The Army Between the “Quad” and the Unifying Narrative (1 of 4)

Dr al-Dirdiri Mohamed Ahmed
Recently, fears have grown that the “Quad” will return to the scene to impose its old-new conditions and restore the militia and its captains to power. This came in the wake of the Quad’s statement issued on 12 September and its recent announcement of a meeting this October. Because of that, enthusiasm spread among those on the other side, who declared that it was necessary to “restore the national alliance between the forces of the revolution, the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), despite its complexities.” What further alarmed people was the feverish activity of Mas‘ad Boulos, the US President’s envoy. His movements suggested that something was being arranged behind the curtain, and that Trump intended to impose on Sudan a ready-made, fully itemised deal, as he did in Gaza; and that, under that deal, the Framework Agreement would be reproduced. Then came General ‘Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s visit to Cairo, which—together with the statement that followed, and leaks in Africa Intelligence—sparked much speculation, some of which continues to simmer despite what Burhan later announced in Atbara on 18 October, and again at Khartoum Airport on 21 October.
Whatever the truth of what is afoot, it reveals a bitter reality: the army has today become the sole actor dominating Sudanese political decision-making. It alone decides whether to submit to what the Quad dictates or to refuse it. This is among the universal patterns God has set to unfold in protracted wars. When war drags on—lasting for many years—it gradually destroys the civil state: its institutions, administration, elites, parties and public opinion. Decision-making thus rests entirely with the victorious army. It is the army that determines when to stop the war, how to do so, and on what terms—and even decides the direction the country sets its course toward after the war. Our army neither expected this, nor planned for it, nor drove people to it; rather, what has befallen others has befallen it—a prevailing pattern. That is the unwelcome news.
On the brighter side, the good news is that a country seared by a brutal war—such as the one whose end we now glimpse—is reborn. It emerges from war as on the day it was born: free and independent. It then possesses the consensus and resolve to strike rock and open what was sealed. If Sudanese have lacked the chance to adopt a unifying national project since the dawn of independence, that opportunity has now arrived. In their hands today is a historic moment to renew the content of independence and recall its meanings. If you will, they stand on the threshold of a new independence.
This places weighty responsibilities on the army’s shoulders. First, it must choose between the two options set before it. It stands at a crossroads: either it draws inspiration from the historic moment in its hands. It renews the country’s independence, or it lets the moment pass and returns Sudan to the agenda that lay on the table before the war—casting the country back into dependency and subservience. The second responsibility incumbent upon the army is to determine its place after the war. Will it relish monopolising decision-making and continue to do so? Or will it work to restore things to their natural order, returning the state to its lost civility? If our present condition is the result of a universal pattern in which the army had no hand, what comes next is a free choice the army alone will make. That choice is the most consequential in this nation’s constitutional journey—indeed, the fateful decision separating Sudan’s flourishing from its extinction. It is the decision that will either see Sudan soar on two strong wings—one civil, the other military—or leave it with its civil wing broken, flailing with a single wing that avails nothing, however strong.
We do not approach this issue of paramount importance through political entry points or journalistic methods. It is too grave to be settled by views grounded in political positioning, or to be sought through the crowded thoroughfare of journalism. Rather, we address it through an interdisciplinary study that brings together comparative constitutional jurisprudence and inquiries of historical induction. That is likelier to gather the strands of judgment and guide us to the path of soundness. Because of this approach, what we have summarised above will be detailed and expanded across four instalments. To examine Sudan’s present condition, we must look at what befell earlier generations that have brought us to this dire morass. And we must draw upon what is theoretical—ideas; what is practical—experiences; and what is settled—principles; all derived from the achievements of other nations. We are not unique among people. We ask the reader to be patient with our method as far as possible; if they do, the locked doors will open.
I recall being invited, after 25 October 2021, to speak to a gathering of Sudanese journalists—men and women—who filled a hall to discuss the media and its course in the new phase they were preparing to enter. The first thing I said was that Sudanese media needed, at this juncture, a new “narrative”. Just as the “Salvation (Ingaz) Narrative” had become stale, so too the “December Revolution Narrative” no longer fired the Sudanese people’s imagination, having been appropriated by a narrow current that burdened it with ideological weight and wounded it with political errors. Had time permitted in that meeting, I would have explained what I meant by “narrative”, citing a modern theory in contemporary political history—or “the history of the future”, as it has come to be called—devised by Yuval Noah Harari in his 2013 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. That valuable work has been translated into sixty-five languages, with twenty-five million copies published. I beg the reader’s leave to devote the opening of this first instalment to the intellectual and theoretical grounding of the term “narrative”, which there was no time to cover in that encounter.
Among a dazzling array of insights, Harari advanced an ingenious idea: that “myth” is the basis of human cooperation. While the common meaning of the word in Arabic and English revolves around a fable or an imaginary tale, Harari gives it a technical sense. By it, he means a shared belief that does not exist in nature but abides in the minds of individuals in a given human group. He does not pronounce on the truth or value of any of these beliefs—these “myths”—but simply argues that their presence among human groups is the secret of Homo sapiens’ success. They enabled humanity, past and present, to cooperate in vast multitudes—and will do so in the future. Nations—say, the British, Iranian or Russian—are not entities existing in nature; they are “myths” in the imaginations of certain groups of people that lead them to a shared belief in their unity, existence and the worth of cooperating for the uplift of their entity. The same can be said of companies, human rights, banknotes—and now electronic currencies such as Bitcoin, which have no physical existence. Yet belief in these “myths”, according to Harari, is what allows humans to cooperate not by the hundreds or thousands, but by the millions and billions.
