That Abdullahi Galab is not very fond of Hasan al-Turabi, nor of the current regime in Khartoum, will not come as a surprise to anyone who studies Sudan. The book under review does not add very much to his previous publications, which have offered a powerful denunciation of the opportunism and theological vacuity of the Islamism expounded by Turabi, the self-avowed ‘Shaikh’ of Sudan's Islamic movement. That earlier work focused on what Gallab has called the ‘First Republic’ of the Islamists – the period from the coup of 1989 which (in effect) brought the National Islamic Front to power, through to the internal putsch of 1999 in which Umar al-Bashir ejected Turabi from the regime. The key ideas which Gallab has developed in that work are rehearsed here, at considerable length and in a style which is both repetitive and colourful, and amply conveys the author's disdain for the ‘lust’ and ‘wilding’ of the Islamists. Those ideas include the argument that Sudan's Islamists are rooted in a ‘community of the state’, created by public education and self-consciously sure of its own modernity and right to power; and the description of the Sudanese Islamist movement as a ‘corporation’ whose members had begun to busy themselves with personal accumulation even before they came to power. There is some development of the analysis here, though the book is less focused on the ‘Second Republic’ (the period since 1999) than the title would suggest. Gallab accuses the Islamists of causing the break-up of the former Sudan and the secession of the South, and ‘Ali ‘Uthman Taha (a man for whom some Western diplomats have a surprising degree of admiration) is discussed at length here as the ambitious traitor in the movement, whose resistible rise to power was made possible both by the consistent intellectual inconsistency of Turabi and by ‘Ali ‘Uthman's deft exploitation of the Shaikh's repeated spells of incarceration. There is also some interesting discussion of the bitter internecine conflicts which have involved both Sudanese and international jihadists. These confound the casual conflation of ‘Salafism’, Islamism and violent jihad which has become the lazy stock-in trade of the counter-terrorism literature.

But only the most determined readers will finish this book, which is densely written and not infrequently elliptical in style. The florid prose can be memorable, as with the description of Ghazi Salah al Din as ‘the Shakespearean Hamlet of the regime … whose loyalty to Islamism made him angry at Claudius who killed Islamism and got married to its state’. Sometimes it catches well the biting tone of Sudanese political discourse, as with the comment that al-Bashir ‘has nothing more to give to the Sudanese people except for asking them to be grateful because during his time in power he brought them the hot dog’. Yet author's precise meaning can occasionally be hard to discern beneath the grand piling of words and some apparently haphazard editing, though the overall argument is clear enough: the failure of Islamism in the Sudan, while particular, also reveals the contradictions and impossibility of the Islamist project internationally. Gallab evokes the prospect of a ‘Sudanese’ liberation, driven by a popular will, which brings down the current regime. A sceptical observer might note that this vision is rooted in a romantic nationalist notion of enduring ‘Sudanese’ identity (apparently embracing the whole of the former Sudan) which is ahistorical and which – more importantly – seems to have little emotive power beyond the very community of the state of which the author is so critical. Islamism in Sudan may, as Gallab argues, have disintegrated, and its messages may be contradictory. But one suspects that it is some way yet from the oblivion which he forecasts.