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.