"Unity is an obligation and a necessity," Sheikh Yousef Qardawi, a leading Sunni cleric based in Qatar, declared during a Friday sermon aired on Qatar television at the end of December. "Greater Sudan must remain Greater Sudan. It is prohibited for a Muslim to vote for secession and a disgrace for a non-Muslim to do so." But during the prolonged and devastating civil war in Sudan did the so called Muslim umma tried to solve this issue? The clear answer is no. In reality Muslims does not have any common ground on this issue nor did they ever realize the consequences of such a murderous and debilitating civil war.
Arab League observers monitoring last week's voting said the polling process was transparent and in line with international standards. But Amr Mousa, the group's secretary-general, expressed concern over whether South Sudan would remain loyal to its Arab neighbours. He said he hoped the Sudanese people would maintain the historically good relations between the north and the south, apparently disregarding the estimated 1.5 million victims of the civil war.
"Muslims have a problem delivering territory under Islamic sovereignty to a population of non-Muslims," Yitzhak Reiter, an expert on Islam from the Hebrew University and the Ashkelon Academic College, told The Media Line. "Sudan is almost the only place in the world where the word Jihad preserves its original meaning in the sense of forcefully converting non-Muslim tribes to Islam. The north has attempted in the past to implement sharia in the south."
Akbar Hussain
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