Mansour Khaled
Any system of government governed by a basic law is a set of laws, rules and principles that define the boundaries of responsibilities, powers, duties and rights. In this sense, all systems of government, including totalitarian systems and those that attribute to themselves a divine right to rule, have constitutions that regulate governance. In this article, we talk about the constitution in the sense that we have become accustomed to since independence, and then we began to invoke it and seek refuge in it after every uprising. Since all of our political perceptions were based on considering that constitution, or the constitutional pattern upon which it was built, as a safety net and the only path to good governance and political stability, it is useful to examine that constitution from its inception to see whether the political damage that befell us was due to the provisions of the constitution, or the unsuitability of the soil in which it was planted, or the need of the constitution to take root as some claim, or because, to begin with, we dealt with that constitution as a form without content, a presentation without substance, and procedures without Meanings. The Sudanese constitution, which has been governed by it since independence, is a liberal democratic constitution. Although democracy is a form of government, liberalism is a political system that aims to protect human freedom, especially his natural and human rights. This can only be achieved by limiting the state’s authority over citizens as long as the citizens consent and comply with a ruler (state) who manages their affairs. This limitation of authority is achieved either by reducing the scope of the state’s exercise of it, or by controlling and curbing that exercise. Since the state is the one that sets the laws, it becomes legitimate to ask: What is the guarantee that the state will limit its authority on its own? There is no guarantee at all, which is why liberal constitutions created principles and controls that are entrenched in the constitution so that they cannot be circumvented, their meanings violated, or they are modified except in accordance with strict controls. At the top of these principles is securing the basic human rights of the citizen, which were added to in the second generation of human rights, the rights of peoples, as sacred rights that are inalienable and inviolable. At the top of the strengthened controls is the rule of law, which is perhaps the most important check and balance mechanism in constitutions. Therefore, many constitutions grant constitutional authority to the judiciary to protectors of the constitution. An example of this is its authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws, that is, to decide whether the laws are outside of, or in conformity with, the provisions of the constitution. This power is enjoyed, for example, by the Supreme Court of the United States and in India, and was enjoyed until 1949 by the Law Committee of the Privy Council in relation to the Canadian Constitution. Other constitutions, such as New Zealand's, expressly prohibit the courts from exercising this power, and the New Zealand written constitution may have adopted the principle followed by the unwritten English constitution that Parliament is the master of its own decision. As the common saying goes, the English Parliament has the right to decide on any legislative issue, amend or abolish it, except for one matter, which is to make males female and females males. Even this exception has almost been nullified in the time of wonders we are in, as some parliamentarians today are discussing the legalization of same-sex marriage. On a more serious tone, we say that this right provided by the English Constitution to Parliament is not an absolute right, as that Parliament is governed by an iron restriction, which is parliamentary conventions, which have not allowed it throughout its history since the declaration of the Magna Carta to deviate from the principles entrenched in the Constitution. This is a necessary introduction to addressing the issue of constitutional development in Sudan. The history of the constitution in Sudan, like the history of politics, is a miserable and miserable history. Nothing is more evident than the inability of the Sudanese to agree on a constitution by which the country will be governed since self-rule. The only two constitutions that departed from the norm were issued under two totalitarian regimes: the Permanent Constitution of Sudan 1973 (the May era), and the Constitution of the Republic of Sudan 1998 (the “rescue” era). In all other periods of government, Sudan was governed under a constitution prepared by the British, primarily to administer a transitional period of self-rule (Stanley Baker Constitution). It is an irony of fate that this constitution is a natural product of institutions about which the Sudanese National Movement said, in the words of leader Ismail Al-Azhari, “We will not enter them even if they come clean of every defect.” That constitution became the constitution of independent Sudan on January 1, 1956, the constitution of the second democracy after October 1964 (the 1956 Constitution amended in 1964), and the constitution of the third democracy after May. What is the source of the deficit? Politicians who have not been endowed by God with the virtue of humility and the advantage of self-criticism have no way to respond to this