Suad Abdel Aziz is a passionate advocate for decolonization and media justice, dedicated to reshaping global narratives around amplify historically silenced voices, challenge mainstream media biases, and highlight the ongoing struggles and resilience of Sudanese communities. Through her activism, writing, and public engagement, Suad critiques the structural inequities in media representation and advocates for storytelling that centers truth, justice, and lived experiences.
Beyond her advocacy, Suad engages in critical discussions on decolonization, the power of independent media, and the role of storytelling in resistance movements. Her work serves as a vital bridge between grassroots activism and global audiences, inspiring others to challenge dominant narratives and reclaim their histories.
Below is a full transcript of her talk & discussion at Nuun Collective on February 25, 2025.
00:00:00 Introduction
Nawal Khan:
Asalam Alaikum Sister Suad! How are you?
Okay so as Kamran has mentioned, you are a two-timer refugee, founder of Decolonize Sudan, as well as a lawyer. Can you please tell me what is going on in Sudan right now?
00:00:13 Current State of Sudan
Suad Abdel Aziz:
Yeah, so as-salamu alaykum everyone. Thank you for being here tonight, and thank you to Nuun Collective for hosting this important talk. I want to first have everyone take a deep breath and ground ourselves. Some of what we'll speak about is a little triggering and dark because it is a harsh reality that we're facing in this dunya currently—so just a disclaimer.
I think what Kamran was getting at is that civil war is not what is happening in Sudan. A genocidal, foreign-backed militia has brutally occupied our lands and is committing a genocide on our people.
One thing that we work at at Decolonize Sudan, that is central in our work, is language and the power of language. We are very intentional about what is happening to our people—what we call it. The language we use—especially regarding conflict and genocide—frame the interventions that are made in genocide and in conflict. We'll speak a little bit more about that, but for just a very brief primer on what has happened in Sudan over the past five or so years:
There was a brutal dictator that the people took to the streets, calling for change. They demanded a viable standard of living, as they were facing extreme poverty. There was an increase in the opposition to the Bashir regime, the dictator in power, due to this poverty. The way he responded to the protesters is with brutal repression. And he did this by hiring a private militia group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
And this was a militia group that had been previously contracted all over the Middle East, North Africa, and the EU to act as brutal mercenaries to harm migrants. In 2016, Saudi Arabia hired them to kill off and massacre Yemeni people, that Saudi was targeting as Houthi. They were in 2018, contracted by the EU and Italy to massacre Libyan migrants coming to the borders of Italy. And these are just a few contracts they had throughout the Middle East and North Africa to kill off people on behalf of governments.
But what followed after that was a power vacuum in which the military told the people theres going to be a temporary transition and we’re going to have civilian rule on April 15, 2023. And the day before, April 14, is when this private militia group that came from outside, the RSF, in a matter of a month, bombed the capital, took over the capital, took over the key military bases of Sudan and occupied much of the country.
The Sudanese people were taken aback and the masses were surprised. This militia, at the time in 2022, was about 10,000 men. And so people were shocked on how did this small militia take over this entire country from this military that was made up of millions? How did this happen? And now we can look back and understand, and you know theres journalism and evidence to show the RSF was planning this takeover from very early on and coordinating with powers such as the UAE, and very early on with Israel.
One of the first things that the RSF did was bomb all of the land records—with the strategy that they were going to take over the homes. So this wasn’t just brutal massacres that were kind of random, it was a very strategic takeover.
Going further back, in 2019, the RSF hired a professional PR and marketing company. It’s an Israeli company called Dickens & Madsen, to craft the civil war narrative that dominates headlines today. And this company would come to be extremely strategic in the Civil War narrative that you see now around Sudan, which shaped many of the headlines and how we talk about what’s going on. And so they very early on strategized with PR and marketing because they understood the power of marketing and of language. and proceeded then to take over the country.
The RSF took over the key telecommunications systems in order to black out the media. This is why you don’t hear from the people on the ground in Sudan and what’s really going on. We can only really rely on journalism from a few journalists. At Decolonize Sudan, we provide who those journalists are to follow, but really there’s just a handful of journalists. Because of the strategic marketing of the RSF and the PR campaign, the subsequent UAE campaign, combined with the mass control of telecommunications in Sudan—this narrative of a “Civil War” was able to flourish while those on the ground are very clear on what was going on.
And what was going on with them was brutal massacrews of whole villages. There are entire families, lineages gone. The head of the RSF, Mohamed Daghelo (Hemedti), one of the first things he had said was, “the way you control the men is that you have to control the women.” And that is a very vital part of their strategy.
