Islamists Between Integration and Exclusion: Democratic Growth or a Zero-Sum Confrontation? Or: Against Banning Islamists—Again

By: Moatasem Aqraa

Segments of the Sudanese political movement suffer from a peculiar irrationality: an insistence on excluding Islamists from the future of political life, while these same exclusionary actors present themselves as “doves of peace.” This call for exclusion often comes from parties that Islamists repeatedly defeated in student elections—from Gezira to Communist Russia—dozens of times, collectively and individually.

We should also recall that the Islamic Front ranked third in Sudan’s last democratic elections, behind the Umma and Democratic Unionist parties, with only a narrow gap separating it from second place. It also won nearly all parliamentary graduate seats, with only minor exceptions.

Add to this the fact that the Islamic Movement has enjoyed the highest level of political influence in Sudan since independence—particularly among educated sectors—and then add its thirty years of rule after a bloody coup.

For these reasons, the insistence on confining Islamists to a political “quarantine” is strange for several reasons.
First: this exclusionist discourse does not demand the exclusion of the Janjawid, who are worse than the Islamists. Nor were Islamists the only faction to conspire against Sudan’s democracy. If the Janjawid are granted the right to participate, and so are parties that conspired against democracy, and parties aligned with foreign powers—then what is the argument for denying Islamists participation?

Second: this push for exclusion often comes from parties that Islamists repeatedly defeated at the polls, or from individuals who have never been elected to anything, who have no mandate and not a single vote conferring legitimacy upon them. Yet they sit proudly—steeped in their own hypocrisy—to decide who may and may not participate in politics, and who must publicly “repent.”

If you sit back, cross your legs, and issue decrees banning Islamists from political participation, you do not become a revolutionary democrat; you simply become a fool—hypocritical in the name of democracy, foolish, authoritarian, repressive, and a catalyst for endless political and social strife.

Even worse than such local fatwas on who may participate is the tendency to seek foreign intervention against Islamists—inviting external powers to settle internal disputes so that “freedom” may return to us once again “on the invaders’ warships.” The farce reaches its peak when such appeals to foreign firepower come from the same mouths that scolded revolutionary youth for chanting “Crush every Islamist”, claiming it was a violent exclusionary slogan—while, somehow, foreign artillery they invite to “crush the Islamists” would be less violent than angry youth armed with nothing but slogans.

Islamists are a social and political reality of Sudanese and Arab societies, and in Muslim-majority countries they are as inevitable as fate—whether one agrees with them or not. Islamists won elections in Turkey, Hamas won the Palestinian elections two decades ago, Islamists won in Algeria in the early 1990s, and they also won in Morocco and elsewhere.

The political arena thus faces two options:

Option One: Integrate Islamists into the democratic process and bind them to the rules of peaceful power rotation and respect for opponents’ rights—since democracy is not the dictatorship of the electoral majority. This integration is possible, as demonstrated by the experiences of Turkey and Morocco.

In Turkey, Islamists played a central role in establishing (imperfect) Turkish democracy, wresting power from a deeply entrenched military establishment—led by Erdoğan and before him Necmettin Erbakan. In Morocco, Islamists won the 2011 parliamentary elections; Abdelilah Benkirane formed a government and governed for years before losing the 2021 elections and stepping down.

Islamists are historical organisms shaped by time, place, and the conditions of struggle; they are not a fixed essence outside history, as Orientalists and their comprador followers portray them.

Option Two: Ban Islamists from political life entirely. But in this case, the advocates of exclusion cannot claim to be “doves of peace,” nor defenders of democracy, because exclusion simply forces Islamists underground, pushing the country into a violent, zero-sum confrontation. One cannot realistically demand that Islamists greet their exclusionists with flowers, and the party imposing the ban becomes directly responsible for deepening political polarization.

After the fall of the Bashir regime in 2019, voices rose calling for banning Islamists. I wrote at that time against dissolving and banning them for the same reasons mentioned above—along with other reasons. (I also wrote against dissolving the National Security Service, but it was dissolved and its capacities, files, and tools were handed to the Janjawid.)

A few days ago, I heard the Marxist philosopher-economist Yanis Varoufakis say he opposes banning Nazi parties in Germany and Europe for two reasons:
First, a principled reason—that their opponents must defeat them through public debate and political struggle, not through police prohibition.
Second, a tactical reason—banning them allows these parties to play the victim and operate underground in ways that become far more dangerous than allowing them to expose their ideas under the spotlight of open politics.

In Sudan, the Marxist intellectual Othman Abdullah (“Othmanto”) arrived at the same conclusion as Varoufakis. He rejected banning the Islamic current by foreign powers, saying accountability should come from the Sudanese people themselves—presumably meaning intellectual and political defeat, not police repression or foreign intervention.

Naturally, from the intellectual emptiness around us, one expects someone to claim that what we say here is a defense of Islamists. But distinguishing between defending the ideas of a group and defending its right to express those ideas is a long-established distinction—known everywhere outside circles of ignorance and fascism since ancient Greek philosophy.

Therefore, nothing I say here can be interpreted as agreement with the Islamists. It is a defense of democracy stripped of hypocrisy, and of the rights of political opponents. But it may well expose me to accusations of “Varoufakian Marxism” or “Othmanite Marxism.”

Defending others’ right to political participation does not mean agreement with their positions—this principle is centuries older than Voltaire’s famous line: “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Let us not forget the Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg, who said that freedom of expression means precisely the freedom of those who disagree with you; whoever does not believe in the freedom of their opponent does not believe in freedom at all. And as Noam Chomsky put it: you do not believe in freedom unless you defend the rights of your worst enemies.

All this means that intellectuals and politicians calling for banning Islamists—or at least forcing them to repent until they earn a “certificate of absolution,” as the Turabi-Popular Congress did under Kamal Omar and Ali al-Hajj—are in fact opponents of democracy and enemies of peace. Their prescription leads to a police state that grants and revokes political rights, and to a bloody zero-sum confrontation with one of the most powerful political currents in Sudan and the region—judged by its intellectual, political, electoral, and military influence.

This page offers no apology for reiterating its disagreement with Islamist doctrines; such apologies only legitimize intellectual intimidation by those who brand every opponent a “Koz” because they cannot defeat them through argument.