Viewing Sudan with hope

It may seem improbable to say it's a hopeful time in Sudan. After all, the east African country's name still appears in news headlines atop stories about mass killing and a refugee crisis.

But Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, a Sudan scholar who teaches anthropology at Rhode Island College, just returned from four months there, and she tells of people celebrating in the streets.

The reason is the signing of a peace agreement between the country's mostly Muslim north and mostly non-Muslim south, which have been entrenched in civil war for 22 years.

Questions about killing in Sudan's Darfur region - Is it genocide or not? How to stop it? -- continue to make headlines. Just Tuesday, President Bush confirmed Colin Powell's declaration of last September that the term genocide does, indeed, apply.

Fluehr-Lobban doesn't diminish the severity of what's happening in Darfur. "It's horrible," she says. "It's horrible what's going on."

She worries, though, that the conflict has overshadowed the peace accord. "It's really an extraordinary agreement, and the press is not paying any attention to it," she says.

The new agreement, signed in Kenya in January, created separate legislatures and judicial systems for the north and south. It set forth terms for land ownership, allocation of oil resources and revenue, and allocation of government assets, among other things.

And it officially released non-Muslims from the purview of Islamic law, or shari'a, which has been the law of the land since 1983, and which still governs the north. People living in the south are no longer subject to the strict brand of law that prescribes punishments such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and flogging for moral offenses such as selling or drinking alcohol.

The agreement isn't as clear on whether the state can apply shari'a to non-Muslims living in the north, and this was the question Fluehr-Lobban studied. With money from a European Union research grant, Fluehr-Lobban interviewed lawyers, judges, scholars, politicians and human-rights activists, asking whether non-Muslims in Khartoum -- a third of the capital city's 7 million people -- were still subject, in practice, to shari'a under the Islamist northern government. She concluded they weren't.

The ease with which an Islamist government released a significant number of its citizens from shari'a is remarkable, Fluehr-Lobban says. She sees it as evidence that the peace agreement goes beyond stopping the shooting, and addresses the root causes. "I think a political solution, not a military solution, is in the works," Fluehr-Lobban says. "I hope it is."

In 50 years of independence, Sudan has seen only a decade of peace. The civil war, a religious-secular conflict with tones of resource access and power sharing added in, has claimed some 2 million victims.

In just two years, the Darfur conflict, which is more about ethnicity, has taken at least 60,000 and maybe as many as 400,000 lives, depending on who's counting and how -- estimates vary widely, as a recent New York Times story noted. The conflict has also made refugees out of almost 2 million people.

Fluehr-Lobban is optimistic that with an end to the civil war, peace in Darfur will follow.

AS A PROFESSOR AT RIC, Fluehr-Lobban aims to open students' eyes to the wider world. She teaches courses in Islamic studies, Arab-Islamic culture, women in anthropology, and tension between Islam and the West.

She offers students a chance to ask questions of someone who's visited the country where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet.

When in Sudan, Fluehr-Lobban is not just a detached observer. "She's so totally plugged in," says Elizabeth Colton, chief of public diplomacy for the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. Colton organized a function in Fluehr-Lobban's honor during her visit, and arranged interviews with her for media members.

As for finding people for Fluehr-Lobban to interview, no help was needed. "She's got tons of friends here," Colton says. "She's out meeting people and taking an interest in people's lives. She speaks Arabic fantastically. She's been coming here since the 1970s. My gosh -- she really knows it."

It might surprise some people to learn that one of the foremost scholars on Sudan teaches at RIC. That surprise rankles Richard R. Weiner, dean of RIC's arts and sciences faculty. "There's an attitude in Rhode Island that Rhode Island College produces schoolteachers, nurses and social workers," Weiner says. "We do a lot more than that."

Weiner quickly rattles off a list of fellowships RIC professors have won: Fulbright. National Endowment for the Humanities. National Institutes of Health. Fluehr-Lobban alone has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And, Weiner says, "There are a lot of people like Carolyn here."

SUDAN WAS A GOOD FIT for Fluehr-Lobban, who was born in 1945 and came of age in Atlanta as the civil-rights movement was gaining momentum.

At the time she was undertaking her doctoral research, Egypt's southern neighbor was a progressive country within the Islamic world, extending a relatively broad swath of civil rights to women. It gave women the right to vote in 1953 and was among the first Islamic states to give women seats in the legislature and appoint women judges.

In those days, there was no place in the United States for her to study Arabic, so she learned it by ear in Sudan. When she finished her doctorate, she landed at RIC, because the anthropology department gave appointments to both her and her husband, fellow Sudan scholar Richard Lobban, when they were seeking jobs together as professors in 1972.

Fluehr-Lobban returned to Sudan in 1979 for research that became a book, Islamic Law and Society in Sudan. Published in 1987, the book remains unique because it goes beyond textual analysis of the law to include observations of the court system in action. The book's findings remain relevant today: It was released in Arabic last year.

When a 1989 coup installed a regime favorable to Osama bin Laden -- he used the country as a base for his operations from 1992 to 1996 -- Fluehr-Lobban stopped going. Things were too ugly. She shifted her research to places like Egypt and Tunisia, still studying women and Islam.

Her most recent trip, then, was like a homecoming. The peace agreement, Fluehr-Lobban says, "is transforming things on the ground with real hopes for democracy."