the allegedly colonial goodness in rescuing Suda- nese women from their patriarchy. 18 In the context of indirect rule the British put these women under the mercy of “tribal” custom by granting native courts a sharia (family law) jurisdiction on equal footing with gov- ernment sharia courts. The sharia of the native courts was however defined as Islamic practices modified by tribal customs. Sharia authorities pro- tested this break up of their unitary tradition to accommodate British fan- ciful administrative whims. To allow these chiefs’ courts to develop along their nativist lines, the British planned to close sharia courts in rural Sudan one court at a time (Ibrahim 2008, Chapter Two). In putting “tribal” women in the Sudan under the mercy of custom, the British had actually subjected them to a law that is far inferior to sharia. Customs are known to diverge, and sometimes remarkably so, from sharia law in certain communities and respecting certain rights (Abu Rannat 1960). However, the government had been cautioned as early as 1927 that when native custom diverged from the Islamic law applied by sharia courts, the latter would be viewed as more just. Unlike sharia, customs, for exam- ple, disinherit women in the understanding that the ultimate responsibil- ity for a woman and her minor children rests with her family. A man was astounded by an order of a sharia judge to give his sister an item of her inheritance. In total surprise, he retorted that the ruling was not Islam as they knew it but an alien rule imposed by the government in Khartoum (Osman 1985, 136). It did not take women long to discover that sharia courts had their interests at heart better than the courts of the patriarchy. Litigious, asser- tive women reached out even to British district commissioners, past formal and informal tribal mediation, in places where sharia courts had not existed. Reginald Davies, a district commissioner, was astonished in around 1920 to be asked to look into domestic disputes by a chief of a nomad 18 Abusharaf has revealed the working of colonial patriarchy in discussing the anti- circumcision crusade. “In an effort to prevent women from carrying out infibulations clan- destinely, the British inserted themselves as colonial authority figures within family and clan networks and reinforced structures of male dominance in Sudanese society” (Abusharaf 2006, 210).</p>
<p>136 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 Arab community. Aggrieved women apparently wanted their cases heard by other than the greybeards of the patriarchy. The chief openly said to Davies that he did not know what the women of the tribe had come to. “The women now want to walk before the men,” he said. Davies himself was awed by the assertiveness of these women. “[T]here is nothing meek or submissive about the wives who came demanding to be divorced,” he concluded (1957, 117–118). Modernist seem to be barking the wrong tree in blaming Taha for the collapse of the law. They viewed his defiant Rufa’a rebellion as undoubt- edly decisive factor contributing to the government’s failure to “enforce the law” (Mahmoud 2001, 72). They should have looked for no one else to blame for this failure but the colonial state itself. Attributing the death of the law to national resistance will not take us far in understanding its debacle. In revisiting this resistance, scholars concluded that it might have taken more than its share of credit for the demise of colonialism. Basic to this revision is accounting for the end of empire by investigating the inherent disabilities of the colonial state (Robinson 1972; Phillips 1989; Darwin 1991). I would use some of the conclusions drawn by the post- colonialists to argue, contrary to the modernists, that it is the colonial administration that bungled the 1946 anti-circumcision law. Nationalists only found a seam and they worked it. Of all the concepts going around in these studies I found Robinson’s “collaborative bargains” (1972) most pertinent to the case in view. Robin- son has a very low opinion of the competence of colonial governments in navigating the uncharted waters of politics in the colony. Thus, he attri- butes the success of nationalism to colonial rulers who, through messing up their “collaborative bargains” (Robinson 1972, 134) with local elites, “ran out of collaborators” (1972, 138). Colonialism was thus made sus- tainable at a prohibitive price and had to close down and leave (Darwin 1991, 95, 116). Uniquely, Robinson chose the Sudan as his case-study for the indigenous collaborators through whom the colonialists had extracted legitimacy for their authority (1972, 133–135). He highlights the various political phases in which the colonial state, constrained by conflicting local contexts, had to make ad hoc adjustment (Phillips 1989, 11–12). The campaign against female circumcision was a missed opportunity for the colonial state to strike a collaborative deal with the nationalists repre- sented by the Graduates’ Congress (1938). The administration was not initially averse to deal with these “effendis;” graduates of colonial schools occupying junior positions in the colonial state. However it shunned them</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 137 because of their 1942 memorandum to the administration. Although “respectfully phrased,” the Congress’s