After Sudan: Hajj Hamad and the Search for the Horn of Africa

Great.

Hello, everyone. Um, many of you know me

but for those of you who don't, I'm

Ali Bedhad, the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies

and on behalf of my colleagues at the Center, I would like to welcome you all

to today's talk um byour new Faculty Affiliate, Professor Alden Young.

And I'm so glad so many of you are able to join us, so many

um of our colleagues at the Center.

Um, many of you know this already, but CNES

which was founded in 1957 um is a research hub

here at UCLA where um over 100 faculty

from humanities, social

sciences, arts, and the Law School

collaborate in a variety of

research and pedagogical projects.

And as I always say, you know, what makes a center such as ours

so successful and an important venue for

exchange of ideas and dissemination of

information about the MENA region

is the quality of its affiliated faculty.

People in the audience and of course uh you know um

our new faculty um here um whose

cutting-edge scholarship and teaching bring really

important perspectives on the challenges

and cultural richness of the region.

So it really gives me tremendous

pleasure and to welcome and

introduce our new member Professor Alden Young.

Professor Young is a political and

economic historian of Africa and the Middle East. He's

currently an Assistant Professor of African

American Studies and a faculty member in the

International Development Studies program

at UCLA. He is the author of a fantastic book called

Transforming Sudan: Decolonization,

economic development, and state formation,

which was published by the prestigious

Cambridge University Press in 2017.

In this fascinating book, Professor Young

carefully traces the emergence of economic

developmentalism, as he calls it, as the ideology

of the Sudanese state in the decolonization era.

The book beautifully demonstrates how

the state was transformed as a result of the international

circulation of tools of economic management and the

practice of economic diplomacy from the management

of a collection of distinct

populations to the management of a

national economy based on

this notion of individual equality.

Along with Natalie Puetz of New York

Abu Dhabi, Professor Young has recently

been awarded a research grant by SSRC

to work on climate change adaptation

among the Red Sea and [...] countries.

And this is some new project that he's working on and

will be writing a book um on it. His talk

today is entitled

After Sudan: Hajj Hamad and the Search for the Horn of Africa.

So please join me um in welcoming him to the virtual podium

and to um CNES. And I hope in the fall

when we're all going back um to um

in person um some of you will um

meet him in person and have a

conversation, continue the conversation.

And by the way, if you wish to ask your

question yourself, please let us know um

in the chat and we will unmute you and

you can ask the question after he speaks after his lecture.

And also, but if you wish to have your

question you can also send it in

question and answer, I will moderate it

afterwards um or um in any way um you wish to

let us know, how we, you wish to ask your question and I will

unmute you. We can even have you join the group

as well, okay. Alden, go ahead.

And thank you Ali. Thank you for such a

generous introduction um and thank you for being with me today as

I'm beginning to explore uh a new work for a forthcoming book I'm

hoping to write about the Sudanese intellectual

Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad.

Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad was a man born in the late 1940s

and you know and lives until 2004.

But he's really important in some ways,

I'm going to try to argue through some translations I've done over

the last few years, of one of Hajj Hamad's um two volume

history of Sudan, he's really interesting in the ways in

which he tries to mix

some ideas of afrocentricity with um,

with certain ideas that we might see as

part of a pan-Islamism.

And he also posits this question of

an African sufism. And he does it,

I want to argue as a part of a movement

that becomes really important

in the 1980s and I think is central to

understanding modern Sudan,

called the Islamization of knowledge.

And so he's very much committed to ideas of social

science even as he's committed to, you

know, talking about sufism,

uh talking about Africanity, uh the Kingdom of Kush,

uh talking about pan-Islamism

and re-imagining the kind of geography

of Sudan in the Horn of Africa.

I first became interested in Hajj Hamad

while I was writing my first book, uh oh next slide,

I first became interested in Hajj Hamad

while I was writing my first

book called Transforming Sudan.

