One may say, with the examples of Zia [in Pakistan], Numeiri [Nimeiri] in Sudan, and probably ultimately Khomeini and his followers, that there is nothing like having a government that calls itself Islamic to discredit Islamism (Keddie 41).
Thus a Western view of Islamic political culture in the era of the global village. Freedom in Sudan discussed in the terminology of Western norms of political discourse seems an impossible task, if it is accepted that the Sudan is a creature of modern revolutionary Islam, which is in its shi'a formulation a throwback to medieval Muslim orthodoxy and opaque to external pressure. Undoubtedly the prevailing Western characterization of Sudan's government is that it is Islamic, radical, and missional, a characterization very much supported by the fact that the present government of Sudan was installed as a result of a 1989 military coup against the first-ever democratically elected government in Sudan's history. It is also supported by the apparent fervor with which Islamic governments and loyalists, including that of the Sudan, urge the view that Israel and the West are in a conspiracy against true democracy and against Islam (Fadlallah 178ff; Jansen 168); that state policy = there is no God but God and his name is Allah (Daniszewski A1); and that the West is to blame for the kidnapping strategies of Muslim political activists in the 1980s (Fadlallah 181). As Daniszewski (A1) says in the context of a 1997 border clash with Ethiopia, "The Islamist government in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, has blamed a cook's stew of foreign adversaries--including Israel, Britain and the United States--for the latest bout of war nibbling at its vast frontiers."
In behavior, the Sudan regime seems not so very different from dictatorial regimes in the secular mold in any part of the world. Meanwhile, however, the human-rights record in the Sudan is against the view that government by shari'a, the prevailing offic...