memorandum called for “granting the Sudan the right of self-determination, directly after . . . [the Second World] war” (Daly 1991, 158). Douglas Newbold, the civil secretary, was upset by the audacity of the Congress for meddling in questions that were the prerogative of the co-domino, Egypt and Britain. Thus, he unilaterally stopped all dealings with the Congress for forfeiting “the confidence of the Government” (1991, 158). The Advisory Council for Northern Sudan, which made pharaonic cir- cumcision a crime in 1946, was an outgrowth of this hiatus with the Con- gress. For the government had realized at that time that a Sudanese representative body had been an inevitable evolution in the post-Second World War era. Into this political vacuum the Congress’s memorandum stepped allegedly “rashly.” To disrupt the Congress’s bid to be the plat- form of the Sudanese once and for all, the British decided to establish this Advisory Council (1991, 161) saturated by the notabilia; tribal elites and religious dignitaries. The Congress boycotted it. Criticisms of the Council, which led the Congress to describe it as a “toothless talk-shop,” were not only legion but also justified. We will not be detained by them though. Suffice it to say that the government itself abandoned the Council in less than two years to establish a little more “democratic” institution to con- ciliate its restive tribal and religious elite allies (Daly 1991, 150). The refusal of the civil secretary to recognize the Graduates’ Congress attests to what Robinson sees as the colonial folly of wasting precious col- laborative bargains. The government could not have found a better indig- enous ally in its campaign against female circumcision better than the Congress. For just two years before being rebuffed by Newbold, the Con- gress adopted a social reform program with projects designed to fight pha- ronic circumcision (Beshir 1974, 157). Bluntly rejected by the British who favored an alliance with the notabilia, the graduates vehemently opposed the law prohibiting the practice. In their Maasi al-Inqliz fi al-Sudan (The Tragedies of English Rule in the Sudan) (1946), a Black Book of colonial misrule, they castigated the law for redundancy. Of all the forms of pov- erty, ignorance, and disease rampant in the country, the Black Book says, the Sudan’s Government Advisory Council “thought it fit to direct its urgent attention to trivial interference in the innermost affairs of the peo- ple.” The graduates took another jibe at the traditional dignitaries of the Council accusing them of hypocrisy and servility. Whereas these tradition- alists found the courage in themselves to legislate against practices that are</p>
<p>138 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 deep-set in the culture, they, supposedly the custodians of Islam, the Black Book goes on to say, found nothing wrong debating simultaneously the “ways and means whereby wines and spirits could best be dispensed to the Muslim population—a reference to the debate on the consumption of alcoholic liquor, which also took place in 1945” (Abd al-Rahim 1969, 151–152). The graduates could have been an ideal collaborative bargain had the British been adept in dealing with colonized influence networks such as the Graduates’ Congress. In fact this was a bargain in which the govern- ment invested time and energy to reconnect with the elite after their break up in 1924. The point that needs to be emphasized in the context of colo- nial mismanagement is that the Advisory Council was largely employed to drive a wedge between the moderates and radicals in the Congress, and to ruin its name “among rural notables, some of whom, although appointed to the council, were still nominal members of the Congress” (Daly 1991, 162–163). The factional feuds between the two currents in the Congress that led to the formations of the National Unionist Party and the Umma Party still haunts the nation. This government’s lack of collaborative tact has been rightly pointed by Daly: “The quick transformation of the Con- gress from the hope of the government into its bane is striking: so deep was the government’s misunderstanding of its junior civil servants” (in Boddy 2007, 282). 19 This opportunity to work on the 1946 law with an influence network of the colonized was missed by Robertson; a man who came to the wrong place at the wrong time. He succeeded Newbold as the civil secretary in 1945. Robertson was combative and hardly a wise replacement of New- bold, the celibate Shepherd of the British administration known for a “flair for consensus building” (Daly in Boddy, 2007, 286). Journalists still relate how they stopped the press in protest of Robertson’s loss of his cool by throwing his pen at them at a press conference. Unlike Newbold, who sought to work with educated Sudanese, albeit moderate, at the critical self-determination time, Robertson did not believe that the post-war period were times for “partnership” with the colonized, not “trusteeship”. He was certain that the Sudanese were “incapable of self-government” and “likely to degenerate without British stimulus and help.” This British sense 19 The British administration antagonized the labor movement just like it did to the Graduates. It only realized in 1956, the independence year, the significance of “getting the Sudanese unions into our camp before independence day” (Cross 1997, 247).