Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim emancipation as a craft

[Elisabeth Janaina]

Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim emancipation as a craft

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By Magdi El Gizouli

Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, a Sudanese veteran communist politician and
feminist, passed away in London on 12 August. She is survived by her
son Ahmed with the late al-Shafie Ahmed al-Sheikh, a communist trade
union leader who met his death at the gallows at the orders of
President Nimayri in the aftermath of the failed 19 July 1971
communist coup attempt. For Fatima the political was essentially
corporeal. She experienced the treacheries of Sudanese politics as a
family dilemma of the first order.

Fatima’s brother, Salah Ahmed Ibrahim, another communist intellectual
and gifted poet of standing, was an early victim of the party’s
scornful scrutiny of its intellectuals. Another brother, Murtada Ahmed
Ibrahim, was irrigation minister in Nimayri’s first cabinet
(1969-1971) and was dismissed in the showdown that followed the 1971
coup. Both did not live to bid Fatima a final farewell. Salah died in
May 1993 in Paris and the older Murtada in May 1996 in Sweden. A third
brother, al-Rasheed Ahmed Ibrahim, passed way a young man in the
United Arab Emirates. Fatima’s two sisters, Nafisa and al-Toma, died
in 1997 in London. The family of the late Ahmed Ibrahim, a Gordon
College (later Khartoum University) graduate and school teacher, and
Aisha Mohamed Ahmed Fadl, one of a few women in her generation to
receive an intermediate school education, have all crossed death’s
way.

Among her siblings Fatima was the most politically dedicated and
organisationally gifted. She is often celebrated as the first woman
parliamentarian in her country Sudan, a seat she earned as candidate
of the Communist Party in the 1965 elections. True, she was, but the
statement somehow reduces a lifetime of innovation in struggle to her
brief contribution to parliamentary politics. Fatima, it must be
acknowledged, invented the new Sudanese woman of the modern age, a
project she launched in her own flesh as it were. She embodied her
project as much as she campaigned for it. Her fidelity to the praxis
of emancipation rather than its slogans is exemplary.

As early as 1964-1965 Fatima found herself as member of the Communist
Party’s politburo and president of the Sudanese Women’s Union (SWU) in
argument with the late secretary general of the Communist Party, Abd
al-Khaliq Mahjoub, over the orientation, organisation and priorities
of the Union. Mahjoub wanted the SWU to ‘mainstream’, he wanted the
SWU to talk ‘gender’ and tackle as its first priority the relationship
between men and women in society. Fatima thought the main issue to be
the engagement of women in political life; the concerns of the private
sphere in her reasoning were to be mediated through women’s invasion
of public life (for details see Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim’s ‘The House
that Matriarchy Built: The Sudanese Women’s Union’). The issue was
never satisfactorily settled and the party and the SWU were soon
engulfed in the political tragedies that made all such contemplation
an impossibility.

From that 1965 debate the dust is still in the air. Fatima continued
to resist the attraction of ‘identity’ politics to her last days,
disappointing many of the young feminists who admired her person but
could not tolerate her example. She simply refused to understand how
issues such as sexual choice or personal liberties including dress and
other lifestyle concerns of the urban and expatriate Sudanese women
who came to dominate the feminist scene could have precedence over or
even link up with the agonies of devastation and hunger that were and
are still today the lot of the women of war-battered rural Sudan, in
Fatima’s own words: “What priority can sexual choice have to a woman
whose child is dying of hunger in her own arms?” Her detractors are
yet to invent that connection and mould it in a productive fashion.
Inadvertently, they vindicate her position by their failure to further
their own agenda.

Under Fatima’s influence, the SWU (est. 1952) developed into a
grassroots organisation with branches in many of Sudan’s towns and
villages. In its structure, it largely copied the organisational grid
of the Communist Party with the distinction that it penetrated into
the realm of social reproduction with its creative engagement of
housewives. Fatima tuned the social agenda of the SWU to the women who
are today at best the ‘respondents’ of NGO-feminism. She opened the
cow’s mouth, to paraphrase a Sudanese proverb, in her pursuit of the
interests of the women left behind not only by men but by the forces
of modernisation. In that quest, she was ready to make the most
improbable of alliances with Sudan’s sharia establishment. When
scrutinised this most productive exchange between the SWU and the
sharia judges of Sudan reveals a ‘praxis’ of an indigenous feminism
that is essentially her authorship.

