The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

al-Turabi, Hasan (b. 1932)

Born in 1932 to a well-known family of religious notables in the town of Kassala in eastern Sudan, Hasan al-Turabi is one of the most intriguing figures among the Islamic thinkers and political activists of the 20th century. In his childhood and youth, he received a basic training in the traditional Islamic disciplines at the hands of his father, a judge (qadi), whose occupation kept the family constantly on the move. On the completion of his secondary school education in 1950, Turabi enrolled at the University of Khartoum, where he came in close contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had just started to set up local branches in the Sudan. In 1957, shortly after Sudan’s national independence, Turabi left the country to continue his studies abroad, earning a master’s degree from the University of London and a PhD in law from the Sorbonne, thus acquiring in-depth knowledge of Western legal systems and thought.

After his return to the Sudan in 1964, Turabi, now the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Khartoum, became immersed in Sudan’s politics and continued to be politically active throughout his life. The political wing of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood at the time was the Islamic Charter Front (ICF), and Turabi emerged as one of its foremost activists, campaigning against the “Communist threat” and seeking support for the adoption of an Islamic constitution. Despite serious setbacks, such as the failure of the parliament to endorse the constitution proposed by the ICF in 1968 and the socialist and secular orientation of the military regime under Ja‘far al-Numayri (1969–85), Turabi never gave up on his agenda of establishing an Islamic state in the Sudan.

After Numayri took power, Turabi was arrested on charges of treason and spent several years in prison. In the 1970s he emerged as the pioneer of what he and his fellow activists called the “Islamic movement.” He authored more than ten books and numerous articles, outlining his ideas about “Islamic renewal” (tajdīd), the key concept in Turabi’s thought, and dealing with diverse topics such as the Islamic political system, Islam and art, Islam and women, humanism, and Islam and the West. What sets Turabi apart from many of his contemporaries within political Islam is his attempt to synthesize Islamic doctrine and some aspects of Western political thought, such as devolution of power, federalism, and democracy (though not a multiparty system). He aimed at creating a new model that reconciled religious principles with the changing realities of modern life. Turabi left considerable room for the reinterpretation of Islam, arguing that, with few exceptions reflecting the eternal components of the divine message, everything could be subject to revision. This position earned him the reputation of a liberal thinker within contemporary Islamism, as well as the enmity of the more conservative-minded leaders within the Islamist spectrum.

Although Turabi consistently emphasized that the path to the Islamic state was only through education and raising an Islamic awareness among all citizens, his political strategies revealed that he also had an acute concern for power. Many observers noted a pattern of mismatch between his proclamations, which emphasized that the Islamization of the individual has to precede the Islamization of the state, and his actions, which suggest that he sought to assume political power first and then impose an Islamic political system that would ultimately lead to the full Islamization of Sudanese society. This contradiction runs as a central thread throughout Turabi’s political career. As many observers have noted, Turabi always gave the impression of being moderate and soft-spoken in his public announcements, but his name is intimately connected to the so-called September Laws that introduced a shari‘a-based penal code under President Ja‘far al-Numayri in September 1983, a move that rekindled the fire of the civil war between the Northern regime and the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA).

During the democratic interlude from 1985 and 1989, Turabi became the leader of the National Islamic Front (NIF), a political party that propagated the establishment of an Islamic state in the Sudan. The party was moderately successful in the 1986 elections but was unable to prevent the rapprochement between the government and the SPLA through democratic means. Turabi was widely perceived as the driving force behind the military coup of 1989 led by General ‘Umar al-Bashir, who was still in power as of 2011. Turabi appeared as the chief ideologue of the new Islamist order, although he served another term in prison immediately after the coup. During the 1990s he was the founder and secretary general of the Popular Arabic and Islamic Congress (PAIC), an international forum for well-known Muslim radicals with its headquarters in Khartoum. As the éminence grise behind the regime he was instrumental in declaring the civil war against the SPLA a jihad, a move accompanied by compulsory conscription for the so-called Peoples’ Defense Forces. The enactment of new shari‘a laws and the promulgation of a new, “Islamic” constitution completed the picture of “God’s rule in the Sudan.” Turabi was finally stripped of his political influence, imprisoned, and kept under house arrest after losing a power struggle against President ‘Umar al-Bashir in 1999, whose regime subsequently displayed a more moderate orientation.

Turabi’s legacy is ambiguous. Hailed as a liberal and innovative Islamist thinker by some, seen as a cynical power broker and pillar of the “NIF dictatorship” by others, accused of directing an international terrorist network by the United States during Bill Clinton’s presidency, admired for his intellectual rigor and skillful pragmatism by his supporters, and disparaged as a secularist in Islamic garb by more conservative Islamists, he invariably caused a stir with his controversial pronouncements. In a series of public lectures after 2003, Turabi declared that the Muslims who died in the war against the SPLA could not be considered martyrs, thus denying that the war fulfilled the Islamic legal requirements for a jihad; he maintained that the consumption of alcohol should not be punishable under Islamic law; and he supported the idea that a woman could lead men in ritual prayer or become president in an Islamic state. Many Sudanese saw him as an enfant terrible whose “Islamic Project” has run its course. A definite assessment of his legacy, however, will depend on his reception by future generations of Islamic intellectuals.

See also revival and reform; Sudan