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 139 of duty “reached almost obsessive proportions in the latter days of the Condominium rule. The onus to civilize is reflected in how officials handled the increasingly public and political matter of pharaonic circum- cision” (Daly quoted in Boddy 2007, 286). Not even after being rebuffed by Newbold did leading Congress offi- cials decline to cooperate with the British to abolish the habit. Mekki Shi- beika and Ibrahim Ahmed, a historian and engineer, respectively, at Gordon College, were on the Standing Committee on Female Circumci- sion formed by the civil secretary after the passing of the anti-circumcision law in 1946. Both had been on the Executive Committee of the Congress at various times (2007, 292). Ironically, it was Ibrahim Ahmed, the presi- dent of the Graduates’ Congress in 1942, whom the British told that the Congress had no business meddling in public policy. The structural failure of a colonial government to work with native influence networks and their leaders is amply illustrated by the British handling of the Society for the Abolition of Female Circumcision (Boddy 2007, 289). It arose in June 1945 (after the resolutions of the Advisory Council abandoning the barbarous habit) in the context of the propa- ganda campaign to prepare public opinion to the impending legislation against the practice. Boddy sees the Society as a mere gadget; “a fishing expedition, designed to flush out Sudanese sympathizers and shame the apathetic into signing on” (2007, 289). Although it was “publicly heralded as a ‘spontaneous’ move by Sudanese and others interested parties, it was backed by the [governor general] palace all the same” (2007, 290). Al-Rayaam , a moderate, leading nationalist daily disapproved the secrecy surrounding its formation and work because the Society neither publicized its formation and aims wide enough nor revealed the names of its officers for prospective members to see with whom they would be doing business on this vital issue (2007, 290). Colonial fabrications were afoot to “main- tain the façade” of autonomy claimed for the society. Mrs. Huddleston, the wife of a former governor general turned an imperial feminist, donated a large sum of money to the society, but was careful to suggest that her check be treated as “anonymous and hope it [appears] to be a Sudanese donation!” (2007, 291). The crusade to stop female circumcision was a bluff; an afterthought of the colonial civilizing mission that had gone awry. It is best understood as a variety of colonial nonsense defined by Bhabha as a colonial ambivalence resulting from the “incompatibility of empire and nation” (1994, 96). He means by this that colonialists experience tension for being pulled in oppo-</p>
<p>140 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 site directions between the “knowledge of [metropolitan] culture and the custom of [imperial] power” (1994, 129). Colonial nonsense is symptomatic of the “rule of colonial difference” served to reconcile the growth of demo- cratic ideals at home with the despotic rule of Empire abroad” (Sinha 2004, 183). Simply stated, colonial nonsense was the state in which the metropolis failed to recognize that its Enlightenment ideals had been sac- rificed to convene the colonial administrations of the empire. J.A. Gillan, a former civil secretary (1934–1939), symbolizes colonial nonsense at its best. He did not like the “barbarous” custom and began looking for a reason as he went. He swerved freely from the custom of power to the custom of the empire in his various statements on the bar- baric custom. In 1930, when he was the governor of Kordofan, he wanted the government to crack on the practice to protect the Nuba, “a primitive people who owed the British the duty of being their guardians” (Boddy 2007, 94) from contracting the practice from the northern Sudanese. He “chided senior officials for being unduly fearful of Muslim opinion” (2007, 262). He softened his tone though when he became one of these senior officials on his appointment as the civil secretary in 1934. His farewell words to the educated Sudanese in 1939 spoke to their freedom of choice. These words “would be easier to omit,” he wrote, but his “conscience and the claims of humanity counseled otherwise” ( 2007, 268). Acknowledg- ing being an “alien administrator” who knew his limits, he added that the British “do not ask you unduly to expedite the liberation of your women- folk. That is a matter of which only you in your good time, and in the light of educative processes, can judge. But can you wonder if some of us feel that there exists an indefinable but none the less real social barrier between us when they know that many of you . . . at least tolerate, if you do not encourage, the barbarous practice of female Pharaonic circumcision in your homes.” The practice itself, he stated, is “a sign against humanity and an obstacle to real progress in civilization” (2007, 269). Gillan however had a third about-face. On retirement, he joined the crusade against the practice and lamented in a letter-to-the-editor “a lack of real co-operation by the educated Sudanese” in the campaign against the practice. R.C. Mayall, the Sudan Agent in London, wished that Gillan had kept quiet for “the less said in the press the better . . . for the Sudan” (2007, 306). Gillan’s various fluctuations were nonsensical in that he had been jolted into them by sheer convenience. As a disease of the empire, colonial nonsense has never come through like in Boddy’s Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (2007).