Transforming Sudan was a history of

development planning and what as Ali just said uh,

how Sudan inherited the post-colonial

economy, the post-colonial Sudan

inherited the post-colonial economy

and how they sought to manage

that colonial inheritance.

The photo right here is a NASA slide of the Gezira scheme,

the largest agricultural scheme in Sudan and

at the time the largest aero-graded

agricultural scheme in the world.

And a fun fact is that it's only one of

two images of man-made

uh man-made structures that are visible

from the colonial period

uh from outer space. The other one being

the Rand Mines in South Africa.

And so to give you a sense of the kind

of enormous economic importance

of these cotton schemes. And so the

challenge for the first generation of

of Sudanese economic planners was how to take

these schemes that have been designed to

serve an imperial economy.

Uh British planners in the 1920s often

spoke of the Gezira Scheme

as potentially a second Nile Valley and it was built

as it became increasingly apparent in

the early 20th century

that the possibility of losing Egypt or

you know having revolt in the Nile

Valley itself was apparent.

Sudan, the Gezira Scheme became for the

for British planners as a sort of insurance,

a second possibility. Uh next slide.

And my first book featured a series of

men who came up through the colonial

establishment and became the first generation of

economic planners in Sudan.

So right above the book, The

Sudan Question, you see Mekki Abbas,

the first director– the first Sudanese

director of the Gezira Scheme,

which we just saw. Once it was

nationalized, he writes a famous book

The Sudan Question in which he argues

for a kind of water nationalism.

He argues that one of the reasons that Sudan needs to

be independent and to break free of both you know

Britain and Egypt is that the two colonial powers which

had ruled Sudan for much of the 20th century until

its self-rule in 1954 were preventing Sudan from developing

its full water resources.

They were preventing Sudan from growing

as much cotton as they could for export

on these giant schemes like the Gezira Scheme.

Next in the center we have Hamza Mirghani Hamza.

Will eventually become the Finance

Minister of Sudan in the 1960s

but previously in the 1950s he becomes

the first Sudanese permanent under

Secretary of Finance.

And he's very interesting because he's

one of the people who becomes most

skeptical of this idea that Mekki Abbas is putting forward, that

Sudan can increase the amount of

uh cotton that it can export.

He thinks that you know the terms of

trade are definitively against Sudan

and that this state-led development

project is doomed to fail. Sudan will not be

able to export

enough cotton to reinvest in the kind of

agricultural-led import substitution and

redevelop the economy.

And then finally we have Mahmoud Bahri

who's also very interesting

because he goes on to become the head of

the African Development Bank,

the head of Sudan Central Bank and he

becomes kind of synonymous with this idea that Sudan

could export its way out of the challenges of post-coloniality.

Sudan can grow enough cotton to develop

in what was often thought of as a series

of stages. So first you would develop the

richest parts of Sudan,

the central regions where the

agricultural schemes were located.

And then gradually once those regions

had become part of

what traditionally was called the modern

sector, profits could be reinvested in

the periphery.

This of course, the strategy of course

would give rise to the first Sudanese civil war

between uh Sudan and South Sudan

or southern Sudan at the time.

And eventually this idea of

peripheries which we still see today,

um complaining about the lack of investment,

and discrimination that the central

state executed against them.

And it's in this context, uh next slide,

it's in this context that we start to

see the rise of men like

like Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad.

Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad has

recently had a renaissance.

Though largely forgotten because he only

writes in Arabic, largely forgotten or maybe never known

outside of the Arabphone world.

In Sudan um, in my recent visits

before the 2019 uh revolution,

for the next for two or three years

prior, I started to hear people talking about

Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad.

And he's very important in the sense um

that he comes of age

in this generation that began to

question the economic orthodoxy, the

political orthodoxy of the Sudanese state of the 1960s, so

the state that we were just referring to– of Hamza

Mirghani Hamza, Mahmoud Bahri,

uh Mekki Abbas. He comes of age,

at least in his self narration from the

1990s which has recently been made into a

very interesting video which we can talk about,

much of his work is circulating on

Youtube videos. And that's something I

would love to talk about in the in the

question and answer period. You see

this resurgence of his public lectures

from the 1990s, you see his

appearances on Arabic TV, you see a

number of memorializing videos.

