and women have held responsible positions as gov-
ernment ministers and judges at various times.
However, since 1989, under an Islamist regime led
by the National Islamic Front (NIF), questions of
citizenship and human rights of women have been
raised in the following areas: 1. mandatory wearing
of ™ijàbin public and empowering morals protec-
tion police and courts to enforce public morality.
Cases of lashing for immoral public behavior have
been brought to international attention by human
rights groups; 2. the purging of non-NIF women
from government employment and the judiciary.
The few public female figures are closely associated
with the NIF, such as Wisal al-Mahdì, the wife of
Islamist leader £asan al-Turàbì; and 3. application
of the ™addpunishment of stoning for adultery or
fornication to women.
Sudan was once a leader in legal reform of Sharì≠a
marriage and divorce laws (Fluehr-Lobban 1987).
Judicial divorce for women on the grounds of harm
or abuse (∂arar) was allowed in Sudan in 1915,
years before such reform was undertaken in Egypt
and elsewhere in the Muslim world. In the 1970s
Sudan continued its path of legal innovation under
the leadership of the last qà∂ìal-qu∂àt (supreme
judge), Shaykh Mu™ammad al-Jizùlì, who took the
bold move to appoint women judges to the Sharì≠a
courts and who expanded legal divorce for women
using the concept of ransom (fidya) whereby a
woman could use her bride-price (mahr) to obtain
her release from a harmful marriage.
After 1983, Sharì≠a was made state law, and since
1989 conservative legal opinion has been influ-
enced by the NIF. Non-Muslim men and women as
well as Muslims in northern Sudan have been sen-
tenced to the ™addpenalty of stoning for adultery.
Southern non-Muslim women have been sentenced
to this penalty in remote parts of the country (Dar-
fur), but as of this writing no sentence of stoning
has been carried out. However, numerous amputa-
tions for theft have been carried out upon men since
1983.
Historically, the struggle for Sudanese women’s
rights was part of the larger nationalist movement.
The first organized group of women, the Sudanese
Women’s Union, was formed in 1946 as part of the
Sudanese Communist Party. After independence,
through the 1950s and 1960s, the Women’s Union
published its Íawt al-mar±a (Woman’s voice) in
which numerous issues relating to the political and
social status of women were raised, such as poly-
gamy, divorce reform, and female circumcision.
Suffrage was extended to women, not at the time of
independence, but after the 1964 popular revolu-
tion against the Abboud military government,278 human rights
when women openly and enthusiastically demon-
strated for popular democracy. Fà†ima A™mad
Ibràhìm, a founder of the Women’s Union, was the
first woman elected to parliament in 1965. The
Women’s Union was also influential in agitating for
the reforms in the Sharì≠a law of marriage and
divorce that took place in the 1960s and early
1970s. In 1993 Fà†ima Ibràhìm accepted the United
Nations Human Rights Prize on behalf of the
Sudanese Women’s Union. Since 1989 the Islamist
regime of ≠Umar al-Bashìr has officially suppressed
all democratic organizations, including the Sudan-
ese Women’s Union, banning their publications and
ability to speak freely in public.
Also since 1989, female supporters of the NIF
have had greater opportunities defending the re-
gime’s policies toward women internally and in
external media outlets. Sudanese Islamist feminists
were especially active at the 1995 Fourth Inter-
national Congress on Women held in Beijing, rais-
ing challenges to human rights activist criticism of
Islamist regimes. They argued that Islam and the
Sharì≠a provide comprehensive legal, political, and
religious rights for women. Their critics, especially
the Republican Brothers and Muslim liberal secu-
larists, counter-argue that the ban some Muslim
countries impose on women as heads of state and
their lack of equal legal rights in divorce and inher-
itance amount to a violation of women’s rights as
human rights.
Since independence in 1956 the movement for
women’s rights has been dominated by northern
Muslim women and their supporters while the
rights of southern women were left out of the
process, or merely offered lip service. Rural women
have also all but been forgotten.
The special issue of FGM has attracted the great-
est attention by international human rights groups.
The topic of “female circumcision” has been a sub-
ject of fascination, horror, and feminist agitation in
the West. The current NIF government has reinsti-
tuted a ban on female circumcision; however, it
remains to be seen how this latest ban will be
enforced.
Allegations of the revival of slavery in the context
of the civil war since 1983 have focused on the
abduction of southern women and children by
“Arab” militias in the border areas between north
and south, especially Bahr al-Ghazal. American
and European Christian groups have intervened to
slow or stop such abductions as they perceive the
civil war in Sudan to be a conflict between the
Muslim north and Christian south.
While equal rights for women are protected in
the Permanent Constitution of 1973, a great deal