he languages of neighboring cultural groups. Under such circumstances, living in isolation and ignorance of one another becomes the rule rather than the exception. Such heterogeneity, combined with the problems of underdevelopment (poverty, limited technology, poor transport systems, etc.) have severely undercut the degree to which African peoples interact and communicate with one another. This barrier to social interaction and communication then translates into barriers not only to intra-African trade per se but also to political and economic integration in general (Mukisa and Thompson 64-5).
With its Ottoman and British imperial history; entrenched cultural, economic, and linguistic divisions between Arab north and multitribal south; and repeated social degeneration into civil war since its independence in 1956, Sudan is all too typical of this description. Further, the most recently articulated basis for Sudanese political governance, Islamic law, can in the modern period be readily identified as a potential barrier not only to the implementation of freedom as a fundamental social value but to the very discourse of freedom. Thus to assert that concepts of freedom (which imply as well concepts of nation-state development) articulated by the Western philosophers John Locke and Karl Marx might have relevance for the future of the Sudan seems a hazard that is both intellectual and practical.
The history of Sudan is nothing if not a testament to the people's direct experience of hazard, terror, and much worse besides owing to the apparent failure of the Sudanese to meaningfully and permanently conceptualize freedom as fundamental to society. Meanwhile, it is a curious fact that the Islam that has been observed on the ground in Sudan has been interpreted in a variety of ways, not all of which are hostile to such conceptualization. For one thing, Hassan al Turabi, described as the architect of Sudan's Islamic system (Viorst 45), was e...