question other than: “The soldiers did not give us a chance.” This is an exaggeration to say without thinking carefully, because the origin of the crisis goes back to before independence, and before the military had any role in politics. In today's terms, we summarize the crisis as: the system of government, identity, human rights, and political and economic marginalization. Of course, the manifestations of the crisis had not crystallized in this way prior to self-rule, but its essence was clearly visible at the political level, and the solution to it should have been clear at the level of vision for the generation of the Graduates’ Congress who considered Gandhi and Nehru to be prophets of patriotism. That is why I will take India with me whenever necessary in these articles. We will not succeed in properly analyzing our problems if escaping history becomes a habit for us. The draft constitution for self-government, which later became a constitution for independence, included two articles about the South (the topic of the South was the most prominent at that time in the issues of the system of government (federalism), identity (religion), and political marginalization (the position of southerners in the rule and administration of the new state). This was the case before the problem worsened and those from the Sudanese peoples who joined them joined the people of the South. These two articles dealt with these issues in a way that did not cost us any difficulty or trouble to follow as they stipulated On two matters: the first was to reassure the southerners about their future, and the second was to satisfy the ambitions of their elites. The first was specifically related to the necessity of appointing at least two southerners to the Council of Ministers, and the second was the responsibility of the Governor-General to ensure that the south received fair treatment. These two articles were canceled after Salah Salem’s visit to the south and his meeting with the leaders of the north, where he agreed with these leaders to remove the two texts from the draft constitution. He then informed the British that the parties of the north do not represent the north alone, but also the south, because these parties all include southerners. This is an opinion that was not objected to by any of the northern politicians except one man, Ibrahim Badri. This was the degree of contempt and intellectual flatness with which Salah Salem dealt with the issue, and the politicians of the North accepted it. It is astonishing that the northern parties that met on January 7, 1953, with Salah Salem to decide on the matter of the south in the absence of its people, included representatives of a party whose members were perhaps no more than the two men who signed the agreement with Salem on behalf of that party. That was the National Party, which was represented by Professor Yahya Abdel Qader and Dr. Abdel Qader Mishal. However, we think well and say that the politicians of the North were afraid that the Governor-General would exploit that text to impede Sudan’s march towards self-rule. We also think well and say that they were determined to take the hand of the southerners and recognize their legitimate rights in one homeland, especially since they all agreed with Salah Salem, and convinced the British of this, that the elected parliament would develop an alternative to this text that would satisfy the south. But, what happened next? Parliament did not, in any way, create an alternative to that article that was included in the draft constitution to protect the rights of the South and reassure its people. Rather, it did not even respect what it pledged to the southerners about federalism, as mentioned above. Thus, that constitution, with its organic insufficiency, at least with regard to the system of government, became incapable of meeting the needs of all the people of one country, and therefore it would not have been a basis for stable governance, as long as there was no agreement on it among the people of Sudan. Although we fell short on the issue of the system of government, whether or not we failed to establish the foundations for a house from which all the people of Sudan would hide from the right and the left, we were less negligent in agreeing on the idea of citizenship and its consequences. Citizenship is a concept that transcends religious, cultural, and linguistic differences. If we do not understand it in this way, we will not realize the true meaning of human and citizen rights. It is interesting that this is the name that was given to these rights when they were created in the French Revolution, the first era of humanity with those rights. The moment we began to divide the people of the country into a majority and a minority, we lost our way and went confused into a desert with no evidence or sign. There is no doubt that in all of God’s countries there is a numerical majority and a minority. There is no doubt that the political fortunes in this country are measured by the balance of numbers. There is also no doubt that nations, or rather the dominant race or group in them, have become accustomed to seeking to assimilate groups that are less numerous in the general context, be it in language, culture, or religion, and this is always justified as fulfilling the will of the majority. However, this mechanical view of the majority and the minority in democratic systems violates the two most important principles