Debates over Sudan's future remain vibrant today. New Islamic political movements have emerged as the Islamist project of the regime entered into somewhat of a holding pattern, while the government seeks to form a national consensus that might include other parties, Islamist or not. Indeed, the sentiment expressed by the president that when the South and its diverse peoples seceded the regime would “fix the constitution of Sudan” is a view shared by many who see the separation of the South, and the departure of religious minorities it occasioned, as a means to reinvigorate the Islamic state and not a mark of its failure. This chapter looks back at the era of late Islamism that characterizes the discursive landscape of the Sudan in which the author arrived in 2005 to begin his fieldwork. He claims that we must understand where the Islamist coup began, into what problems it saw itself intervening, what solutions it offered to those problems, and how it recalibrated its vision as a result of realities on the ground.