And so one of the first videos that I

translated um, it's a short video based

based on the 10th year anniversary of

his death in 2004.

So it came out around 2014

and it tries to recapture his

recounting of his life story

in an article from the mid 1990s.

And in that article, he's talking about what

um what Ibrahim El Badawi who's on the

screen right here calls the Decades of Solitude.

The Decades of Solitude are the period

of the al-Ingaz regime in Sudan

or the National Salvation Front which

comes to power in an Islamic

revolution or coup in 1989

and rules from 1989 to 2019.

Ibrahim El Badawi has referred to this period

as Decades of Solitude,

a period in which Sudan was largely cut

off from the rest of the world through a

series of increasingly punishing sanctions

regimes.

As the Islamic movement and

military rulers

increasingly solidified a dictatorship

inside Sudan in which they punished the

business sector, they punished dissidents, many people

left the country.

They ruled through a reign of terror and

they intensified the persecution of the war, the second

Sudanese civil war.

But it was in this period

that Hajj Hamad writes a memorial video

or writes a memorial article trying to

tell his life story. He's in and out of

the country during these these decades,

never fully uh breaking with the Islamic movement but

never joining the Islam.

He writes an article in which he tells

the story, he tells his life story and he says,

you know I came of age in the 1960s.

His first political ambitions were as a

high school activist,

protesting with the students

in Abara against um against the rise to power of Lumumba,

I mean against the intervention against Lumumba in the

Congo. And so it's this kind of

Pan-African sentiment that brings him

into student activism and then very early he joins

uh the Eritrean Liberation Front. And so

in the early 1960s,

he joins the Eritrean Liberation Front.

And the way he explains it and I think

this becomes really important in

thinking even about

what the National Salvation Front

thought they were doing.

He explains his involvement in Eritrea,

his activism against the intervention

against Lumumba

as a dawning realization

that his protests against General Abboud

and the military government in Sudan

were– all three were tied together.

He comes to see that the

military regime in Sudan in the 1960s is supporting

the western intervention in the Congo

just as Haile Selassie's regime in

Ethiopia is oppressing the Eritrean rebels.

And he sees them as part of an imperialist front.

These are the regimes that support

neo-imperialism on the African continent

despite independence.

And so as he participates in the 64

uh revolution, October 64 revolution which overthrows

the Abboud regime and he joins the Popular Front.

As he grows more and more disillusioned

with the coming to power of Nimeiry in 1969,

it's natural for him to devote his energies

to fighting Haile Selassie and joining the ELF.

And I think what's interesting in his

own life trajectory is the idea that it's through the

ELF or the Eritrean Liberation

Front that he actually increasingly becomes a pan-Arabist. So he

moves to Beirut where he founds the Propaganda office

for the ELF.

And in this video from the mid-90s,

you see him having a crisis of faith.

So he talks about going to Beirut in the mid-90s

and he says you know, I've stopped

praying, I've stopped reading the Quran,

I've stopped worshiping. How could I worship?

He says, you know, as I saw

the civil war break out in Lebanon

in the mid 70s and I see the suffering

of the Palestinians.

And then he talks about you know having

a spiritual awakening,

waking up one night at Fajr on Mount Lebanon

uh with his book, with his finger in the

Quran on the story of Moses and Harun

and realizing that you know, he had a

return to faith.

And I think here he's doing an

interesting thing of articulating a kind of

Islamic revivalism and its possibilities

for an anti-imperialism.

And one of the things I've been

interested in and, I have a recent

article about this,

uh The Intellectual Origins of Sudan's

Decades of Solitude

are to what extent,

while not the full imagination perhaps

of what the anti-imperialists might have

thought in Sudan,

the al-Ingaz regime or the National

Salvation Front, in part, tries to take up some of these

ideas that have been constant among Sudanese reformers.

