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Published in 1983, the September Laws introduced Islamic norms into Sudanese civil and criminal codes, representing the first instance of Islamic law being applied to both Muslims and non-Muslims in Sudan. According to Salomon, the September Laws caused much frustration, especially in the south, where the majority of non-Muslims reside. Governmental concessions to the south 13 years ago provided some relief, but due to a northerly migration from the south to the capital, Khartoum, these laws remained problematic.
Salomon concluded, “There were no clean geographic spaces on which an idealized demography could be mapped,” and like Walton, he suggested that it is problematic to think of secularism and Islam as exclusionary categories.
By way of example, Salomon quoted a southern Sudanese judge opposed to the Islamization of law. “Every tribe has its own traditional dress, but according to the law all women have to wear Islamic dress,” the judge argued. Furthermore, “a way of marriage in the south is by impregnating the girl,but according to Islam, it is adultery.” The state should rise above such differences, the judge argued, concluding that “Khartoum is for all Sudanese, regardless of religion, race, or culture.”
Yet
this purely secular ideal would in turn deny what some consider to be the full expression
of Islam. Hasan al-Turabi, one of the primary authors of the 1991 legal code, advocated that
religious fulfillment “can only come about when public life, the life of the state,
is in unity with God,” Salomon said. That is, the civil service and its policies were
in themselves a form of worship for Turabi and his supporters, and a secular government would
thus disallow the full realization of a just Islamic public order.
Hence the Khartoum dilemma, to which Salomon admitted that he could offer no perfect solution.
Walton and Salomon agreed that the complex relationships between secularism and Islam in Turkey and Sudan are forcing new students of religion to rethink old explanations. “Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of religion only truly test the steel of their theories against the specificities of context,” Walton said. They concluded that, to discover how secularism and Islam interact, one must observe that localized context—a particular country, a particular town, or even a particular person—always keeping in mind that the interaction will be different for the next country, the next town, or the next person.
In his response to Walton and Salomon’s papers, GhaneaBassiri
admired their focus on religion as it is practiced. He pointed out that while the practice
of religion differs in localized context, the question of what role religion ought to play
in the modern nation-state endures not only for Turkey and Sudan but many other nations,
including our own. He asked whether people in one part of the world could learn from the
religious and political experiments of people in another. Are there lessons, for example,
in Turkey’s secularist experiment for Sudan or in Sudan’s Civilizational Project
for Turkey? He concluded the formal presentations of the symposium by encouraging the participants
to deliberate what he considered “to be the greatest and perhaps most exciting challenge
for contemporary study of religion—to develop appropriate analytical categories for
intelligent discussion in the public sector about religion across shifting boundaries: East
and West, secular and religious, Muslim and non-Muslim, self and other.” 
Camille Curry ’04 is a Reed senior majoring in religion.
Reed thanks Kenneth Brashier for his assistance with this article.
