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 Ḥasan al-Turabi,
the Last of the Islamists
 Ḥasan al-Turabi,
the Last of the Islamists
The Man and His Times 1932–2016

Abdullahi A. Gallab

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gallab, Abdullahi A., author.
Title: Ḥasan al-turabi, the last of the islamists : the man and his times 1932-2016 /
Abdullahi A. Gallab.
Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014984 (print) | LCCN 2018016019 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781498548373 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498548366 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Turabi, Ḥasan. | Muslim scholars—Sudan. | Politicians—Sudan. |
Islamic fundamentalism—Sudan.
Classification: LCC DT157.65.T87 (ebook) | LCC DT157.65.T87 G35 2018 (print) |
DDC 962.404/3092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014984
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To my sister Zienab Ahmed Gallab
 Contents

Prefaceix
Acknowledgmentsxvii

PART I: THE MAN 1

1 An Introduction 3
2 Childhood, Family, Environment 25
3 Ḥasan al-Turabi School Days 49

PART II: THE ISLAMIST 73

4 The Great Transformation 75
5 The Road to Islamism 101
6 From Ḥasan to Dr. Ḥasan125

PART III: FROM THE REVOLUTION TO

COUNTERREVOLUTION149
7 October: The Revolution and Its Generation 151
8 October: Counterrevolution and Its Discontents 179

PART IV: THE SHAIKH 201

9 The Two Tails of Counterrevolution 203
10 No Turban No Crown 225

vii
viii Contents

11 The Anatomy of Death 247

12 Conclusion273

Appendix283
Bibliography285
Index293
About the Author 303
 Preface

Why Ḥasan/Dr. Ḥasan and Shaikh Ḥasan al-Turabi? Each one of these
names has its history, weight, and significance throughout the lifetime and
the political career of the man. Some of the reviewers of my previous books
about Islamism in the Sudan—The First Islamist Republic: Development and
Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan and Their Second Republic: Islamism
in the Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion—argued that each one of these
books was or is about Ḥasan al-Turabi. That might be to a certain extent
true. Another reviewer of these books claims that I am “not fond of Ḥasan
al-Turabi, nor the current regime in Khartoum.” That might not be an accu-
rate characterization of an implicit lesson about the contemporary status and
the future of the local, regional, and world reality described as Islamism and
one of its well-recognized leaders. The most important aspect of that is the
complexity of the post-1964 October Revolution in the Sudan and the con-
nection between the death of Islamism and the fate of its last leaders. And yet
nothing is more necessary than this lesson and the wisdom gained from Ḥasan
al-Turabi’s cumulative time over generations, al-Turabi’s Islamism, and his
disciples as a counterrevolutionary fact in Sudanese life that has been less
studied and even less understood as a phenomenon. My concern, in this book
and other previous books, could easily be seen in the face of this phenom-
enon by exploring the axiom together, with the man, his spirit, ghost, and the
ghost of his Islamism. Hence, each claim of my reviewers could have its own
merit. But let us take first things first. Without Ḥasan al-Turabi in his different
conditions and transformations of his life chances—from Ḥasan to Dr. Ḥasan
to Shaikh Ḥasan—there would have been no al-Turabi Islamism, al-Turabi
Islamists, or an Islamist regime. For both, al-Turabi and his disciples’ savage
Islamist regime, he directly or indirectly tormented other Islamists, and he
was tormented by non-Islamists and by his own Islamists, especially those

ix
x Preface

who were considered by many as his own handpicked and nurtured dis-
ciples. This was the knot that I addressed in my previous book, Their Second
Republic. In that book I described in great detail, in chapters 7 and 8, the
threads constituting the knot that tied together some of the second-generation
al-Turabi Islamists—‘Alī ‘Osmān in particular. In Their Second Republic
I addressed how that knot developed historically, its sociological force, its
different forms of expression and opportunism, and the systems that manipu-
lated the absence of the leader in prison to help Osman climb the ladder of the
party and the regime as an opportunity. Later the theory and practice of that
political Islamist group under the leadership of ‘Alī ‘Osmān permeated not
only politics but also a culture that was bundled into a multiplicity of perfor-
mative violence as a system of governance against the Sudanese people, their
fellow Islamists, and Ḥasan al-Turabi himself. Within ‘Alī ‘Osmān’s once
shadowy presence and within a peculiar form of “rule,” al-Turabi’s Islamism
saw a reversal into violence, and the brutal state took over the regime. Nev-
ertheless, Ḥasan al-Turabi, as I said before, has remained an albatross around
the neck of the Sudanese Islamism, and the Sudanese Islamist movement will
stay forever as an albatross at his neck too.
Of this much we can be certain. Such is the condition and the paradox of
the Islamists’ history of factionalism and later the Islamist party recreated by
al-Turabi from the 1964 October Revolution. That onward opened up an evil
pursuit not up to the task of fermenting a revolution, though it institutional-
ized the tradition of fermenting violence, which he and his Islamists named
the 1989 coup and the totalitarian regime that emerged out of it—Thourat
al-Inighaz (The Salvation Revolution). That by itself, and the state the
Islamists designed, unrivaled in its severity and evil, the most oppressive
period in the history of Sudan. Hence, this constitutes an indictment of Ḥasan
al-Turabi and his Islamists.
Nevertheless, al-Turabi stays as one of the most important Islamist and
political figures in the Sudan and the twentieth century—what is called the
“Muslim world.” My previous books were about the important development
of what I called the Islamist state, which is considered the first of its kind in
the Sunni “Muslim World.”
Ḥasan al-Turabi was “a man apart.” He was not a Muslim Brother.
He describes the Egyptian Brotherhood, or that organization, and the ideology
of Islamism “as traditional” and branded its foundation as based on traditional
forms of leadership. He asserted that “the earliest Muslim Brotherhood was
led by Ḥasan al-Banna in the typical manner of a sheikh with followers; there
is little that was democratic about it. And there was a view that that shura or
consultation is not binding; it’s informative, it’s persuasive, but it’s not bind-
ing on the Amir, the leader.”1 Moreover, al-Turabi doesn’t recognize Sayyid
Qutb or ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam. It seems we can read al-Turabi’s moment as he
 Preface xi

