- After years of civil war, the majority Christian South of Sudan chose to secede
- Border squabbles and skirmishes over the division of oil wealth are still the norm
- Diktats on Islamic dress have loosened — but there is the occasional street sweep
- The death sentence for apostasy has left many Sudanese shocked
(CNN) — “Who are we?” It’s a question Northern Sudanese have been asking themselves for some time. Tucked away at the meeting point of Arab North Africa and the Horn, the people here have identified with both East and West.
It’s a question Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir believes he’s given the definitive answer to. At one of his many public rallies he told supporters: “We are an Arab, Muslim nation. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go.”
This was after those who didn’t like it did exactly that: In 2011, after a peace agreement brought to an end more than 21 years of civil war, the majority of Christians chose to secede and create their own country, aptly named South Sudan.
But it hasn’t brought the two countries any closer to a lasting peace: Border squabbles and skirmishes over the division of oil wealth are still the norm.
It did, though, give Islamists in northern Sudan a clearer goal for the “cultural project” launched in 1989 when they took power in a military coup that instated Islamic law and did away with any semblance of political plurality.
Islamist theocracy
The project denounced the multi-ethnic, culturally-rich Sudan — with its Sufi chants and Orthodox Easter festivals — and reinforced — as an Islamist theocracy with headscarves and “public order” courts. Effectively it created morality police.
In the early years of Islamist rule, the public order courts were our bogeymen. Girls who were deemed inappropriately dressed — by the arbitrary metric of whichever officer happened to be on duty at the time — were carted off in the back of police pick-up trucks in their hundreds, taken to be at best humiliated, and at worst flogged.
Even today, although the “diktats”, or rules on Islamic dress have loosened, the occasional street sweep serves as a reminder of what still lies in wait should your behavior be ruled “un-Islamic.”
It was a public order court that
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