Islam, Politics, and Identity: The (Im)possibility of Sudan’s Islamic State

Sudan currently ranks in the top ten most at risk countries on the Fragile State Index. Yet despite decades of political instability and conflicts destabilizing the country, the aspirations for an Islamic state proved to be resilient, and an Islamist government of the Sudanese state continues to function. How are we to explain the resilience of this Islamic state when conventional wisdom seems to suggest it should have been an impossible project from its outset? Noah Salomon’s ethnography of the Islamic state in Sudan provides a window into the making of a modern Islamic state by focusing our attention on the Sudanese people that not only constitute it, but bring it to life through their poetry, spiritual devotions, and everyday lives.

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