saw it emerging within its time and space. He reargued the debated issues in
a different manner against the Qutbian perspective. Al-Turabi held the state
as a central issue different to and colliding with the Society of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s dispositions of tarbiya, Sayyid Qutb’s vanguard creed, and
the Salafi isolationist worldview. From such a perspective, and a dissimilar
structuring of the discourse, emerged al-Turabi’s calculation. According
to al-Turabi’s definition of modernity, which he articulated in his meeting
with the American scholars, he might have thought of himself as a more
educated person with cultural capital superior to that of all the locals, such as
Maḥmoud Moḥamed Ṭaha, Babikir Karrar, Ṣadiq ‘Abdallah ‘Abd al-Mājid,
and regional and local founders of Islamism including Ḥasan al-Banna,
Abu A’la’ al-Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb.
Nevertheless, there might be a controversy about the central properties
of the essential or dubious claims and the reasons for some to overlook the
importance of al-Turabi and the Islamist state that he and his Islamists created.
Some of these reasons could be attributed to Ḥasan al-Turabi himself. That is
to say, what makes him an important personality is not his successful theory
of value or the model state he and his Islamists established; it is their failure
to see and accept, as a moral, religious, and civil values, the necessity to pay
attention to the process by which people as citizens agree according to their
free will without coercion or a military coup and the violence that emerges
out of it.
Clearly, the Sudanese Islamist state (1989–present), despite its use of its
institutional and rhetorical stance about Islam, the state, constitution, parlia-
ment, and/or republic, has in practice institutionalized violence and worked
hand-in-hand and groomed a dictator, ‘Omer Ḥasan Aḥmed al-Bashir. ‘Omer
Ḥasan Aḥmed al-Bashir became the first sitting president to be indicted by
the International Criminal Court (ICC) for allegedly directing campaigns of
mass killing (genocide), rape, and pillage against Sudanese civilians in dif-
ferent parts of the country and in particular in Darfur. Al-Turabi’s Islamists’
experience that brought him and his Islamists to power through a strange
form of a military coup transformed their Islamist movement and its politi-
cal party—al-Jabha al-Islamiyyah al-Qawiyya (The National Islamic Front)
(NIF)—into a military unit by planning for and executing the peculiar 1989
coup. The Islamist experience in power and its transformations from 1989 to
present stand as a very important one in the history of Sudan, the region, and
in general. That is not of its successes but because of its total failure. It proved
that what has been advocated by the Islamists in general, and in Sudan in
particular, as al-Islam hwa al-Hall (al-Islam is the solution) or what has been
described as the “Islamist or the Islamic state” is in itself an unachievable
idea neither by default nor by design. However, it presented to the world a
new model of and a distinctive project of separation between the state and
xii Preface

religion that designated the state as the field of coercion with excesses of
greedy forms of tamkeen2 and expulsion of religion to the private sphere as
part of the coerced and manipulated public sphere.
In his review of my book, Their Second Republic, Professor Justin Wil-
lis claims that, I am “not fond of Hasan al-Turabi, nor the current regime
in Khartoum.” My question is—is that a requirement? The term Brother
al-Turabi is a reminder of the “Whatever I am, Germany is” found in a pre-
liminary draft of the essay “Brother Hitler” of 1938 by Thomas Mann. It is
a defiant assertion against the far more potent view at the time that Germany
was where Hitler was. What Thomas Mann once said: “The fellow is a
catastrophe, but that’s no reason not to find him interesting as a personality
and destiny.”3 Here the radical aesthetic speaks who finds an unusual phe-
nomenon gripping, regardless of what morality says about it. No one should
feel “above dealing with this murky figure.” Politically, after all the rest, it
does not matter either, “it has its directness a refreshing effect with otherwise
manifold complexity.”4 Thousands, if not millions, of Sudanese people of
all ages feel strongly about dealing with Ḥasan al-Turabi as a murky figure
for the evil that emanated from his Islamism, Islamists, and the regime that
emerged out of them. The man who so dominated the course of al-Turabi
Islamism from 1964 until his death on March 5, 2016—suffering the regime
of the meanest of both his school mate Ja’far Nimairi and the most scheming
of his disciples ‘Ali ‘Othmān—stirs up more emotions than any other Suda-
nese political figure in the history of modern Sudan. That is due to the scale of
crimes that his Islamism committed during his presence. Al-Turabi Islamism
goes in history as one among the twentieth-century-“isms”: Nazism, fas-
cism, colonialism, Stalinism—a great killer of human beings. The three most
important elements of al-Turabi Islamism and his Islamists in power were
their involvement in methodical and systematic patterns of terror, treating
all Sudanese people in disdain, and bellowing them off by sending them en
masse into exile and refugee camps.
Ḥasan al-Turabi, who prides himself as ibn al-thaqafa al-Farancia (a son
of French culture), created his own laїcité, not promoted but typified by the
Islamist movement. On the one hand, Ḥasan al-Turabi’s laїcité represents a
breakaway from culture, religion, and modernity. It depicted culture as prim-
itive by despising the Ṣūfi Islam. It broke away from religion by reproaching
the ‘ulama and censured modernity by denouncing secularism. Typically,
his brand of Islamism differentiates its field of action by designating religion
and religiosity in different spheres that advance “politics over religiosity
and political action over theological reflections.”5 Within this, however,
al-Turabi’s Islamism placed itself within a limited and limiting field of the
secularism debate. However, al-Turabi attacks secularism and secularists all
the time. Here, al-Turabi’s Islamism built its own instruments and devices that
 Preface xiii