Uh next slide.

And in this article, I also explore some

of the ways in which Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad,

he has a certain politics of citation in

his two-volume history of Sudan.

Sudan historical impasses

and future possibilities [...].

So it's a two volume uh work which

actually is printed twice. So

one comes out in 1980 um and the second one,

second printing of it, which gets expanded.

A lot of what I'll read later in this

talk will come from the second volume

which has an expanded sort of

introductory section of Sudanese history in 1996.

Works, he never really cites uh, you know

the marxist in Sudan,

Fatima Babiker Mahmoud, but you see in his writing, you know

you see these concepts of hegemony,

uh you see a kind of neo-gramscianism,

you see world systems, you see these

ideas that he's clearly borrowing,

or I want to argue is perhaps borrowing

from writers like [...] who are so

frequently cited in works like Fatima Babiker Mahmoud.

You see that the Islamists are also

um you know deeply invested in these readings.

And you see Hajj Hamad also talk very

explicitly about who he's citing.

So there's a whole section in his work

about the politics of citation, who not

to cite, who to cite.

And it was clearly interpreted this way

because I found dissertations written

in Malaysia, for instance, citing Hajj Hamad

in which they accuse him of being a Marxist.

They say that, you know, Hajj Hamad was one of this

generation of Islamists who were actually Marxist and

who simply rewrote Marxism with an Islamic veil.

Uh next slide.

But Hajj Hamad came to me and I decided to

work on this project thinking about

the role of Hajj Hamad um in Sudan

I think maybe a year or so before.

In 2018, I went to Sudan.

And that year, I came to this new

Institute called the Center for

Development in Public Policy.

It was a new think tank um and I was

brought there by

uh several several young associates I'd met

uh between the US and and uh and Sudan.

And they were really excited to take me

to this thing. It was a really well funded

think tank in Khartoum. And when I got there

it became sort of apparent

that there was a younger generation

of officials who were not yet breaking

with the regime, but who were trying to think past the regime.

These are these officials were working on this idea that um

on what would come next. Could you do a

reform project of the National Congress Party from the inside?

And they were clearly in many ways uh.

They had chosen them very carefully

right, so you know, these were the

children of Islamists in Sudan.

They had made sure that they had only,

they had all done their first degree

their bachelor baccalaureates inside the country.

And then they had gone abroad to do

their master's degrees.

And they were trying to produce a new

generation of intellectuals. This think

tank would be destroyed during the 2019 uprising

as its leadership team, its research team broke,

some siding with the revolution and

publicly protesting, some staying silent.

And it was just disbanded. It was largely

funded by some of the owners of the major

mobile phone companies in Sudan.

It had certain Gulf money.

But when I went there, they started talking to me as well about

Hajj Hamad and this made me think

what is it about Hajj Hamad that's made

him have a kind of renaissance in the present.

Next slide.

And a series of tv shows being made, you know

there's one from Al Jazeera recently in 2019. Uh this

one from Sudania 24 is from 2016.

A series of TV shows being made narrating

uh his book project. So this this TV show uh

narrates his two-part volume two-part

history of Sudan.

Uh next slide.

So my book project right now is called

The Fourth World: Sudanese Intellectuals in an Age of American Hegemony.

And it tries to think about the

30-year rule of al-Ingaz of the al-Ingazi

regime in Sudan and tries to think past this idea of it

simply being, you know, a period of religious

fanaticism and military authoritarianism,

a kind of irrationality, which is what exactly what uh finance

minister Al-Badawi described it in

He said it produced nothing but decades of solitude.

And what would it mean to think of it, to

think of the architects of the [...] regime as also

having a debt to the third world internationalism.

And to think about it as part of what

Hajj Hamad in the book that he wrote before he

writes his two volume history of Sudan

calls the second Islamic globalization [...] in 1979.

