Between Murawih and Al-Baz: Sudan’s Deferred Questions and the Media’s Role in Re-founding the Meaning of the Nation

Dr Muzammil Suleiman Hamad
Amid the renewed intellectual debate opened by Ambassador Obeid Murawih—former Director of the Sudanese Radio and Television Corporation and founder of the Sudanhorizon media platform—on the “Sudan earthquake” and the questions of “transitional founding”, the intervention of Adel Al‑Baz in his article “Questions of Formation… and the Explosion of Deferred History (2/2)” emerges as an important critical extension of this discussion. It does not merely comment, but rather deconstructs the very idea from a deeper angle: knowledge before politics, formation before transition, and consciousness before power.
At its core, this dialogue is less about differences of opinion than it is about revealing a deeper crisis in the Sudanese experience: a crisis in producing the foundational knowledge of the state, not merely managing its political disagreements.
In his second article, Obeid Murawih poses a fundamental question: how do we move from a state that failed to understand its society to one that emerges from a precise understanding of its composition, grievances, and transformations? He proposes what he terms “transitional founding”, whether through an expanded intellectual elite or via an initiative led by the state itself—an approach that seeks to open the door to collective thinking about the roots of Sudan’s crisis before delving into the mechanics of power.
However, Adel Al-Baz, in engaging with this proposal, ventures into a more critical terrain. He argues that these ideas, despite their seriousness, are not new to the Sudanese experience; they have been attempted in various forms over decades through conferences, dialogues, and committees, yet have failed to produce genuine transformation. In his view, the issue is not a lack of good intentions, but rather the absence of a proper methodology—namely, a deep understanding of the nature of the Sudanese state and its historical, social, and cultural structures.
Both perspectives converge on a central point: Sudan’s crisis is not a superficial political problem that can be resolved through settlements or power-sharing arrangements. Rather, it is a crisis of formation in the deeper sense—how the state was constructed, how identities were shaped, and how an imbalanced relationship emerged between the centre and the periphery, and between the state and society.
Yet Al-Baz adds a crucial warning: returning to the same old tools—conferences, political dialogues, and rapid settlements—would reproduce failure. This is because such approaches treat symptoms while leaving the roots of the crisis unexamined through any rigorous scientific diagnosis.
This brings the discussion to a more sensitive question: who has the authority to found? Is it the political elite, the state, intellectuals, or scholars in history, sociology, and economics? A different vision emerges here—one that argues that the process of founding cannot be left to politicians alone. By their nature, politicians are preoccupied with managing the present moment, whereas founding requires dismantling history and constructing knowledge, not merely administering conflict.
This leads to a key idea: Sudan has not failed because it lacked conferences, but because it failed to produce sufficient knowledge about itself. In other words, solutions were pursued before diagnosis was completed; power was divided before agreement was reached on the meaning of the state; and recommendations were drafted before answering the foundational question: why does failure recur in the first place?
In this context, Huwaida Shabo’s call for a “new social contract” stands out as an important contribution. Yet it requires a necessary precondition: comprehensive intellectual grounding. A social contract cannot simply be a political document; it must be the outcome of a profound understanding of Sudanese society, its history, and its contradictions.
From here, a more decisive conclusion takes shape: if “transitional founding” does not evolve into a project of knowledge production, it will merely reproduce the same crisis under new labels. However, if it becomes an analytical, scientific phase involving scholars of history, sociology, economics, and culture, then Sudan may indeed be on the threshold of a genuinely different beginning.
In the background of this debate lies a more dangerous challenge: the chaos of consciousness, where information is confused with propaganda, opinion with fact, and political discourse with media manipulation. Here, the role of media and cultural formation becomes inseparable from the founding project itself. A state that lacks critical awareness among its citizens will remain trapped in the cycle of reproducing its crises, regardless of changes in government.
What unites the contributions of Murawih, the analyses of Adel Al-Baz, and the voices of others is a growing recognition that Sudan requires not only political transition, but a re-founding of meaning: the meaning of the state, the citizen, identity, and even truth itself within the public sphere.
Thus, this open intellectual exchange transcends mere journalistic debate; it becomes an early attempt to pose the most difficult question: how can Sudan understand itself before attempting to change itself?
Ultimately, perhaps the most important contribution of this exchange is that it restores the question to its proper place: not how do we govern Sudan?, but how do we first understand Sudan?
Without that understanding, history will continue to revolve in its deferred cycle—and the next eruption will remain an ever-present possibility.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=12402