One of the vehicles which
has been used by the Clinton Administration in its anti-Sudanese
campaign has been the federally-funded U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom. This body was brought into
being by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, passed
by the United States Congress. The Act requires an annual
report on religious freedom. The Commission published its
first report at the end of 1999. It perhaps comes as no
surprise that Sudan features among the five countries cited
as "countries of particular concern". The others
were China, Iran, Iraq, and Myanmar. The Commission has
gone out of its way to focus on Sudan. Indeed, at the March
2000 United Nations Commission on Human Rights meeting in
Geneva, Rabbi David Saperstein, the chairman of the U.S.
Commission on International Religious Freedom, and Ambassador
Robert Seiple, U.S. Ambassador-at-large for international
religious freedom, devoted almost all their time on Sudan
during their discussions with non-governmental organisations
and the press. It perhaps also comes as no surprise that
Saudi Arabia was not singled out in the Congressionally-funded
Commission's first annual report on religious freedom. nor
was Saudi Arabia, or any other countries apart from Sudan
and China, mentioned in the comments of Rabbi Saperstein
and Ambassador Seiple during their presentation at the Commission
on Human Rights.
The blatant double standards of the U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom are central to its usefulness to the Clinton
Administration. These double standards were highlighted by
the fact that the Commission has also taken a stance, on grounds
of "religious freedom" against investment in Sudanese
oil projects, while it remains mute with regard to the Saudi
Arabian oil industry. It is a matter of record that the Sudanese
government has on several occasions invited the U.S. State
Department's Committee on Religious Freedom, the Commission's
forerunner, to visit Sudan to assess at first hand the religious
situation in Sudan. They never visited.
What is self-evident is that while successful as a propaganda
projection, the image of Sudan presented by the Commission,
that of an intolerant Islamic regime, is simply not borne
out by reality, in theory or in practice. Dr Hasan Turabi
has been seen as the architect of Sudan's present Islamic
model. He was elected speaker of the Sudanese Parliament in
1996. In a 1995 interview Dr Turabi outlined his concepts
of Islamic government and society:
What would an Islamic Government mean?.The model is
very clear; the scope of government is limited. Law is
not the only agency of social control. Moral norms, individual
conscience, all these are very important, and they are
autonomous. Intellectual attitudes toward Islam are not
going to be regulated or codified at all. The presumption
is that people are free. The religious freedom not just
of non-Muslims, but even of Muslims who have different
views, is going to be guaranteed. I personally have views
that run against all the orthodox schools of law on the
status of women, on the court testimony of non-Muslims,
on the law of apostasy. Some people say that I have been
influenced by the West and that I border on apostasy myself.I
don't accept the condemnation of Salman Rushdie. If a
Muslim wakes up in the morning and says he doesn't believe
any more, that's his business. There has never been any
question of inhibiting people's freedom to express any
understanding of Islam. The function of government is
not total.
Respected Africa analyst and commentator Colin Legum has defined
some of the differences between Turabi and Islamic fundamentalists:
Turabi's policies are out of step with other Islamic
fundamentalist organisations on a number of important
issues. For example, he strongly opposes the idea of a
Pan-Islamic movement, which brought him into conflict
with other (Muslim Brotherhood) parties in Egypt and elsewhere.
He insists that the Sudan has its own national problems
which require a particularist approach.
One of Turabi's fundamental breaks with the strict Islamic
traditionalists is over the place of women in Muslim societies.
As a declared supporter of women's liberation, he insists
on their right of equality and their right to full membership
of the (Muslim Brotherhood), the only Islamic movement
that does so.
Legum also commented on the particular difficulties faced
by Islamic leaders in the Sudan in trying to "reconcile
the demands for an Islamic state with the interests of the
sizeable minority of non-Muslim Southerners". Legum states
that:
The solution proposed is that non-Muslims should have
the right to live according to their own traditions and
desires just as Muslims have the right to live in a system
governed by sharia laws within a democratic society.
A significant example of Khartoum's effort to accommodate
the interests of Sudan's non-Muslim southerners was the 1991
exemption of the largely non-Muslim southern Sudan from
sharia
law. Even the Clinton Administration has had to admit that
sharia law was not applied in the south. The American
State Department's
Sudan Country Report on Human Rights
Practices, for example, has stated:
Sudan's 1991 Criminal Act, based on Shari'a law, (prescribes)
specific "hudud" punishments. The Government
officially exempts the 10 Southern States, whose population
is mostly non-Muslim, from parts of the 1991 Criminal
Act. But the Act permits the possible future application
of Shari'a law in the south, if the local state assemblies
so decide. (emphasis added)
It was the present Sudanese government, therefore, that exempted
southern Sudan from the Islamic
sharia law introduced
by Washington's ally General Nimeiri, and kept in place by
the democratically-elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi. The
Commission on International Religious Freedom confirmed that
southern Sudan was exempt from
sharia law. The Commission
also states that several Christian groups have received permission
to build new churches and that the government permits non-Muslims
to worship in existing places of worship. The Commission also
documented that only one person was known to be imprisoned
"on formal religious grounds". It has to be said
that such behaviour does not quite fit in with the Commission's
projections of Sudan as an extremist Islamic state, a country
of "particular concern".
