Enemies of the State: Curbing Women Activists Advocating Rape Reform in Sudan

Sudanese women activists launched a legal campaign in 2009 calling attention to how the country’s Sharia-based Criminal Act of 1991 produced impunity for sexual assault in the Darfur conflict. After years of mobilization, Sudan enacted rape reform in 2015. While on the surface a success story, extensive interviews conducted in Khartoum suggest that this regime-controlled rape reform is more about the struggle of an authoritarian state to keep an emerging independent women’s movement under control, rather than the protection of rape victims in Darfur. By situating the reform within the broader political dynamics of the International Criminal Courts’ (ICC) arrest order against Sudan’s president for the use of rape as a war tactic in Darfur, it becomes clear that this pushed an already pressured head of state to clamp down on independent women’s groups advocating rape reform. Women activists were framed as collaborators of the ICC and an enemy of the Sudanese state. The immediate implication of targeting women activists is that the regime has silenced critical voices pointing to the limitations of the rape reform as well as those actors most likely to watchdog its implementation. The long-term implication is that it weakens the foundation for generating further policy changes on violence against women

Discrimination in the Name of Religious Freedom: The Rights of Women and Non-Muslims after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan

Government policy since independence has by and large disregarded Sudan’s multi-religious character through continuous Islamisation and Arabisation processes that have fuelled the civil war. International considerations regarding religious pluralism and the accommodation of different religious communities were at the forefront in the peace negotiations. The study outlines Islamic actors’ perception of non-Muslims’ rights after the comprehensive peace agreement (2005), including the rights of apostates. Also, the study elaborates how non-Muslims themselves perceive their rights within the frame of Islam. In their eagerness to include marginalised religious groups, Sudanese and international peacebuilders ignored gender issues during the negotiations. In the name of religious freedom, the CPA and the national interim constitution have left the civil rights of women to the country’s religious communities – Islamic, Christian, and traditional African beliefs. Muslim and non-Muslim leaders alike perceive this as an intrinsic religious right. Civil rights such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, maintenance and financial custody of children, and alimony are perhaps the most tangible and important in the daily lives of “ordinary” Sudanese women. Yet, the CPA and the national interim constitution have not defined how the religious and tribal family laws that regulate women’s civil rights are being and should be formed and applied in today’s Sudan. Sudanese woman are granted different civil rights depending on which religious or tribal community they belong to. This study outlines the main discriminatory features in what has become a complicated patchwork of plural legalities for Sudanese women since the peace agreement. Religiously defined laws in and by themselves are not necessarily discriminatory against women, but this plural legal system does not guarantee all Sudanese women equal civil rights as enforced in today’s Sudan. The study shows that there are ongoing debates within the religious communities towards maintaining or changing the discriminatory features of religious and tribal family laws. Despite the fact that most Sudanese elite women deem their current “rights status” as discriminatory, they do not demand a secular law on women’s civil rights. They promote “changing from within” by reinterpreting and transforming the religious and tribal laws in a more gender equal direction

Democratizing Islam and Islamizing democracy: An inquiry into Hasan al-Turabi's conception of Shura in light of Western democratic theory

This article explores Hasan al-Turabi’s conception of democracy with particular focus on the role and rights of non-Muslims. This is done through a qualitative analysis of his writings as well as semi-structured interviews conducted with Turabi in 2006, 2007 and 2008. In contrast to earlier studies which discuss Turabi’s ideas in light of Islamic theology and history, I engage with a range of western models of democracy in order to shed a different light on Turabi’s ideas, illustrating the elasticity of the democratic concept itself. Shura is part of an ongoing debate about the foundations of democracy. Hence, my analysis attempts to move beyond the Sudanese context into the realm of democratic theory in order to have a critical discussion of Turabi’s political thinking. My findings suggest that despite its democratic qualities, some aspects of his religious democracy, particularly with regards to the role and rights of minorities, are problematic from a multicultural perspective. The article claims that Turabi performs an internal exclusion of non-Muslims with regards to political affairs, because Islam exclusively sets the condition for substantive participation. A pre-print of the article can be downloaded as a PDF above

