Education in the Sudan: the privileging of an Islamic discourse

Abstract

This article examines the educational discourse in the part of the Sudan administered by the Government of the Sudan. It first analyses the value system upon which the Sudanese education is based by focusing on the nature of Islamism. Such a discussion is necessary because the dominant discourse is a discourse where power and Islamic theocracy legitimise each other and spill over into the educational discourse. Given the ethnic and religious complexity in the Sudan the imposition of a fundamentalist Islamic discourse is fiercely contested. The second part of the article, therefore, discusses the educational discourse of the government and relates it to the oppositional discourses in the country. It pays particular attention to the homogenising efforts of the dominant discourse to eradicate difference as a constituting factor in the Sudanese education system. The attempts to recognise difference have not led to a fundamental negotiation of the consequences of Islamism in the official school system.

Keywords:

• Islamic discourse
• Islamism
• The educational discourse
• Educational reform in Sudan
• Orientalism in reverse
• Essentialism of cultures
• Lack of multiculturalism
• Schooling and exclusion

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Thomas Sletten Eri for some of the information used in the section on curricula and textbooks (see Eri, 2003, p. 102), and to Dr Oddbjørn Leirvik for information on Christian education.

Notes

1. The study is part of a more comprehensive research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council on cultural values and schooling in South Africa and the Sudan. The research in South Africa was conducted by the author and David Stephens of Oslo University College. The author is responsible for the research in the Sudan. Qualitative data collection techniques were used in the fieldwork during which government representatives, community teachers, parents and children were interviewed by both Norwegian and Sudanese field workers.

2. Lesch defines Islamist as ‘an organization such as NIF, which has an exclusivist vision, based on a particular reading of religious doctrine, that it seeks to impose upon the political system and population’ (Lesch, 1998, preface).

3. One distinguishes between the concepts of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamic’. A Muslim state is a state with a Muslim population. An Islamic state is a state that founds its policies on sharia. (Eidhamar & Rian, 1995, p. 171).

4. The article was written before the comprehensive peace agreement which was signed on January 9, 2005.