Last June Sudan’s National Congress Party (NCP) celebrated 22 years in power. Most may agree that this period will go down in history as the darkest, not just for Sudanese citizens but for humanity as whole. Since after Hitler, Stalin and Mao it is Omar Al Bashir that has resided over the largest massacre in the history of mankind, mainly under the banner of religion and ethnic-based discrimination.
However, what is more striking is that when discussions of a post-NCP scenario take place amongst ordinary apolitical Sudanese citizens of any class a common and boring response is often, “minu al badil?” (meaning: who is the alternative?). This question reflects the real challenge we are facing as a nation, which is changing people’s mind-sets, who have for the past 22 years lived under a dictatorship that normalized the status-quo and closed people’s minds in a box forbidding them to think critically and creatively; especially when it comes to questioning the relationship between the state and religion.
Although most Sudanese citizens today would agree that the NCP’s so called “civilization project” and its Islamic state is a failed experiment that we should quickly discard, there remains a great vacuum in making this debate more mainstream. So far the discussion on a Sudanese secular state has been limited to a select elite community whose audience is small and homogeneous, and whose thoughts, ideas and publications are ferociously censored by the regime.
This makes the transition, at the level of the Sudanese street, from the question of “who is the alternative” to the more particle terrain of “what is the alternative” a difficult but important and urgent move that we need to make as a nation. Otherwise, if we are ever lucky enough to join the club of the “Arab Spring”, we will find ourselves in limbo without a common agreement on a conceptualized vision for the future state of Sudan, a state where all citizens, including religious and ethnic minorities, enjoy equal rights.
Having said that, I want to start making this debate mainstream now by sharing with you a discussion by normal citizens of a nearby country who are not intellectuals and who did not publish books that are banned by their regime. And who managed to have a civilized discussion about the secular state as seen below in the selected tweets I compiled from a recent tweet "nadwa" on the subject.
However, what is more striking is that when discussions of a post-NCP scenario take place amongst ordinary apolitical Sudanese citizens of any class a common and boring response is often, “minu al badil?” (meaning: who is the alternative?). This question reflects the real challenge we are facing as a nation, which is changing people’s mind-sets, who have for the past 22 years lived under a dictatorship that normalized the status-quo and closed people’s minds in a box forbidding them to think critically and creatively; especially when it comes to questioning the relationship between the state and religion.
Although most Sudanese citizens today would agree that the NCP’s so called “civilization project” and its Islamic state is a failed experiment that we should quickly discard, there remains a great vacuum in making this debate more mainstream. So far the discussion on a Sudanese secular state has been limited to a select elite community whose audience is small and homogeneous, and whose thoughts, ideas and publications are ferociously censored by the regime.
This makes the transition, at the level of the Sudanese street, from the question of “who is the alternative” to the more particle terrain of “what is the alternative” a difficult but important and urgent move that we need to make as a nation. Otherwise, if we are ever lucky enough to join the club of the “Arab Spring”, we will find ourselves in limbo without a common agreement on a conceptualized vision for the future state of Sudan, a state where all citizens, including religious and ethnic minorities, enjoy equal rights.
Having said that, I want to start making this debate mainstream now by sharing with you a discussion by normal citizens of a nearby country who are not intellectuals and who did not publish books that are banned by their regime. And who managed to have a civilized discussion about the secular state as seen below in the selected tweets I compiled from a recent tweet "nadwa" on the subject.
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