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W6nnews.com ==== وطن === تاريخ النشر – 2026-06-14 23:51:00
When slogans become a substitute for thinking, Episode Two: Do we disagree about issues or about the meanings of words? Abdo Al-Hajj – June 14, 2026 While the war continues to tear Sudan apart, and with it displacement, asylum, killing, destruction, and the collapse of livelihoods, the attempts of the Sudanese to search for a way out of this tragedy do not stop either. There have been many initiatives, meetings and dialogues, and people have met many times in the hope of reaching common ground that will help stop the war and open a path towards peace and rebuild the state. But many of these attempts faltered before reaching tangible results. Sometimes the cause of stumbling is not only disagreement over solutions, but rather disagreement over the nature of the problem itself. While some believe that the priority should be to stop the war and save what can be saved, others believe that the crisis is deeper than that, and that a radical solution to the Sudanese problem must first be agreed upon. There is no doubt that searching for the roots is important, and no people can build their future without understanding the causes of their crises. But the question that arises is: Does the search for a final treatment conflict with stopping the bleeding that is taking place now? The doctor does not let a patient bleed until the diagnosis is complete. Rather, he stops the bleeding first and foremost and then continues searching for causes and treatment. Otherwise, the patient may not survive until the diagnosis is completed in the first place, and then there may be little value to the correct diagnosis or effective treatment. All Sudanese today agree that Sudan is going through a deep crisis, but as soon as talk begins about the causes of this crisis, the diagnoses multiply in a way that almost makes us talk about different countries, not one country. There are those who see that the root of the problem is the state of 1956, and there are those who attribute it to the center and the margins, and there are those who see it in identity, religion, secularism, political elites, the military institution, or other explanations. Difference in itself is not a problem, but rather it may be a healthy and necessary thing if we use it well. The problem begins when every opinion turns into an absolute fact, and every diagnosis into a certainty that cannot be revised. Here the well-known story of the blind people who were asked to describe an elephant comes to mind. Each one of them described him according to the part he touched. One of them touched his leg and thought it was a tree, another touched his side and thought it was a wall, a third touched his trunk and thought it was a snake, and a fourth touched his fang and thought it was a spear. None of them was a liar, and none of them was inventing anything of their own. Each of them described what he actually knew. But the problem was not that each of them knew part of the truth, but rather that he treated the part he knew as if it was sufficient to explain the whole picture. Perhaps it would not occur to any of them that he possessed the entire truth. Indeed, many would reject this description if they were told. But a person may sometimes act as if he owns it. When he refuses to see only what he sees, or hears only what confirms his prior conviction, or reduces all of reality to one interpretation, he falls – without realizing it – into the same mistake that those blind people fell into. Perhaps what we see today in the Sudanese arena is very similar to that. Each party touches on an aspect of the crisis and then deals with it as if it were the complete explanation for everything that happened and is happening. The part turns into the whole, the partial diagnosis turns into a comprehensive explanation, and then the conflict begins over which part represents the complete truth. The error here is not in knowing part of the truth, as humans by nature do not see the whole picture, but rather in denying what we do not know. We often deny what we have not experienced, or what does not fall within the framework of our own experience, or what is not consistent with the perception that has settled in our minds. And whenever denial begins, learning stops, because the one who thinks he has reached the complete truth no longer has anything to learn from others, while the one who realizes the limits of his knowledge remains able to listen, review, and develop. Perhaps many of our intellectual and political crises begin from here. Instead of dialogue being a means of discovering what we do not know and working to cross-fertilize visions and ideas, it turns into a means of defending what we think we know. Instead of sitting down to learn from each other, we sometimes sit down to prove to each other that we are right. This is why we often leave dialogue with the same ideas we entered into, and perhaps more dispersed. However, simply sitting at the dialogue table remains a positive act in itself, even when it does not achieve the desired results. Peoples do not learn dialogue by abandoning dialogue, nor do they learn joint work by staying away from it. Rather, they learn by practicing, making mistakes, reviewing, correcting, and developing. Just as the individual learns from his mistakes, societies also learn from their accumulated experiences. Therefore, the faltering of some dialogues should not lead us to despair of the dialogue itself, but rather to improve it, develop it, and expand its base. Perhaps one of our biggest mistakes is that we sometimes wait for a complete dialogue or complete consensus before we begin joint work, even though reality teaches us that consensus itself develops through practice. People do not learn how to work together except when they work together, and they do not learn how to disagree in a healthy way except when they experience difference and discover its limits, harms, and dangers. Then, assuming that what we know is necessarily unknown to others is not always correct. Others may have knowledge, experience, or perspective that we do not have. Therefore, true dialogue is not based on the assumption that one party knows and the other is ignorant, but rather on the possibility that each party has something that it can add to the overall picture. Just as we have something we would like to say to others, others may also have something we need to hear. One of the most dangerous things that ready-made slogans do is that they relieve us of the trouble of thinking, because they provide a simple and convenient explanation for complex and interrelated problems. Perhaps the repeated talk about the 1956 state provides a clear example of this. For years, the term has been bandied about as if it were a ready-made explanation for the entire Sudan crisis, although the question that is rarely asked is: What do we even mean by the state of 56? Is this description