Modern Muslims : A Sudan Memoir

Authors

Steve Howard

Files

Description

Steve Howard departed for the Sudan in the early 1980s as an American graduate student beginning a three-year journey in which he would join and live with the Republican Brotherhood, the Sufi Muslim group led by the visionary Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Taha was a religious intellectual who participated in the early days of Sudan’s anticolonial struggle, but quickly turned his movement into a religious reform effort based on his radical reading of the Qur’an. He was executed in 1985 for apostasy.

Decades after returning to the life of an academic in the United States, Howard brings us this memoir of his time with the Republican Brotherhood, who advocated, among other things, equality for women. Modern Muslims describes Howard’s path to learning not only about Islam and Sufism but also about Sudan’s history and culture. When the Brotherhood was thrust into confrontation with Sudan’s then-president Jaafar Nimeiry, Howard had a front-line perspective on the difficult choices communities make as they try to reform and practice their faith freely.
As well as a story of personal transformation, the book offers an insider’s perspective on a modernist nonviolent Islamic movement that thrived and was brutally suppressed. An important book for our times, Modern Muslims yields significant insights for our understanding of modern Islam, African history, and contemporary geopolitics.

Copyright Statement

Modern Muslims © 2016 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821445778

Publication Date

10-26-2016

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Steve Howard, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Republican Brotherhood, Sufism, Islam and modernity, Sudan, Anticolonial movements, Religious reform, Apostasy in Islam, Equality for women in Islam, Islamic modernism, Jaafar Nimeiry, Nonviolent Islamic movements, African Islam, Sudanese history, Cross-cultural experience, Memoir, Faith and reform, Religious persecution, Contemporary geopolitics

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Islamic Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Howard, Steve, "Modern Muslims : A Sudan Memoir" (2016). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 79.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/79