Hassan al-Turabi
Hassan al-Turabi was a Sudanese politician and scholar. He was the alleged architect of the 1989 Sudanese military coup that overthrew Sadiq al-Mahdi and installed Omar al-Bashir as president. He has been called "one of the most influential figures in modern Sudanese politics" and a "longtime hard-line ideological leader". He was instrumental in institutionalizing Sharia in the northern part of the country and was frequently imprisoned in Sudan, but these "periods of detention" were "interspersed with periods of high political office".
al-Turabi was leader of the National Islamic Front , a political movement that developed considerable political power in Sudan while never obtaining significant popularity among Sudanese voters. It embraced a "top down" approach to Islamisation by placing party members in high posts in government and security services. al-Turabi and the NIF reached the peak of their power from 1989 following a military coup d'état, until 2001, as what Human Rights Watch have called "the power behind the throne", head of the first Sunni Islamist movement to take control of a state.
al-Turabi oversaw highly controversial policies such as the creation of the "NIF police state" and associated NIF militias that consolidated Islamist power and prevented a popular uprising, but according to Human Rights Watch committed many human rights abuses, including "summary executions, torture, ill treatment, arbitrary detentions, denial of freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, and violations of the rules of war, particularly in the south". Turabi was a leader of opposition to the American–Saudi "coalition forces" in the Gulf War, establishing in 1990-1991 the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress, a regional umbrella for political Islamist militants, headquartered in Khartoum.
After 1996, al-Turabi and his party's "internationalist and ideological wing" saw a decline in influence in favor of more pragmatic leaders, brought on by the imposition of UN sanctions on Sudan in punishment for Sudan's assistance to Egyptian Islamic Jihad in their attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. al-Turabi was out of power beginning in 1999, leading a splinter group of the National Congress known as the Popular National Congress. He was imprisoned by Omar Al-Bashir on 17 January 2011 for nine days, following civil unrest across the Arab world. He died in 2016 without facing trial for his role in the 1989 coup.
Early life and education
al-Turabi was born on 1 February 1932 in Kassala, eastern Sudan, to a Sufi Muslim sheikh, and received an Islamic education, before coming to Khartoum in 1951 to study law and joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a student. He graduated from Khartoum University School of Law in 1955 and also studied in London and at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1962, where he gained a PhD. He became a leader of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1960s. He is a descendant of a famous 17th-century religious sheikh, Hamad al-Turabi.Religious and political beliefs
Turabi's writings, rhetoric, sermons, and public pronouncements have often been described as progressive, theologically liberal, "moderate and thoughtful", but his time in power was notable for harsh human rights violations. The diplomat Andrew Natsios explained these contradictions by claiming that he took more moderate positions when being interviewed by English and French-speaking interviewers when compared to his speeches to his fellow Islamists.al-Turabi's philosophy drew selectively from Sudanese, Islamic, and Western political thought to fashion an ideology for the pursuit of power. al-Turabi supported Sharia and the concept of an Islamic state, but his vision was not Wahhabi or Salafi. He appreciated that the majority of Sudanese followed Sufi Islam, which he set out to change with new ideas. He did not extend legitimacy to Sufis, Mahdists, and Islamic scholars, whom he saw as incapable of addressing the challenges of modern life. One of the strengths of his vision was to consider different trends in Islam. Although the political base for his ideas was probably relatively small, he had an important influence on Sudanese politics and religion.
His views on the role of women in society were relatively progressive. al-Turabi had his greatest success in recruiting supporters from the educated and professional classes in urban areas. He attached fundamental importance to the concept of shura and ibtila, his view of modernity, which he believed should lead to a more profound worship of God. Religion was regularly tested by the reality of ibtila.
As a Sunni Islamist, Turabi's ideas differed in some ways from traditional Islamic ideas, such as in his lack of reverence for professional Islamic scholars. Rather than the ulama being restricted to educated Islamic scholars, he stated that "because all knowledge is divine and religious, a chemist, an engineer, an economist or a jurist are all ulamas." In fact, in an Islamic democracy, which Turabi maintained he was working towards,
ideally there is no clerical ulama class, which prevents an elitist or theocratic government. Whether termed a religious, a theocratic, or even a secular theocracy, an Islamic state is not a government of the ulama.
al-Turabi originally espoused progressive Islamist ideas, such as the embrace of democracy, healing the breach and expanding the rights of women, where he noted:
The Prophet himself used to visit women, not men, for counseling and advice. They could lead prayer. Even in his battles, they are there! In the election between Othman and Ali to determine who will be the successor to the Prophet, they voted!
He told another interviewer, "I want women to work and become part of public life" because "the home doesn't require much work anymore, what with all the appliances". During an interview on al-Arabiya TV in 2006, al-Turabi describes the word hijab as not a face veil but a cover or diaphragm put in a room to separate between men and the Prophet's wives, whereas niqab is just an old Arab habit. Hijab literally means "barrier" and he said it was "a curtain in the Prophet's room. Naturally, it was impossible for the Prophet's wife to sit there when people entered the room". The Prophet's wives sat behind it when talking to males because they were not allowed to show their faces. He opposed the death penalty for apostasy from Islam and opposed Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He declared Islamist organizations "too focused on narrow historical debates and behavioral issues of what should be forbidden, at the expense of economic and social development".
al-Turabi also laid out his vision for Sharia law that would be applied gradually instead of forcefully and would apply only to Muslims, who would share power with the Christians in a federal system.
In contrast Natsios writes that when in power,
one of the pieces of national legislation he pressed for was that apostasy be punished by the death penalty, a position he has since disavowed. When he talks about women's rights, he is referring exclusively to Muslim women, whose honor and virtue will be protected within the context of Sharia law,... Christian or non-Muslim women may be treated as property without rights or protection.
In 2006, out-of-power again, al-Turabi made international headlines issuing a fatwa allowing Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, and allowing alcohol consumption in certain situations, in contradiction to historical Sharia law. He also embraced human rights and democracy in "a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn" of his views. One critic of Turabi complained to an American journalist in Khartoum of Turabi's ideological reversal, saying, "it is said in the daily papers and in the discussion centers here in the university that Turabi killed Ustazh Mahmoud",, "and now he's stealing his ideas."