Mohamed Khougali on the Sudanese Revolution, Civil War, Racial Regimes, & Socially Reproductive Labor

And, you know, I was-- You made a comment there about, um, about Germany and, and you know, and God.

And I mean, it's such a funny thing because it's like also this-- I also see this reaction, and I mentioned before we started that we had recently had this conversation with, uh, Farwa Seal and, um, and, um, Fadia Nagwa Fikri on Islam and, you know, looking at different historical currents, right? Looking at revolutionary or communist infused currents, uh, in, you know, Southeast Asia, for instance.

Um, and looking at, uh, you know, Wahhabism, which, um, you know, Farwa's work really looks at that as a kind of imperial project, right? And, um, but what was interesting in the chat, right? Because in some ways, I was of course having that conversation, and we talked about this a little bit afterwards.

I was having the conversation, of course, thinking about it from a left that is, you know-- I mean, I don't know how prominent Marxism actually is within the left in the West, but it's there.

It's a, it's a thing, and it definitely Um, we have a large infusion of kind of secular, uh, you know, thinking around the left in the West.

Let me just put it that way.

Whether you are-- Marx certainly is one strain of that, um, but also, you know, many strains of whether it's anarchism or different fra- variants of liberalism that are kind of left-leaning, that, that emphasis on the secular.

So in my mind, a lot of the conversation, I'm having it in part because of that, right? And trying to open up spaces for people in the West to understand that when we talk about something like Islam, it's not just one thing.

It's-- There-- It's not just a particular political current.

These things, which your book does a fantastic job, by the way, of, of talking about this, of delving through, you know, the histories of the, the building of different sectarian, uh, you know, groups and things like this, right? And, and how these are historically developed.

Um, and that's the case, I think, in every country, right? W- regardless of religion, um, not even just particular to Islam, right? Um, and it was funny because, of course, Farwa and Fadia are coming to it from a, a different perspective to some degree, right? Coming from majority-- thinking in relation to majority Muslim societies and thinking about the left, right? But what was also fascinating was all the comments, right? And so you have people coming that are coming from a variety of, of reasons, too.

And one of the things you, you see also, of course, is certain people who are Muslim who have a very negative experience with communists or Marxists and think about it really within these terms of being very antagonistic to their spiritual, you know, faith-based projects.

And, um, I mean, and, and we can talk about maybe this is a good way to kind of transition in some ways to a discussion of the left, uh, within Sudan, right? Because you do talk about, um, you know, the history of the left.

Um, I don't know if we wanna go to the co-- You have the concept of irrational revolution, but let's, let's table that for a second.

Talk a little bit about the history, just the history of the left within Sudan, which might be a good way to kind of bridge from those random comments I just threw out at you.

[chuckles]

[laughs] I, I don't think they're random.

I think also they're, you know-- Uh, um, oof.

Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask this question because it's such a-- it's, it's, uh, for me, it's such a fresh in my mind kind of, uh, uh, uh, comment and, and, and, and thing.

Yeah, please.

Um, I'm not-- And what's it called? I don't-- I'm not gonna-- I'm gonna be a little bit ambitious and be like, "Okay, I'm gonna end the religious debate [laughs] here." But what, what I'm-- what I said earlier about, like, one of the central, let's say, questions that separates us as, as a species from anything else is basically why is society legible to us and w- how is society in a way that is legible to us, right? And I think, you know, a, a lot of, you know, a lot of people think that, you know, let's say gravity or, like, the-- our ability to observe, you know, certain, you know, phys- physical dynamics or, or whatever it is, it just is because it just is.

You know, like, it just, it just, it just happens to be.

But actually, there's, there is the fact that we're able to observe or understand or try to have a theory of history, gravity, or whatever it is, it's actually a crazy thing in itself.

W- Like, there's no other species that has this ability that allows it to theorize about why we even know what w- how, how these things relate to us or how we know these things.

And the reason why is because this fundamentally is a transcendental sort of claims that every human being has to make implicitly or explicitly, meaning that we see what's happening in front of us, I mean, to, to different, to, to different degrees.