Judging by outcome, the SWU’s campaigns achieved legislations granting
young women the right to be consulted before marriage; abolition of
the obedience laws; a woman’s right to divorce in case of abuse as
well when she had no interest in living with a husband as long as he
was paid back the dowry; mothers were granted custody of their sons up
to the age of seventeen and their daughters until marriage; in the
case of divorce children were granted the right of maintenance by
their fathers provided it did not exceed half the father’s income.
These breakthroughs which have largely survived turbulence of
government since would not have been possible without Fatima’s
culturally embedded brand of feminism. It is virtually impossible to
imagine such reforms in the absence of the cultural premises that
Fatima relied on to negotiate support among women and an agenda
against the male sharia establishment.

Fatima in her sharp and clear prose explained these premises as such:
“Emancipation does not mean getting rid of our national good
traditions and values, or for us Sudanese women to become another copy
of the Western woman. It is emancipation from illiteracy,
backwardness, disease, unemployment, poverty and discrimination in the
home and in society; Equality does not mean for Sudanese women to
become another copy of the man. It means for women to be completely
equal to men in rights and in decision-making at all levels; Men, as
males are not responsible for discrimination against women. Most of
them are also exploited and discriminated against. For this, women and
men should work together to make social changes that preserve
democracy, which is based on social justice and human rights.”

For Fatima, it seems the question of ‘who are we fighting for’
overdetermined the question of ‘what are we fighting for’. She drew
her answers to these questions from the lived experience of Sudanese
women rather than a blind reliance on the discourses of Western
feminism. She made a point of showcasing the shortcomings of Western
feminism and its inability to live up to its universalist claims. In
Fatima’s understanding, women in Western countries, despite their
personal freedoms, continue to suffer from physical and structural
violence at home and within society. Sexual freedoms as experienced in
the West, she argued, did not necessarily translate into equality in
power relations between the sexes nor protect women from
commodification, sexual violence and exploitation. The focus on
violence and rape, she argued further, addresses results and symptoms
of social disorders rather than their causes.

Fatima pointed out the atomised nature of Western societies and
criticised the prevalent culture of individualism in the West. In
upholding and nurturing this principle, she argued, women’s
organisations in the West are “upper” organisations and have no links
to women at grassroots levels. In a similar sense gender studies
departments in universities, despite their profuse research on the
subject, have no direct contact with the mass of ordinary women who
also have no access to these researchers. Importantly, Fatima
highlighted the fact that the vast majority of women in Western
countries are not involved in politics at all. The predominantly “male
ruling class”, she wrote, “is keen to keep women out of the ruling
class because this helps to limit the competition for getting into
power.”

One remarkable feature of Fatima’s criticism of Western feminism is
her obvious rejection of its claims to universality. Fatima’s
independence in this regard could be read in light of her record of
anti-colonial struggle. Her clearly voiced rejection of these claims
is integral to her own concrete praxis. For her the theatre of
struggle is not the domain of culture as such which she dismisses as
an obfuscation; it is the political arena where discriminatory
policies, constitutions and laws against women are introduced and then
executed. Her criticism extends in Leninist fashion to liberal
democracy which she describes as “artificial” since it does not
eradicate class, race and gender discrimination.

In Fatima’s mind, the struggle the for emancipation of women is
intrinsically linked to the struggle for a just society that
transcends the ‘capitalist’ deadlock. “Western women are still
discriminated against because capitalist societies still practice
class and racial discrimination”. “Women will never be equal with men
in a society where a man is not equal to a man”, she concludes,
“because women’s issues and problems are connected with men’s and
society’s problems”. This ‘Red’ Fatima is long out of fashion in the
Khartoum circles of feminist activism. However, elements of her
critique of Western feminism can be identified in the works of
post-colonial feminist theorists. I am not sure whether Fatima read
Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses’ but she would have probably approved it.

Now, who are today the heirs of Fatima’s legacy? This a thorny topic.
Since the inconclusive debate between Abd al-Khaliq and Fatima in the
mid 1960s the SWU deteriorated with every political tragedy that has
befallen the Sudanese left as did the Communist Party to become a
wasted force. Three competing trends emerged to replace Fatima’s house
as it were. The first is arguably the Islamist women’s movement
pioneered by women in Fatima’s generation like Suad al-Fatih al-Badawi
and decisively promoted by the late Hassan al-Turabi. The second and
third are liberal trends of feminism divided between a reformist
school around the Ahfad University for Women’s Gender Studies
Institute under the directorship of Balghis Badri and a number of
declaredly activist and occasionally confrontational initiatives such
as ‘No for Women’s Oppression’ or civil society organisations
dedicated to the promotion of a trademark ‘feminism’ with a focus on
sexuality and domestic violence such as the Salmmah Women’s Resource
Centre.

