Gender, Religious Identity, and Political Mobilization in Sudan

Abstract

This chapter examines the politicization of gender and its manifestation in identity politics in Sudan. It explores the paradoxical forces in post-colonial Sudan that have produced, on the one hand, an apparent secularization of societal institutions and a concomitant rise in the legal status and social positions of women, and on the other, the rise of Islamism. The National Islamic Front is a dynamic component of the state. The state constructs gender matrices to control human resources. In Sudan, as elsewhere, the class base of Islamism is the middle-class. In the years just after independence the state's expression of gender ideology usually took the form that a developing Sudan needed emancipated women. The theoretical framework has generated hypotheses to account for the Sudanese state's manipulation of religious ideology and the nature of identity politics the centrality of gender in the process and the impact on the gender division of labor and gender arrangements.