Sudan

In discussing higher education and scientific achievement in the context of historical Islam, it must be remembered that the Arab Empire's commercial blockade of the West imposed from the seventh to the twelfth centuries left European urban society impoverished, while the Muslim countries became economically and culturally enriched through their control of trade with India and the Far East. The indebtedness of the West to the Islamic world has been de-emphasized to the point that even the rebirth of learning and scholarship in Europe was at one time believed to have resulted from the direct influence of Greek and Roman sources without any input from the "barbaric" Muslims. In fact, the Arabs had translated and preserved the classical works of antiquity, and when the Muslims occupied Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, they brought their high standards of scholarship and learning to be established in Muslim communities, part of the greater network of scholarship throughout the Muslim world. Although the Arabs never occupied all of Europe, they quite literally conquered Western civilization by cordoning it off through their blockade that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Asia, preventing commercial interaction and cultural exchange with the East. The Arabs preserved the writings and cultural accomplishments of ancient Greece and Rome, and they passed along their scholarship and forms of educational systemization to Europe. That is to say, the body of knowledge that Europe inherited from the Arabs made possible the foundations of modern scientific inquiry. In mathematics the Arabs donated the foundational numerals used for computation, and Arabic numerals replaced the unwieldy Roman numerals. The Arab's mathematical bequeathal also included such advancements as logarithms, algebra, and trigonometry. In other branches of science as well, such as medicine, botany, natural history, and zoology, and the technical-vocational specializations such as paper manufacture, which the Arabs learned from the Chinese, the Muslim world was centuries ahead of backward Europe before the Renaissance. Today this historical bequeathal is an embarrassment of sorts for a civilization such as the West, which in the history of human knowledge and systems of thought would like to believe that it alone has always occupied the lofty perch of the most advanced civilization in the world.

The European university was not a direct product of the Islamic world, but the form which it was to take in the West from its inception in the Middle Ages, as a vitalized, corporately structured entity in the thirteenth century, resulted from what had been inherited from the Islamic structures of higher education. Higher learning in the Islamic world was organized along the lines of charitable trusts and endowments. A madrasa, or boarding school for higher learning most often associated with a mosque, was established through the gift of a benefactor, and the income from the endowment, such as the rental income from a property given or purchased as part of the endowment, was used for paying teachers, funding student stipends, and other educational-related purposes. The main purpose of such endowments was most often the study and teaching of fiqh and Islamic jurisprudence. Endowments provided for a given number of students to study law, hadith, sufism, and other subjects in the madrasa. Teachers of the various subjects were supported by the endowment, and the holder of an endowed chair in a particular subject would be supplied with teaching assistants much in the same manner as the needs of modern university departments are served by teaching and research assistants, part-time lecturers, and adjunct professors.

Students would learn through exposition by a mudarris (teacher) in oral lectures followed by clarification in tutorials and exercises supervised by teaching assistants, learning over several years the consensus of scholarship on particular legal and social issues of the day. Those students wanting to move on to become teachers themselves, or qadi, (judges) or muftis (Muslim legal experts), studied longer than other students, and they were trained in ijtihad, the process of logical dispute and reasoning by which a consensus was reached. At this higher level of learning, students received an advanced certification attesting to their competence in ijtihad, a higher level of ijaza (educational certificate), which authorized them to practice as teachers, judges, and legal experts within the Muslim Umma.

The university that the Islamic world borrowed back, so to speak, from Europe in the nineteenth century was an institution replete with Islamic elements that were the unrecognized inheritance earlier bequeathed to Europe by the Arabs—the foundational knowledge in mathematics, science, and classical studies that made possible the modern advancements and branches of inquiry—and the organization of the educational infrastructure, including the endowments and charitable trusts that made possible the forms of higher learning that developed throughout Europe in the form of university communities. Europe took the borrowed system of knowledge in the Middle Ages, organized this borrowed knowledge, and developed it into a corporate system undergirding the branches of modern scholarship and scientific inquiry. So from a "borrower" in the Middle Ages, Europe became a "lender" in modern times, retransmitting to the Islamic world through colonialization and imperialization that which Islam had previously transmitted to the West. The branches of scientific inquiry and the system of education had been changed and christianized by European scholars and scientists, many of whom saw in God's creation the structure and orderliness of intelligent design, which man (and woman) could discover through scientific inquiry. To Christian minds, Christ was the force by "all things consist" (Colossians 1:17). The Christian belief that intelligent design had resulted in an orderly creation spurred some of the greatest minds in Christian Europe, Isaac Newton for example, to diligently search out in an orderly fashion, with scientific methodology, the laws, structure, and composition of a marvelous creation. Western civilization as a debtor to the Arabs, became a debtor to the great minds who demonstrated what scientific advancements could be achieved in searching out the orderly structures of God's creation from the vantage point of a Christian worldview. Both Muslim and Christian controlled governments had shown how scientific advancement could be curtailed by religious interference in politics, but the notion of freedom of conscience to be enunciated in the Protestant Reformation that swept Europe in the sixteenth century was to liberate great minds to do great works with fewer restrictions from overbearing interference by men of religion who sought to maintain their power base under the guise of religiosity.

