The editors of Ordinary Sudan have assembled an incredible collection of essays and scholarly articles that effectively contextualize Sudan’s contested present while placing the region’s history in deep historical perspective. The essays, some of which were originally written in Arabic before being carefully translated into English, grew out of an international conference held in Paris exactly a year after the outbreak of the protests that led to the fall of Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. Written in an era of hope, these essays have now been published at a moment of war that raises questions about the very future of Sudan. Edited by five scholars, this collection nevertheless comes together as a collective whole in a number of surprising ways despite including topics that range in time and place from ‘women in the Funj era’ to the historiography of the December 2018 revolution, the history of the Ingaz regime or the Sudanese soldiers who fought in nineteenth-century Mexico. One connective tissue of many of the chapters is a focus on women. Another strength of the collection is the very international nature of the authors, more than half of whom are from Sudan. The editors have consciously worked ‘to provide an international forum for Sudanese scholars who usually write and teach in Arabic’ (p. 5).

At a moment when contemporary Sudanese politics is often defined by outsiders using phrases such as ‘the battle of generals’, the writers included in this volume contend ‘that ordinary men and women are forces that have interacted with the state in important ways, contributing to its creation or resisting its power’ (p. 1). This volume seeks to restore to prominence the social history of Sudan as a radical project in and of itself, a history that highlights unsensational and quiet lives, and it shows how those lives created the world around them. In a nuanced essay about the al-Inqadh (Salvation) period from 1989 to 2019, a period that remains difficult to write about because of the fraught and contested legacy of the Islamist civilization project in Sudan, Abir Nur finds a way to discuss the enduring power of the Islamic movement without falling into clichés by focusing on the Sudanese General Women’s Union (SGWU). Nur reminds us that this organization of over six million women was the largest NGO in the nation, but that it remains little studied because ‘women who do not explicitly oppose patriarchal structures in society are … often framed in these studies as lacking agency and depicted as passive subjects’ (p. 180). Yet, Abir Nur, quoting the anthropologist Saba Mahmood, reminds us that agency is not synonymous with resistance. For Mahmood, agency means the capacity to act within the confines of historically specific conditions of subordination. Thinking creatively about what agency might mean within the confines of the Sudanese deep state, Nur argues that the endurance of al-Inqadh’s regime for thirty years, the longest of any regime in modern Sudanese history, could not have been solely due to pressure and coercion. Rather, Nur shows that al-Inqadh infiltrated Sudanese civil society, not only through top-down pressure but also because ordinary Sudanese women in organizations such as the SGWU felt that they could ‘express and practice their interpretation of women’s “empowerment” (tamkin)’ (p. 183) and that these experiences of empowerment were not just rhetorical but found expression in tangible ways in millions of members’ lives. However much we might critique these expressions of empowerment for failing to challenge the patriarchy, millions of women found meaning in the SGWU’s calls to action.

Similarly, Amel Osman Hamed alters standard chronologies of modern Sudan by highlighting the Funj sultanate (1504–1820), whose legacies into the present are often obscured when historians begin the history of modern Sudan in 1820 with the Ottoman–Egyptian armies of Muhammad Ali. In the process, the modern history of Sudan becomes a history of foreign imposition rather than a history of the internal dynamics of the numerous kingdoms that surrounded the Nile south of Egypt. Hamed focuses on the Kitab al-Tabaqat fi Khusus al-Awliya wa-l-Salihin wa-l-Ulama wa-l-Shu ‘ara fi al-Sudan (A Biographical Dictionary of Saints, Holy Men, Scholars and Poets in Sudan) written by Muhammad al-Nur bin Dayfallah in roughly 1809. Written in Sudanese Arabic, Kitab al-Tabaqat is one of the best sources of the highly neglected social history of precolonial Sudan. While Bin Dayfallah wrote the Kitab to collect the biographies of holy men, Amel Osman Hamed reads the text creatively to tell us about the lives of women in the Funj sultanate. In doing so, she is able to tell us stories about devotion to Sufi sheikhs, marriage and divorce, slavery and education, and the numerous ways in which ordinary women were able to create meaning. For instance, Hamed remarks that ‘there was also a common practice in society at the time of slaves dedicating themselves to Sufi sheikhs in return for spiritual blessings’ (p. 140).

Finally, the first two chapters of the volume by Yoshito Kurita and Safa Mohamed Kheir Osman ask how we might tell the history of Sudan’s ongoing December revolution. Kurita writes that we need to read the events in Sudan from 2018–19 as a social history of revolution, where ‘ordinary people overthrew one of the most dictatorial and oppressive regimes in modern Africa and the Middle East’ (p. 38). Kurita claims that the December revolution is ushering in a new period of Sudanese history akin to the Mahdist revolution in 1881 and the October revolution of 1964. Similar to these earlier events, for Kurita the events of December were a people’s revolution. One of the major breakthroughs of the December revolution for Kurita is that ‘the fate of the “marginalized areas” such as Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile, and that of the popular struggle in the centre (Khartoum) are now inseparable’ (p. 47). The unity of struggle is an idea captured in slogans like ‘the New Sudan’ and the 1924 White Flag Rebellion. For Kurita, the dichotomy between ‘Arabs’ and ‘blacks’ fostered by colonial administrators became an essential element of the global counter-revolution, and a window onto colonial experiences from Sudan to Palestine.

Meanwhile, Safa Osman reminds us that, while throughout Sudanese history from Kush until the present women have held and exercised political power, ‘women form one of the largest segments of society most afflicted by military regimes’ (p. 57). While women were frequently the object of oppression through laws such as the Public Order Law passed in the early 1990s by the al-Inqadh regime, Osman reports the irony that there were relatively large levels of female participation in al-Inqadh: female representation in parliament, for instance, reached 30 per cent (p. 59). While women actively participated in al-Inqadh, they were also among the leaders in undermining the regime’s legitimacy. Osman reports in detail about the online communities on Facebook that women formed, such as Minbarshat (Extreme Love), which started as an online support group for women, before morphing into ‘the security force for the revolution’ (p. 70). These groups began to spread sensitive information about marches and routes, as well as about crucial supplies for demonstrations, such as water and face masks. The security forces were forced to begin arresting women for stereotypically female activities such as ululating, or for wearing the white thob. Common phrases that used to echo regime slogans such as ‘a woman’s voice is ‘awra’ (indecent) became translated as ‘a woman’s voice is thawra’ (revolution) (p. 74). The participation of women in public life had been regulated during Bashir’s thirty years in power in ways that reinforced the power of the regime, but during the months of the revolution that symbolic participation was reinterpreted in ways that fundamentally undermined the regime and gave way to the people’s revolution.

The authors of this volume persuasively argue that the undermining of Bashir’s thirty years of rule took place because of the actions of ordinary Sudanese, frequently women. They overthrew an entrenched military–security dictatorship through everyday actions and organizing. In the process, the ordinary became extraordinary. As Kurita reminds the reader, the political history of the last few years in Sudan is really the social history of revolution. Social history in its most radical form. Social history that emphasizes that the actions of ordinary people matter and make the world that we live in. The authors of this volume remind us that, as much as the powerful want the masses to believe that those in power define history, it is the contributions of ordinary Sudanese that shape Sudan’s destiny.