One marked effect of the supposed new Cold War (Islam vs the West) has been the publishing explosion of books in English about Islam and the Middle East. A search of Amazon’s UK website for titles containing the word “Islam” today yields 16,655 results. Richard Beswick, of Abacus (Little, Brown), says: “We’ve realised … isolation is dangerous.”
In the early 1950s, contemplating the decolonisation of its African colonies, Britain considered it essential to isolate Black Africa from the alleged corrupting influence of the Middle East. Sudan was the crucial cordon sanitaire. It was effectively divided, in an attempt to preserve the South from Islam and confine Arabism to the North.
The discipline of English literary studies provided a mechanism for maintaining this boundary. It bestowed a sense of Englishness upon Arabs in the North, creating the expectation of a right to administer and govern in Britain’s place after Independence; while the rights of Southerners (predominantly black) remained shackled to a Christian anti-ideal of the primitive, with less access to resources and less of a role in democratic government.
This paper focuses on rights imagined or denied by English literary education in the context of Cold War isolationism. I look at the political function of “English Literature” in a predominantly Islamic culture, unique in the history of the British Empire, when university student aspirations were an important aspect of Sudan’s nation’s formation. The fault lines of that formation would open the Horn of Africa to an explosive and violent future.