Sudan deserves to ban Islamists as they do not recognise the modern nation-state

The majority of the Sudanese people eagerly await the day when their country follows in the footsteps of Jordan, Tunisia, and other nations in the region by banning Islamist political groups.

- Abdulmoniem Suleiman

While the entire region has paid a heavy price due to Islamist politics, Sudan has suffered a double toll; losing its unity, security, stability, and prosperity. Sudan's experience holds exceptional significance for several reasons, carrying crucial theoretical implications that the entire region should heed.

Among these reasons is the fact that Islamists seized power in Sudan as the first Sunni-majority country, ruling for over three decades and fully implementing their ideological project thereby exposing its true intellectual and practical nature.

The Islamists came to power through a military coup on June 30, 1989, and maintained their grip on authority for thirty years solely through brute force and violence.

A persistent myth, naively repeated by some, claims that political Islam groups turn extremist due to persecution, particularly during the Nasser era. Yet Sudan's experience demolishes this fallacy. Unlike their counterparts in Egypt, Sudan's Islamists suffered no such repression. Nevertheless, they seized power through violence and maintained it with grotesque brutality.

They detained and tortured hundreds of thousands in secret detention centres infamously known as "ghost houses". Over 300,000 Sudanese were purged from civil and military service. Dissent against their totalitarian regime was met with unrestrained violence, unbound by legal, ethical, or human-itarian constraints. Their crimes grew so monstrous that the world's highest judicial body, the International Criminal Court (ICC), charged them with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Arrest warrants were issued for regime leader Omar Al Bashir, his Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Hussein, and State Minister Ahmed Haroun.