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Berridge, W. J. "Communists, Islamists, Ba'athists and Sectarians: The Political Parties in 1964 and 1985." Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan: The ‘Khartoum Springs’ of 1964 and 1985. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 65–93. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474219969.0008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 09:30 UTC. Copyright © W. J. Berridge 2015. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 Communists, Islamists, Ba ’ athists and Sectarians: Th e Political Parties in 1964 and 1985 Middle Eastern analysts have argued that in the second half of the twentieth century, political parties identifying with a pluralist democratic system were not signifi cant actors on the regional political scene. 1 Similarly, Africanist literature for the most part treats multi-party politics as a serious phenomenon only aft er the great wave of liberalization in the 1990s. 2 Th erefore, it is unsurprising, that a number, though not all, of the Sudanese participants and observers of the 1964 and 1985 uprisings have sought to downplay the role of the political parties. 3 Nevertheless, a number of factors should be taken into consideration before dismissing the role played by the parties in Sudan. First of all, the very fact that the two uprisings did succeed in returning genuine multi-party democracy to the country, albeit for relatively brief periods, ensured that none of the Sudanese parties spent as long a period in political occultation as their counterparts elsewhere in the region. Moreover, the two military regimes ’ experimentation with periods of ‘ liberalized autocracy ’ in which they co-opted diff erent parties (or factions of parties) at diff erent times also enabled these same parties to continue exercising infl uence. Th e political parties that participated in the uprisings of both 1964 and 1985 shared a number of common features – fi rst of all, they mainly traced their origins back to the late colonial period. Secondly, they all operated out of Khartoum and relied principally on a northern Sudanese constituency. However, a distinction is usually made between the modern ideological parties established by the educated elite of the University of Khartoum (Gordon College before independence), particularly the Sudan Communist Party and Muslim Brotherhood, and the so-called ‘ traditional ’ parties that were sponsored by the Ansar and Khatmiyya religious orders. Th e ‘ traditional ’ parties included the Umma Party, which was established in 1945 by Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, the Imam of the Ansar religious movement. Th e Ansar movement itself dates back to the 1880s, when it was founded by Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, the grandfather of Sayyid Abd al-Rahman, to aid his war against the Turco-Egyptian colonizers of Sudan. Although the Mahdist Ansar were defeated by the British in 1898, Sayyid Abd al-Rahman developed an intimate relationship with the colonial administration and was able to rebuild the economic and political power of the Ansar movement, particularly through his patronage of various CCivilivil UUprisings.indbprisings.indb 6655 110/23/20140/23/2014 44:17:20:17:20 PPMM 66 Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan cotton farming schemes on the White and Blue Niles. He used this power-base to campaign for Sudanese independence in the 1940s and 1950s. Th e Khatmiyya Sufi order, on account of its close commercial relationship with Egypt, sponsored rival political parties that supported unity between Egypt and Sudan. In 1944, Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani granted his support to the Ashiqqa ’ ( ‘ blood brothers ’ ) party, which had been formed by young graduates in the previous year to advocate for unity with Egypt. Th is party had morphed into the National Unionist Party (NUP) by the time of the 1953 elections, and its leader Isma ’ il al-Azhari became Sudan ’ s fi rst prime minister aft er having abandoned the principle of amalgamation with the country ’ s northern neighbour. In 1957, a rift within the party led to a splinter movement forming the People ’ s Democratic Party (PDP), which drew the support of the majority of the Khatmiyya. Th e party was still split at the time of the October Revolution of 1964, but the two rival groups amalgamated themselves into the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 1967. Th ese parties consistently outperformed the more ‘ ideological ’ parties at the polls during elections in Sudan ’ s periods of multi-party parliamentary democracy between 1953 – 8, 1964 – 9 and 1986 – 9, refl ecting the infl uential presence of the Ansar and the Khatmiyya in the rural areas of northern, eastern, western and central Sudan. However, they found it much harder to obtain the support of Sudan ’ s educated elites, who tended to identify with the ideological movements emanating from the wider Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century. Sudanese students who had completed educations in Egypt brought back with them the ideals of the Egyptian communists and the Muslim Brotherhood, although the local ideological movements that began to emerge as a result in the 1940s usually had a specifi cally Sudanese outlook. Th e Islamic Liberation Movement, which was established by Babikir Karrar in 1948, became the most dominant faction among the various Sudanese groupings infl uenced by Egyptian political Islam. Karrar clashed with individuals such as Ali Talaballah who believed that the Sudanese movement should incorporate itself into the Egyptian parent organization. 