Many southerners are voting for an independent Sudan this week, thirsting for freedom from the north. They equate sharia or Islamic law that President Omar al-Bashir has vowed to strengthen with slavery.<\/p>\n
Al-Bashir has declared that if Southern Sudan votes in favor of separation, sharia will become the main source of Sudan’s Constitution, Islam the state religion and Arabic the official language.<\/p>\n
Many in the north are embracing al-Bashir’s pledge.<\/p>\n
Newspaper publisher Al-Tayib Mustafa said he will be happy to see his nation break in two. Islam, he said, comes above all else.<\/p>\n
“When the south goes, then the north will be Muslim,” he said. “For a Muslim, unity is not as important as religion. Sharia is religion. Sharia is Islam.”<\/p>\n
But there are other faces of Islam in Sudan, including a Sufi community, and Mustafa’s position is hardly shared by all Sudanese.<\/p>\n
Some in the north consider themselves Arabs, others Africans. They speak a dozen different languages, and while a majority of people are Muslims, a significant number are Christians or practice traditional religions.<\/p>\n
Sharia already is the law of the land in northern Sudan, but Sudanese authorities have relaxed its enforcement since 2005 when a peace treaty ended more than 20 years of civil war.<\/p>\n
The war pitted a northern government of Arab Muslims against blacks in Southern Sudan who practice Christianity and animist religions. It killed 2 million people and displaced several million others, mainly from Southern Sudan.<\/p>\n
The president’s comments have stirred fear that the government will implement sharia for the hundreds of thousands of southerners and other non-Muslims in northern Sudan, including many who fled fighting, disease and famine in the south.<\/p>\n
Even many Muslims find the imposition of Islamic law troubling, and it’s even more disturbing for the small and ancient Christian community in the north.<\/p>\n
“We as Christians, we feel that Christianity is a Sudanese religion and should be respected,” said Bishop Ezekiel Kondo, who oversees Khartoum’s Episcopal Church and chairs the Sudan Council of Churches.<\/p>\n
Al-Bashir’s vow to strengthen Islamic law came as a shock to Kondo.<\/p>\n
“As a church we are not happy with what he said, and we feel as the president — he is the president for everyone in the country — he knows very well that there are other religious communities.”<\/p>\n
But Mohammed Othman Salih, secretary-general of the Sudanese Muslim Clerics Council, brushed aside such concerns.<\/p>\n
“The Islamic sharia guarantees the rights of non-Muslims better than secular laws,” he said. “Why? Because it’s an issue of a religious duty, and they are human rights sanctified by God almighty.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many southerners are voting for an independent Sudan this week, thirsting for freedom from the north. They equate sharia or Islamic law that President Omar al-Bashir has vowed to strengthen with slavery. Al-Bashir has declared that if Southern Sudan votes in favor of separation, sharia will become the main source of Sudan’s Constitution, Islam the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}