then functioned outside what could be described as the religious thought-of

rationalization. As stated earlier, al-Turabi himself described the field of his
Islamism as dominated by “students and university graduates everywhere
[who] represent modernity and they are the only current which exercises
any measure of ijtihad, any review of history.”6 How his Islamists differ
from other groups that relate to modernity, according to that, is based on an
assumption and generalization. He assumes that “liberal politicians and intel-
lectuals are not interested in Islamic history, they are interested in European
history; they want to transplant European institutions. They don’t know how
to grow them in soil. They look so much to the West that they are not actually
renewing, they are not deciding any ijtihad. If there are any mujtahidin, they
are the Islamists now.”7 The Sudanese mujtahdin, according to him, are “young
people who are equal; there was no one who could proclaim to be senior in
age to become an absolute sheikh.”8 These groups, or lumpen intelligencia as
described by Guilain Denoeux and Olivier Roy before him, are “not usually
clerics but young, university-educated intellectuals who claim for themselves
the right to interpret the true meaning of religion (their actual knowledge of
Islam is typically sketchy).”9 At the same time, their reference presents the
political discourse of al-Turabi and those who blindly follow him in denounc-
ing secularism as a “political discourse in religious garb.”10 In this sense
Islamism is, inside and outside, secularism at the same time. In its “two-sided
relation to modernity and the West at the very heart of Islamist ideology, lies
a powerful, comprehensive critique of the West and what Islamists see as the
corrupting political and cultural influence of the West on Middle East societ-
ies.”11 On the other hand, “the Islamists’ reliance on concepts drawn from the
Islamic tradition also indicates a desire to break away from Western terminol-
ogy. Hence, Islamism is a decidedly modern phenomenon in at least two critical
respects: the profile of its leaders and its reliance on Western technology.”12
Ḥasan al-Turabi added another aspect by including and modifying for his own
purpose certain ideas of salafi and Wahabi Islam to his Islamism and excluded
and severly attacked at the same time others. While he agrees with the Ṣalafis
in denigrating Ṣūfi Islam, he takes a step further within his laїcité by brag-
ging that he is a child of French culture and disapproving of the ‘ulama and
their institutions. Hence, al-Turabi’s Islamism has floated free of modernity
and its secular underpinnings, free of Islam and its scholarship, or ‘ulama, and
free of culture and its Ṣūfi representations. That such provocation riddled with
ideological exceptionalism, one would argue, has set him free to practice his
unchecked ijtihād and to critically challenge everybody else, since only a few
people—his disciples—could be conformists. Aḥmed Kamal al-Din argues
that al-Turabi “gave himself unlimited freedom,”13 but I would say that that
freedom has gone wild by giving no attention to the conventions and the rules
of engagement within the local, Islamist, and Islamic discourse. It developed
xiv Preface

laissez-faire—forms of verbal and later physical violence that evolved around

a system of conflict and became a group-binding function for a full differ-
entiation of the group and its individual members from the outside world. This
is not a reaction against secularization, but a product of it. It is a combination
of both “holy Ignorance”14 and “institutionalized Ignorance.”15
As Jacques Derrida said, “For many of us, certain [and I emphasize
certain] end of communist Marxism did not await the recent collapse of the
USSR and everything that depends on it throughout the world.”16 I will add
that the end of Islamism did not await the end, the collapse, of the ISMs of
the long twentieth century. Therefore, what makes Ḥasan al-Turabi the last of
the Islamists that “whither Islamism. . . . Resonates like an old repetition.”17
The central purpose of this study is to hold together more than one aspect
of that, which must be taken seriously in the Sudanese, post-1964 October
Revolution, its actors within the colonial and the postcolonial state, and the
extent of all levels of playing fields of the Sudanese community of the state.
This book seeks to explore charted and uncharted train of life and times of
Ḥasan al-Turabi, his Islamism, and Islamists in a holistic way within the good
times and bad times of Sudanese human experience of the long twentieth
century.

NOTES

1. Moḥamed E. Ḥamdi, The Making of Islamic Political Leader: Conversations

with Hasan al-Turabi (Boulder, Westview Press, 1998) 14.
2. Tamkeen is a Quranic term associated with “those who, [even] if we firmly
establish them (maknahum) on earth remain constant in salah (prayer) and render
zakat (alms levy), enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid that doing of what is
wrong; but with God rests the final outcome of events” (al-Hajj 22:21). For al-Turabi
Islamists tamkeen represented a takeover moment by using the state to extract as
much wealth as possible and to climb up to the highest level of political and state
power by appropriating the most senior government positions to their co-Islamists.
3. Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Man Life as a Work of Art: A Biography (Princeton,
NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999) 423.
4. Ibid.
5. Frederic Volpi, Political Islam Observed. (see chap. 1 no. 7) 6.
6. Arthur L. Lowrie, ed., Islam, Democracy, the State and the West: A Round
Table with Dr. Ḥasan Turabi (Tampa, The World & Islam Studies Enterprise,
1993) 20.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Guilain Denoeux, “The Forgotten Swamp: Navigating Political Islam,” Middle
East Policy 9, no. 2 (2002) 56–81, 62.
10. Ibid.
 Preface xv

11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Aḥmed Kamal al-Din in an internet interview with the author, March 2012.
14. According to Olivier Roy “fundamentalism” is the unwanted child of
secularization.
15. According to Mohammed Arkoun is a scholastic culture, giving rise to institu-
tionalized ignorance.
16. Jacques Derrida, Specter of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International (New York, Routledge, 1994) 15.
17. Ibid.
 Acknowledgments

This book is a product of critical thinking on an important and complex period

in the Sudanese human experience—an experience that brought together
contributions of generations of Sudanese-educated, organic intellectuals,
knowledge workers, politicians who took politics as their theme, and which
included the good, the bad, and the ugly. I accrued great debt and gratitude
to those I call our community of conversation, who went to school, politi-
cal prison, some who went into the same or different professions together
and shared opinions, laughter, tears, and good and bad times. In this sense,
a declaration of intent is my own way of saying thank you to the best minds
of my generation. This community of conversation has been expanded and
enriched by our colleagues and scholars of the Sudan Studies Association of
North America, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other parts of the world.
My work has been enhanced by their encouragement, criticism, com-
ments, and suggestions. I owe deeper appreciation and gratitude to late Dr.
‘Abdel Majed ‘Ali Bob, Professor ‘Abdullahi ‘Ali Ibrāhim, Dr. Moḥammed
Maḥmoud, al-Sir Sidahmed, Dr. Salman Moḥamed Aḥmed Salmān, and a good
and diverse number of scholars who reviewed my previous books for academic
journals, the Social Research Council (SSRC), United States, The Royal Afri-
can Society, United Kingdom, websites, and other Arabic publications.
Even before 1989, when I began my frequent personal contacts with Suda-
nese politicians, government personnel, actors, and activists, I conducted
on-the-spot and online-intensive and in-depth interviews and recorded
observations about al-Turabi Islamism and with al-Turabi in person. I am
grateful to all those who have made their ideas, publications, and themselves
available to me ever since. I am particularly grateful to Sayyid al-Sadiq
al-Mahdi for the interviews and online communication for the past few
years. Over the last few years, I have benefited from the conversations and
interviews I had on the topic of Islamism in the Sudan and its personalities
xvii
xviii Acknowledgments