in them, namely equality of rights and duties and equality before the law. And if we claim that we have no limit or possibility regarding that matter, Be dishonest. We had before us the experience of India that we knew well, or so we continued to recite poetry, prose, and song. It is known by the politicians who used to read and study the ideas of its politicians (read The Struggle of a Generation by Ahmed Khair, and Democracy in the Balance by Muhammad Ahmed Mahjoub), just as those who used to decorate the walls of their homes with pictures of its Hindu leaders, Gandhi and Nehru, not the Muslims among them, such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah (read the memoirs of Ahmed Muhammad Yassin). In addition, it is known by the jurists, for whom the book of the scholar Ratanlal has become a bible in jurisprudence, and the artistic people, whose voice has always resonated as it sings of Gandhi’s face, Tagore’s voice, and the echo of deep India. In fact, we suffer not only from a weakness in memory, but also from a complete loss of the focus in which interest in anything is focused, as every event is a reference to itself. Whatever the case, those visions and practices that remained prevalent until the sixties have lost their meaning, if they truly had a meaning, and they have also lost their legitimacy, if we ever thought they had legitimacy. Since that date, things have changed in two ways. The first is the issuance of the second generation of international covenants on human rights, civil, political, economic, social, and cultural. Deviation from them became a departure from international legitimacy. The second aspect is that the new humanitarian law undermines all prevailing concepts about minorities. The law now distinguishes between indigenous groups and minorities within states (International Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples 1989). The Kurds in Iraq, the Copts in Egypt, and the Berbers in Algeria and Morocco are not called a minority because they have established historical rights in their homelands. The law defines these as “groups that have historically settled in a specific land and have an ancestral or tribal relationship to that land, and continued their presence in that land before other groups displaced them, or invaded them by colonialism.” This reference is important in order to remove from our minds the concepts that divide citizens into a majority and a minority according to subjectively defined criteria in order to reach certain results. Whoever says that the majority of the people of Sudan are Muslims is only saying the truth, but he is not right when he wants to base a political ruling on this axiom that results in depriving citizens, regardless of their number, of their basic rights, such as declaring Sudan a Muslim state. Whoever says that the majority of the people of Sudan are men may be honest, but he lacks credibility if he wants to invoke that truth to issue a ruling that results in depriving women of basic rights that they deserve by virtue of their humanity and not by virtue of sex or gender. On the practical level, and despite the claims of the majority and the minority, these false distinctions did not begin to produce any negative or hostile phenomena, whether with regard to religion or language, except in the sixties, when religion turned into a purely political product, and language became an expression of ethnic patriotism. With the clash of action and reaction, the issues of language and religion went beyond their normal scope. For example, Since the beginnings of self-rule, southerners have accepted without difficulty the reforms introduced by the Minister of Education, Abdul Rahman Ali Taha, to education in the south in 1949. In his speech before the Legislative Assembly (11/1/1949), Professor Al-Muallem declared, “Since Sudan is one country with all its parts sharing one political institutions, the first thing that must be achieved is for the country to have one language that all its people understand and speak, and this language cannot be other than Arabic.” One of the leaders of the South at that time (Booth Dew) went on to ask the government to accelerate teaching the southerners the Arabic language so that they could join their brothers in the north, and Booth did not view the language except as a medium for communication, knowledge, and learning. Some venerable teachers, such as Sir al-Khatam al-Khalifa, Ahmed Hassan Fadl al-Sayyid, and Mustafa Abu Sharaf, played an important role in performing this task in the south. They approached it with the compassion of a father and the objectivity of a teacher. At the same time, English remained a recognized working language in Parliament and in government circles in the South. The same is true of religion, as neither the state nor the politicians made it a major conflict until the establishment of the Aboud regime. That regime, which was not known for the religiosity of its people, took the initiative to take absurd measures that harmed politics and did not benefit religion, such as replacing the Sunday holiday with the Friday holiday in the south, and replacing local or Christian names with Arab or Islamic names. The southerner used to call those names that were imposed on him “the name of those who belong to the government.” Perhaps we will leave the issue of religion to address it in greater detail in the following article and limit the discussion in this