The “Tagaddum Gods” Punish Us by Making Us Haul the Islamists’ Boulder Up and Down the Mountain for Eternity
Abdallah Ali Ibrahim
(I recall here a not-so-old commentary I wrote after witnessing the gloating that erupted yesterday among the “No to War” advocates, who erupted in whistling and clapping after a group of Western countries designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Whoever counts on the world for cover remains naked.)
I ask myself: what is the magical “playground trick” that the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) and Tagaddum think they possess—this thing they believe will deliver a guaranteed, decisive victory over the Islamists and finally grant them, and the country, peace of mind?
They lay in wait for the Islamists after the 1969 coup and mockingly called them “Hat’hout’s Brothers.” Yet that supposedly progressive coup collapsed, by 1983, into a full-blown theocracy—Islamists by another name.
They stalked them again before and after the April 1985 uprising, smeared them as “the regime’s acolytes,” chased their leader Hassan al-Turabi to the far edges of Khartoum, and defeated him.
Then the Islamists returned with the 1989 coup, establishing the most hardline theocratic state imaginable.
Then the revolutionaries crushed them again as “remnants” in 2019—and stomped on them.
Then they returned once more.
And here we are again, summoned—as always—to mobilize for their “final eradication.”
Isn’t there something profoundly absurd in all this?
How long must we continue this endless, futile contest with the Islamists?
Our decades-long, ever-repeated mobilization to defeat them—yet never truly defeating them—can only mean we have been struck by the “Islamist Curse”, much like the curse of Sisyphus.
According to Greek myth, the gods punished Sisyphus by forcing him to roll a massive boulder up a mountain. Each time he reached the top, the boulder would tumble back down, and he would begin again. Push. Fall. Push again. On and on—until the end of time, had the pagan Greeks believed in such a thing.
It seems the FFC and Tagaddum do not wish us to see the flaw behind their insistence that we shoulder this Islamist boulder they have strapped onto our backs.
Their flaw is painfully simple: they are incapable of defeating the Islamists.
So the Islamists slip back through some tragic crack in their performance, and the same tired questions echo once again: Where did these people come from?
And we—the people—are left hauling the boulder through the valley because, after failing again and again, and becoming addicted to failure, the revolutionaries emerge spotless, “like a hair pulled from dough,” only to shout:
“Blame the Islamists!”
