Sharia Divides African Nation : Issue of Islamic Law Fuels Political Strife in Sudan

OMDURMAN, Sudan —  Mohammed Idem never denied that he was caught with a load of stolen auto parts in his car after his two cohorts fled on foot.

But he would have liked a chance to plead that the poverty of his life with a wife, six children, his father, mother and brother had driven him to thievery. That might have mitigated his sentence.

Instead, Idem had no opportunity to speak before the Islamic judge at his trial, which lasted the briefest part of an afternoon.

He spent seven days in jail, and on the eighth he was led from his cell. His right wrist and left knee were injected with a painkiller, and an antique ceremonial sword imported from Saudi Arabia was brought down sharply on the numbed joints. Thus, his hand and leg were severed in accordance with the prescription of sharia, the Islamic criminal code.

Idem’s ordeal occurred in June, 1984, after Sudanese military strongman Jaafar Numeiri imposed Islamic law to entice the country’s Muslim fundamentalists into helping shore up his crumbling rule.

Under the law, liquor disappeared from shelves and gambling was outlawed. About 400 thieves lost their limbs in the next 18 months. Countless other Sudanese were flogged for drinking or stoned to death for adultery. One prominent political foe of Numeiri was charged with “opposing Islam” and executed.

Today, Idem speaks from a dusty courtyard on the outskirts of Omdurman that houses the local Sudan Assn. of Amputees--83 men, most of them young and poor, rendered all but useless to Sudanese society by a crippling and irrevocable sentence. He has not worked since his day of punishment except to stand in the choking red dust of the city’s disorderly streets, selling cigarettes at 12 cents each to passers-by.

Idem is a symbol Sudan might do well to consider. For the Sudanese government that succeeded Numeiri with a promise to repeal sharia is intent today on reimposing the code on this country of diverse ethnic groups and religions.

Splits Country

Indeed, it is as if sharia was another wedge driven into the cracks that divide Sudan--a wedge between Arabs and Africans, northerners and southerners, fundamentalists and moderates.

Despised by the Christians and animists who predominate in southern Sudan, sharia is hated even by many Muslims. In its prohibitions on crimes such as murder, it has much in common with the Judeo-Christian code familiar in the West. But it also addresses a host of other activities viewed as antithetical to Islam itself, including religious conversion and defamation of the faith.

And although sharia still commands some backers, its primary support here appears to come from the two Islamic fundamentalist parties that hold a commanding majority in Parliament.

“It’s a politicization of Islam, because the government sees it as a way to control society,” says Mohammed Omer Beshir, a critic who is one of the country’s leading historians and experts on Afro-Arab affairs. “These people have trapped us as if the issue is Islam or not Islam. But we’ve been Muslim for 14 centuries. The issue is, they want to be in power.”

The plan to invoke sharia again has stirred widespread mistrust of Prime Minister Sadek Mahdi, leader of the majority Umma (People’s) Party, who in 1985 pledged to repeal Islamic law. At that time he suspended Islamic punishment of thieves like Idem, but the culprits remain in jail.

Mahdi’s about-face also has undermined his credibility on another crucial issue--whether he intends to settle Sudan’s ruinous and unpopular war with southern rebels, for whom repeal of sharia is a non-negotiable condition. Last week, Sudan’s military leaders demanded that he form a new government oriented toward finding a political solution to the war. And on Saturday, the Cabinet met in an emergency session and ordered Mahdi to form a new, broad-based government, wire services reported.

But many Sudanese believe that Mahdi and his coalition partner, the National Islamic Front (NIF), are so intent on establishing a fundamentalist state that they might sacrifice the whole country--not to mention the south--to achieve it.

Sacrificing Peace?

Certainly they appear willing to sacrifice peace in the south, which would require a renunciation of sharia.

Recently, Mahdi’s Umma Party offhandedly dismissed a peace plan negotiated with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army by its one-time coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party. When the DUP pulled out of the government, Umma and the National Islamic Front, headed by fundamentalists, were left in control in Parliament.