But in my book, The Fourth World, Sudan in

the age of American Hegemony, I try to use the the history of the

Sudanese intellectual and commentator Hajj Hamad,

Mohammad Abu Qasim Hajj Hamad to tell the stories of

a post-colonial generation

of Sudanese reformers who came of age in

the October revolution

of 1964 and who died

as Sudan reasserted itself– as the United

States reasserts itself as the

predominant power in the greater Middle East

in the decade after September 11th 2001.

In the 1970's, Hajj Hamad and many

Sudanese intellectuals, politicians, and

businessmen of his generation

thought that the rise of the Arab gulf

petrol states might allow the region to

achieve the kind of equitable

development that had eluded the Sudanese

state in the 1960s.

Yet today, the Red Sea region is among the most

the world's most inequitable. The

viciousness of the Second Sudanese civil war

from 1982 to 2005 and the movement of the economic

and financial centers of gravity from

Cairo, Beirut, or Khartoum to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha

make it hard to envision that writers

like Hajj Hamad could have proposed that a hegemonic

African sufism. And here when he talks

about something like an African sufism,

I think it's important to remember that even though

particularly in the 1990s increasingly

writes religious Tafsirs of the Quran

always describes himself in secular

terms. Right so when you see him on Arab TV

he says that he's a researcher of [...]. Uh

you know he sees himself as an analyst.

He creates centers of geo strategy.

And so he's using, I think, African Sufism,

he's trying to use it as a kind of

sociological uh type. But the Muslim internationalism

of Hajj Hamad was novel because of the ways it returned

questions of identity. And here I think

it's part of a broader movement

which I would like to explore also in

the 1980s uh within leftists or within

you know kind of post-marxist tendencies

to rethink ideas of race, gender, and

religion. Bring them to the center of discussion.

I wonder to what extent we can even see

the National Salvation Front

of coming out of this kind of politics of cultural nationalism.

And I think you know, thinking about

figures like Hajj Hamad allow us to

think about the extent to which

you know Islamism comes out of this

cultural nationalism.

And also the possibilities of for people

like Hajj Hamad of developing a kind of

Afrocentric analysis as well and the ways in which you know

in Sudan of the 19–

from the 1970s until until today,

you've seen a minor tendency to try to

combine Islamism and Afrocentrists.

And I say minor tendency right, because

this is this is in opposition to the civilizational

project of the National Salvation Front.

The National Salvation Front continues the project

of Arabization that we can date back to

the 1950s and 60s of the first generation of Sudanese

intellectual Sudanese nationalists

who thought they could Arabize the

African periphery. Hajj Hamad

rejects that idea. He says this is not

going to work.

And I wonder to what extent part of the

reason that Hajj Hamad has become so popular

in the Sudan of today is exactly

uh is exactly, this tension right. This recognition on

his part that Arabization is not a viable project.

That the the country itself cannot be Arabized.

And therefore they needed another path.

And here I want to read a few just a few

passages uh from from Hajj Hamad's work on the

history of Sudan.

Here he says, here, he's talking about his frustration

with the political scene

coming out of the 1960s. The reason,

you know, the idea that neither the

Marxist nor the Islamists nor the traditional

parties Hajj Hamad himself was a member of the [...] Sufi

order, were able to articulate a plan for Sudan

a political economy for Sudan's development.

He begins his work by saying he's

writing this, he's writing his book. He

says, because we overcame our frustrations as

we are unfortunately until now, we remain living in the past. Here

he's talking about Sudanese

intellectuals in general.

In fact we are still living in the past. [...]

the unionists are among the vast expanse

which has stopped the growth and

development of Sudan for years.

Traditionally, Arabism has been averse to

opening up when confronted with an Africa

advancing on all sides. While Marxism

wished with select texts

to impose its own will upon the

historical dialectic of objective reality,

the reliable and Salafi brothers

confiscated the present in the name of the past.

Their golden moments in time are couched in the beyond,

are in what is after death. They are

living in the present or for permanent duality of alienation.

The ideology of the [...] the Muslim Brotherhood

is in the past despite the fact that

they are living in a different present.

And here my idea of calling the book The

Fourth World comes from an exile paragraph.

