In 1982, not long after secondary school, I made an overland backpacking trip to the Middle East that eventually brought me to Juba, the capital of the Southern Sudan. Juba in the early 1980s was a quiet town in one of the remotest parts of the world. For most of the year, it could only be reached from the North by a boat trip on the Nile that could take up to a week. Seventeen years of civil war with the North of the country had stalled all development and even in the years of peace under President Numayrī, not an inch of asphalt road had materialized. Many Southerners were angry and told me that the war would soon break out again, something I did not take very seriously as the place looked friendly and peaceful.
One evening I was having dinner in a local restaurant, when a young Northern Sudanese man with an Afro haircut emerged from the dark and started selling pamphlets to the customers. I bought one out of curiosity. The English pamphlet was entitled The Southern Sudan: Problem and Solution, and was issued by the followers of a certain Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭaha. It argued that a real and lasting peace between the Northern and Southern Sudan required a far-reaching reform of Islam. Northerners, it maintained, would eventually want to base their society on the law revealed by God, and Islamic sharīʿa law as it stood could never provide an equal citizenship status for the predominantly non-Muslim Southerners. A year after my return to the Netherlands, Numayrī introduced Islamic law in the Sudan and the civil war broke out again, as I had been foretold. In January 1985, I read in a Dutch newspaper that Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭaha had been executed for his opposition to Numayrī’s sharīʿa laws.
In my later professional life as a researcher and journalist, I always kept an eye on the Sudan and returned to the country several times. Over the years, the Northern Sudan came to be ruled by the Muslim Brothers and the civil war continued until the Southern Sudan eventually broke away. Meanwhile, the problems Maḥmūd Ṭaha had spoken about assumed global proportions. Nine-eleven, two political assassinations in the Netherlands, the global upsurge of nationalist and religious chauvinism and many other developments made me aware of the significance of Ṭaha’s call for a radically new narrative, not only in the Muslim world but also in the West.
The present book was written to highlight the neglected efforts of this man and also of his followers, who were very welcoming and helpful with my research. I am particularly grateful to Muṣṭafā ʿUmar al-Jaylī and his wife, the late Najāt ʿUthmān Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, who, from the late 1990s, showed enormous patience in answering my questions and gave me a personal example of Ṭaha’s views in practice. I also want to express my gratitude to my supervisors over the years. In the early stages, the late Rex Sean O’Fahey and the late Ghassan ʿAscha taught me how to channel my initial enthusiasm into serious academic research. In the final years, the encouraging and inspiring comments and criticisms of Gerard Wiegers and Herman Beck raised this text to a higher level. Finally, I thank my dear family and friends for their patient support for my seemingly endless struggle to get this story on paper. All this time, the pamphlet I bought in Juba has been standing on my shelf as a silent witness of how my journey had begun.