African Interventionist States by Roy May

Author:Roy May [May, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781840149890
Google: 0JU4DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1980455
Publisher: Ashgate Pub Ltd
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Islamic Militants and External Intervention

The Islamists who seized power through a coup in 1989 did not have a clearly defined foreign policy, but in the succeeding years they soon formulated one. In particular the leading figure, both ideologically and organisationally, Dr Hassan al-Turabi, soon came out with his vision of Sudan’s external relations, and actively trumpeted it around the world.

His vision was essentially Islamist in character. He argued that Muslims should be linked at a number of different levels. At base Muslims belonged together in households, but also in wider communities, right up to the Commonwealth of Muslims: dar al-Islam, and the Umma (the community of Muslims). This was not to be regarded as a single monolithic structure, so much as an inspiration towards which all Muslims were obliged to strive. Non-Muslims could find their place in dar al-Islam, as they had always done in the past. European imperialism had destroyed the last great pan-Islamic achievement, the Ottoman Empire, but there was a long tradition of seeking such an ambition. Writers since Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the nineteenth century had called for such an aim, and the revolt of Mohamed Ahmed al-Mahdi in Sudan had sought (unsuccessfully) to take his message of purifying Islam far beyond Sudan’s borders.

After the crushing experience of European imperialism had come nationalism and other ideologies, but all had failed, and with them the nation-state had been a ‘resounding failure’.3 Though the Muslim countries had established the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), it was led by pro-Western states which were dependent and manipulated (as shown in the Gulf War), and was therefore politically impotent and totally unrepresentative of the ‘true spirit of the community that animates the Muslim people’. Instead, ‘as Muslims tend towards their common ideals, they would perforce move towards closer unity; and that would undermine the moral foundation and the positive structures of the present nation state … However, once a single fully-fledged Islamic state is established, the model would radiate throughout the Muslim world’ becoming in time ‘a focus of pan-Islamic attention and affection’. It was his view that Sudan after 1989 was in the process of becoming just such a beacon. ‘Muslims would forever aspire to the ultimate ideal of the caliphate restored, of one central authority that holds the Muslim world together’, though ‘countries may remain as areas of self-management for the full enrichment of Islam in the particular environment’.

However Turabi did not envisage that the dar al-Islam had to be achieved by confrontation and force, ‘the present trend towards unity derives more from the inside revival of Islam, as spirituality for society, rather than the excitation of Islam as the battle cry … It is the common enemy that draws Muslims together’.4 It would prove less a threat, than a ‘positive contribution to the human community in general’.

In order to give expression to his views, in 1991 Turabi was the leading light in the establishment in Khartoum of the Popular Islamic and Arabic Conference (PIAC). Representatives of the

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