They rape women, they take women and girls as hostages and as sex trafficking slaves, They also take child soldiers, and this is a main makeup of the militia, that are taken from Sudan but also mostly from neighboring states, such as Chad and Uganda. Another part of the militia are paid mercenaries. These men, mostly in Chad, are promised more money than they can ever imagine in their life, to come and fight in Sudan. They are not told anything about the strategy, the occupying, but they are told if you take over the home, you can occupy it. They’re incentivized. It’s a business of privately paid individuals and also of coerced and trafficked soldiers. And so what’s extremely important to identify with the RSF a registered transnational corporation, and Hemedti himself has become a billionaire since 2023.
00:11:02 Motive behind Sudanese Genocide
Nawal Khan:
Jazakallahu Khairun for that briefing, it was really informative. I did want to ask, you talked about the RSF and how it is a corporation - what do you think is the motive of that corporation and why did they specifically target Sudan?
Suad Abdel Aziz:
Yeah, I mean, it's the motive for, I would say, all of the conflicts in the world that we are facing. It's a land and a resource grab. It is all about resources. And Hemedti has become a billionaire since 2023 from this endeavor. And he has done this mostly by selling gold. He has stolen and sold billions and billions of dollars of gold, and the primary beneficiary of that gold has been the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. And in exchange for this, the UAE has been the primary funder and provider of weapons to the RSF militia.
And so at the core of this to understand is that it is a grab for resources. And this is, like I said, not dissimilar to any other conflict that we see in the world today. So what's happening in Congo is very similar. There was a militia that came out of, that initially, one of the heads had come out of the ranks of the military of Congo, created his own private militia, and then took over, and now he's making deals with countries like Rwanda to extract the mineral resources of Congo. And so the issue of private militias is something that we're not immune to. I mean, I could speak even today,
Trump has deployed the Blackwater American private militia in Gaza, and he is also deploying this same private militia. There is a prospective deal that he's going to use the private militia to detain migrants within the US. This private militia is going to act on the president's behalf to capture people, to kill people abroad and possibly kill people domestically. It's a very, very eerily similar situation to how we got here to present day Sudan. So it's something that the issue of privatization, especially of defense, is something that, defense, military spending, is something that is not an issue unique to Sudan.
00:14:16 Decolonizing the Narrative
Nawal Khan:
So you talked about how, well, everything you're saying right now, we don't see in the mainstream media at all. I would say that I personally thought the Sudan Civil War was actually an internal conflict. I could not have imagined it came from UAE and Israel and everyone else has a play in this part, much less a corporation.
So can you tell us how has the media played such a severe role in misleading almost, I believe, all of us in this aspect?
Suad Abdel Aziz:
Yeah, so I think one of the key issues in journalism around Sudan is that, and this is not even an identity politics issue, it's that the journalists themselves are not Sudanese. But not only are they not Sudanese covering the issue of Sudan, but they have never studied in Sudan, they've never lived step foot in Sudan, they might never have spoken to a Sudanese person and they're maybe just placed on, okay, you got the Sudan story, and they're just repeating what their other journalist colleagues have already published on the issue, which is that it is a civil war. So the civil war narrative began within Zionist sources.
Within the Jerusalem Post was one of the first to publish this kind of framing of Sudan as a civil war. And I would pay attention to that in how particularly Zionist sources use this framing. because now the issue of Sudan is being weaponized against Palestine, and the bodies of Sudanese people are being weaponized against the genocide in Gaza by saying that somehow there's a civil war, or there's genocide happening in Sudan, but people don't care about it because it's an internal issue. It doesn't involve Jewish people, and therefore it's the outrage, the protests around Gaza are anti-Semitic.
This is the argument that they're using. So I'd pay attention to that argument because I'm seeing that rhetoric being weaponized by Zionists in particular. This narrative was very intentionally put out by professional PR and marketing sources. From there, when people talk about how there is anti-blackness around talking about Sudan, what comes to mind for me is because it's an issue of black people and black people in Africa, there's a dismissal of, oh, it's African issues are usually internal. It's just Africans fighting amongst themselves. And therefore, a mental block kind of occurs there that I would call bias, where you don't investigate further what is actually happening there. Who's involved? Who are the actors involved? And where are they getting their mone? is the first thing that you should be asking yourselves when you're seeing these things. Where are they getting their weapons? And where are they getting their money?
And so your question was around media. And I just want to quickly talk about why language is important in these issues. And this is something that the state of Israel has been very keen to. They very intentionally use language around Gaza and around Palestine in general as framing around war. And they do this because when the framing of an occupation of either a state or non-state armed party occupying another, when that occurs, there are certain obligations that the occupier has under international law, and there are also rights that the people who are being occupied have.
