Thinkers Timeline

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese Islamic reformer, political thinker, civil engineer, and Sufi mystic, known to his followers as Ustadh ('the teacher') Mahmoud. He developed one of the most ambitious twentieth-century reinterpretations of Islam, which he called the Second Message of Islam. He was executed for apostasy by the Sudanese government in January 1985. He was 76. He was born in 1909 in a village near Rufa'a, on the eastern bank of the Blue Nile about 150 km south of Khartoum. His family came from a Sufi religious tradition linked to the Qadiriyya order. He was educated at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (later the University of Khartoum), graduating as a civil engineer in 1936. He worked briefly for Sudan Railways, then started his own engineering business in Rufa'a. His political life began with the founding of the Sudanese Republican Party in October 1945, an anti-monarchical, pro-independence movement seeking a Sudanese republic free of British-Egyptian colonial rule. He was imprisoned twice in 1946 by the British colonial administration, the second time for two years. During his second imprisonment and in a subsequent period of religious seclusion (khalwa) at his home in Rufa'a from 1948 to 1951, he developed the theological vision that would shape the rest of his life. He emerged from seclusion to lead a small but committed movement called the Republican Brotherhood, distinct from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood despite the similar name. He published his masterwork The Second Message of Islam in 1967. As President Gaafar Nimeiri's regime imposed Sharia law in Sudan from 1983, Taha distributed pamphlets opposing the move. He was arrested on 5 January 1985, tried for apostasy in a hasty proceeding he refused to recognise, and publicly hanged on 18 January 1985.

Tayeb Salih (al-Tayyib Salih) was a Sudanese novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, widely considered one of the most important Arab writers of the twentieth century. He was born on 12 July 1929 in the village of Karmakol, on the Nile near al-Dabbah in northern Sudan. He came from a family of small farmers and religious teachers. He attended a Quranic school as a boy, then continued at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (which became the University of Khartoum), where he took a Bachelor of Science degree. He planned to work in agriculture. After a brief period as a schoolteacher in Sudan he won a scholarship to study in London. He never returned to live permanently in Sudan. He spent the rest of his working life abroad, primarily in Britain. He worked for over a decade at the BBC's Arabic Service, eventually becoming Head of Drama. He served as Director-General of Information in Doha, Qatar. He spent his last working years at UNESCO in Paris, including time as UNESCO's representative for the Arab Gulf states. For more than a decade he wrote a weekly column for the London-based Arabic magazine al-Majalla, ranging widely across Arabic and world literature. In 1965 he married Julia Maclean, a Scottish woman; they had three daughters and lived in southwest London. His literary output was small but extraordinarily influential. He published the short story collection A Handful of Dates (1964), the novella The Wedding of Zein (1966), the masterpiece Season of Migration to the North (Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal, 1966), and the two-part novel Bandarshah (Daw al-Bayt, 1971; Maryud, 1976). In 2001 the Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy named Season of Migration to the North the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century. He died of kidney failure in London on 18 February 2009 at age 79. His body was returned to Sudan and buried at al-Bakri Cemetery in Omdurman.

Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim was a Sudanese feminist, socialist, writer, and political leader. She was the first woman elected to the Sudanese parliament and, according to several sources, the first woman elected to any African parliament. She led the Sudanese Women's Union, one of the largest women's organisations on the African continent, for much of the second half of the twentieth century. She was born in Khartoum in 1933 (some sources give 1928 or 1932) and died in London on 12 August 2017 at age 84. Her funeral in Khartoum a few days later drew large crowds. She came from an educated Sudanese family. Her grandfather had been headmaster of the first Sudanese school for boys and an imam. Her father was a teacher who graduated from Gordon Memorial College and was expelled from a government school for refusing to teach in English. Her mother was among the first generation of Sudanese girls to receive formal schooling. Fatima attended Omdurman Girls' Secondary School, where she founded a wall newspaper called al-Ra'ida (The Pioneer) and led the first women's strike in Sudan, against the school's decision to replace science classes with 'home economics'. The strike won. The pattern of organising and winning began early. In 1947 she founded the Intellectual Women's Association. In 1952 she helped found the Sudanese Women's Union (al-Ittihad al-Nisa'i al-Sudani, SWU). She joined the Sudanese Communist Party in 1954 and served on its Central Committee. In 1965, after Sudanese women won the vote, she was elected to parliament. She campaigned successfully for equal pay, maternity leave, women's suffrage, and other reforms. Multiple Sudanese regimes banned the SWU. She was held under house arrest under Nimeiri. After Bashir's 1989 coup she went into exile in London, leading the SWU from abroad. She returned to Sudan in 2005 and served briefly in parliament again. She received the UN Human Rights Award in 1993 and the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2006.