Sudan

Deriving its name from Balad as-Sdn (“Land of the Blacks”), the Republic of the Sudan (Jumhryat as-Sdn) was until 2011 the largest country in Africa and is distinguished by historically multivariate regimes and civilizations. Encompassing the ancient northern kingdoms of Kush and Christian Nubia, Sudan's ethnically diverse population includes the Furs in western Sudan, and it also included the Nubians and the Dinkas in the region that became the country of South Sudan in 2011. In 640 CE, the Rashidun caliphate brought Islam to northern Africa and left Sudan overwhelmingly Muslim and ethnically Arab (with Arabic remaining Sudan's lingua franca).

In 1821, Egypt's Muhammad Ali Pasha's invasion of Sudan marked the beginning of the Turkiyah (1821–1885) or Turco-Egyptian rule, which was challenged in May 1881 by a member of the Isma'iliyya religious brotherhood, Muhammad Ahmad (1845–1885). Calling for jihad against the khedive (the Ottoman Empire's Egyptian viceroy), Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi (“the guided one”), the messianic leader whose spiritual and temporal authority would presage the end of the world. After defeating British General C. S. Gordon's Egyptian forces and capturing Khartoum in 1885, the Mahdi and his adherents, the Ansar, established the Mahdiyah (1885–1898), or Mahdist state, which introduced Sharia'a law and urged continued jihad. Attempting to defend imperial interests and secure control of the Sudanese Nile, British confrontations with the Mahdiyya also sought to reclaim khedival Egyptian lands taken after 1885. In September 1898, General Horatio Kitchener, the sirdar (“commander”) of the Anglo-Egyptian regulars, routed the Ansar outside Omdurman, and shortly thereafter the Mahdiyya collapsed. In January 1899, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1955) was promulgated and placed Sudan under both countries’ indirect, co-domini administration. Following independence on January 1, 1956, the nascent Sudanese state was beset with sectarian and regional conflicts (between northern Muslims, southern Christians, and the southern Anyanya insurgency).

Since 1956, multiple-party Muslim civilian governments and single-party military states have alternately ruled Sudan. In September 1983, Jafar al-Numeiri's military regime (1969–1985) introduced Shari'a law with an emphasis on hudud (“moral transgressions”) punishments, but discontent prompted a coup in April 1985. Four years later, General ‘Umar Hasan al-Bashir, who was guided by the Muslim Brotherhood's National Islamic Front leader Hasan al-Turabi, overthrew the short-lived multiparty civilian government and proscribed all political parties. Al-Bashir's rule has evinced strong support for conservative Islamic groups outside Sudan. Beginning in 2003, the Janjaweed, who comprise Chadian and Darfurian Arab militiamen, backed by Al-Bashir appropriated land from non-Arab Darfurians while targeting those groups in a genocidal campaign. The Darfur Peace Agreement, which was negotiated in 2006, has not brokered an enduring cessation of hostilities. The 2005 peace accord between Khartoum and the southern insurgents, however, generated a tenuous peace and a separatist resolution to the conflict in the southern region. A referendum held in July 2011 resulted in a vote of more than 99% of the southern residents [Page 1228]to form an independent state comprising the Christian and the traditional African animistic cultural areas of the south. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan officially became the world's newest country.

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