And this set of rights and obligations is entirely different when you're talking about war. And that's one of the reasons why I really hate this word, war, because rarely do you see a true war happening where there are two equal sides, battling and the battling only amongst themselves, especially nowadays when empires intervene in conflicts in order to use one or the other party as a proxy. This is rarely something that we would see, is this equal? There's typically an oppressive side that has more power and the word war really, exonerates it, it frees that party of guilt under law, of the shame of what they've done and it makes us not think about things in terms of power because when you think about how power works and how there is one side that has greater power and is targeting maybe targeting civilians, rather than engaging in fair war play, that's something that we need to be careful about is that language.
For me, the importance of language comes from the foundation of law and how that creates and calls for different interventions and how we resolve conflicts. One way that you resolve a war is you do peace talks. You put together and you negotiate about how you're going to resolve this war and you compromise as to what issues each party has and one thing that the Ukrainian president recently stated, so Trump and the US is coercing Ukraine to get into peace talks with Russia. And Zelensky stood up and said, no, I am not going to sit down with my occupier and have talks. There's nothing to talk about. My people unequivocally want this occupying power out.
And Zelensky has been and is being raised as a hero for doing this. And he deservedly so. He's protecting his people and he's standing firm on the demands of his people. But why are African leaders, when they do this, when the Sudanese leaders say we're not going to go to peace talks with this occupying militia, when Congolese leaders say we're not going to sit down with the M23 militia, and also the Rwanda, their funders. We're not going to sit down and talk with them. We have nothing to talk about. When African leaders do this, they are seen as not playing ball, not coming to the table, being difficult, and bringing it upon themselves and their people, the violence that is being wrought. And so I just want us to think about how one small word, Occupation versus Civil War, can create this entirely different reality where people are calling for peace talks and ceasefires rather than an end to occupation and very unequivocally calling for that.
00:23:37 Prompt #1: Media & The Hidden Message
Nawal Khan:
Thank you so much for that information.
Now, I'm talking to you guys. So everything that Sister Suad has talked about, you guys wouldn’t have known if she wasn’t our speaker today. Why is that the reason? So now we're here, and we're passing out articles, and we're going to ask you guys to read the title and see what the real narrative and story behind it is.
Nowadays, I'm sure everyone goes on Instagram. You guys consume media, whether it be CNN, Al Jazeera, et cetera, right? You guys don’t really look past the narrative and the title to see what’s actually happening in the world. So, people are passing out the articles—sit among yourselves, talk about it, and see if you can figure out, based on all the context that Sister SUad gave you, what she's really trying to say and what the hidden meaning and conflict are behind it. Have fun.
00:24:51 Prompt #1 Discussion
Nawal Khan:
Now that you guys have had some time to go through the articles and hopefully you guys have pinpointed specific words, Sister Suad will go through the articles and actually tell you what the article is meant to say, and then we’ll go from there inshā’Allāh.
Suad Abdel Aziz:
So this exercise was just picked out a couple of articles online at random that are pretty infuriating around narrative. And I want you to note something about the authors. So all of the authors of these pieces are white Americans. They don't have experience living or studying in Sudan. I just want you to take note of the authors because I think that's a responsibility of the reader is to look into the author who is writing this piece and what is being said and what may be their particular biases.
The first article that we looked at is Airstrikes Kill at Least 70 Seeking Care at the Last Functioning Hospital North of North Darfur Capital. And so there is no indication that the RSF shot these airstrikes and are exclusively targeting civilians, that they have bombed the largest hospital in Darfur. So that's an alternate title.
The next title is Fighting in Sudan Civil War Sets Ablaze the Country's Largest Oil Refinery.
This article uses passive voice, which implies that the oil refinery “magically” set ablaze. Of course, the RSF set this oil source on fire in the midst of massacres throughout the western regions of Sudan.
Another title: Inside the Mountain Stronghold of an Elusive Rebel Movement.
Someone in the audience pointed out the word "movement" here is interesting. The RSF has no popular support; their support comes from within the RSF itself and from people being paid. So, framing the RSF—this private militia group with no popular support—as a “movement” is misleading.
This one’s an interesting article. You all should read the full text of this one because it’s actually one of the most interesting articles on Sudan. The chief international correspondent with CNN and she travels to Sudan and gets taken hostage by an RSF militia leader, and then befriends her kidnapper. She writes a puff piece about the RSF, framing them as underdogs. The title of her article was How a Militia Feels Ignored. She frames this as a woman being taken hostage and treated well, implying that the militia must not be so bad. Meanwhile, the RSF’s key strategy is to control people through rape, brutal sexual assault, and the abduction of women and girls. This is a very out-of-touch piece.