with many Islamists, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals whose views

helped to either form or shape my ideas about the Sudanese experience of
the Islamists in power and their state. I wish to express my gratitude to Dr.
‘Alī al-Ḥaj Moḥamed, Dr. Ghazi Ṣalah al-Din al-‘Atabani, late Yasin ‘Όmar
al-Imam, professors El-Tag Fad Allah, al-Ṭayyib Zain al-‘Abdin, Ḥasan
Mekki, al-Mahboob Abdel Salam, Aḥmed Kamal al-Din, Ṣiddiq Moḥamed
‘Osman, Dr. Souhar Salah, and other younger Islamists for the valuable time
they rendered me during long interviews in Khartoum, Bonn, the United
Kingdom, and other places. My thanks and appreciation to Laura Marie
Thomson for providing me with an electronic copy of her father professor
Cliff Thompson unpublished manuscript: Days of the October Revolution.
The last few years were very rich in discussion with colleagues at Arizona
State University’s African and African American and Religious Studies depart-
ments, their students, and centers—together with other scholars, especially
those whom I met and conversed with at conferences about Islamism or the
Sudanese experience. In the United States such conferences were organized by
The Cornell University Institute of Comparative Modernities, the Sharjah Arts
Foundation in South Africa, Afro-Middle East Centre, World Peace Foundation
of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Harvard Kennedy School
of Government. From these platforms we have continued the conversations
on issues about Islamism, and ongoing developments in Sudan, with different
Sudanese communities in the United States, Sudanese discussion groups, and
websites—especially al-Rakoba, Sudanile, Huryyat, and Àbdin List. They have
given space to my Arabic writings that reflect part of my scholarship and also
for the insightful ideas and critical skills of their readers through the years.
An important outcome of that is I feel indented to many individuals that I have
never met before, and they are more than I can recall in this instance.
I am obliged to Dean Patrick Kenney and the Institute of Social Science
Research for their continued support and to the School of Social Transfor-
mation, my colleagues at the African and African American Studies, Reli-
gious Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at ASU.
A special thanks is also due to my gifted and efficient graduate and under-
graduate research students who were assigned to me by these departments.
I am very grateful to Tina Ping whose help has been greatly appreciated.
I am equally grateful to Rabah and Um Salama al-Sadiq al-Mahdi for their
appreciated help by providing me important texts and writings of Sayyid al-
Sadiq, including transcripts of al-Jazeera interviews with al-Sādiq al-Mahdi
and Ḥasan al-Turabi.
I am grateful to my publisher, Lexington Books—an imprint of Rowman
& Littlefield—for being endlessly patient and the assistant acquisition editor
Holly Buchanan, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful com-
ments on the manuscript of this book. I am also grateful to the professional
and careful editing from Jerryll Moreno.
 Acknowledgments xix

I am grateful to my good friend Hassan Musa for preparing the meaningful

portrait of Ḥasan al-Turabi for the front cover.
Some paragraphs of this book have been adopted, modified, or elaborated
(with permission) from previously published works. I am grateful to my pre-
vious publishers Ashgate/Routledge for granting me permission to use parts
that appeared in my previous book, Their Second Republic: Islamism in the
Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion.
For the last twenty something years, if not more, my wife Souad T.
Ali and our children Aḥmed, Àzza, and Shiraz and our families in Sudan did
everything to provide their unrelenting support, forbearance, and encourage-
ment, which made research an enjoyable endeavor, made writing an inspi-
rational and elevating intellectual exercise, and made life better.
While all these colleagues and friends have been helpful in different ways,
any remaining deficiencies or inaccuracies are solely my responsibility.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS
AND OTHER MATTERS

For the transliteration of Arabic and Sudanese names of people, places, and
institutions, I followed a simple style based on The Chicago Manual of Style,
sixteenth edition, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. How-
ever, generally accepted English forms of Arabic words and names, such as
Islam, Sudan, Khartoum, and so on are used as they appear in their English
forms without diacritical marks. I have italicized any Arabic and Sudanese
words followed by a translation of the word or concept. I have tried to be
consistent for any given name, especially for commonly cited historical names,
for which I have tried to follow the most frequently cited spellings. I have,
however, left many of the Sudanese and Egyptian spellings that authors have
used for their names. Finally, unless specified, all translations from Sudanese
and Arabic sources, poetry, proverbs, and other expressive culture are mine.

***

For this study I used several sources and resources in the field of Sudanese
studies written in English, Arabic, and translated into these two languages.
It is gratifying to notice how this corpus of knowledge has grown through
time. In addition to that, there is a similar corpus of Sudanese expressive
culture, TV and journalistic writings and interviews, YouTube videos and
Sudanese discussion groups, and electronic media. Taping, synthesizing, and
blending these gigantic bodies of knowledge is both intellectually edifying
and investigatively rewarding. I would like to thank all those who contributed
to this body of knowledge.
 Part I

THE MAN
 Chapter 1

An Introduction

On a particular evening, September 9, 1964, a young, unknown Sudanese

professor, who had recently come from Paris after finishing (or not finish-
ing)1 his PhD from the Sorbonne, stole the show from other fellow university
panelists at the Examination Hall at the University of Khartoum. The young
professor was Ḥasan ‘Abdalla al-Turabi (1932–2016), and the event focused
on the warring situation in southern Sudan. Five other members of the
University of Khartoum’s community participated in that panel, including:
Ḥussien ‘Abdel Jalil, secretary of the Social Science Society and organizer
of the event; Aḥmed ‘Abdel Ḥalim, assistant director of the University of
Khartoum’s library; and student leaders ‘Abdullahi ‘Ali Ibrāhim (Rabitat
al-Tulab al-Shiuiyeen [The Association of Communist Students]), Khou-
jali ‘Abdel Rahim Abu Bakr (al-Tulab al-Mustaqilien [The Independent
Student’s group]), and Ishaq al-Gasim Shadad (Hisb al-Ba’ath al-Qoumi
al-Arabi al-Ishtraki [Ba’ath Party]). Al-Turabi had already started to gain
attention as an articulate speaker at the University of Khartoum when he
spoke at that panel, where he gave the greatest statement of his life.
Some members of General (Elfriq) ‘Abboud’s ruling Military Council and
Cabinet members attended the panel. Chief among them was Major General
al-Magboul al-Amin al-Ḥaj; finance minister Mamoun Biḥari; Buth
Dui Thung and Ambrose Woul, two well-known southern politicians; Dr.
‘Oun El-Sharief, a young university professor; and statesman Ahmed
Mohmed Yasin, a former member of the defunct Supreme Council (1956–
1958).2 Yasin was appointed by Ibrahim ‘Abboud to head a committee to
advise his government on a resolution for what was described as the South-
ern conflict (‫)مشكلة الجنوب‬.3 That night, I personally heard Dr. Ḥasan al-Turabi
say that a peaceful resolution to the problem in southern Sudan lies in
extending democracy to the whole country. In a long interview by Ahmed

