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Sudan made the event again at the beginning of last week when the head of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, signed with Abdel Aziz Adam al-Hilu, leader of the rebel group, the Popular Movement- North, a declaration of principles according to which religion and state would be separated. It is one of the many articles that opens the door to building a federal Sudan with a diverse religious and ethnic makeup in which the state treats without a religious background, but on the basis of equal citizenship.
This is an important step for Sudan at the political level, because it can prepare a lasting peace after conflicts where the use of religion was strongly present. However, its importance may go beyond this country to engage in the space of Arab-Islamic culture in general, especially since the question of the relationship between religion and politics is one of the most complex and most sensitive.
Perhaps the question that arises in the Sudanese context is this: how can a country which has a deep Islamic heritage that started since the Mahdist movement and which has intensified its presence with the late President Jaafar Nimeiri to come back strongly with the Islamic movement at the end of the 90s of the last century, to take such a step to separate Islam and the State?
The answer to this question is certainly found through the experience of activating Islam as a benchmark for the state with Nimeiri, as well as after the 1989 coup led by the Islamic Front. This period demonstrated the extent of the damage that could be done to the state by using religion, and in this case Islam, as the basis of the political process and the organization of society, especially in a country with ethnicities and religions. The situation reached the point of dividing blacks into two states after a devastating civil war. The Sudanese have understood, after the experience of the Islamization of the state, that the construction of a true national unity is done mainly on the basis of citizenship and belonging to the territorial identity.
The Sudanese case confirms these other experiences of contemporary history. Secularism, in the sense of the legal separation between state and religion, has only been observed by countries whose history carried a strong religious heritage and have found themselves in difficulty with the spread of political and social rationalization. that accompanied the emergence of the nation-state. This was the case in France in 1905, after a bloody struggle between religious and laity throughout the nineteenth century, after nearly a century of strong return to the Church with Napoleon I. Turkey witnessed this same path with Kemal Ataturk, who established a legal separation between the emerging nation-state and its Islamic heritage upon which the Ottoman Empire built its glories.
With the same historical logic, it is not excluded that the arrival of political Islam to power in the Arab world becomes a gateway to prepare the ground for a secular or secular experience in many countries.
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