Then there’s a UNICEF article titled 200 Days of War Leaves a Generation of Children in Sudan on the Brink. This title is grounded in a charity lens and frames the issue as a civil war. This is man-made famine because this militia has come in and bombed the key wheat sources, the key sources of food, clean water sources, is very intentionally destroying vital infrastructure in order to starve the people out.
00:31:33 How did Sister Suad get here?
Nawal Khan:
So, through this activity, hopefully, you guys have learned not to believe exactly what you see in headlines. Now, before all of this, how did you get into the space of advocacy and the Sudan movement? What’s your life story? How did you come into this?
Suad Abdel Aziz:
I was born and raised in a very, in a very poor village in Sudan, called Al-Hasaheisa, in the East. I never had lawyers, I never met lawyers or had any access to anyone who was a lawyer. So I really didn't know what this career field was. I did kind of have like an interest in social justice and there was this word around NGOs.
So the primary NGOs that operated in Sudan at that time and up until they fled in 2023, were white Western NGOs coming in to save the children of Sudan and save the women. This is the big story around saving women and children. And the primary focus of these NGOs was around FGM, Female Gender Mutilation. Just some brief background about FGM in Sudan.
There was a large movement within Sudan of Islamic scholars and combined with medical professionals that would go around and speak to Sudanese people, especially in remote villages, about how it is an un-Islamic practice and how it is medically unsound and dangerous for the child. Due to this internal grassroots movement, the rates of FGM extremely decreased in Sudan. Despite the internal movement happening, these NGOs, again, primarily focused on this issue without any kind of speaking to any Sudanese women, about, hey, what are the issues that you're facing? What are the things that we can focus on that would better your life? And a lot of those issues were around poverty. In Sudan, for 20 years, we were sanctioned under terrorism, sanctioned by the US, which starved out our people. So women might have been telling these NGO heads that maybe that's the problem. We need to lift sanctions off of our country. and issues around education, healthcare, access, that all around kind of just basic living. But these NGOs were not covering those issues. And so this idea of human rights was kind of an idea that was foreign to me. It was something that I always thought about that's not for my people. That's just a kind of a term that's weaponized by other people to come in. It's not really something that's basic and inherent that we have.
So the first lawyer that I encountered, this is all to lead up to that. So we fled Sudan when I was a teenager. And we fled from Sudan to Egypt because it was nearby. And in Egypt, we were extremely impoverished. We suffered greatly awaiting resettlement. And for many, resettlement never comes.
Many Sudanese people are just stuck in Egypt or in that other place that they have fled to. But we were, we just happened to be very lucky. And I'll tell the brief story. My dad was, he would walk all the way from essentially one end of Egypt, of Cairo, to the other in order, every single morning, in order to get to the U.S. Embassy to ask for an interview. And every morning, the receptionist at the embassy would tell him, you don't have an interview, sir, you can't come in. And so he would do this, so he continued to do this. And one day he brought me on his back, and he brought me, and I was sitting there with him in the embassy, and this lady was passing by, and she looked at me and she just thought I was really cute. And she just started talking to me and playing with me. And from there, she was like, what do you need, sir?
She looked at my dad and she said, come in. And he explained to her our story. And I just remember him, this big, powerful man, really... This attorney had such power. And the power she had was that which drastically changed our lives. that she decided whether or not we would come here. And without that decision, my voice would be just as silenced as those of my family members in Sudan. And... So the idea of law and power stuck with me after that experience. And I told her, even in that interview, she asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be like you.
And I said that because I wanted to be powerful. I wanted to change my family's circumstances, my circumstances. I wanted to change the circumstances of my community. And that was the way in. I knew it was. And so this idea of law and power stuck. And from there, you know, I worked my way to law school.
Along the way, I met passionate and amazing like-minded Sudanese women, organizers and advocacy professionals like myself. And we kept putting off creating an organization, a collective, where we could make change for our people. But the events of 2023 really... made that very rapid, that's the process rapid for us.
We started right away because for myself, I lost many relatives. The majority of my family was internally displaced. And some we even were able to get externally displaced. So it hit very close to home. Our homes are all destroyed. And so, you know, this was an urgency to act and recreated what is now decolonized Sudan.
And initially this was created to report and file human rights complaints on behalf of Sudanese people because the reporting mechanisms do not exist. Again, the NGOs in Sudan are focused on very specific issues and so do not do mass human rights documentation. And then we started to see this this narrative issue.
Why are people talking about our genocide as a civil war? And where is this coming from? What can we do to change this? And so a lot of our focus at the Kalonais Sudan shifted to this narrative work which is a lot of what we're working on now. We are currently working on a documentary in Sudan, and that is going to be an extremely powerful project to give a platform for those on the ground that have been silenced. Again, silenced due to the very intentional telecommunications blackouts, and due to the media manipulation primarily done by the RSF. And so that's some of our work.
