Most people date Sudan’s Islamist turn to 1983, when the decaying government of Jaafar Nimeiri began a controversial experiment with Islamic sharīca law, or to the Islamists’ National Salvation Revolution, led by Omar al-Bashir in 1989. But for Hasan al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan’s Islamist movement for most of its twentieth century existence, Sudan’s Islamist turn, and its first modern experiment in Islamic legislation, began a few years earlier, in August 1977.
The Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan, set up by the 1977 law, marked a decisive twist in Sudan’s entangled histories of economics and religion. From the late 1970s Sudan’s Islamic banks formed the economic basis of the Islamist movement. The movement used the economic power that these banks bestowed to consolidate an alliance between Islamists, financiers and security men, which emerged in the 1970s and took power in the National Salvation Revolution of 1989. The banks helped this alliance to build a new constituency of urban merchants who had hitherto had little access to capital, and to establish a commanding position in finance, managing remittances for Sudanese migrant workers in the Arabian peninsula, and the import-export trade in consumer goods – just as a new global economy based on labour migration, finance capital and international trade was coming into fashion. Turabi’s movement used the language of sharīca to align the interests of new social forces with new global economic trends. The invisible hand backed the Islamists.
This paper uses the changes that began with the Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan to reflect on the ways that growth and inequality have been repatterned in Sudan over the last forty years. The alliance of Islamists, financiers and security men which the bank helped to create was exceptionally durable because it succeeded in harnessing global forces to Islamic values and using them to transform Sudan from an agricultural economy to one based on growing oil rents and growing services. These transitions were not painless – changing patterns of growth led to changing patterns of inequality. I will try to draw together some of these themes – Islamism, economic transformation, growth
and inequality – without drifting off into abstraction, or vexing the reader with too much detail.