Over greasy McDonald’s french fries and soda, a meal we could never have shared in his native Sudan because of international sanctions, Nabeel Mohamed tells me the story of his descent into fanaticism, and his escape from it. “See, I was tolerant, then I became fanatic, and now I’m tolerant again,” he says, sitting at the Voice of America office where he works. His story is not an action-packed thriller of terrorist networks and grandiose plots to change the world order, but a story of insidious forms of extremism that emerge from intellectual repression and social restriction. 

Gentle-mannered and quick to laugh, Mohamed, 23, always has a book tucked under his arm — currently, he's reading a history of Eastern Europe. Through his love of books, Mohamed carries on Sudan’s history of a vibrant intellectual life. At a reading in Sudan in the 1960s, the late Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani paid homage to this tradition with the saying: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Khartoum reads.”

However, the generations who have come of age under the 24-year rule of autocratic President Omar al-Bashir, like Mohamed, are the “lost generations.” Their exposure to the outside world has been limited due to growing up amid censorship; an onslaught of government propaganda; a deteriorating education system; religious and social close-mindedness and sanctions by the international community. Those who have struggled to find and keep Sudan’s intellectual tradition alive have done so out of sheer determination. 

“My father and his generation used to read all sorts of books — foreign ideologies, stories, all sorts of things. In our minds the West has been characterized as bad and evil — that they want us to abandon our culture, our religion, so we’re not even open to reading their books. Even the ones translated into Arabic, we put labels on that author — he’s a communist, he doesn’t believe in God or he’s an agent, so why would we read that,” Mohamed says.