00:40:56 Prompt #2: How do we move from being passive consumers of information to active participants in shaping the narrative?
Nawal Khan:
It’s so inspiring. It's funny that you came to the US because a lawyer thought you were cute! You got here because you were cute!
Going through your story, from being cute to now creating a whole decolonizing movement, it shows how you’ve taken control of your own narrative and created such a powerful movement. For us, though, many of us aren’t in the political space—we might be pre-med, students, etc. But there's still something we can do to be active members of society. So, I have a question for you: How do we move from being passive consumers of information to active participants in shaping the narrative?
00:41:50 Prompt #2 Discussion
Mustafa Syed:
Who wants to go first?
Attendee #1:
So I came up with a couple of different ideas. My answer was really, so first let me read a quote of one of my favorite authors, because he, throughout my life, the last 15 years, Throughout my life, the last 15 years, I was inspired by him because he always provoked thought, you know, mind anyway. And one of his quotes says,
"I try to encourage people to think for themselves to question standard assumptions. Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to question Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself."
And the last one I want to talk about is this second quote, and then I'll elaborate on it.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
And for me, when I think of that quote, I think of the media and how very lively debate is going on on every station, the CNNs, the MSNBCs, the Fox News. And it appears to be free thinking going on when in actuality everybody is thinking within that spectrum, within that box. And there's not really free thought because it's, everybody that seems opposing, they're not opposing. They're just speaking the same language in different ways.
Exactly. So, you know, like the last 10 years, I've always, you know, been able to do in-depth research and really, you know, just try to speak to different people. And I'll leave you with this. I don't want to be too much longer. Being able to grasp a concept of a different perspective has truly challenged me because you don't have to believe everything you hear, but being able to grasp a different concept of a different perspective, it'll allow you to grow. And that's what really sent me down this kind of, you know, I’m like, “Okay, what’s under the curtain?”.
00:45:15 Prompt #2 Response
Suad Abdel Aziz:
I like that idea of what's under the curtain like thinking coming from coming first with a place of skepticism and coming from a place of trying to understand because we all have biases we all have experiences that have shaped who we are when we make or consume or put out knowledge so first coming from a place of trying to understand the biases of the author. Where are they coming from? What perhaps are they trying to get at with this? Because what you were reading, that was all accurate.
They weren't saying anything false. Just the way that they were using language was a little manipulative to kind of mislead you to think that a different underlying narrative was happening. Because you can say 600 children, you can say children killed, but to say who killed them is something that is not being done here, and it's not being done for a reason. What is that reason?
00:46:44 Prompt #2 Discussion
Mustafa Syed:
Speaker 3: Alright, that was all very profound. I need one person from the sisters to share.
Attendee #2:
As-salamu alaykum. Thank you for leading this discussion and this conversation. To answer this question on how we can be more proactive from an ideological perspective, I believe that first and foremost we need to understand what our responsibility as Muslims living in the U.S. is. you know, we have the privileges to get an education, get a job, be able to donate. But in reality, what right do Muslims around the world and what right does the global community have over us? Because may Allah protect us from ever being questioned, but there is a chance that if we are questioned, how will we be able to answer on the day of judgment? So that's an ideological perspective. From a practical point of view, starting off with having grassroots level conversations such as these. It is not as common as we would like to believe they are.
So starting off with spaces like this I think is a great, great opportunity for us to hone these conversations and have them and then share that with the people around us. I know even in our workspaces, it's hard to have open conversations because quickly that could turn into an HR report.
But if you have tailored conversations with your coworker, maybe ask them, hey, I like your Nike shoes. By the way, did you know that they're supporting Oiger labor? You know, little tidbits like that. Share those details. Of course, with coworkers who you feel will not try to put anything against you, but take simple actions within your day-to-day.
Even having tailored conversations with your friend groups. For example, some of my friends and I have started up book clubs where we talk about global history, more specifically global Muslim history. And then even on a political sphere, encouraging those around us to get involved in politics.
Understand if you don't want to learn more on the political side, that's really fine. You don't have to be politically involved necessarily, but like we're talking about, understand the articles, understand the legislation in place and how the legislation is not working in our favor. How can we change these conversations?
So I think those are some practical steps in how we can be proactive in becoming consumers of information and knowledge. Even within our Islamic schools, we're in Dallas. you know, asking leadership within our Islamic schools, what are you teaching our students, our young students, about Muslim history? You know, Muslims were the leaders of algorithm, of different spheres. So understanding, even with Sudan, Sudan falls key into Rasul's ancestry. for example. So learning those type of details and understanding not only the significance of how it affects our day to day as just people, but even from a religious perspective, what responsibility do we have for the people of Sudan?