Quite like Fatima’s emancipatory project but unlike the liberal
alternatives on offer, Turabi’s brand of Islamic feminism was linked
to a ‘political’ attempt at reworking power relations in Sudanese
society at large. As an oppositionist in the 1970s during an era when
political Islam offered many a revolutionary idiom to upset given
social structures, Turabi made a point to reach out to women offering
the young and the ambitious routes out of patriarchal enclosure while
retaining the cultural context of Islamic faith. If Fatima was able to
think the Muslim woman in secular emancipatory terms, Turabi offered
the same woman liberation within a reinforced religious badge and
indeed succeeded in drawing scores of young women to the ‘path’ as the
words of a once favoured nasheed enticingly proclaimed: “Come to our
path you thirsty.. Come to our path you perplexed”. At a certain
juncture in the 1980s and into the 1990s the distinction between the
Islamist women movement and its leftist and liberal opponents appeared
to correspond to the obfuscated class barrier that Fatima was keen to
demonstrate. Paradoxically or not so paradoxically, the disadvantaged
tob-clad young women turned hijabis from rural Sudan flocked to
Turabi’s movement and their class superiors were happier in the
hijab-free liberal currents.

Turabi’s dismissal of the tob as an unnecessary nuisance and its
replacement by the hijab as a sort of uniform for the new ‘Muslim’
woman was a master stroke in political symbolism at its time.
Political Islam among women had a trademark. Fatima, obviously
unprepared for the age of the spectacle, retained the tob and nursed
puritan sexual morals to her dying day while the Islamic movement was
toying with ideas of ‘casual marriage’ in an attempt to respond to the
increasing social dissociation in Sudan’s urban scene. In late age,
Turabi, back in opposition in the 2000s, went as far as to proclaim
the right of women to marry without a guardian from an Islamic point
of view, once again attempting to catch up with the fragmenting
pressures of the city. From Fatima’s point of view, these were chaotic
and obviously opportunistic overtures that did no account for the
needs of the mother with the hungry dying child in her arms.

Liberal feminists, on the other hand, dropped Fatima’ kaleidoscopic
reading of the oppression of women favouring instead the
donors’-watered grazing grounds of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM),
sexuality, domestic violence.. etc. The critique she hurled at Western
feminism she reiterated to Sudan’s feminist activists of the post-Cold
War era, stressing repeatedly the lessons she had drawn from years of
praxis. Her detractors rightly or wrongly accused her of
‘conservatism’, ‘dogmatism’ and ‘reaction’ and blamed her for their
shrinking support base. However, in their frustration, they wasted her
lessons in grassroots engagement and her textured but sharp reading of
the constellation of forces that affect the status of women in
society. Patriarchy and Islam replaced class, economy and even race as
determinants of oppression.

Accordingly, when indeed initiatives such as ‘No to the Oppression of
Women’ reach out beyond their class constraints the encounter is often
a caricature. Where Fatima would have organised the contemporary
activist poses for the camera theatrically enacting the role of the
oppressed. Such was the situation when activists wanted to demonstrate
solidarity with Khartoums’ famed tea ladies. Since tea ladies are
readily accessible they have come to occupy a place of priority in the
agenda of feminist activism, possibly as place-holders for the
ordinary working woman from a disadvantaged background. It is probably
telling that domestic workers do not enjoy the status of tea ladies in
this cartography of oppression, may be because they sustain the
households of the emancipators themselves. Prominent women activists
took up positions behind stoves and tea pots with beaming smiles on
their faces facing the zaps of smartphones. The role play, alas,
worked only in one direction. A truly subversive version would have
involved the tea ladies occupying the neat houses and driving the
air-conditioned cars of their activist friends.
Fatima’s greatest achievement, I claim, is that she invented relations
of common struggle and solidarity between women and also between women
and men in Sudan. Hers was a dream for collective emancipation, a
communist dream. The route she initiated is arguably irrecoverable
today. The women and men who share this dream would have to invent
these relations anew and strike new routes to a future unknown. In the
words of the late Tijani al-Tayeb speaking on the occasion of the 50th
anniversary of the Communist Party: “The first [communist] pioneers
stormed the unknown, unknown to them and to the Sudanese society, and
established a party of a new type without prior experience”. Fatima’s
life and praxis offer a trove of such experience but who needs her
lessons?

In writing this piece I relied on Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim’s Our Harvest
in Twenty Years (1972), Our Path to Emancipation (1962), Sudanese
Women’s Union: Strategies for Emancipation and the Counter Movement
published in Ufahamu 24 (1996), Arrow at Rest in Women in Exile edited
by Mahanaz Afkhami (1994) as well as Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf’s
Narrating Feminism: The Woman Question in the Thinking of an African
Radical published in Differences 15 (2004), Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim’s
The House That Matriarchy Built: The Sudanese Women’s Union published
in the South Atlantic Quarterly 109 (2010) and Chandra Talpade
Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses published in Boundary 12 (1984)