885. Religious Practice & Belief
Wendy James
Conventional writing on religion in the Sudan, by historians or theolo-
gians, tends to take as quite distinct topics the spread of Islam on the one
hand and of Christianity on the other; or else it focuses on other belief
systems – on contemporary ‘tribal’ religions – as though they existed
in isolation. However, modern anthropological or sociological studies
of actual Sudanese communities show how difficult it is to disentangle
the story of the world religions from each other, or from their respective
involvement with the legacies of pre-existing beliefs or the vibrancy
of current locally-rooted ceremonial practices. The latter category we
can take to include many domestic rituals connected with the cycle of
life, maturation, healing, and death. These rituals are found across the
country alongside the major public affirmations and rites that we rightly
dignify as African traditional religion.
Beneath the initial appearance of a community as ‘Muslim’, ‘Chris-
tian’, or ‘traditional African’ lie many layers of complicated memory
and accommodation to other traditions. The dominant patterns of
inequality which are so well established in many Sudanese communi-
ties, including gender relations, patronage and clientage, differences
between locals and incomers, and the legacy of historical relations
between slaves and their owners, find surprisingly robust expression in
religious activity. Tensions may surface more explicitly in the symbolic
discourse of religious practice than is usually possible in the everyday
language of life as led in the towns and villages, or for that matter, in
the language of national political life.The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors
(www.riftvalley.net).