00:50:18 Discussion Cont.
Attendee #3:
To be an active participant in shaping the narrative, I think we need to understand just how much power lies in ideas and thoughts. We have to recognize that Americans use and rely on ideas to legitimize genocide and legitimize violence against oppressed people. And the way that they do so is not by giving you this whole political narrative.
No, they just make it a common sense understanding. What's happening in Sudan is a civil war. Say that so many times, it becomes common sense. We don't question it because we hear it and they believe it and we don't know the background. So yeah, we believe it too. It's common sense. So when we engage narratives and we contradict these narratives, and we can do them in a multitude of ways, from protests to teach-ins to writing, even an Instagram post, or even music lyrics. If you pay attention to music lyrics, ideas exist in everything, and they can be pushed through everything.
And if we contradict these ideas that legitimize genocide and we contradict them with our own decolonial ideas and we push them everywhere, that's one of the ways that we can shape the narrative.
00:51:39 Prompt #2 Response
Suad Abdel Aziz:
Y'all are really brilliant. Y'all should come up here and speak, honestly. I have no comments. It really resonated to me around how our identity as Muslims living within the belly of the beast, within the nation that actively harms our Muslim people all over the world. how is our education being, you know, what kind of biases might we have from an education system that is grounded in that? And operating from that place is important.
Nawal Khan:
All of these responses were so good, oh my gosh. Listening to it was like so thought-provoking. So I did want to add on to that. Based off of everything you guys said and everything Sister Suad said, why are we in this position? We are the next generation, and we don't understand why we are always targeted. It's not just Sudan.
It's quite literally almost every other Muslim country. And we never really ask ourselves, what can we do to prevent that coming in the new future? So I even want to tie back to your childhood and how you didn't wait for someone to rescue you from Sudan.
You actually took matter into your own hands and tried to accomplish something out of your own will. And that actually reminds me of a very famous quote that one of our team members will be speaking about.
00:53:15 The Mehdi: The Personification of Power & Justice
Anzar Lateef:
The quote is: "Give up waiting for the Mehdi, the personification of power. Go and create him." Iqbal was writing at a time when his homeland was suffering under British colonialism, and one of the greatest obstacles to resistance wasn't just external oppression, it was the people's own inaction. Too many believed the Mahdi would one day arrive and solve all their problems, so they did nothing. The hope for a savior became an excuse for passivity, a defeatist mindset that still paralyzes us today. The Mahdi, the personification of power and justice has become a justification of complacency.
Irrespective of the differing views on the authenticity of the Mahdi Hadiths, ask yourself this, would a true leader emerge for a people unwilling to act? The effectiveness of any leader depends on the strength, vision, and readiness of those he leads. A Mahdi cannot lead the ineffective, the fearful, the idle. A Mahdi, the archetype of an effective, transformative leader, will not rise from a nation unwilling to rise itself. Iqbal's message isn't only about the personal transformation, it's about institution building, about laying the foundations for power and justice now. Stop waiting.
Stop using the Mahdi as an excuse to avoid responsibility. Every problem you hope the Mahdi will solve, you could begin solving today. Build the organizations, the movements, the networks, the systems of justice and strength. You want a change maker? Be that change maker. You want a leader? Cultivate the kind of people and institutions a leader could actually lead. This isn't just theory. We see it happening. Sister Suad, through decolonized Sudan, didn't wait for some distant savior. She'd recognized the urgency of the moment and started the work herself. She built something real, a movement rooted in action and service. That's what it looked like to embody the power we're so often waiting for.
This is Iqbal’s call: Give up waiting for the Mahdi. Go and create him.
00:55:27 Reevaluating Charity and Mutual Aid
Nawal Khan:
As Anzar mentioned, we have to be change-makers. Currently, the only way we believe change is being made is by giving charity or by giving money.
Now, I want to go back to you. Being in the West, our immediate knee-jerk reaction is to go save Palestine or go save Sudan and be like, I need to give money. I'm so privileged that I have the ability to give you guys money.
And in our response, you see on Instagram, you see a little like, give money, give money. OK, we understand that. They don't need that though. So I want you to expand on what charity actually does to everyone else. What is the aspect?
Suad Abdel Aziz:
So whilst there are material needs of people that needs to be met, and there are governments and international institutions that are not meeting those needs, and so that is the importance of mutual aid, at Decolonize Sudan, One of our core principles is to shift from this model, this charity model to a social change model.
