Arabo-Islamism… Again

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Hisham Ahmed dismissed every Sudanese culture other than Arab and Islamic culture. He listed them all and claimed that they lacked any civilizational heritage. Such a statement is reckless and unfounded. Here, I would like to revisit the recommendations of the National Dialogue Conference for Peace (1989) concerning identity, education, and languages as a framework for understanding how it seems that we have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Recommendations of the National Dialogue Conference for Peace on Identity, Education, and Languages

The introduction to the conference’s recommendations on culture and education stated that cultural diversity is a source of strength for the nation. Consequently, the state is required to embrace and nurture this diversity effectively so that it becomes an intellectual and emotional foundation upon which Sudanese people from all regions can unite. The media, at the local, regional, and federal levels, bears responsibility for reflecting and advancing this diversity. Federal media institutions, in particular, should be convinced that media is a public service through which our peoples and tribes come to know one another and learn the values of freedom and fellowship. The conference did not accept a phrase proposed by our committee stating that “the media is a service, not a platform for proselytization.”

We then moved on to recommendations concerning educational policy and the language question. We stated that the diversity of languages is a blessing, and therefore the state should refrain from granting privileges to any particular language or culture. The project further stipulated the following:

1. Educational planning should be federal in nature and should take into account, in its implementation, personnel, and institutions, the characteristic of Sudan’s cultural diversity.
2. Educational planning should recognize the historical experience of the Arabic language as the mother tongue of a large Sudanese community, a language of communication among many Sudanese groups, and the official language since independence. Arabic should therefore be employed in education to the extent necessary to fulfill these roles effectively.
3. Educational planning should recognize the historical role of the English language as a language with a special status in the southern regions and as Sudan’s means of communication with the outside world. It should be utilized in education to the extent necessary to serve these functions.
4. Educational planning should also recognize local languages and adopt the established educational principle that instruction should begin in those languages. Given the comparatively weaker position of local languages relative to Arabic and English, educational planning should:

   a) Not use limited resources as an excuse to permanently exclude any local language from education.

   b) Support initiatives undertaken by cultural and tribal communities to develop their languages and introduce them into local schools.

5. Educational planning should regard linguistic, cultural, and environmental diversity as established educational assets and experiences upon which schooling should build rather than disregard. In this way, the knowledge acquired at school is added to the experiences that students bring with them and that continue to shape them within their communities. Therefore, educational planning should:

   a) Maintain a connection with the student’s mother tongue as outlined above.

   b) Ensure that school curricula are sufficiently flexible to accommodate regional, cultural, and environmental diversity. This can be achieved by empowering state education agencies and councils to creatively incorporate the student’s immediate history and culture into the curriculum.

   c) Develop mechanisms for comparing and harmonizing curricular differences arising from these considerations, ultimately producing a national certificate of education that embraces diversity without obscuring national unity.