3
4 Chapter 1

Mansour, he recalled, “I said that decentralization was the solution for the
Southern Problem, which means more freedoms should be given; that means
the regime needs to go!”4 ‘Abdelwahab El-Affendi later wrote that al-Turabi
said, “The problem of the south was first and foremost a constitutional prob-
lem, reflecting [an] assault on people’s liberties both in [the] north and south,
although certain additional factors caused the situation in the south to degen-
erate into armed rebellion. There could thus be only one solution for this
problem and the problem of the country as a whole: the ending of the mil-
itary rule.” A report from the American Embassy in Khartoum, translated
and published recently by Moḥamed ‘Ali Ṣalih in many Sudanese media
outlets, stated that al-Turabi said, “No to the federal solution, no to the
secession solution, yes to self-government and for freedoms, dissemination
of facts and a constitutional Committee.”5 Based on what was recorded by a,
then, law professor at the University of Khartoum, Cliff Thompson, the
debate that took place at the Examination Hall was more than an event
involving al-Turabi and his disciples. It was a story with many dimensions
and details that spoke to the complexity of the struggle against the military
rule of that time. Thompson added, “The editor of El-Ayam newspaper,
Beshir Muhamad Said, also made a daring decision. The next morning, the
front page of his paper, unrelieved by any photo or drawing, carried Turabi’s
speech in full.”6
Long before the gathering of that panel, ‘Abdel Khaliq Mahjoub, sec-
retary general of the Sudanese Communist Party, wrote, in al-Ayam Daily,
an important proposal about self-government for the south as a solution.
However, people only remember al-Turabi’s shorter but more appealing
proposition expressed at the Examination Hall that particular evening—a
single event that brought him nationwide recognition. After the downfall of
‘Abboud’s military regime, he continued to move up the ranks of the small
Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan amidst many events, such as the October
Revolution, the Round Table Conference for the southern Sudan question, the
sociopolitical activities that took place at the University of Khartoum, and the
Islamist movement, which were all extremely rich and significant in regard
to the general development of Sudan. Each one of these, along with other
influences, such as the additional political parties, trade unions, professionals’
associations, Sufi brotherhoods, and the general media, operating in public or
underground, experienced, and instilled profound changes in the sociopoliti-
cal field, and exceeding all that had previously taken place. If indeed every
society produces its own pace and space for these kinds of changes, then post-
colonial Sudan, in its production of the perceived and conceived construction
of the contemporary Sudanese human experience in all its complexities, gave
rise to these issues at major intersections of conflict. It has been said that these
were, and might continue to be, part of the bearers of evolving dialectical
 An Introduction 5

formations of the Sudanese people by and for themselves in their field of

action with its localizations, worldly embodiments, and multiplicities. Hence,
and for our purposes here, the knowledge of each one of these factors, and
in particular Ḥasan al-Turabi and his Islamism, presupposes an acknowledg-
ment of their effective influence on what has been and what continues to be
the contemporary Sudanese human experience.
In many ways, the October Revolution is the single most prominent event in
the history of post-independent Sudan. The revolution successfully launched
a general moment of civil disobedience that sought a different state and a new
regime based on the rights of citizens with respect to social justice, freedom,
dignity, and accountability. The real significance of the October experience
lies in its sense of innovation and efficiency as a movement led by unarmed
civilians which spread throughout the whole country. Civilians consciously
pursued, for the first time, in Africa and the Middle East, in particular, and the
entire world, in general, a discourse and strategy of fields of power organized
to an effectual and triumphant end by forcing a violent dictatorial military
regime out of power. This was true in three fundamental ways. The first was
that Ibrahim ‘Abboud’s regime was chased out of power by the collective
action of individuals, organizations, and groups (professionals, workers, stu-
dents, farmers, and political parties). The second was that ‘Abboud’s regime
contributed to the growth of these collectivities by expanding public services,
such as education, but at the same time violently infringing upon their public
liberties in an attempt to dominate and control the affairs of the country and
its citizens. The third was that the war which the state waged in the south-
ern part of the country, which was not meant to be described as a civil war,
represented the apex of this infringement on public liberties and citizens’
civil and human rights. The southern Sudanese demanded action and a pro-
gram of an imaginative political initiative for liberation from dispossession
which could lead the way out of the construction of marginalization and the
“development of underdevelopment” in the country at large. The October
movement, which was initiated by almost all sectors of the Sudanese citi-
zens as a collective and successful social and political action (not by Ḥasan
al-Turabi single-handedly, as he claims), added to the value manifested in the
role, the power, and the political capital of the Sudanese civil sphere, which
emphatically was/is secular in its character and composition. As a result of
the October Revolution, the country witnessed a new generation of politicians
and leaders in most of the political parties and associations. Of course it did
not take long to discover that the totality of liberation had never reached a
reasonable degree of favor in its local constitutions, constituencies, or politi-
cal parties’ programs and expressions. Consequently, the counterrevolution
manifested itself not so much as a break from liberation ideals but as their
reversal. Thus, Ḥasan al-Turabi’s two-faced Janus emerged.
6 Chapter 1