Islamisme og demokrati hånd i hånd

Ifølge Hassan al-Turabi bør den islamske staten styres demokratisk. Men hva ligger i den sudanesiske islamistens forståelse av demokrati

Beyond numbers? Women's 25% parliamentary quota in post-conflict Sudan

This article explores the validity of critical mass theory in the context of a 25% women’s quota in the national parliament in post-conflict Sudan. It is being argued here that the implementation of a women’s parliamentary quota carves out the space necessary to allow more Sudanese women to enter national politics, but several factors have to work together in order to create an enabling political environment necessary for the quota to be successful. The combination of an independent parliament and the critical presence of feminist voices are decisive factors for translating numbers into substantive legislative changes for Sudanese women

Ansar al-Sunna and Women’s Agency in Sudan: A Salafi Approach to Empowerment through Gender Segregation

This article explores the possibilities, limits, and paradox of Salafi female agency at a time when Ansar al-Sunna is assuming a new political role under the rule of an Islamizing state in Sudan. The Islam Ansar al-Sunna preaches is Salafism and is based on the idea that there is a unitary Islamic doctrine and only one correct understanding of the Quran and the Sunna. That one correct understanding of Islam dictates gender segregation. Introducing new empirical data on a largely understudied movement from Sudan, the article argues that in its attempt to introduce gender segregation Ansar al-Sunna has provided (perhaps unintentionally) a space for women’s empowerment. Despite Ansar al-Sunna disavowing women’s political participation based on arguments that women are more emotional and less rational than men, the women have begun to challenge this stance of the unitary Islamic doctrine. Women have begun to participate politically as a consequence of: (1) the opening of a segregated Ansar al-Sunna women’s center in which leadership fall to women themselves and therefore constitutes a parallel form of governance within the movement, and (2) the political context in which Ansar al-Sunna are entangled within Sudan’s Islamic state, in which they struggle to distinguish themselves from Islamism. While women are challenging the male leadership’s position that women’s biological makeup excludes them from making sound political decisions, they are simultaneously maintaining and inhabiting norms of gender segregation and thus implicitly and explicitly critiquing state-induced gender mixing in the name of Islam. A preprint of the article can be downloaded as a PDF file abov

Feminist interlegalities and gender justice in Sudan: The debate on CEDAW and Islam

The fundamental argument put forward by Islamists, who have ruled Sudan since 1989, for not signing the convention is based on cultural relativism; different cultures provide indigenous and local solutions to their women's problems. Islam is the solution, not Western feminism. But the Islamists' failure to ratify CEDAW should not be regarded as a complete rejection of Western feminism, however defined. Through a review of the debate on CEDAW and Islam, this article explores the entanglements of `Islamic' and `Western' normative legal orders. It argues that although Islamist feminists' discourse deems Western tenets of feminism and gender equality to be unessential to Islamic societies and falsely universalising in its premises, it simultaneously draws upon them in order to demonstrate their `alternative' feminism. By analysing a range of Islamist women's positions, it becomes apparent that on the one hand they reject CEDAW and gender equality, and on the other promote issues which empower women in the Sudanese state and society. But there are important points of criticism to be made regarding Islamic solutions in a multi-religious and class-divided Sudanese society. Sudanese Islamist women's claims on behalf of Islamic solutions for Sudanese women can paradoxically be critiqued being as universalising in its premises as so-called Western feminism. A pre-print of the article can be downloaded as a PDF abov

Women at work in Sudan: Marital privilege or constitutional right

This article explores how working women in Sudan's capital negotiate legal constraints placing them under the guardianship of their husbands, imposing strict public dress and behavioral codes upon them, and upholding occupational segregation in the workplace. Upper- and middle-class women of different political-ideological standpoint see constraints as well as advantages with the Islamist approach to women's economic empowerment. While the restrictive legal framework enables Sudanese working women to make independent economic choices, the economic resources gained through wage work have had limited transformative potential in relation to the larger structures constraining various aspects of women's lives. The article is part of a special issue on legal regimes, women's work and women's empowerment. The article is open access, just follow the link https://academic.oup.com/sp/article/26/2/223/549065