#  Religion and Public Life Fall Series Concludes with Discussion on Sudan 

 





The Religion and Public Life (RPL) program at Harvard Divinity School hosted the final session in its three-part series, "Scripture, Secularism, and Statecraft," with a lecture by Professor Alden Young of Yale University on religion and the postcolonial revolution in Sudan.



 

October 14, 2025

 

 

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     ![Divinity Hall](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-10/070207_DivHall_005.jpg?itok=C-yVoXV1) 

Photo of Divinity Hall by Kristie Welsh.



 



 

Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life (RPL) program hosted the final lecture in its three-part series, “Scripture, Secularism, and Statecraft," with a presentation by Professor Alden Young, Associate Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, titled "Religion and the Postcolonial Revolution in Sudan."

During the conversation, Young situated Sudan’s current war—now the world’s largest displacement crisis—within a broader history of religious politics and state formation. Unlike previous conflicts at the periphery, the 2023 war erupted in Khartoum, marking a rupture in the country’s political geography.

Young traced the conflict back to the rise of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti), “two forces that were created by the Sudanese military,” he said, whose power was consolidated through their participation in counterrevolutionary regional conflicts, especially after 2013. Both, he said, “have tried to walk the line” between performing secular politics and invoking their “Islamic credentials in a majority Muslim country.”

Young connected these developments to the collapse of Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which faced hyperinflation and a bloated security apparatus that threatened “to consume the entirety of Sudanese society.” The state’s earlier “Arab-Islamic civilization project” promised modernization through Islamization, but by 2019, protesters were calling for civilian rule and reclaiming older cultural symbols.

He highlighted protestor Alaa Salah’s iconic image as a Kandake, which “made claims in reference back to the idea that the Sudanese are an African people” and implicitly challenged Arabization. Underlying this uprising were long-standing intellectual rifts: Hassan al-Turabi’s belief that “Islamization could only occur as a result of a vanguard that would capture the towering heights of the state” clashed with Mahmoud Muhammad Taha’s assertion that “only a Muslim society, a society of true believers, can create an Islamic state.” Taha’s refusal to repent when accused of apostasy and his subsequent execution marked a major turning point in Sudan’s religious politics.

In closing, Young underscored the persistence of Sudan’s unresolved identity struggle. Since independence, ruling elites “saw themselves stuck in this position where the country itself was only partially Arabized,” generating enduring debates about who counts as Sudanese and what role Islam should play. After the 2011 secession of South Sudan, these tensions remained unresolved.

Amid today’s war, Young said, “Sudanese society has proven to be incredibly resilient under unbelievable hardships,” as grassroots “emergency response rooms” work to sustain daily life. Ultimately, he asserted “the revolution cannot be finished until the nature of the Sudanese state is fundamentally changed.”