With an evolving, more complex Sudanese sociopolitical and existential

world, the Examination Hall event and the October Revolution were the rites
of passage that marked al-Turabi’s route to fame from Dr. Ḥasan al-Turabi,
the unknown university law professor, to Dr. Ḥasan, the young Sudanese
political star. He was recognized as a new name in Sudan—especially among
students of higher education institutions—now someone who could give the
small and marginal Islamist party a new image. The October Revolution
added value and prestige to the faculty, the students, and the workers of the
University of Khartoum, turning it into a temple for the emerging, Sudanese
civil religion. Due to al-Turabi’s role during and after the October Revo-
lution and, especially, at the Round Table Conference in 1965, as well as his
relationship to the University of Khartoum, he won, by a significant landslide,
the top seat in the dawair al-khrijeen (the Graduates Electoral College).7
This win became the epitome of pride for Dr. Ḥasan al-Turabi, the Islamist
“leader” now “unbowed by authority and orthodoxy.”8
The October Revolution was and will remain a way to call attention
to the planned, visceral, and creative force by which the Sudanese came
together as citizens and demanded social change. Prior campaigns and forms
of resistance with symbolic meaning paved the way for political and revo-
lutionary progress unprecedented in the country and in the region. The initial
aim of the revolution was to create a space for all Sudanese citizens from the
north, south, east, west, and center where they might coexist amicably despite
their diversity of culture, faith, and ethnicity—not to create an Islamist
political leader. However, in both the revolutionary and counter revolutionary
developments and in the push and pull of change, which were complex and
unstable enough to allow for an emergence of a new generation of politi-
cal leadership, a new intellectual environment within the public and official
spheres acquired new relevance and resonance to serious challenges.
The emergence of Dr. Ḥasan through the events of the October Revolution
helped al-Turabi himself, his propagandists, and the conventional storytell-
ers among his followers reshape the history (inevitably offering him a more
significant role in the October Revolution than what his involvement actually
warranted). Many of al-Turabi’s disciples set the tone for this; chief among
them was Ahmed Shamoug—first among the Islamists to publish a book
about the October Revolution. Al-Turabi and the Islamists continued to claim
that he initiated and, hence, owned the October Revolution, which is a claim
that has been bitterly disputed by recorded history, media reports, observ-
ers, and other political parties. However, judging from the latest interview
with the man in the 16-part series of ‫( شاهد على العصر‬Shāhid ‘Ala al-‘Asr) on
al-Jazeera TV that started on April 16, 2016, it seems that the totalitarian
mind and personality cult created by al-Turabi himself and his disciples did
not strip their trappings enough to offer a credible assessment of that event
 An Introduction 7

in history. As stated earlier, the interviews which were recorded in 2010 by

al-Jazeera were released after al-Turabi’s death, whether in agreement with
Ḥasan al-Turabi or for other reasons, including, possibly, pressures from the
Khartoum regime. In the first six sessions that dealt with al-Turabi’s early
life, including his relationship to the October Revolution, al-Turabi’s dif-
ferent sense of self, as mediated within his personality cult, seems hardly
comparable as he articulates his memories of the October Revolution as a
one-man show, disregarding any other person or prior development that made
the change possible.
On November 6, 1968, at the same place that launched the new status of
Dr. Ḥasan, the Examination Hall at the University of Khartoum, a group
of al-Turabi’s student Islamists stormed a traditional dance performance
organized by the National Culture Students’ Club at the university. One of
the students was killed, and others were injured. The paradox then was that,
while Dr. Ḥasan was a regular speaker at the students’ club at the University
of Khartoum—where he introduced his new version and vision of Islamism
within a shifting center of gravity of the national discourse—his young
disciples at the other side of the campus were introducing a new form of
violence at the Examination Hall (where, ironically, al-Turabi’s personality
first emerged). It did not take long for al-Turabi’s Islamism and its practices
to show up at the Sudanese political market, including everything from the
university campus and its wallpapers to the Islamist party and its newspaper,
al-Mithaq al-Islami, in addition to open-air, political-discussion events and
rallies. These were used to sell him and his version of Islamism to differ-
ent generations of urban Sudanese youth with poor elementary religious
education. In this respect, al-Turabi’s Islamism and Islamists emerged as an
autonomous and self-satisfied entity, antagonistic and violent toward almost
every form of representation within the local and regional surroundings.
The fundamental fact to be addressed is that the logic of violence that grew
with the emergence of al-Turabi’s Islamism developed within its counter
revolutionary mode of operation into a wide-ranging self-constitution of
action, eventually leading the way to the military coup of 1989 (no wonder
why some of the leading members of the organization take pride in describing
themselves or being described as sikha (Iron rod), salouk al-jabha, or saloouk
al-Ikhwan (the gangster or the bully of the Brotherhood)). This makes faith
and piety the least-needed factors of the organization’s communal life, and so
the foundation of the organization, at best, represents a community that devel-
oped personally and communally imagined areas of conflict which leave no
room for the kind of beliefs that ponder the absolute rather than the transitory.
However, we might need to give closer and more careful attention to the
relationship between the colonial state in Sudan and Islam, in particular,
or religion, in general, with respect to that particular institute of education,
8 Chapter 1