article to the repercussions of the issue of cultural identity since the sixties. The crisis began when the issue began to take on a chauvinistic dimension on the one hand, and a contemptuous dimension on the other. In previous articles, we alluded to many examples of this chauvinism, which in most cases occurs, either due to the desire of certain segments of Arabized groups to maintain political or economic hegemony, or to the exaggeration of some elites with an interest in maintaining this hegemony. What is truly unfortunate is that these groups always talk about preserving the Arab/Islamic identity in a way that places religion where it should not be. The ambiguous understanding of identity made Islam and Arabism two clashing mechanisms, such that the first (Arabism from an ethnic perspective) became the mechanism of exclusion, while the second (Islam) remained the mechanism of inclusion par excellence because Islam does not distinguish between people on the basis of their races and origins. In fact, Islam was the most important factor in uniting the people of Sudan, which means that Arab Muslims (in the ethnic sense of the word) never internalized the spirit of the religion whose banners they raise. ''The Bedouins said, 'We believe.' Say, 'You do not believe,' but say, 'We submit,' until faith enters your hearts. And if you obey God and His Messenger, He will not deprive you of any of your deeds. Indeed, God is Forgiving, Merciful.” May God forgive us and them. As for contempt, or if you want, contempt, it was expressed by all schools and intellectual trends (from the Aberof school to all the schools of Arab nationalism), which did not see in local cultures anything worthy of celebration. Whatever it is, These irrational trends generated anti-Arab culture trends as a whole as one of the tools of the Arabized North’s dominance over the non-Arab South, so that the Arabic language and culture became condemned to collapse and the natural process of the Arabic language stopped. The British became aware of this simple fact after they were fed up with the tricks to erase the Arabic language in the south. For example, the Governor-General of Sudan, Sir John Maffei, wrote in his report: “Wherever I go, whether in the Upper Imatong or on the Belgian-Congo border, I find everyone speaking Arabic, including the official spokespersons of the tribes. In the face of this fact, we must not be careful about the effort and money we make to suppress the Arabic language. Indeed, we should not think about how it could become an effective tool for implementing our policy.” (Report of the Governor General 7/12/1927). Over the years, the Arabic language and culture did not spread throughout Sudan through orders, prohibitions, and constitutional texts, but rather through social osmosis, the tools of which were cohabitation, trade, intermarriage, education, art, and music. Or is it not surprising that the only Sudanese to whom the leader of the Popular Movement invited, through the First Representative, to participate in the signing of the peace protocol in Naivasha was Professor Muhammad Wardi, a Nubian from the far north who came to sing to the people of the south in a language that is neither his mother tongue nor their language: “You, Green October.” These are the shadows of the image that the chauvinists whose sight God has blinded cannot and will not see. Language in itself is not necessarily a problem. There are many countries whose constitution does not stipulate an official language, such as Kenya and Uganda, which use English and Swahili as needed and necessary, while their neighbor Tanzania has adopted Swahili as an official language. In Nigeria, there is no reference to the official language of the state in the Nigerian Constitution except for the reference in Article 55 of it to the working language of Parliament, which reads: “The work of the National Assembly is carried out in the English, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba languages, and the state must provide the necessary capabilities to achieve this.” Also, although English is traditionally the official language of the United States, its constitution does not include any text about the state language. The problem always begins when the language becomes, as we said, an expression of ethnic patriotism. We know from history what the journey of ethnic patriotism led to, from Johann Fichte's speech (Message to the German Nation) in 1807 to the speeches of the Bavarian engraver Adolf Hitler in Munich. Fortunately, the chauvinism that deepened the feelings of apathy among some southerners toward the Arabic language and led others to forcefully invoke their local cultures did not reach that level of obscenity. Rather, I would add that despite all the tragedies of the recent war, the role played by the Popular Movement in expanding the scope of dealing with the Arabic language had not been played by any movement of southern origin before, for practical reasons and purely objective circumstances. The movement includes elements belonging to peoples and groups that communicate with each other in Arabic, the only common language of communication. It also seeks to play a political role in all parts of the country, including the north. The movement, at the level of its leadership, has built, and is still building, many bridges to interact with the political and social forces in northern Sudan, and with Arab countries outside Sudan.