Our structure is among the third world

of the backward world or the developing world.

Or the fourth world or among the most

poor among the people

of the third world. We live outside of

the customary metrics which create

within them the nations

of the advanced industrial realm.

Here the advanced nations are not a

specific part of the globe in itself but

the structures are definable

or carry the title of advanced nations

through future contemplation.

The remaining civilizations live and die on their margins.

And in their shadows. The formation of

the various social structures in the

growth and development

of our society proceeded in an insufficient manner.

The forms of the various social bodies

in the path of their evolution and

development were not sufficient.

Various of the relations of production

are interlocking in non-comparable methods. Then

colonialism and its effects

and cultural heterogeneity.

And the educated suffer the crisis

of consciousness about the very structure of the nation.

And he's making these moves, he also does

another interesting thing

where in Sudan, if many

uh Sudanese writers as well as colonial

writers had structured

Sudan is a conflict between Africa and

Arabs, he tries to also in his retelling,

break apart this idea of a duality.

On racial ideas, he says take a careful

pause to the study of the historical

frameworks which are included in the national

composition of Sudan.

It is possible that this reveals to us

that Sudan is not only a vast country

millions of miles square

but it is. And here is a dangerous point.

A field of national mixing for all of

the peoples of the African continent on one hand

and for the mixing with the Arabs on the other.

So the Sudan takes this geographical

location in the Eastern Corner of the

African continent, where it undertakes the borders of

civilizational contact, what is between the western Sudanic

breeds, which extend from

West of the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean

and across the Savannah Basin

between the forest and the desert and

between the breeds of the Ethiopian plateau.

And what is usually named in terms of

races, the hermetic,

and what includes the area that is

between the Nile and the Red Sea to the east.

And Sudan is not only considered to touch

geographically and culturally connect

what is between the peoples of the

African continent to the east

and to the west of the Nile. Instead, this

area also touches what is inclusive

encompassing of Equatorial Africa,

which extends to the south and arrives

to the lakes of the Nile in Uganda and Kenya.

And we add to it that after all,

after all of the area of Africa in which the Arabs spread

by extinctions including the actions of Nisba

which encompassed all of these specific

African parties in their cultural and

racial origins and formations. So Sudan is the largest

circle of interaction, including all of the types of the

African continent.

So it is the geographic mediator between different divisions.

And he goes on and he tries to cite you know uh

he tries to say that the last time that Sudan

was actually an important civilization,

what he calls an international

civilization, a civilization capable

not only of borrowing, but also

of giving something to international society.

He says that it was he says it is not, it

is enough to repeat what has been said

before in relation to Kush.

It was not a Sudanese kingdom alone.

It played a large role in Sudan's social development

and played a similar role in the

development of the African continent.

The civilizational ideas at that time

were gathered in Marawi.

And Marawi gave them an African imprint

and spread them to the continent in every direction

afterwards, to the West and to the South.

The doctrines, ideas, and artistic stability were spread

during the 10 centuries during which

Kush lived, 725 to 350.

So I had some disputes about those dates.

The advantages of the Sudanese position

were clarified, specifically

is pervasion of the African continent.

And indeed they spread

for a period a complete global

civilization to all of Africa extending its effects

through them to all of the peoples of Western Sudan.

The impact of Marawi advanced even to

the Yoruba people and others among the peoples of West

Africa. Indeed it has been discovered that those

who worship the eyes of the gods of Marawi

were known and [...] worshipped it in his first days.

But he says the fall right came because

the kinds of integration that was possible during

uh the Kingdom of Marawi of the

kingdom of Kush was never re-possible

again and so he talks about you know the

Nubian failures to recreate it. He talks about how

even though the Arab world was expanding,

he says after 1492 the Islamic empires were expanding into

Africa. It was not a period of retreat for him.

They were not able to create a synthesis

and then he blames us in part because he says,

the possibility was there for what he

calls an African sufism.

