The Death Sentence for Mahmoud Muhammad Taha:
Misuse of the Sudanese Legal System and Islamic Shari’a law?

TAHA’S VIEW ON REINTRODUCING SHARI’A LAW

Through this approach, Taha aimed to revive Islam to promote the interpretation of Islam as an egalitarian and tolerant belief system, which he held was manifested in the traditional Shari’a legal system. He was dedicated and committed towards the removal of specifically restrictive and discriminatory laws, which had been supposedly based on Shari’a, by replacing these rules with far more appropriate Islamic principles that met with the humanitarian needs of modern society. An-Na’im declares that his devotion to this desire was so deep that Taha’s ‘own death was the ultimate act in the advocacy of his vision and conception of what he used to call the Second Message of Islam’.[xxxvi] These alternative principles, which Taha consistently promoted and demonstrated for over 30 years, would be the formulation of modern-day Shari’a, as his views were based on the same basic Islamic sources, interpreted to overcome the present challenges and problems of modern society.

Taha did not advocate or support secularism, but his aim was to promote the use of an Islamic solution to the problems raised by certain parts of traditional Shari’a. These problems included questioning the civil and political rights of all members of an Islamic state, specifically focusing on the status of women and non-Muslims. Although he was against the Marxist idea of ‘communism’, Taha did emphasise the concept of a just Islamic socialist economic order, within which all citizens could receive their basic needs met as a right, and not through a dependence on charity. ‘He also strove to distinguish his conception of democracy and socialism from the prevailing notions of liberal democracy and Marxist socialism.’[xxxvii]