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 141 The book is a close, definitive, and critical reading of the colonial archive of the crusade to suppress female circumcision, or the colonial discourse of “Battling the Barbarous Custom” (2007, 202). At the expense of taking away from its subtle treatment of the subject, relying on idioms she picked from this archive, I will characterize the parties to this discourse, the colo- nial administration and the metropolis, as the “candor and evasive” and the “ cranks and enthusiasts,” respectively. Boddy uses “candor and evasive” to describe the delay tactics adopted by the colonial bureaucracy in the Sudan to hoodwink the imperial author- ities that had been probing their work fighting the barbarous custom. The first encounter of this bureaucracy with the inquisitive metropolis was in 1930. Moved by Katharine Mayo’s Mother India (1927) that judged Indi- ans unfit to govern themselves as long as they abjectly subordinated their women, a group of imperial feminists, led by Duke Atholl, a parliament member, sent a questionnaire to John Maffey, the governor general of the Sudan (1926–1933), to provide information on his efforts to stop female circumcision (2007, 233–236). The autocratic colonial state did not want any of the democratic habits of the metropolis. 20 The hoodwinking of the metropolis began by Maffey’s dispatches to Duke Atholl. These correspondences, it seems, were “hardly about to reveal more to Atholl’s committee than what the latter knew. Perhaps they already knew too much” (2007, 252). Maffey even told his staff that “direct contact with Athol should come to abrupt end.” Com- munication with the metropolis, he ordered, “would have to follow formal channels through the Foreign Office and High Commission in Egypt, lest a political slip be made” (2007, 253). Boddy concludes from reading the female circumcision archive that the metropolitan drive to stop the “barbarous custom” fell on deaf ears. Khar- toum authorities were unwilling to risk battling the custom for fear of putting their administration in jeopardy. The delay tactics of Khartoum authorities led Boddy to describe them as ever lukewarm in stopping the practice: “There seemed never a ‘good’ time for Khartoum to ensure that pharaonic circumcision stop, even had it the means to do so” (2007, 302). 20 Abolition of slave trade was also a tug of war between the colonial administration and the metropolis. The former was dragging its feet to effect the abolition. “Although officials condemned slavery ‘in theory,’” they “condoned it in practice, with the result that the whole issue grew to be shrouded in the coy veils of euphemism, slaves being referred to as ‘domestic servants’ . . . in legislation as in the official discourse as a whole” (Cross 1997, 226) .</p>
<p>142 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 The metropolis was of course aware that Khartoum authorities had been dragging their feet in this crusade. Sir Basil Neven-Spence, an imperial crusader, was convinced that the “grisly skeleton in the cupboard of the Sudan . . . had been masked by a sort of a conspiracy of silence backed by masterly inactivity at the highest level” (2007, 306). In their disapproval of the metropolitan prying of their work, Khar- toum authorities called this lobby at the center, for their ardent passion for reform based on little than ignorance, the “cranks and enthusiasts.” Maffey, the governor general, coined the term to describe these “ignorant critics” in the metropolis. He dubbed them grouch and impassioned to justify censoring the views of the Wolffs, Mable and Gertrude, the British offi- cials in charge of nurses and midwives, against the harms of female circum- cision lest they should be public knowledge in Britain. For if the Wolffs’ critical views were “thrown open” to these cranks and enthusiasts they would wreck the gradualist approach to female circumcision adopted by the government with promising results. Additionally, the cranks would “cause serious embarrassment” to his administration (2007, 258). Talking about enthusiasts; Athol had only heard about the practice in 1929 in a meeting held by the Church of Scotland Mission in London (2007, 234). A sample of cankerous imperial feminists: When Antony Eden, the foreign secretary suggested to Irene Ward, a parliamentarian, in 1944 that education, if they were patient enough, would take care of the barbarous custom, she was apparently sick and tired of this education “thing.” She said, “I am a little bored with hearing on so many things which are of importance that education is the only means of progress (2007, 278). Khartoum was not averse to muscle these cranks and enthusiasts to stop harassing the colonial administration. In 1949, three years after the prom- ulgation of the law, the Sudan agent in London was frothing with anger at the imperial feminists and their “fellow travelers” (2007, 307). What irked the agent was that these enthusiasts did not let the female circumcising matter to rest. He was afraid that hammering on the practice would turn the Sudanese students (“these boys”) in Britain (2007, 307) into commu- nists. He wanted to “keep these ‘ladies’ quiet” (2007, 307). He met with Hubert Huddleston, a former governor general of the Sudan, apparently to rein over his wife to no avail. She had promised him to keep silent as long as he had been in office. After that she was free to engage the practice (2007, 307). Huddleston also was going to do his share in the campaign (2007, 308).