Mansour Khaled
Any system of government governed by a basic law is a set of laws, rules and principles that define the boundaries of responsibilities, powers, duties and rights. In this sense, all systems of government, including totalitarian systems and those that attribute to themselves a divine right to rule, have constitutions that regulate governance. In this article, we talk about the constitution in the sense that we have become accustomed to since independence, and then we began to invoke it and seek refuge in it after every uprising. Since all of our political perceptions were based on considering that constitution, or the constitutional pattern upon which it was built, as a safety net and the only path to good governance and political stability, it is useful to examine that constitution from its inception to see whether the political damage that befell us was due to the provisions of the constitution, or the unsuitability of the soil in which it was planted, or the need of the constitution to take root as some claim, or because, to begin with, we dealt with that constitution as a form without content, a presentation without substance, and procedures without Meanings. The Sudanese constitution, which has been governed by it since independence, is a liberal democratic constitution. Although democracy is a form of government, liberalism is a political system that aims to protect human freedom, especially his natural and human rights. This can only be achieved by limiting the state’s authority over citizens as long as the citizens consent and comply with a ruler (state) who manages their affairs. This limitation of authority is achieved either by reducing the scope of the state’s exercise of it, or by controlling and curbing that exercise. Since the state is the one that sets the laws, it becomes legitimate to ask: What is the guarantee that the state will limit its authority on its own? There is no guarantee at all, which is why liberal constitutions created principles and controls that are entrenched in the constitution so that they cannot be circumvented, their meanings violated, or they are modified except in accordance with strict controls. At the top of these principles is securing the basic human rights of the citizen, which were added to in the second generation of human rights, the rights of peoples, as sacred rights that are inalienable and inviolable. At the top of the strengthened controls is the rule of law, which is perhaps the most important check and balance mechanism in constitutions. Therefore, many constitutions grant constitutional authority to the judiciary to protectors of the constitution. An example of this is its authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws, that is, to decide whether the laws are outside of, or in conformity with, the provisions of the constitution. This power is enjoyed, for example, by the Supreme Court of the United States and in India, and was enjoyed until 1949 by the Law Committee of the Privy Council in relation to the Canadian Constitution. Other constitutions, such as New Zealand's, expressly prohibit the courts from exercising this power, and the New Zealand written constitution may have adopted the principle followed by the unwritten English constitution that Parliament is the master of its own decision. As the common saying goes, the English Parliament has the right to decide on any legislative issue, amend or abolish it, except for one matter, which is to make males female and females males. Even this exception has almost been nullified in the time of wonders we are in, as some parliamentarians today are discussing the legalization of same-sex marriage. On a more serious tone, we say that this right provided by the English Constitution to Parliament is not an absolute right, as that Parliament is governed by an iron restriction, which is parliamentary conventions, which have not allowed it throughout its history since the declaration of the Magna Carta to deviate from the principles entrenched in the Constitution. This is a necessary introduction to addressing the issue of constitutional development in Sudan. The history of the constitution in Sudan, like the history of politics, is a miserable and miserable history. Nothing is more evident than the inability of the Sudanese to agree on a constitution by which the country will be governed since self-rule. The only two constitutions that departed from the norm were issued under two totalitarian regimes: the Permanent Constitution of Sudan 1973 (the May era), and the Constitution of the Republic of Sudan 1998 (the “rescue” era). In all other periods of government, Sudan was governed under a constitution prepared by the British, primarily to administer a transitional period of self-rule (Stanley Baker Constitution). It is an irony of fate that this constitution is a natural product of institutions about which the Sudanese National Movement said, in the words of leader Ismail Al-Azhari, “We will not enter them even if they come clean of every defect.” That constitution became the constitution of independent Sudan on January 1, 1956, the constitution of the second democracy after October 1964 (the 1956 Constitution amended in 1964), and the constitution of the third democracy after May. What is the source of the deficit? Politicians who have not been endowed by God with the virtue of humility and the advantage of self-criticism have no way to respond to this