But I think is you know in the 19 mid 1990s,

in writing this is a critique actually

of the al-Ingaz regime and its turn to

a kind of Arabization,

Arab Islam. You're saying that it was in

that process, you know this turned

towards an Arab Islam.

That integration of Sudan was impossible and for him,

in some of his earlier writings about

why uh even when the Communist

party came to power in the early days of

the Nimeiry regime to fail

to create an anti-imperial front. He says

because we were divided.

We were not able to integrate our

society in order to stand up

to the neo-imperialists. And so I think

this failure of integration for Hajj Hamad

is at the core of his critique of what

went wrong in Sudan.

And I think it's interesting to think

about the ways in which the National Salvation Front

from people like Hassan Al-Turabi

understand a part of this critique, the

idea that you need to integrate

Sudanese society even by force

into an Arabo Islamic civilization in

order to create a common culture.

But misunderstood are being critiqued by

writers like Hajj Hamad for

for failing to try to create an Africanity,

right, the role of Africa

in this integration or in this new

culture that would be a Sudanese culture.

Next slide.

And so over the last uh

five years or so, five or six years,

we've seen actually a rise of what we

might call neo-nubianism right. Uh

and here there's the artist and uh

fashion designer Mayada Adil

uh and she's you know creating her own renditions

of what she sees as a kind of Neo-nubian fashion.

And these are people who much like the

people in the in the Center for Development in Public

Policy are the children of people who did very

well under the National Salvation Front.

They are children of people who either

lived in Saudi Arabia

or you know, parents thrived under the

booming economy of the early 21st

century. The oil economy of the National

Salvation Front but who after 2011 in the economic

downturn and the partition have come to question

uh the Arabization program or the civilizational

project of the National Salvation Front

and try to reimagine alternatives.

Uh next slide.

And in 2019 uh this photo was taken by uh by Noah

Salomon, uh the anthropologist. You know, you see

this idea of the origins of civilization

uh in the 20 in the 2019 protest

and you see the Pyramids of Marawi uh

towards the bottom

in the light bulb. This idea that

you know, Nubia comes to play uh, in the kingdom of Kush.

These ancient uh African civilizations

are coming to play an increasingly

important role in the reimagination of a new Sudanese nationalism.

And to what extent you know these can be

traced back to sort of the critiques

of people like Hajj Hamad in the 1990s,

why are they being taken up by the urban

elite populations of cities like Khartoum. Um,

what role did they play and you know the

eventual discrediting

not just economically or politically, but

intellectually of the civilizational project of Turabi,

which I would argue also goes way back in

Sudan you know you can see it even in

writers like Mekki Abbas who

would have been secular writers. When he

describes the Gezira scheme, he says it's

a new Mesopotamia,

right this idea that you could transport

through development Sudan to the Arab world.

So you see this kind of critique popping up

uh now and I think I'm really

interested in questions of why. and what that can tell

us about you know the limits and possibilities of

the cultural project,

uh what what role do people like uh Hajj Hamad

see for culture and the making of political economy.

To what extent you know can we see uh the al-Ingaz

regime as also a cultural project tied

to critiques of anti-imperialism. And

then what this resetting of a kind of

uh afrocentrism at the base of urban

Sudan, um urban Sudan's politics. What that can

tell us about the future directions of Sudan.

Uh thank you again.

Thank you so much Alden for that

wonderful presentation and for introducing us to your um

great new project. What a fascinating

project of interest to many of us, not only people

who work on Sudan and the Middle East, but the kind

of a broader sort of postcolonial readers who

who have has a wide range of interest

in the relationship between

pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism,

and postcolonialism. But this new concept

that you introduced is quite suggestive. The fourth uh

um what you call it the fourth uh world,

which is um really fascinating.

Um I really encourage those colleagues who were here today and

to um to get together with alden when

we are in person, and we look forward to

having him at the Center.

And thank you so much.

We look forward to more collaboration.

Thank you so much for having me

and giving me this chance to talk about

my project. Thank you.

Thanks everyone.