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 143 The colonial government might have yielded under metropolitan pres- sure and reluctantly played along. The British crusade to look into the practice in the Sudan “may have forced the hand of Sudan’s colonial mas- ters before they felt the time was politically opportune. Then again, it may already have been too late” (2007, 284). But the metropolitan victory would be short-lived. The law incriminating the custom in 1946 was a moment in which the metropolitan lobby seemed to have won the day. In leaving its implementation entirely in the hands of Khartoum authorities, the metropolitan lobby apparently lost control. Caught unprepared by the law, provincial administrators were reluctant to enforce it afraid that it might jeopardize the political atmosphere at the time. The law faded away because “[a]dministrators everywhere were too stretched to inquire into so difficult a subject” (2007, 304). It is reasonable to argue here that the law did not need Taha, as alleged, to write its death certificate. It was dead on arrival. The whole campaign to stop the barbarous custom was basically nonsensically conceived. The assumption behind it was that the Sudanese were neither able to help themselves nor capable of being helped. Boddy puts her finger on this paradox in the modernizing imperative: the Sudanese could not have been a party to it if they had wanted to (2007, 277). In her determination to stamp out the custom, Hills-Young called on the Sudan government to play an active role in the anti-circumcision crusade for the Sudanese “can- not be expected to help themselves in the matter without the assistance of public opinion in Great Britain and Government action in the Sudan.” Boddy reveals the “nonsequitur” in Hills-Young’s line of thinking: “that the Sudanese cannot be expected to help themselves without government assistance suggests they lack the ability to change even should they wish to comply with progressive ways” (2007, 277). What remained of the civiliz- ing mission for Taha to kill? Conclusion The debate over female circumcision, as noted by Boddy, was similar to the one about sati (widow burning) in India. It was “less about women than about what constituted civilization and the civilizing mission (Boddy 2007, 371 n30). The vilification of the practice, in John Camaroff ’s words, paints in the starkest terms the “barbaric margin [providing] a foil for European self-definition” (Abusharaf 2006, 213).</p>
<p>144 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 In the metropolis, female circumcision had names evoking the savagery of its practitioners such as “a barbaric custom;” “ritual mutilation;” African mutilation” (Boddy 2007, 307). 21 The nationalists were not unaware of this implication of the crusade. The timing of the British crusade against the practice alarmed them. In equating the practice with savagery, the British, in the view of the nationalists, were merely renewing their colonial mandate to rule the Barbarians with no end in sight. Taha was therefore not off the mark in identifying the campaign to abolish female circumcision as a perpetuation of a colonial legacy whose expiry date had since arrived. Phillipa Levine suggests that it was rather the imperialists who made the connection between a society’s treatment of women and the degree of civilizations attained by this society. This mea- sure is masculine in that the position of women “thus became a fulcrum by which the British measured and judged those they colonized. Women became an index and a measure less of themselves than of men and of societies” (2004, 6–7). The racial overtones in this standard are too obvious. Naturally, this debate on savages and civilization invoked the memory of Gordon of Khartoum and the Mahdi of Allah; the two saints at the polar ends of the drama of light and darkness holding the history of the nineteenth-century Sudan in its grip. Boddy makes the interesting link between the raising of a question in the British parliament on January 26, 1949, the anniversary of Gordon, and reviving “the regime’s mythico- history and sense of obligation to Sudanese” (2007, 305). A spate of letters to the editor invoked this civilizing mission. Neven-Spence castigated the Sudanese, for by allowing the mutilation of their women, they “stand con- demned in the eyes of the civilized world as being themselves barbarious [ sic ] and uncivilized” (2007, 306). The message was not missed on by the nationalists. This is why they met iron with iron as the Arabic expression goes: the British crusade was met with jihad. In his Friday sermon in Rufa’a, Taha said to the worshippers: “This is not the day to worship in khalawa s (Quranic madrasas) and zawaiyya s (Sufi shrines). This is the jihad time” (Osamn, Rufa’a Archive, Sudaneseonline ). These religious implications of the confrontation are sen- 21 Nnaemeka puts her finger on this Western power of naming other people’s practices to degrade them: “Westerners are quick to appropriate the power to name, while remaining totally oblivious of and/or insensitive to the implications and consequences of the naming.” It was an institution of the caliber of the German Bundestag that declared in 1998 that “the term ‘circumcision’ shall no longer be used by the government” (2001, 178).</p>
