Former Sudanese Armed Forces spokesman al-Sawarmi Khalid Saad has launched a sharp attack on Sudan’s Islamists, describing them as political theorists who have failed to exert any meaningful influence on the ground.
In a Facebook post that sparked widespread debate, al-Sawarmi criticised what he described as the failure of Islamist figures to spread religious values and provide organised religious education in Sudan’s remote and marginalised regions.
He said Sudan was now paying the price for the absence of sustained religious outreach, claiming that some communities in the country’s peripheries lacked even basic knowledge of Islamic teachings.
Al-Sawarmi argued that Sudan urgently needed preachers prepared to work directly among communities in distant areas and take responsibility for promoting religious values through practical fieldwork.
He said those commonly presented as Islamic intellectuals had limited their activities to political engagement and abstract theorising, without building an effective presence among ordinary people.
According to al-Sawarmi, these figures spent their time discussing Islamic government and political power while neglecting the practical religious work needed in rural and peripheral communities.
He blamed this failure for contributing to Sudan’s current crisis and called for the gap to be urgently addressed to ensure that religious teachings reached isolated populations.
The remarks are particularly significant given al-Sawarmi’s own background. He served as the official spokesman for the Sudanese Armed Forces under former president Omar al-Bashir, whose government was dominated by the Islamic Movement and Muslim Brotherhood-linked figures.
His comments amount to an unusually direct criticism from a former senior military spokesman of the Islamist forces that exercised extensive political and security influence during Bashir’s three decades in power.