question other than: “The soldiers did not give us a chance.” This is an exaggeration to say without thinking carefully, because the origin of the crisis goes back to before independence, and before the military had any role in politics. In today's terms, we summarize the crisis as: the system of government, identity, human rights, and political and economic marginalization. Of course, the manifestations of the crisis had not crystallized in this way prior to self-rule, but its essence was clearly visible at the political level, and the solution to it should have been clear at the level of vision for the generation of the Graduates’ Congress who considered Gandhi and Nehru to be prophets of patriotism. That is why I will take India with me whenever necessary in these articles. We will not succeed in properly analyzing our problems if escaping history becomes a habit for us. The draft constitution for self-government, which later became a constitution for independence, included two articles about the South (the topic of the South was the most prominent at that time in the issues of the system of government (federalism), identity (religion), and political marginalization (the position of southerners in the rule and administration of the new state). This was the case before the problem worsened and those from the Sudanese peoples who joined them joined the people of the South. These two articles dealt with these issues in a way that did not cost us any difficulty or trouble to follow as they stipulated On two matters: the first was to reassure the southerners about their future, and the second was to satisfy the ambitions of their elites. The first was specifically related to the necessity of appointing at least two southerners to the Council of Ministers, and the second was the responsibility of the Governor-General to ensure that the south received fair treatment. These two articles were canceled after Salah Salem’s visit to the south and his meeting with the leaders of the north, where he agreed with these leaders to remove the two texts from the draft constitution. He then informed the British that the parties of the north do not represent the north alone, but also the south, because these parties all include southerners. This is an opinion that was not objected to by any of the northern politicians except one man, Ibrahim Badri. This was the degree of contempt and intellectual flatness with which Salah Salem dealt with the issue, and the politicians of the North accepted it. It is astonishing that the northern parties that met on January 7, 1953, with Salah Salem to decide on the matter of the south in the absence of its people, included representatives of a party whose members were perhaps no more than the two men who signed the agreement with Salem on behalf of that party. That was the National Party, which was represented by Professor Yahya Abdel Qader and Dr. Abdel Qader Mishal. However, we think well and say that the politicians of the North were afraid that the Governor-General would exploit that text to impede Sudan’s march towards self-rule. We also think well and say that they were determined to take the hand of the southerners and recognize their legitimate rights in one homeland, especially since they all agreed with Salah Salem, and convinced the British of this, that the elected parliament would develop an alternative to this text that would satisfy the south. But, what happened next? Parliament did not, in any way, create an alternative to that article that was included in the draft constitution to protect the rights of the South and reassure its people. Rather, it did not even respect what it pledged to the southerners about federalism, as mentioned above. Thus, that constitution, with its organic insufficiency, at least with regard to the system of government, became incapable of meeting the needs of all the people of one country, and therefore it would not have been a basis for stable governance, as long as there was no agreement on it among the people of Sudan. Although we fell short on the issue of the system of government, whether or not we failed to establish the foundations for a house from which all the people of Sudan would hide from the right and the left, we were less negligent in agreeing on the idea of citizenship and its consequences. Citizenship is a concept that transcends religious, cultural, and linguistic differences. If we do not understand it in this way, we will not realize the true meaning of human and citizen rights. It is interesting that this is the name that was given to these rights when they were created in the French Revolution, the first era of humanity with those rights. The moment we began to divide the people of the country into a majority and a minority, we lost our way and went confused into a desert with no evidence or sign. There is no doubt that in all of God’s countries there is a numerical majority and a minority. There is no doubt that the political fortunes in this country are measured by the balance of numbers. There is also no doubt that nations, or rather the dominant race or group in them, have become accustomed to seeking to assimilate groups that are less numerous in the general context, be it in language, culture, or religion, and this is always justified as fulfilling the will of the majority. However, this mechanical view of the majority and the minority in democratic systems violates the two most important principles