Sudan’s military government is making efforts to portray itself as disconnected from the Muslim Brotherhood, the transnational movement that advocates for Islamic polity and historically played an influential role in the politics of Sudan, Egypt, and other countries.
“The Sudanese people toppled the Brotherhood with their revolution [in 2018-2019], and we will not allow them… to return under any circumstances,” asserted General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Commander-in-Chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces, in an interview with Al-Arabiya news channel.
Al-Burhan consistently portrays his government as apolitical, arguing that military rule is a temporary necessity until order is restored. Yet Al-Burhan himself is a long-serving general under the Brotherhood-linked National Islamic Front, which ruled Sudan from 1989-2019 (rebranding in the 2000s as the National Congress Party). While the NIF was never a formal branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, its leaders drew heavily on Brotherhood thought and styles of organizing and activism. That intellectual lineage helps explain why Al-Burhan refers to the former Sudanese regime as “the Muslim Brotherhood.”
After taking power in 2021, Al-Burhan’s government freed from prison and halted the prosecutions of many prominent Islamist politicians who had been arrested after the 2019 revolution, including the former president, Omar al-Bashir. Meanwhile, it has prosecuted in absentia leaders of the secular political opposition coalition, Sumud, which blames Islamists for the outbreak of Sudan’s war and advocates for a peaceful resolution.
Sudan War Monitor