SESS hosts Dr. Noah Salomon for an insightful talk on Sudan's post-partition dynamics
December 15, 2023: The School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS), IBA, Karachi hosted Dr. Noah Salomon, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, University of Virginia, USA, and author of the award-winning book 'For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State' (2016). The talk was organised by Dr. Sajjad Ahmad, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences, SESS and was attended by students and faculty linked to Political Science, History, Economics, and Journalism, who were keen to learn more about African politics and the country of Sudan.
Dr. Salomon presented a talk titled 'Partition's Religion: The Formation of a Muslim Minority in Sudan,' discussing how South Sudan came to be the newest internationally recognised country in the world, after it split from the Republic of Sudan in 2011. Muslims had been a majority in unified Sudan, and deeply intertwined with an Islamic state project that spoke in their names, but their status took on an interesting change when they found themselves a demographic minority in an avowedly pluralist and secularist political arrangement in post-2011 South Sudan. Drawing interesting parallels with the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and then of East and West Pakistan in 1971, Dr. Salomon argued that while certain local and international imperialist forces had portrayed the conflict in Sudan as having ethnic/religious roots, the real issue in Sudan was resource distribution. Since this latter issue remained unresolved even in the new state of South Sudan, the secular promise of successfully mediating religious diversity failed to become fulfilled in either part of partitioned Sudan, following the birth of the two new republics.
The audience asked Dr. Salomon various questions on themes including Arab and non-Arab politics in Africa, the effect of wealth inequality on ethnic/religious strife and civil war, Western imperial influences in Africa, Islam, Christianity, tribal religions in Africa, secularism, and the value and function of the discipline of anthropology in the realm of Religious Studies.