in them, namely equality of rights and duties and equality before the law. And if we claim that we have no limit or possibility regarding that matter, Be dishonest. We had before us the experience of India that we knew well, or so we continued to recite poetry, prose, and song. It is known by the politicians who used to read and study the ideas of its politicians (read The Struggle of a Generation by Ahmed Khair, and Democracy in the Balance by Muhammad Ahmed Mahjoub), just as those who used to decorate the walls of their homes with pictures of its Hindu leaders, Gandhi and Nehru, not the Muslims among them, such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah (read the memoirs of Ahmed Muhammad Yassin). In addition, it is known by the jurists, for whom the book of the scholar Ratanlal has become a bible in jurisprudence, and the artistic people, whose voice has always resonated as it sings of Gandhi’s face, Tagore’s voice, and the echo of deep India. In fact, we suffer not only from a weakness in memory, but also from a complete loss of the focus in which interest in anything is focused, as every event is a reference to itself. Whatever the case, those visions and practices that remained prevalent until the sixties have lost their meaning, if they truly had a meaning, and they have also lost their legitimacy, if we ever thought they had legitimacy. Since that date, things have changed in two ways. The first is the issuance of the second generation of international covenants on human rights, civil, political, economic, social, and cultural. Deviation from them became a departure from international legitimacy. The second aspect is that the new humanitarian law undermines all prevailing concepts about minorities. The law now distinguishes between indigenous groups and minorities within states (International Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples 1989). The Kurds in Iraq, the Copts in Egypt, and the Berbers in Algeria and Morocco are not called a minority because they have established historical rights in their homelands. The law defines these as “groups that have historically settled in a specific land and have an ancestral or tribal relationship to that land, and continued their presence in that land before other groups displaced them, or invaded them by colonialism.” This reference is important in order to remove from our minds the concepts that divide citizens into a majority and a minority according to subjectively defined criteria in order to reach certain results. Whoever says that the majority of the people of Sudan are Muslims is only saying the truth, but he is not right when he wants to base a political ruling on this axiom that results in depriving citizens, regardless of their number, of their basic rights, such as declaring Sudan a Muslim state. Whoever says that the majority of the people of Sudan are men may be honest, but he lacks credibility if he wants to invoke that truth to issue a ruling that results in depriving women of basic rights that they deserve by virtue of their humanity and not by virtue of sex or gender. On the practical level, and despite the claims of the majority and the minority, these false distinctions did not begin to produce any negative or hostile phenomena, whether with regard to religion or language, except in the sixties, when religion turned into a purely political product, and language became an expression of ethnic patriotism. With the clash of action and reaction, the issues of language and religion went beyond their normal scope. For example, Since the beginnings of self-rule, southerners have accepted without difficulty the reforms introduced by the Minister of Education, Abdul Rahman Ali Taha, to education in the south in 1949. In his speech before the Legislative Assembly (11/1/1949), Professor Al-Muallem declared, “Since Sudan is one country with all its parts sharing one political institutions, the first thing that must be achieved is for the country to have one language that all its people understand and speak, and this language cannot be other than Arabic.” One of the leaders of the South at that time (Booth Dew) went on to ask the government to accelerate teaching the southerners the Arabic language so that they could join their brothers in the north, and Booth did not view the language except as a medium for communication, knowledge, and learning. Some venerable teachers, such as Sir al-Khatam al-Khalifa, Ahmed Hassan Fadl al-Sayyid, and Mustafa Abu Sharaf, played an important role in performing this task in the south. They approached it with the compassion of a father and the objectivity of a teacher. At the same time, English remained a recognized working language in Parliament and in government circles in the South. The same is true of religion, as neither the state nor the politicians made it a major conflict until the establishment of the Aboud regime. That regime, which was not known for the religiosity of its people, took the initiative to take absurd measures that harmed politics and did not benefit religion, such as replacing the Sunday holiday with the Friday holiday in the south, and replacing local or Christian names with Arab or Islamic names. The southerner used to call those names that were imposed on him “the name of those who belong to the government.” Perhaps we will leave the issue of religion to address it in greater detail in the following article and limit the discussion in this