In the Sudan, the western influence was represented in the complex administrative bureaucracy of Sudan's Condominium government, the missionary schools in the South, the establishment of Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum, and various other social institutions transferred from the Condominium to the national administration at independence. The Islamic counterparts to this influence both before and after the nationalist takeover of the Sudanese government took the form of social institutions developed specifically for the purpose of fostering the growth of an Islamic elite. The establishment and increasing influence of traditional Islamic schools and institutes such as the Islamic African Center of Khartoum (Al Merkaz Al Islami Al Ifriqi bi' Khartoum), formed in 1977 by the government to offer African societies an alternative model of modernization to the Western model, was seen as a way to counteract the pervasive Western influence. The center's aim was to combat negative perceptions of Islam, and to reverse the work of the European imperialists and Christian missionaries through the development of an Islamic educated elite, young Muslims drawn from not only the Sudan, but other countries in Africa as well. The vision for extending Islam's frontiers beyond Sudan was strikingly reminiscent of the Mahdist Islamic vision.

The high level of instruction in Islamic and Arab culture at the center under highly qualified teachers was designed to reinforce Islamic orthodoxy and improve the general standards of education in communities throughout Sudan from which students had been drawn. The low standards of education among Sudanese youth in the 1960s and the domination of anti-Western nationalist thought in the wake of independence, inspired the Muslim political factions to more firmly embrace Islamization and Arabization as the vehicle for cultural decolonization of the Sudan. Strictly speaking, the Sudan had never been colonized because the joint administration under the co-domini powers represented a continuation of the Ottoman-style rule of the Sudan through Egypt's overlordship. But the effect was the same, and of the co-domini powers, Britain wielded the real authority. In the process of de-emphasizing and reversing the influence of the West, the new Muslim-educated elite, missionaries of the new Islamic revivalism (Al Sahwa Al Islamia—Islamic awakening), were being prepared to take on the challenge of competing with Western style education, and Western-educated intellectuals. And from this process of cultural liberation from the "West is best" ideology as well as the "Mecca versus mechanization" dichotomy (Eickelman 1999), there were studies done by Islamists to analyze the possible models of Islamic teaching and research in the modern era.

Religious orthodoxy was needed to liberate the Sudanese from the shackles of European cultural colonization from Sudan's recent past. But in southern Sudan, the policy of Islamization and Arabization failed due to—as Islamists themselves realized—the deep-seated rejection of Islamization for ethnic and religious motivations driven by a desire for autonomy in the face of possible subordination to the new imperialist Islam. In the minds of southerners, Arabization became equated with Islamization. As the loga al Islamiyya (the language of Islam), the Arabic language was heavily freighted with the religion of Islam, and the one entailed the other.

It was hoped that the formation of a new Islamic elite from among the Sudanese youth would stimulate change in favor of the Islamist vision for Sudan. Prior to the establishment of the Islamic center in Khartoum, a center had been established in Omdurman in 1966, the Islamic African Center, created by government decree and housed in a building provided by the Sudanese Wahhabi movement. But from the initial cultural Islamization aims, the goals were to be transformed into the spread of militant Islam, not taking into account the large sectors of Sudanese society who did not want to be Islamicized, or who did not agree with the propagation of militant Islam—for example, nonfundamentalist, secularist Muslims of the North fearing the nonrealization of their own vision for a multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural Sudan.

