A Civil Society Deferred: The Tertiary Grip of Violence in the Sudan

3. The Malignant Tumor of the Colonial State: The Antibodies

3 The Malignant Tumor of the Colonial State The Antibodies In his last poem, A˙med wad Sa'd, the greatest of the Mahdiyya bards (mudda˙) painted an extravagant picture of the time, the society, and the state he admired the most, bemoaning its end in a prophetic, apocalyptic vision full of affectionate intensity. After lamenting the demise of the great society of the Mahdiyya, he grieved over its brutal obliteration. In what could be considered a requiem par excellence for the death of a society, wad Sa'd pleaded with the martyrs of Karari to wipe away his tears. He concluded his poem by crying loudly: ya ahl al-juba jala shofo al-Kuba Islamna Iraba hab dina insaba, Oh wearers of al-juba,1 hearken and see what a disaster [this is where] our Islam has grown murky and our religion been cursed.2 Here, one will disagree with Robert L. Tignor, who asserts, “Often the voices of the invaded are silent. We look in vain for their reactions to the trauma of invasion and occupation.”3 The Egyptian Muslim scholar and chronicler 'Abd al-Ra˙man al-Jabarti (1753–1825)4 and others, such as wad Sa'd, noticed that “the exceptional nature of that [colonial] power lay not so much in military prowess, but in the order established in the aftermath of the conquest.”5 This new order has had specific characteristics and serious consequences. Most important of all was its attempt to prevail by shaking what Peter Berger describes as “the taken-for-granted The Malignant Tumor of the Colonial State · 43 certainty” and the “worlds of fate” to transform the entire social world of the colonized. Not all the Sudanese supported, or even sympathized with, the idea of Mahdism or its state. Different individuals and groups contested the idea that Mu˙ammad A˙med was the Mahdi; others took up arms against the Mahdist regime at different times. Nevertheless, great numbers of the population represented the engineering of the latent and manifest forms of resistance to the colonial state and its order. Nothing could have saved Sudanese society from the penetration and violence of the occupying system. However, the lives of the Sudanese people and their society would have been annihilated had it not been for the protective countermoves (both latent and manifest) that buffered, to a certain degree, the action of such destructive force, its order, and its mechanism of obliteration. Two opposing forces struggled to reshape Sudanese society, its population , and their material life. The proliferation of these processes gave rise to a malignant tumor that begot and grew into the colonial state and has stayed alive ever since, guiding the disciplinary and coercive forces of the postcolonial state. A Social Capital-in-Circulation: Mobilizing the Resources and Symbols of Resistance Where intense destructive forces subjugated resistance and other forms of hostile engagement and the order of a colonial system was endured, inventive reactions and types of struggle assumed different modes within the wide-ranging scope of continuing resistance. A variety of social and political modes of operation capable of manufacturing additional factors that support and maintain the means of resistance from one side and social integration to the other, buttressed the production of self-identity and contributed to the sound and fury of an uneasy rebirth and suffocation of a civil society in the face of the colonial and postcolonial states and their coercive order. Central to wad Sa'd’s feeling of loss is what could be perceived as the countertransformation, the destruction of a good society he described in one of his poems as al-jira al-'ammana khiera (the neighborhood whose virtuous wealth we all relished). The virtue of that society had shaped the imagination of those who appreciated the kind of social change that was perceived as constituting the practice of a good and righteous Muslim 44 · A Civil Society Deferred society. Wad Sa'd’s argument in this respect was speaking to the moral disposition of that society, appreciating its social practice rather than reflecting on the political differences of opinion, however repressive the regime that ruled over the population. His argument found meaning in the societal relations that the Mahdist revolution created for itself, its state, and the determinants of the founding of the Ansår as the core builders of what they perceived as a good society. The goodness or civility of...