And part of that is the way, so like my favorite part in this work is teaching other Sudanese people and organizers and activists within diaspora on advocacy skills and how we can inform our organizing. And one of the things that I really emphasize in that work is the way in which we talk about our, we frame our struggle rather than one of we need help, help us, help Sudan. You know, please help us. It is one of we have... the right to live free of occupation, of genocide. We have a right to live in sovereignty, in self-determination.
We have these rights that are imbued to us and our obligations of third states to ensure these rights, and there are legal obligations to not aid and abet these violations that are causing this situation to happen, and there's an obligation not to kill, do war crimes, crimes against humanity.
So the language around rights and obligations rather than one of need. when it comes to, so the idea of charity is one that we need to, especially within Muslim communities, have a drastic change of understanding into one of mutual aid. And mutual aid is when we give to one another It's from a place of mutual care, a communal act that is mutually beneficial either in the short term or the long term.
And I want us to think about zakat is the ultimate form of mutual aid. It is a divine mutual aid. It serves as a social safety net for Muslim communities. In fact, it is compulsory, sacred mutual aid. It's not just something nice and selfless that we do we aren't doing a favor to the poor but rather they are doing when we give that person is doing us a favor in helping us to fulfill our obligation and receive the greatest of rewards Zakat literally means to grow. The act of redistributing our wealth through zakat comes along with a purification through detachment from dunya. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has promised us that he will reward us. He will double our loan of zakat and grant us forgiveness. And so there is a reward that we get from these actions. But most importantly, zakat is a right of the poor, a divinely established right.
And so zakat plays a role in confronting political repression when we build from this foundation the practice of mutual aid and zakat being its divine form literally establishes the fundamental paradigm that poverty isn't something to look down upon, but rather it is something to proactively address.
And so this paradigm shift is one that is already embedded in our belief system. And it's something that we not only need to theoretically understand, but in practice kind of take on. So one thing, so very briefly, I don't think I have time to touch on the idea of aid washing, but I would love for a continued discussion about this. And we also have resources around what it means to do aid washing and kind of this idea of developmental aid and charity from states being a propeller of the oppression that we're experiencing. And yeah, so you can find more resources on decolonizedsudan.org.
01:01:32 Prompt #3: How can we reevaluate the charity model and understand it in a mutual aid context for different causes?
Nawal Khan:
So essentially, in a nutshell, you were telling us to donate to empower, not out of pity, not out of insult, because when we give charity, we're almost, we're taking, we're stripping them away from their identity, right? And so our support of the ummah, as you mentioned, our zakat, should have political purpose.
It should not be for charitable reasons, but rather to give, build infrastructure, create a long-term change for the ummah, because short-term change doesn't do too much. So I will leave you guys with a prompt and how we can reevaluate the charity model and understand it in a mutual aid context for different causes.
I’ll leave you with this prompt: How can we reevaluate the charity model and understand it in a mutual aid context for different causes?
01:02:14 Prompt #3 Discussion
Mustafa Syed:
All right, in the interest of time, we’re gonna pick one person to share.
Attendee #4:
Hey, everybody. Salaam. How's everybody doing? So I thought about this in the context of a previous conversation I was having about a week ago. And I was having an argument with this guy, and he said that the role of the government is not to provide food for people. That's the role of charitable organizations.
And when I heard this, I was viscerally opposed, and I started arguing with this guy. I was like, you're evil, why would you say that? And reading this prompt, it made me think about it. I still kind of think maybe he's evil, but it made me think about how do we balance the idea of Zakat and being upstanding members of our community and providing charity to the people who need it the most while also continuously pushing on our governments to provide necessary services for the life and liberty of people. We live in one of the richest countries in the world.
If we can be the world police, why can't we be the world humanitarian? There's a standard we have to hold ourselves to to help our community, but at the same time, I think we need to continue to push on our governments to increase the standard for everybody around us um you know it's it's mutual aid but like i said we we have to push on the governments because if they if they can oppress us they also have the ability to help us and and by turning inward and solely trying to become self-sufficient which i agree is very important it takes the responsibility off of them and allows them to continue the the oppression that they're doing and i think that that's something that we should think about.
01:04:28 Prompt #3 Response
Suad Abdel Aziz:
So brother, I would very much agree with you in that we, especially when we're pressuring this particular government, the interventions should be, the demands should be calls for getting no longer destabilizing and causing harm to other nations. And I would disagree around the humanitarian aid portion.
This is, I would disagree around the humanitarian aid portion. that the focus should not be on the humanitarian aid. And this is for the reason around aid washing. So the US has been the primary giver of aid to Sudan throughout the entirety of Sudan's post-colonial history.