which was later called the University of Khartoum. The colonial state created,
in and of itself, a new religious entity via its monopoly over the Sudanese,
open religious space. The state could strategically deploy its authority to
regulate and impose certain rules and roles and to deny access to particular
religious fields and markets. The enforced social, political, and religious
fragmentation turned different religious representations into appendages of
the state after making a distinction between “good” Islam, which would be
accommodated, and “bad” Islam, which would not be tolerated. As Nandy
argues, “Colonization colonizes the minds in addition to the bodies, and it
releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities
once and for all.”9 Young al-Turabi was exposed to a variety of systems
and movements, stories, and experiences that ultimately shaped his ideol-
ogy. He lived under the influence of a hegemonic culture and its structures’
forces, which supported and maintained the colonial system, as well as
that of the national movements which resisted colonialism in Sudan (see
chapter 2). But he also lived through the infancy of the Islamist movement
at the University College of Khartoum as well as the emergence of Babikir
Karrar and Ḥarakat al-Tahrir al-Islami (ILM, an anti-Communist movement).
Young al-Turabi lived during the time of Moḥmoud Moḥamed Ṭaha, another
Sudanese Islamist who was “admired by young Islamists for his combative
style, while arousing the hostility of Ṣūfi leaders by touching the same raw
nerve the Mahdi touched a century earlier in claiming direct divine mandate
to reshape Ṣūfism (and the totality of Islam).”10 Al-Turabi was self-romantic,
and hence he rarely mentioned history and its personalities so as to avoid any
impediments in the establishment of his personality cult. Such a cult, as will
be explained later, could be an important part of the riddle of his foundational
acts that generate impact or a key to understanding al-Turabi’s Islamism.
Al-Turabi’s personality cult did not emerge overnight. To trace the gen-
esis of its development, we need to go back to the emergence of Islamism
as a movement whose public presence partly budded in the University of
Khartoum and high school campuses after the 1964 October Revolution.
Here, step-by-step, Ḥasan al-Turabi methodically and successfully consoli-
dated his power, with strict centralization of all the Islamist party’s authority
in his hands. Simultaneously, his personality cult grew; he—the brilliant stu-
dent, the acknowledged university professor, and the “fox-like” politician—
was always celebrated as the heart of his disciples’ cult, and he continued to
be perceived by them as a representation and expression of an exceptional,
modern Islamist ṭarīqa which they liked to believe in and promote as their
image to the Sudanese public.11 Dr. ‘Alī al-Ḥaj Moḥamed, a close aide to
al-Turabi and a devout follower, attributes al-Turabi’s prominence to his
outstanding ability to “get ahead and stay ahead.” He argues that al-Turabi
“is not only a brilliant person but also a dynamic thinker, and by staying for
 An Introduction 9

so long at the helm of the organization he shaped his leadership position, and
it shaped him.”12
To better understand these qualities in relation to the formation of his
personality cult, we need to look at the history of this person and his role as
part of the definition of the social phenomenon within the growth of what
I call the Sudanese community of the state.13 In one sense, al-Turabi does not
strike those who study his legacy as merely a successful member of the Suda-
nese community of the state or as an accomplished scholar. One needs to look
deeper into al-Turabi’s personality cult, which was blended with an environ-
ment conducive to the Sudanese community of the state’s general feeling:
that their “rendezvous with destiny”14 had been fulfilled and that they
emerged as heirs of the state’s colonial community and products of higher,
expanding public education. This imposed an unchallenged authority that
controlled the postcolonial state ever since the early formation of the modern
Sudanese state. Al-Turabi had the privilege of being one of the few and first
Sudanese students to be admitted to the University College of Khartoum—a
year after it was established from what was originally Gordon Memorial Col-
lege. After his graduation from the School of Law in 1955, he studied abroad
and completed a master’s degree in 1957 at the University of London.
In 1964, he was one of the first Sudanese scholars awarded a PhD from the
Sorbonne in Paris. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the role of emerging
powers within a liberal democracy. In 1961, he visited and toured the United
States. According to some writings about his legacy, he was disturbed by the
racial prejudice he had encountered. After finishing his dissertation in 1964,
al-Turabi traveled extensively in Europe. On his return to Sudan, Dr.
al-Turabi was quickly appointed the dean of the Faculty of Law at the
­University of Khartoum, an issue disputed by many. He left the prestigious
university position within a few months to become a member of the
post-October Revolution Sudanese Parliament and the secretary general of
the Islamist organization that adopted the name Jabhat al-Mithaq al-Islami
(‫( )جبهة المیثاق االسالمي‬ICF or Islamic Charter Front) instead of the Muslim
Brotherhood.
His strange speaking style was a mixture of sarcasm, mockery, and pro-
vocative language, with verses from the Qur’an infused as if part of his
speech, mixed with some concepts reproduced from modern Arabic terms.
All of this touched a raw nerve for inexperienced, foreign media and an
ingenuous, Sudanese audience. Andrew Natsios, who spent years as the
Special Humanitarian Coordinator, wrote on President George W. Bush’s
Special Envoy to Sudan, “When Western scholars and writers interview
him, they tend to accept him for what he appears to be—urbane, charming,
witty, and brilliant. Turabi knows how to speak to Western audiences, using
language calibrated to be inoffensive but also misleading.” Natsios added,
10 Chapter 1

“Two Hassan al-Turabi exist in parallel universes: the moderate and thought-
ful Islamic scholar who can be found when he is out of power or when he
speaks to Western audiences in English or French, and the religious zealot
who emerges when he is in power or speaking in Arabic.”15 The Sudanese
citizens, who knew al-Turabi better than anybody else, confirmed this in their
satire by declaring, “there are two Ḥasan al-Turabi[s]: one for export and the
other for local consumption.”
He has an enduring effect on some of his disciples, who emulate his iconic
writing style and rhetoric, involving erratic movements and animated hand
gestures and facial expressions. According to Ahmed Kamal al-Din—an
attorney, a former disciple who maintained good relations with al-Turabi, and
a self-described, independent Islamist—this style gave al-Turabi an added
value of “unclaimed sacredness.” Unclaimed or not, this sacredness most
likely speaks of “a pure charisma [that] depends on devotion to the person . . .
[rather than a] successful charisma based on devotion to his work”16 with
which his followers associated him. Some of his disciples raised him to the
level of prophethood.17 Others believed in him while in power, hated him
before his death, and started canonizing him afterward. He was perceived
by many as the absolute leader in Hannah Arendt’s characterization who
“impersonate[s] the double function of the characteristic of each layer of the
movement—to act as the magic defense of the movement against the outside
world; and for some time, to be the direct bridge by which the movement is
connected with it.”18 He also “represents the movement in a totally differ-
ent way from all ordinary party leaders; he claims personal responsibility
for action, deed, or misdeed, committed by the functionary in his official
capacity.”19 Thus, he “who has monopolized the right and the possibility of
explanation . . . appears to the outside as the only person who knows what
he is doing.”20 But he also projects himself as “the only representative of the
movement to whom one may still talk without totalitarian terms.”21 But the
expectation that all members of the party would work harmoniously with
the devout followers to achieve the charismatic leader’s goals proved to be
a different matter. It was within this context that Ḥasan al-Turabi’s tragedy
occurred, which hasn’t received the attention that it deserves among those
who have been studying his legacy. Al-Turabi’s story and his pursuit for
power deserves more consideration, as it surpasses all bounds of what he
repeatedly described as the tragic parts of ibtila’, which are now attributed
to the brand of Islamism he created, its demise, and the essence of Islamism
at large.
Dr. Ḥasan wasted no time to muscle his way up the ladder of Sudanese
Islamism and to frame his own brand of secularized religion. Al-Turabi here
did not recognize Ḥasan al-Banna, Abu A’la’ al-Mawdudi, or Sayyid Qutb
as inspirational figures, and so he contributed his success and his Islamism
 An Introduction 11