What Harari says today—that “myth” underpins human cooperation—calls to mind what Ibn Khaldūn wrote centuries ago—while imprisoned in the Castle of Ibn Salama in Algeria (1375–1378 CE)—that “ʿaṣabiyya” (group solidarity) is the foundation of human civilisation. On its face, the term “ʿaṣabiyya” refers to a bond of tribal or ethnic solidarity that gives a group the capacity for political mobilisation and fighting necessary to found authority. But Ibn Khaldūn is concerned with it as a phenomenon that produces an observable sociological existence traceable through history. Perhaps Harari’s and Ibn Khaldūn’s theses meet in that both attempt to answer a central question: how does the social cohesion arise that enables humans—alone among God’s creatures on this earth—to cooperate in boundless groupings? Yet their convergence ends there: they differ fundamentally in terminology, method and ontological assumptions. Specialists may well dive deep to compare the two, offering us what is both novel and rooted.
What concerns us here, with our eyes on the Sudanese context, is that while Ibn Khaldūn lays out how ʿaṣabiyya, as a lineage-based entity, transforms into a social force among relatives, achieving domination over outsiders, Harari examines how myth generates a collective faith among non-kin that makes trust possible between them, enabling the creation of a non-lineage entity founded on belief in a shared creed.
Perfection is not to be sought in human theorising. Each of Ibn Khaldūn and Harari is a child of his environment. Ibn Khaldūn relates observations drawn from the history of Islamic states in his era; his theory is thus not readily scalable to the forms of the modern state. Harari’s theory, for its part, may be criticised for excessive symbolic reductionism in the idea of “myth”, to the point of overlooking other material structures of societies, past and present.
Be that as it may, Harari’s “idea” of myth merits contemplation and is worthy of inclusion among our tools for analysing Sudan’s present condition. Yet I do not favour the term “myth” he uses—and many may feel the same—because of the shadows, connotations, and epistemic concepts it evokes. For our limited purpose here, we therefore shift to the term “national narrative”. This is not a mere terminological quibble. While the “national narrative” resembles Harari’s “myth” in comprising a set of conceptions, symbols, rituals and institutions that shape a “shared story” about who we are and why we share a common destiny, it differs in that myth is timeless, whereas narrative is mortal. A narrative undergoes cycles of vitality and dormancy: after flourishing, it is beset by decay, then can be renewed. In this respect, “narrative” approaches Ibn Khaldūn’s “ʿaṣabiyya”: he holds that the cycle of civilisation begins with “vigour and solidarity” and ends in “indolence and luxury”. Thus, for him, ʿaṣabiyya disintegrates across generations, heralding a new dynastic cycle. Now we may plunge, with the reader, into the inquiries of our Sudanese narrative, using the tool and terminology agreed above.
We began developing our first national narrative—which we call the “Independence Narrative”—as our modern national consciousness took shape after the White Flag Revolution of 1924. That revolution was the symbolic spark that awakened the elite and established the first foundation for collective cooperation among Sudanese against colonial rule and foreign domination. We then set about crafting the official story of that narrative, making independence our historic goal and its achievement our national project. The national press—starting with al-Ḥaḍārah al-Sūdāniyyah, then al-Ḥaḍārah, then al-Fajr, then al-Nīl—and the Graduates’ Congress took up that narrative. A discourse was produced whose tenor was “political freedom, then self-rule, then ending colonial hegemony”. The elements of that national narrative were a clear, central objective around which mobilisation was easy—independence—and a common external foe—the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium—whose presence temporarily cancelled out internal differences.
The Independence Narrative succeeded in mobilising key central sectors around the negotiations on self-rule and the pre-independence elections. By their broad participation in those elections, the Sudanese people expressed their approval of democracy as the path to governance, and that became part of the Independence Narrative’s content. Independence was declared on 1 January 1956, and the Sudanese breathed, with pride and exultation, the joy of being free and independent. Such were the limited meanings contained in the Independence Narrative—its immediate aims—which were achieved with unparalleled success. Yet the narrative stopped there; it did not proceed to produce a unifying Sudanese project for the post-independence era. It quickly withered, its content eroded, and it lost the attributes of a “shared belief” that would enable Sudanese to cooperate as a nation in the period following independence.
The chief reason for the Independence Narrative’s rapid erosion was its lack of unifying content—save a little. At the very height of building that narrative—when absolute unity was needed—the elite split into two currents: one exulting in the Mahdist Revolution and adopting its stances; the other recalling the position of the elder al-Mirghani. Along those old historical lines, a modern split emerged over the most complex questions of independence. That failure was followed by another: failure to find nationally agreed symbols. Though the White Flag Revolution produced heroes such as Ali ‘Abd al-Latif and ‘Abd al-Fadil al-Maz, and icons of cultural struggle like Khalil Farah, author of the immortal poem “‘Azza fi Hawāk”, the national movement—because of political conflict—did not bring forth a collective leadership for the Sudanese that was internally concordant and popularly consensual. The national narrative thus lacked sufficient content on the eve of independence, and, moreover, lacked figures to embody its unity and inspire people with a shared belief at independence’s dawn.
While Sudan’s Independence Narrative collapsed, other countries’ independence narratives succeeded and inflamed national sentiment after independence, becoming the foundation for a shared belief on which the political system, economic growth and social stability rested. Among these are the United States (in earlier times) and South Africa (in recent times). Let us, however, choose the “Indian Independence Narrative” as a model of successful independence narratives, as India’s independence is closer to ours in time—it was achieved in 1947—and because India’s reality was closest to ours. We shall devote the next instalment to a comparison with the Indian narrative, to understand why Sudan’s Independence Narrative failed to continue inspiring the national imagination, while India’s Independence Narrative succeeded to a remarkable degree.

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