alone sufficient to explain what happened during nearly seventy years of Sudanese history? Perhaps fairness requires that we look at the independence experience in its true context, not in our context. That generation did not start from previous Sudanese experiences from which it could learn, nor did it have the global experiences available to us today, nor did it have the means of communication and transfer of knowledge as we know it now. He started almost from scratch and tried to build a modern national state in extremely complex circumstances. Despite this, he laid the first building blocks for the modern Sudanese state and contributed to building institutions, civil service, and professional competencies inside and outside Sudan whose competence and discipline were attested by many. This does not mean that the experience was complete or free of mistakes, but it does mean that fairness requires that we see what they were right in as well as what they did wrong, and that we deal with previous experiences as material for learning, not material for demonization or sanctification. This talk is not intended to defend the state of 1956 or absolve it of mistakes, but rather to warn of the danger of turning history into A peg on which we hang the failures of the present. Even if we assume that some elites made a mistake or fell short, the question remains: Where are we in this equation? Where is the community? Where are the citizens? The people are not supposed to be mere spectators of what the elites do, but rather they are the source of power and have the right to oversight, accountability, and change. Therefore, reducing the entire crisis to the elites alone may also turn into a kind of misleading simplification. Societies do not change only by changing governments, or changing elites, but rather they change first by increasing the level of public awareness, and by the ability of citizens to organize themselves, defend their rights, and monitor and hold accountable those who hired them to manage their affairs on their behalf. Perhaps it would be easier to always look for an external peg on which to pin mistakes, but what is more difficult and more useful is to also ask ourselves: What could we have done better? What are we still capable of today? The same applies to many of the terms that fill our political life. Secularism, marginalization, center and margin, democracy, federalism and other concepts have become frequently used in public discourse, but we rarely stop to ask whether we mean the same thing by them. Take, for example, the concept of center and margin. Many people treat it as a clear and agreed-upon concept, while people differ widely about what it means. Are we talking about political, economic, developmental, cultural, geographical marginalization, or all of these together? Indeed, the concept of margin itself may sometimes become relative, as what is considered margin from a certain angle may appear concentrated from another angle. Within the capital itself, we may find areas that suffer from conditions and services that make them closer to the margins than some areas that are geographically distant from them. This does not mean denying the existence of real injustices or clear developmental imbalances, but rather it means that understanding the problem begins first by defining what is meant by the terms we use before we base judgments and solutions on them. The same applies to secularism and other major concepts. The secularism that people talk about is not one agreed-upon model. The French experience is different from the American one, different from the British one, and different from other experiences. The same applies to many models that are described as religious. Even those who talk about the religious state do not always mean the same thing and do not invoke the same model. That’s why people often use the same word and mean completely different things. And perhaps that’s why we sometimes find ourselves disagreeing more about descriptions and labels than we are about the suffering we all see, or about many of the goals we seek. We may agree that there is a crisis, agree on the need for peace, justice, and human dignity, and then disagree about the interpretation of the crisis or the path leading to those goals. After all that, we can return to the question with which we started: Do we disagree about issues or about the meanings of words? Perhaps the answer that our experiences suggest is closer to the fact that many of our differences are not complete disagreements about goals, as much as they are disagreements about understanding problems, defining terms, diagnosing reality, and arranging priorities. When we move from slogans to contents, we sometimes discover that the area of agreement is larger than it appears in political and media discourse. Perhaps this is one of the problems that has continued to weaken our ability for joint national action. Revolutions do not succeed with slogans alone, and peoples do not advance merely by theoretical agreements, but rather when areas of agreement are transformed into joint action, and when efforts are united around what brings people together and not around what divides them. If each of us sees part of the picture, and if the truth is too big for an individual or group to monopolize, then Sudan’s current problem is also too big to be solved by one group, one movement, or one party, no matter how good its intentions are or how great its confidence in itself. Major crises are not faced by exclusion, but by pooling wisdom, experience, and human effort wherever it is found. Unless we learn how to listen to each other, and how to benefit from the knowledge and experience of others, we will continue to revolve around the same crises and repeat the same mistakes under different names and slogans. This does not mean that this is the only problem facing us, nor that we claim that it is the complete explanation for our political faltering. Perhaps the mistake we are warning against here is the same as reducing reality to one cause or explanation. That is why we are trying in this series to shed light on some of the aspects that we see as affecting our crisis, not as the whole truth, but as parts of a larger picture that needs to be completed. The truth is too big to be monopolized by an individual or group, and too broad to be summarized by a banner or slogan. Man is greater than sects, and the nation is greater than being reduced to one idea, one group, or one interpretation. It does not approach us when we are fanatical about what we know, but rather when we have the courage to review what we know in light of what we do not know. From here we move to another aspect that has no less impact on our political reality. If some people sit at the dialogue table and are prisoners of their prior diagnoses, what about those who reject dialogue in the first place and choose to stand outside of it? That is what we will try to approach in the next episode. author
