Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State.

Sondra Hale. Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Hardcover, 294 pp., glossary, index

FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGISTS HAVE COME a long way in challenging previous models of "women and state" that reduced the histories and experiences of non-western women to mere state repression. Ethnographies from different cultures show that state gender ideologies are not accepted silently. Instead they are continuously contested, negotiated, and often manipulated by women and men to strategically serve their own social and political ends. Sondra Hale's book is a remarkable example of a contemporary feminist attempt to revisit old theories and methodologies dealing with women and state politics.

Drawing on several field trips during the 1960s and 1980s, and continuous dialogues with elite women and men in northern Sudan, Hale examines the shifts in socio-economic processes and the complexities of the dynamics underlying the interplay of state power, party politics, and gender ideologies in the country. Focusing on two major political parties, the secular Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) and the religious National Islamic Front (NIF), the author scrutinizes the policies and strategies through which the two parties appropriate indigenous gender meanings to mobilize women to serve "male-controlled" political institutions. Such positioning of women, Hale argues, has its foundation in the state politics of the post-independence Sudan and the debate among both liberal and radical sections of the Sudanese elite over the proper social place of women and their role as central figures in protecting family values and thus reproducing an authentic national culture.

In this regard, the author questions the success of political parties and revolutionary movements in addressing women's emancipatory projects. She argues that women's own "feminist interests" were suppressed under the banner of a general struggle. In connection to this, Hale shows how a Marxist-Leninist approach embodied by the SCP had to face challenges to its own existence in an Islamic society dominated by religious affiliations. Thus both the party and its feminist branch, the Women's Union (WU), had to strategize to assert their legitimacy at the expense of addressing major issues related to women's sexuality and their private-public participation.

The perception of women as bearers and guardians of tradition impacted the attitudes of progressive organizations. The moral standing of the women who joined the SCP and the WU was a vital measure in demonstrating the conformity of these organizations with dominant social norms. The author, however, is careful to underline that such conformity was not motivated only by a deliberate strategy to project a particular social image, since some SCP and WU activists did see in Islamic culture an ideal representation of manhood and womanhood. Thus further analysis of early Sudanese feminists' perceptions of Islam, gender, and sexuality could have been useful in illuminating how the positions of both men and women activists were shaped and constrained by common cultural constructions.

Hale's analysis of the rise of Islamism in Sudan is another example of how "identity politics" and hegemonic forms of power work through a military supported state to create a "modernist Islam" that engages old and new gender meanings to construct an "authentic culture." Here, Islamist women are both active organizers in the political forums of the NIF and principal agents in the family- as mothers socializing a new generation of fundamentalist activists who would shoulder the building of the Muslim umma (nation). Their public participation is, however, circumscribed by the religious and political agenda of the Islamic state whose chief objective is the creation of an "ideal woman citizen" responsible for the "purity" of a national Islamic culture.

Consequently, women's public participation is channeled through professions deemed unthreatening to the dominant modes of power and moral structures and seen as "appropriate" extensions of their essentially domestic roles. Hale argues that since the NIF movement is urban-middle-class oriented, it created a culture and economy in the service of the interests of a specific class. Accordingly, the Islamic moral codes propagated by the state have targeted women in unprivileged economic situations and denied other professional women their active public participation.

In her concluding remarks, Hale shows how the agendas for social change proposed by the feminist organizations of both the SCP and the INF failed to address women's personal problems and daily struggles within a constrained economy. They also failed to incorporate women's multiple forms of cultural expressions, especially within the context of rituals, ceremonies, and social networks through which women attempt to subvert official patriarchal discourses.

The book is a profound and insightful examination of how the relationship of women to state politics differs with respect to their political and class affiliation. The author's focus on the elite women of the WU and NIF has, however, obscured the voices of women in other social and political locations who are inventing myriad ways of coping with current state policies. The book is a valuable contribution to the growing field of Sudanese women's studies and to the efforts of feminists and anthropologists to understand the intersections of religion, gender, and state politics, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

Amal Hassan Fadlalla is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Population and Development, Harvard University.