He called on the Jews to return to their homeland .. Sudanese minister accused of flirting with Israel

Khartoum-Ahmed Fadl

Before the new minister of religious affairs and endowments, Nasr al-Din Mufarreh swore, he threw his contribution to revealing a mysterious history of the country's Jews as long as it was embarrassed by the Arab-Israeli conflict or the "taqiyya" practiced by the remaining Sudanese Jews.

Although the new minister threw a stone in a still pond from the angle of religion, parties indicate that the talk is not without political loads.

Mufreh belongs to the Al-Ansar sect, which emerged from the National Umma Party, and was a preacher at Al-Ansar Mosque in Rabak, capital of the White Nile State.

The normalization of relations between Sudan and Israel has always been a tantalizing material for arousing public opinion, and the exchange of accusations between opinions that acknowledge the realities of the ancient Jewish presence in Sudan, and others that it sees as a small presence that some use as a pretext for normalization with Tel Aviv.

Malicious attack

The minister of Awqaf has called on the Jewish minority who left Sudan to return to it again, vowing to maintain religious and religious coexistence.

"Jewish minorities have departed from the country and we call them the right to naturalization and citizenship to return to the country," Mufreh told Al Arabiya television.

The head of the National Justice Party, Amin Bennani New - in a statement to the island Net - the minister's speech and promised to demonstrate the weakness of political experience and religious culture.

Bennani believes that the minister talked about what he does not mean and what is not within his competence "because it is a matter of foreign policy and how Sudan's relationship with Israel in the future."

Social media platforms were full of critical comments by the minister in a hurry to raise controversial issues within the country's foreign policy.

Expected swap
Bennani said he expected a trade-off between Western countries and Sudan to normalize the latter with Israel, but he saw what hurt the minister that his approach was religious, which the West does not want, of course, seeking a political approach to find relations between Khartoum and Tel Aviv.

He also deplores the minister's remarks that the presence of Jews in Sudan is not considered. He said they have left the country since independence in 1956, saying, "I see no reason to invite them to return because it is more likely that they migrate to Israel."

"These are issues that will distract the new regime from its program, and the minister's speech outside the text and cause a religious crisis is embarrassing for Israel itself."

Bennani asserts that calls for normalization are popularly rejected in Sudan and there is no political party calling for normalization. He points out that the issue of normalization was raised within the national dialogue conference launched by the ousted President Omar al-Bashir and completely resolved.

Hidden relationships

But Professor Fateh Al-Alim Abdullah, professor of history and archeology and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Omdurman Private University, told Al-Jazeera Net that the untold thing in Sudan is that there are entities and leaders who had low political, economic and diplomatic relations with Israel.

A series of reports published by the Sudan Tribune in December 2017 from Israeli archive documents showed that Mohamed Ahmed Omar, a member of the Umma Party and editor-in-chief of the party's Nile newspaper, was linked to Israeli officials in the 1950s.

According to the report, Omar coordinated in 1954 two secret meetings in London between Umma Party Chairman Siddiq al-Mahdi (father of the current party leader Sadiq) and Israelis to discuss any support Israel could provide to support Sudan's independence and counter Egyptian influence.

The Israeli archive described the managing editor of the Nile as an exclusive link between Tel Aviv and Khartoum.

Old presence
The professor of history acknowledges that the Jewish presence in Sudan is ancient and began in the 16th and 17th centuries before Turkish rule in the form of travelers and explorers such as Robert Tuter, who wrote a book on the kingdom of Sennar, which was destroyed by the Turkish invasion in 1821.

He also says that Jews entered Sudan with Turkish rule as merchants and officials in the bureaus of government and then reduced their role with the dominance of the Mahdia state, which favored the minorities of Jewish and Coptic Christians between paying tribute and convert to Islam.

After the British occupation of Sudan in 1899, migrations from Egypt to Sephardic Jews, descended from Jewish dynasties living in Spain, intensified.

But with Sudan's independence and harassment during the era of the late President Jaafar Nimeiri, they preferred immigration to escape nationalization in 1970 and the application of Islamic law in 1983.

Evidence and evidence

The professor of history and archeology demonstrates the Jewish presence by saying they have monuments in the capital Khartoum and several cities including temples, shops, homes and social homes.

In 2016, a report led by Israel's Foreign Ministry property department reported a diplomatic campaign to recover the property of 850,000 Jews who lived in Arab countries, including Sudan, with an estimated $ 300 billion in compensation.

Abdallah asserts that the Jewish minority had a "Cinema Closium" in the center of Khartoum, and two other temples in Abyad, North Kordofan Wood Madani in the state of the island.

"Until the late 1960s, the Shaul family lived in the city of Karima, where they professionally made and sold alcohol and left when the Nimeiri government accused it of spying on transmitters and eavesdropping."

He pointed out that the building of the Ministry of Information overlooking the University Street in Khartoum was a Masonic forum with its gate decorated with the sign of the forum, as well as the tombs of Jews located south of the bridge of freedom south of Khartoum.

Few Jews are still in the Masalma neighborhood of Omdurman, some of whom have intermarried with Sudanese families after converting to Islam.

But the caution that characterized the Jews made one of these hybrid families wary of talking to Al Jazeera Net about their history or origins in Sudan.