They didn't do this out of the goodness of their heart. They do this, they have a country rely on them for aid. in order to control that country's, in Sudan's case, foreign policy. And this was very deliberate decisions to pull aid when Sudan was falling out of
line with US foreign policy and to give aid and take away sanctions when normalization with Israel happened. in 2019 during the power vacuum that was essentially a blackmailing of Sudanese, at the time, the leadership, saying we have control of all of your monetary resources and we will pull them if you do not do this action.
And so I think it's a very dangerous game to play to rely on US humanitarian aid for the livelihood of our people. And that's the reason why a lot of the, there's an alliance of Sahel states that has come together and said we are no longer going to, we're gonna pull all of our financial reliance out of our colonizer, who for them it is France. and so that we can have our own stable economy. For Sudan, this seems to be a far away dream given the current instability, but inshallah we will get there. That's our vision of a secure and stable and sovereign Sudan one that is not reliant on the humanitarian aid of the colonizer.
01:07:34 Calls to Action
Nawal Khan:
So as we talked about in our earlier prompts about taking action and being an active participant in our own narrative, what are some calls to action that we can participate in?
Suad Abdel Aziz:
So a couple of calls to action that we've put together.
The very first one is a very real one that you can join on is the international boycott of the UAE. The UAE, of course, is the primary funder and provider of arms and continues to be despite claiming that it is no longer giving arms.
And so there's also a UAE arms embargo that actually US officials in the Senate and the House have introduced. They have called for a US arms embargo on the UAE until it halts its arming and financing of the genocidal RSF militia. And so we support the proposed legislation in the House and Senate, and on our website we link how exactly to support this legislation, decolonizedsudan.org. Second is to get clear on the narrative that this is not a civil war or an internal conflict between two conflicting generals. This is a genocide and an externally-backed private militia has occupied much of the country, is displacing, massacring, and terrorizing the people.
So learn more about this. More resources, including resources outside of Decolonaisestudent, are available on our website, again, decolonaisestudent.org, where we have a political education resource document that links to a lot of other brilliant works and writers. And then three along that line, shift narratives. educate your own circle about what's happening in Sudan, and reach out to your local community center, your local masjid, your local MSA, your community groups, to schedule a training and mobilize your community. To colonize Sudan, we offer, most of the time they're free trainings, but if you have a budget to provide, especially travel budget, we can come to you, we can provide a training.
So schedule your training. And our team members will be able to facilitate. So this was a very brief version of kind of the training that we put on, which is usually two and a half hour extended advocacy training. And then three, reevaluate the charity model and transform it into understanding of mutual aid.
Support mutual aid efforts for those Sudanese people in diaspora in your network trying to keep their family members alive. So again, there is very real material need that people have. What I have proposed is a better understanding of our own ideology, of what zakat is, and operating from that place, and therefore also calling for interventions from that place. A list of grassroots fundraisers is available on decolonizedsudan.org. And then our last call to action is actually donating to the ongoing documentary on Sudan that we putting on so we are going to Sudan we're going to Nairobi, Kenya, to interview both internally displaced and externally displaced refugees and those on the ground within Sudan to give them direct voice, to voice what is going on to them, their political aspirations and their demands. This has been a gap in our media around Sudan. When do you see people in Sudan talking about what's going on?
Very rarely do you see this. So we have a launch good, launchgood.com slash Sudan documentary. And we have a grant. So this documentary is happening whether or not you donate. Your donation means whether or not we'll be able to go to a different region and interview give voice to hundreds of other Sudanese people.
So consider donating in order for us to have a budget for this documentary. And that is our final call to action, follow us. and keep up to date about what's going on in Sudan. It changes a lot of like the actors and calls to action and demands change on a week by week basis.
So we usually have those updated demands and we link to other people to follow and other organizations to look to for information on Sudan.
01:13:23 Closing Remarks
Nawal Khan
And that concludes our interview. If you guys want to contact Sister Suad, we have an email: nuunxsuad@gmail.com.
Kamran Kazmi:
Can we give her a round of applause? Amazing, amazing, amazing stuff. The other day, I was actually, I was talking to a friend of mine, I asked him, like, he was asking about Noon, we were talking about it, and he was like, yeah, Noon is like, that thing where leaders come in, you guys talk about changing the world. And I was like, you know, the reality is that, the world was changed in rooms like this. So I want you guys to take the opportunity, introduce yourself to the person next to you, talk about what you're passionate about, what you're working on, talk about the topic we spoke about today.
And as you're doing that, I also want to give you guys the opportunity to email Trisha Suad. One of the main tenets and principles that we try to promote here is trying to connect you with incredible people like her.
Take that opportunity. Like, don't wait for the Mahdi type beat. You know what I mean?
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