I am ashamed of the companions and workers.

The government objected to the government's suppression of the Ansar in their religious rituals, so the government offered a salary to Professor Al-Maraghi. His response was that the salary contained only religious supplications inherited from the Prophet and verses from the Book of God, and that some of the phrases the government objected to, such as "So grant us victory over the disbelieving people," were not from the words of the Mahdi, but rather verses quoted from the Holy Quran. As a result, the government permitted the reading and printing of the salary, but it soon revoked its decisions, ordering the confiscation of the salary and its submission for examination. This was after the appointment of Sir John Mynors as Governor-General. Mynors was known for his intense hatred of Islam and for laying the foundations of missionary policy in Sudan and carrying its banner after Gordon.

Native Administration After 1923, the British began to reduce their persecution of me, to curtail my freedom, and to draw a veil over the past with its grudges and incitements. I seized this opportunity to rally the ranks of the Ansar and raise their morale. I began to bring closer the educated who had not been swept away by the tide of the Egyptian movement. On the other hand, I began to implement my economic projects, for money is the sinew of political action. The British did not object to my economic and political activity. It seems they saw that the independence movement I was advocating would be a counterforce to the pro-Egyptian movement. The British stance on the independence movement has been a source of accusing it of serving the interests of independence. I believed from the outset that there was no path for Sudan other than the path of independence, and no way to independence without establishing a nucleus for Sudanese nationalism. As for the British, the independence movement, in their view, was a temporary means to appease their adversary, Egypt. This is the traditional British policy, which is summarized in confronting existing problems and leaving future problems to the passage of time. Therefore, as soon as the independence movement gained strength, and the day of reckoning arrived when the Independence Front in the Legislative Assembly demanded self-government in 1951, the British became aggressive towards the call for independence and fought it and its supporters.

Whatever my objection to the federal movement from a national perspective, I must admit that the independence movement and the federal movement were complementary to each other. We would not have achieved independence without their existence side by side. If the federal idea had been allowed to live and flourish without competition, Sudan would have ended up in humiliating dependence on Egypt.

I used the movement calling for the unity of the Nile Valley to pressure the British to obtain 47