<p>“Keep These Women Quiet” 145 sitively picked up by Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub, a poet and Taha’s associate who parted ways with him in the late 1940s. In a poem praising Taha for his staunch stand against the British in 1946, he evokes the mem- ory of al-Mahdi, Gordon’s nemesis, in a “writing back” mode: Bring us dawn, and wipe out a night to which sun has not undimmed Fifty years [of a colonial] rule vulgarizing the country with the culture of rouges and low-born If Gordon fell [killed by the Mahdists] followed by his eunuchs let them know that the sword is still unsheathed You [Taha] are the free and who, except you, represent a freedom modeled after the Prophet? I am the young poet whose poems flow with history and hope Importantly, the debate amongst the Sudanese surrounding Taha’s role in the Rufa’a revolution raises the issue of colonial knowledge and national research projects on decolonization. Evidently our indigenous experience of the Rufa’a revolution was framed by imperialism (Smith 1999, 28). It is our colonial experience that traps us in the project of modernity by means of theories built on the assumption of “modern” and “traditional” societ- ies. The validity of these theories rests on the Enlightenment that formal- ized the European negative views about the other through science, philosophy, and imperialism, into explicit systems of classification and “regimes of truth” (1999, 38). The modernization theory, the culmination of the Enlightenment, has been under fire for polarizing the “traditional” and the “modern.” The production and investment in its key words, tradi- tion and modernity, critics argue, has gone largely unexamined (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 15) Critics specifically faulted the theory for ignoring the power at the root of these binary oppositions. Taha clearly was a victim of a regime of truth of a colonial setting wrought by colonial power conflicts. A man who was not traditional in any meaningful sense was “traditionalized” by fiat by an Enlightenment, colonizing project that went awry. A freedom-loving per- son like him found himself vilified for posterity to the relief of a confused colonial administration. Taha could have been an ally in this campaign, but he, and his class of nationalists, had never been genuinely solicited to lend a hand in a sustained, respectful way. The administration took a leap in the dark with a law it had been avoiding its legislation like a plague. For not distancing themselves from the certainties of imperial cam- paigns, Taha’s critics did not see the specific custom targeted for reform as</p>
<p>146 A. A. Ibrahim / HAWWA 9 (2011) 97–151 part of the spectrum of women at risk in the colony (Paddle 2003, 24). Abd al-Halim is right on target when she takes exception of Taha’s critics: “Apparently it was not Taha and men in Rufa’a town who were responsi- ble for society’s inability to see harm in FC [female circumcision]. The complexity of the issue is beyond this single incident” (Abdel Halim 2006, 39). She agrees with Abusharaf in that the efficacy of female circumcision laws is conditioned on women coming “to the forefront as active advocates of eradication . . . when women demand their passage and enforcement” (2006, 39). The conflicted view about Tahas’ feminist legacy arose from a sorrowful dichotomy in scholarship about the Sudan. The culturally sensitive femi- nist writings about female circumcision in the country have failed to influ- ence the writing of the narrative of Sudanese nationalism. In this narrative the claims of colonial modernity to civilize the “natives” (like rescuing colonial women from their male oppressors) has been widely accepted. Worse, this rescue mission is currently missed and nostalgically remem- bered as a golden past by both scholars and lay people who were turned off by the disarray of independent Sudan. Drawing on post-colonialism, the paper sought to bridge the gulf between these two scholarships to reha- bilitate the feminist outlook and praxis of Taha, a consummate, different nationalist. The colonial rescue concept, or modernity, is viewed here as a form of “colonial nonsense” as developed by Bhabha (1994, 131). This nonsense is evidence of the sterility of colonialism, an alleged modernist project, torn between the demands of the metropolis raised in the custom of democracy, and the administrative constraints of the colony mired in the custom of power. Bibliography Archives SAD: Sudan Archives at Durham University (England) Osman, Rufa’a Archives: a past and present record of Rufa’a revolt on Sudaneseonline , the worldwide internet. Papers and Magazines Al-Adath (Sudan) Al-Haya (Sudan) Al-Rayaam (Sudan) Sawt al-Mara (Sudan) Sudanile (on the internet) Sudanow (Sudan)</p>
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