4 In spite of the desires of the Sudanese Islamists to be not too closely identifi ed with the Egyptian movement, in 1955 they established an ‘ Executive Bureau ’ to represent the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun ) in Sudan, which would elect a ‘ general supervisor ’ ( muraqib al-aam ). 5 Th is ‘ executive bureau ’ would sponsor a number of political parties – the ILM between 1955 and 1964, the Islamic Charter Front (ICF) between 1964 and 1985 and the National Islamic Front (NIF) between 1985 and 1989. Confusingly, these parties are usually referred to by non-Islamists as the ‘ Muslim Brotherhood ’, although there were a number of other factions, such as Babikir Karrar ’ s Islamic Socialist Party (formed in 1964) and Sadiq Abdullah ’ s Muslim Brotherhood, that also identifi ed with the original movement. Further terminological confusion followed Hasan al-Turabi ’ s decision to rename the Muslim Brotherhood organization the ‘ Islamic Movement ’ following the 1964 Revolution to emphasize the uniqueness of the Sudanese Islamist experience6 – many of the movement ’ s opponents continued to use the ‘ Brotherhood ’ label. Th e Sudan Communist Party emerged in a fashion similar to that of the various Islamist parties, being established by Sudanese students in Cairo as a branch of the Egyptian Communist Party in 1944, and then emerging as a movement in its own right in 1946 when it founded the Sudanese Movement CCivilivil UUprisings.indbprisings.indb 6666 110/23/20140/23/2014 44:17:20:17:20 PPMM Communists, Islamists, Ba’athists and Sectarians 67 for National Liberation. 7 Th is party was outlawed by the British colonial government, the Sudanese parliamentary regime that followed it and Abboud ’ s military regime.8 As such, it already had a long history of underground political activity by the time of the October Revolution. Just as was the case in the aft ermath of the Arab Spring, the various political parties made a variety of highly contested claims regarding their participation in the 1964 and 1985 uprisings. Representatives of these parties have frequently attempted to claim that their political opponents had either failed to contribute to the civilian insurrections, or actively opposed them. When specifi c parties maintained that their rivals had ‘ opposed ’ the uprisings, what this oft en really meant was that they opposed the vision of the Revolution that they had tried to create during the transitional periods (see Chapters 6 and 7). Meanwhile, political ‘ neutrals ’ who were not members of these parties have tended to insist that the role of the political parties was irrelevant to the outcome of the Revolution, and to highlight the role of the professional elites, or the ‘ Sudanese people ’ in general. A number of politicians in their dotage such as Muhammad Ibrahim Nugd and Hasan al-Turabi now downplay the role of their own parties – although the latter perhaps has his own motives for doing so. A number of the accusations that specifi c parties ‘ opposed ’ either the 1964 or 1985 uprisings highlight the relationship of these parties with the state in 1964 and 1985. Both the SCP in 1964 and ICF in 1985 were accused of having been ‘ in cahoots ’ with the defunct regimes following their overthrows. While it will be seen that the ICF had a closer, if not necessarily a more harmonious, relationship with Nimeiri in 1985 than the SCP did with Abboud in 1964, we must beware of establishing binary models of ‘ collaboration ’ or ‘ opposition ’ . As Sami Zubaida has observed, the state in the Middle East is not so much a homogeneous entity as a ‘ political fi eld ’ in which various social and political factions compete for infl uence.9 Nimeiri ’ s state was particularly porous in this regard. All the major northern political groups – the Umma, DUP, ICF, SCP, Ba ’ athists and Nasserists – either actively identifi ed with it or drew support from it at some point. Most parties oscillated between seeking absorption within the state or actively seeking to overthrow it, which was the cause of much internal factionalism within these same parties. Hasan al-Turabi, the Ikhwan and campus mobilization Debates over the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1964 tend to focus on the actions of Hasan al-Turabi, which, as illustrated in Chapter 1, were genuinely signifi cant.