article to the repercussions of the issue of cultural identity since the sixties. The crisis began when the issue began to take on a chauvinistic dimension on the one hand, and a contemptuous dimension on the other. In previous articles, we alluded to many examples of this chauvinism, which in most cases occurs, either due to the desire of certain segments of Arabized groups to maintain political or economic hegemony, or to the exaggeration of some elites with an interest in maintaining this hegemony. What is truly unfortunate is that these groups always talk about preserving the Arab/Islamic identity in a way that places religion where it should not be. The ambiguous understanding of identity made Islam and Arabism two clashing mechanisms, such that the first (Arabism from an ethnic perspective) became the mechanism of exclusion, while the second (Islam) remained the mechanism of inclusion par excellence because Islam does not distinguish between people on the basis of their races and origins. In fact, Islam was the most important factor in uniting the people of Sudan, which means that Arab Muslims (in the ethnic sense of the word) never internalized the spirit of the religion whose banners they raise. ''The Bedouins said, 'We believe.' Say, 'You do not believe,' but say, 'We submit,' until faith enters your hearts. And if you obey God and His Messenger, He will not deprive you of any of your deeds. Indeed, God is Forgiving, Merciful.” May God forgive us and them. As for contempt, or if you want, contempt, it was expressed by all schools and intellectual trends (from the Aberof school to all the schools of Arab nationalism), which did not see in local cultures anything worthy of celebration. Whatever it is, These irrational trends generated anti-Arab culture trends as a whole as one of the tools of the Arabized North’s dominance over the non-Arab South, so that the Arabic language and culture became condemned to collapse and the natural process of the Arabic language stopped. The British became aware of this simple fact after they were fed up with the tricks to erase the Arabic language in the south. For example, the Governor-General of Sudan, Sir John Maffei, wrote in his report: “Wherever I go, whether in the Upper Imatong or on the Belgian-Congo border, I find everyone speaking Arabic, including the official spokespersons of the tribes. In the face of this fact, we must not be careful about the effort and money we make to suppress the Arabic language. Indeed, we should not think about how it could become an effective tool for implementing our policy.” (Report of the Governor General 7/12/1927). Over the years, the Arabic language and culture did not spread throughout Sudan through orders, prohibitions, and constitutional texts, but rather through social osmosis, the tools of which were cohabitation, trade, intermarriage, education, art, and music. Or is it not surprising that the only Sudanese to whom the leader of the Popular Movement invited, through the First Representative, to participate in the signing of the peace protocol in Naivasha was Professor Muhammad Wardi, a Nubian from the far north who came to sing to the people of the south in a language that is neither his mother tongue nor their language: “You, Green October.” These are the shadows of the image that the chauvinists whose sight God has blinded cannot and will not see. Language in itself is not necessarily a problem. There are many countries whose constitution does not stipulate an official language, such as Kenya and Uganda, which use English and Swahili as needed and necessary, while their neighbor Tanzania has adopted Swahili as an official language. In Nigeria, there is no reference to the official language of the state in the Nigerian Constitution except for the reference in Article 55 of it to the working language of Parliament, which reads: “The work of the National Assembly is carried out in the English, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba languages, and the state must provide the necessary capabilities to achieve this.” Also, although English is traditionally the official language of the United States, its constitution does not include any text about the state language. The problem always begins when the language becomes, as we said, an expression of ethnic patriotism. We know from history what the journey of ethnic patriotism led to, from Johann Fichte's speech (Message to the German Nation) in 1807 to the speeches of the Bavarian engraver Adolf Hitler in Munich. Fortunately, the chauvinism that deepened the feelings of apathy among some southerners toward the Arabic language and led others to forcefully invoke their local cultures did not reach that level of obscenity. Rather, I would add that despite all the tragedies of the recent war, the role played by the Popular Movement in expanding the scope of dealing with the Arabic language had not been played by any movement of southern origin before, for practical reasons and purely objective circumstances. The movement includes elements belonging to peoples and groups that communicate with each other in Arabic, the only common language of communication. It also seeks to play a political role in all parts of the country, including the north. The movement, at the level of its leadership, has built, and is still building, many bridges to interact with the political and social forces in northern Sudan, and with Arab countries outside Sudan.