The Muslim elite-in-training were expected to be able to evince a dynamic image of Islam, and students were trained in high standards of religious instruction. Additionally, they were granted scholarships and free maintenance allowances. The period from 1971 to 1982 saw the center transformed from having a cultural orientation to being militantly and fundamentally Islamist. By 1987 the center was also considering opening a center for female candidates as well for the training of the new elite. From the center, the students would go on to university, for example, the Islamic University of Omdurman, or with a diploma of Da'wa (extending the "call" to the Muslim faith, Islamic proselyzation and preaching), they were qualified as Muslim missionaries to propagate Islam in Sudan and elsewhere. The ideology of Da'wa equates with a militant, missionary activity in modern societies, combining the secular studies with the religious, in the formation of the ideal Muslim man. Of course, less importance was attached to the indoctrination of women. Their role was one of subservience, to comply with being driven from public view back to the domestic scene, behind the veil of religious seclusion. The center was defined by its opposition to Westernization, particularly Western modernization brought about by the missionary activities of the Christian organizations. Combating such Western influence with an indigenous Islamic discourse was a priority. After a governmental decree in 1992, the center became the International University of Africa, a model of an ideal African Islamic institution of higher learning.

Other changes in this period included the reincorporation of the Islamic University of Omdurman as the Quranic University of Omdurman, and the nationalization of the Khartoum branch of Cairo University, which was reincorporated as the University of the Two Niles (El Nileen University). The transformation of universities posed new challenges for educational development in the final decade of the 1900s. Finding highly qualified lecturers to fill teaching posts and integrating student populations from diverse backgrounds was difficult, but the center was successful in that the young, modern, urban youth were attracted to—and by and large successfully initiated into—the Islamist vision being propagated by Islamic centers such as the Islamic African Center of Omdurman and the Islamic African Center of Khartoum. But the effect on the Muslim to non-Muslim discourse cannot be seen in any sense as a success. For militant movements such as the brand of political Islam espoused by Sudan's NIF regime since 1989, compromise is not an option. Strategic retreat perhaps, but never compromise.

During the 1990s there was a large increase in university student enrollment in Sudan. The number of new universities created in the last 15 years of the twentieth century is impressive. But this expansion in numbers has not necessarily been accompanied by a correlating growth of educational services in terms of quality of education and scientific research. From 4,000 university students in 1990, university enrollment increased to 30,000 in 1999, and the number of universities mushroomed from only 6 in 1989 to 26 in 1999. But as of the year 2000, the exodus from Sudan of qualified lecturers and teachers to the oil-rich Gulf states continued. In Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, Sudanese educators could be sure of a regular salary, a degree of stability, and adequate facilities for their professions. This exodus of Sudanese professionals has made necessary the hiring of foreign educational professionals from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and the poorer countries of the Arab world.

The growth of the Sudanese university system occurred after the 1989 military coup of General Omer Ahmed el Beshir, under whose administration a new educational policy was developed and implemented. This policy became known as the New Educational Policy of 1991, and it involved a reorganization of the entire educational system. The new policy targeted the curricula of state schools and the management of higher institutions of learning. As of 1991, the Ministry of Education issued orders instituting Arabic as the sole language of instructions at all levels of education, a directive which has not necessarily been strictly implemented, for example at Al Ahfad University where English remains the language of instruction. In the words of the 1998 constitution, other languages are "tolerated." The directive seems to have been aimed at the lower levels of education, in particular the schools in the South where English is still used. The Arabization of all universities and institutions of higher learning has meant that any student wanting to go for higher education in Sudan, must have a grounding in Arabic at the primary and secondary levels if he or she is to have any chance of obtaining a university placement. Also of importance, many universities were opened under the new policy, and students studying abroad at the time were requested to return to Sudan to enroll in one of the national universities. Additional changes included the reincorporation of the Khartoum Polytechnical Institute as the Sudan University of Science and Technology. Also as a result of the New Educational Policy of 1991, four new regional universities were established in Darfur, Kordofan, the Northern Region, and the Eastern Region, along with other specialized universities such as the Quranic University of Omdurman.

Additionally, the University Act gave the government authority over officer appointments for all universities, and according to this act all state postsecondary institutions had to be affiliated with one of the state uni-versities. The main criticism of the new policy has been that it has been informed more by the politics of the day, namely the politics of Islamization and Arabization, to the detriment of multicultural diversity and plurality of ideology instead of the recommendations of professional educators.