Meanwhile, the savage four-year war against the southerners is the chief cause of the country’s rapid and visible deterioration. More than 250,000 people, mostly civilians, have died of starvation in the south as both sides hinder relief shipments and commandeer much of the food and medicine that does arrive for their soldiers. Millions of refugees have gathered in squalid camps around Khartoum, the capital.

According to diplomatic estimates, the war costs the government as much as $2 million a day, which accounts for the collapse of the economy. Wheat is in such short supply that families in Khartoum spend all night lining up for bread; gasoline is available almost nowhere but on the black market, where a gallon costs more than $4.

Opportunistic Approach

Mahdi’s approach to compromise over the sharia has been largely opportunistic. He has offered to exempt the south from Islamic law, but many find that a transparent acknowledgement that the government does not have the political or military muscle to impose its will here.

“We know their pledge not to impose sharia in the south is not because they’re fond of human rights but because they’re unable to, just as Numeiri was,” says Abdalla Nagib, a leading Christian activist.

No form of exemption would obscure the truth that enactment of a manifestly Islamic statute would relegate Sudan’s non-Muslim minority to official second-class status. And that forces the Sudanese to question the future of what many are proud to characterize as a democratic, secular society. Many fear that sharia could presage discrimination on a broader scale.

“If you’re going to use Muslim principles, who then would have a right to say religion is a basis of making decisions, and not race?” says Bona Malwal, a former government minister and southerner of the Dinka tribe who now edits the opposition Sudan Times.

Nonetheless, supporters of sharia argue that its opponents have distorted its nature.

“They pick the harshest thing about it to criticize,” says Idris Mohammed Sallawi, professor of international law at Omdurman Islamic University.

To understand sharia, he says, one must be mindful that the sternness of its penalties is always mitigated by a nearly unattainable standard of proof. The combination is designed to make the punishment more symbolic than real.

“One cannot be stoned to death for adultery merely on the basis of an assumption,” Sallawi says. “It has to be witnessed by four people of great maturity and high morals. Well, it’s impossible to witness such a thing, so in reality the punishment could not be applied.”

Yet recent history tells the Sudanese that standards of proof are subject to relaxation--and the combination of that with sharia’s harsh penalties can be a recipe for mindless brutality.

State of Emergency

In Numeiri’s final days, during which he imposed a state of emergency, married couples learned to carry their wedding documents in their cars, insurance against frequent roadblocks in which police challenged them to prove that they were not adulterers. Some men carried their daughters’ birth certificates as well, for a man driving with his daughter could be similarly accused.

Thieves could scarcely rely on sharia’s injunction against punishing those who steal out of genuine need. Under Numeiri, the theft of anything worth more than 100 Sudanese pounds (then about $40) was presumed to have been motivated by greed.

In any event, as Idem learned, few poor defendants got much of a chance to plead their case.

And there is evidence that the current government intends to use sharia as a weapon in a religious war and against the country’s growing political opposition.

Curbs on Traveling

Mahdi has rejected no fewer than 10 applications for the construction of new churches, generally on the ground that they would go up offensively close to Muslim establishments. Christian church officials also have been barred from traveling to any towns with even a sizable Muslim minority.

From there, it is no great step toward applying sharia to political dissent, with which the regime has also shown increasing impatience.

After a group of prominent Sudanese intellectuals, business people and religious leaders met with opposition representatives recently in Ambo, Ethiopia, to issue a peace manifesto, they were arrested on their return to Sudan and publicly denounced as traitors by Umma and the NIF.

“You know . . . we could all have been charged with ‘canvassing against Islam’ and beheaded,” observed Adlan Hardollad, dean of economics at the University of Khartoum and one of the Ethiopia conferees.

SHARIA SPLITS SUDAN

The outskirts of Omdurman house the local Sudan Assn. of Amputees--83 men, most of them young and poor, rendered all but useless to Sudan by the crippling sentences of sharia , the Islamic code of law.

Sharia is another wedge driven into the cracks that divide Sudan--a wedge between Arabs and Africans, northerners and the Christian and animist southerners, Islamic fundamentalists and moderates.