The liberal model of Islam in Sudan has also been remarked
upon by respected commentators such as the veteran American
journalist Milton Viorst,
New Yorker columnist and
author of
Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern
World. Viorst has written that "Sudan is the only
state in our age that has formally opted for Islam as its
system of government". He has also compared the Sudanese
model to others in the region:
By the standards of other Arab societies, Turabi's
concept of Islam is open-minded and tolerant. Though he
sees no reason to emulate Western liberalism, few would
contradict his assertion that "we do not advocate
a very strict form of Islam". The signs are plentiful,
in a visit to Sudan, that the Islam practiced there is
less strict that that of Egypt, to say nothing of Saudi
Arabia. One scarcely sees the hijab, the head-covering
that makes many women in Egypt appear so forbidding, much
less the Saudi veil. Most Sudanese reflected Turabi's
preference for a genial, non-rigorous Islam, more in keeping
with Sudan's special experience within the flow of Islamic
history.
Viorst has also interviewed the Sudanese head of state Omer
Bashir. President Bashir stated with regard to the Sudanese
model of Islam that:
Not all groups agree on how we are interpreting the
sharia, but we believe there is wide latitude. We have
chosen a moderate way, like the Koran itself, and so the
sharia in Sudan will be moderate. The dispute over what
it requires lies not in the area of private but of public
affairs. Unfortunately, there is no model in history for
Islamic government. Fourteen centuries have gone by since
the prophet, and everyone now has his image of an Islamic
state. Some countries confuse traditions - like the suppression
of women - with religion, but tradition is not Islam.
Professor Tim Niblock is one of the foremost British authorities
on Islam and Sudan. He has pointed out two areas in which
Sudan's model differs from maintstream Islamist thought. One
is the Sudanese Islamists' "explicit acceptance of liberal
democracy as the appropriate form of political organisation
for Sudan. The advocacy of liberal democracy by the N.I.F.
went well beyond the stress which Islamist movements customarily
place on the need for shura (consultation)." Secondly,
the Sudanese model with regard to women is "qualitatively
different from that proposed in most Islamist programmes.
The emphasis is on women 'escaping from social oppression'
and 'playing a full part in building the new society', rather
than on their primary duty lying within the family".
Even the
New York Times, a source not noted for its
affinity to Islamic models of government, said of Turabi in
1996: "He voices a tolerant version of political Islam
- far less conservative than Saudi Arabia's, far less militant
than Iran's".
And there is no doubt that the Sudanese model is under attack
for its moderate interpretation of Islam. In February, 1994,
for example, extremist gunmen opened fire in the al-Thwarah
mosque in Omdurman, Sudan. They killed nineteen people and
wounded twenty others.
New African magazine reported
that the Muslim extremists involved "showed that they
did not think that the government of General Omar Al-Bashir
was sufficiently fundamentalist for them. One of the targets
on their hit list was Dr Turabi. The London-based Arabic language
newspaper
Al-Sharq al-Awsat has stated with regard
to the threat posed by Islamic extremists to the Khartoum
authorities, that the government: "Now.senses that it
is under threat from factions that can brook no deviation
from their hard-line interpretations of religion, which are
incompatible with the requirements and conditions of political
activity in any Muslim state on earth. Khartoum has been describing
them as 'religious fanatics'.certainly the slaughtering of
Muslims in a mosque, as occurred in Sudan, is fanaticism.
It is the same fanaticism whose effects we can witness in
Egypt and Algeria, regardless of the causes". The newspaper
concluded that "Sudan's government and people stand in
the same trench as the other countries who live in fear of
the extremist organisations".
The Commission on International Religious Freedom's apparent
concern about religious freedom and Islamic fundamentalism,
while useful in attacking Sudan, did not of course extend
to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was not listed as a country
of particular concern. This despite the fact that Saudi Arabia
is the most fundamentalist country of all. As much has been
placed on record in
Foreign Affairs:
The greatest hypocrisy in the debate over political
Islam is the fact that the Americans have fought a war
and committed their military and diplomatic power to secure
the survival of the most fundamentalist state of all -
Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime's own legitimacy is based
on an alliance with the Wahhabi movement, and extremely
conservative Sunni sect. The Saudi government is actually
more rigid in its application of Islamic law and more
repressive in many respects than the one in Tehran. Saudi
Arabia has no form of popular representation, political
rights are totally denied to women and non-Muslims, and
the regime has consistently applied sharia to criminal
justice. It has financed a variety of Islamic groups worldwide,
including the Hamas.Saudi Arabia, like all the other Arab
oil-exporting states of the Persian Gulf, is an absolute
monarchy that does not recognize the concepts of civil
rights or civil liberties.
Not a single church is allowed to exist in Saudi Arabia. Tens
of thousands of Christian workers in Saudi are denied any
freedom of worship. There are thousands of hudud punishments
annually, including executions and amputations, and hundreds
of people are currently incarcerated on formal religious grounds.
By way of comparison, Sudanese Christians occupy key posts
throughout Sudanese political life. They include the Sudanese
vice-president, cabinet members, ambassadors, legislators
and civil servants. There are hundreds of churches all through
Sudan, north and south, and as the Commission itself has stated
Christians can worship freely in these churches.
Sudan may be far from perfect but it has not warranted the
particular attention given to it by the United States Commission
for International Religious Freedom. It is sadly clear that
the Commission has allowed itself to be used for all too obvious
propaganda purposes in its "focus" on Sudan. In
so doing it has undermined its own credibility, as well as
that of the United States Congress and government, with regard
to the issue of religious freedoms.