to his own time and space. This is warranted by his course of action, includ-
ing, for example, his opposition to the Qutbian perspective with respect to
certain issues that Sayyid Qutb brought to the Islamist discourse, including
his vanguard creed (this will be addressed later in chapters 5 and 6). He also
opposed Ḥasan al-Banna and his Society of the Muslim Brotherhood, brand-
ing it as traditional, because its method for capturing the state (through
tarbiya) directly collided with his. On the other hand, he and his Islamism
were similar to the Sudanese Communist Party and shared Salafi’s aversion
to Sufi Islam (though in disagreement with their isolationist worldviews22);
from such a perspective emerged al-Turabi’s political agenda. It is evident
that, from al-Turabi’s definition of modernity, which he articulated later in
his meeting with American scholars, he thought of himself as a person with
cultural capital superior to that of all the locals, such as Maḥmoud Moḥamed
Ṭaha and Babikir Karrar, as well as that of all the regional founders of
Islamism including, of course, Ḥasan al-Banna, Abu A’la’ al-Mawdudi, and
Sayyid Qutb. His life experience and relationship with the main discourse
concerning modernity within three metropolitan centers—Khartoum, Lon-
don, and Paris—represent an added value to that cultural capital as part and
parcel of his own laїcité, breaking away from culture, religion, and modernity
as was previously defined. Hence, the process and function of differentiation
as described by his discourse, for how and where to assemble and construct
his group with God as well as his own space as an individual, according to
some prevailing worldviews, has become subject to controversy. In this field,
al-Turabi’s Islamism represents an unthought-of form of laїcité—not secular-
ization, which will be explained later—that presents religion as an enterprise
and a product of manufacture, distributable through a new breed of wholesale
and retail vendors. Only in this sense is Ḥasan al-Turabi similar to Sayyid
Qutb. Each one is a wholesale vendor but within his own terms. Neverthe-
less, Ḥasan al-Turabi, the Sudanese Islamist, his Sudanese Islamism, and his
Islamist followers each seek a different interpretation.
When Ḥasan al-Turabi, who prides himself as ibn al-thaqafa al-Farancia
(a son of French culture), created his own laїcité, which was not promoted
but typified by the Islamist movement, it was more than a personal project.
As early as the mid-1950s, al-Turabi, as a graduate student in London, sub-
mitted a memorandum to the Fifth Congress of the Sudanese Ikhwan that
proposed “the movement be transformed into an intellectual pressure group
on the lines of the Fabian Society, and not to work as an independent party.
Instead it should act through all the political parties and on all of them.”
Meanwhile, while he was in France , his laїcité represented a breakaway from
culture, religion, and modernity. He started studying the French language,
proving his early interest in French culture and literature. By despising Ṣūfi
Islam, he depicted the culture as primitive, broke away from religion by
12 Chapter 1

reproaching the ‘ulama, and censured modernity by denouncing secularism

(though he was, in fact, secular in nature). Typically, his brand of Islamism
differentiated its field of action by designating religion and religiosity to dif-
ferent spheres, advancing “politics over religiosity and political action over
theological reflections.” Within this, al-Turabi’s Islamism limited itself with
respect to the debate over secularism. However, al-Turabi attacks secularism
and secularists all the time. Here, al-Turabi’s Islamism built its own instru-
ments which functioned outside of what would be described as religious,
thought-of rationalization. As stated earlier, al-Turabi himself described the
field of his Islamism as dominated by “students and university graduates
everywhere [who] represent modernity, and they are the only current which
exercises any measure of ijtihad, any review of history.”23 How his Islamists
differ from other groups that relate to modernity, according to this, is based
on an assumption and a generalization. He assumes that “liberal politicians
and intellectuals are not interested in Islamic history, they are interested in
European history; they want to transplant European institutions. They don’t
know how to grow them in soil. They look so much to the West that they are
not actually renewing, they are not deciding any ijtihad (processes of creative
reasoning). If there are any mujtahidin (the Jurist conducting Ijitihad), they
are the Islamists now.” The Sudanese mujtahdin, according to him, are
“young people who are equal; there was no one who could proclaim to be
senior in age to become an absolute sheikh.” These groups, or lumpen intel-
ligencia as described by Guilain Denoeux and Olivier Roy before him, are
“not usually clerics but young, university educated intellectuals who claim
for themselves the right to interpret the true meaning of religion (their actual
knowledge of Islam is typically sketchy).” At the same time, their reference
presents the political discourse of al-Turabi and those who blindly follow
him in denouncing secularism as a “political discourse in religious garb.”
In this sense Islamism is, internally and externally, secularism at the same
time. In its “two-sided relation to modernity and the West at the very heart
of Islamist ideology, lies a powerful, comprehensive critique of the West
and what Islamists see as the corrupting political and cultural influence of
the West on Middle East societies.” However, “the Islamists’ reliance on
concepts drawn from the Islamic tradition also indicates a desire to break
away from Western terminology. Hence, Islamism is a decidedly modern
phenomenon in at least two critical respects: the profile of its leaders and its
reliance on Western technology.”24 Ḥasan al-Turabi added another aspect to
his Islamism—its resemblance to Salafism. While he agrees with the Salafis
in denigrating Sūfi Islam, he takes it a step further within his laїcité by brag-
ging that he is a child of French culture and disapproves of the ‘ulama and
their institutions. Hence, al-Turabi’s Islamism has floated free of modernity
and its secular underpinnings, free of Islam and its scholarship or ‘ulama, and
 An Introduction 13

free of culture and its Sūfi representations. Such provocation, riddled with
ideological exceptionalism, one would argue, has set him free to practice his
unchecked ijtihād and to critically challenge everybody else since only a few
people—his disciples—could be conformists. Aḥmed Kamal al-Din argues
that al-Turabi “gave himself unlimited freedom,” but that freedom has gone
wild by giving no attention to the conventions or rules of engagement within
the local, Islamist, and Islamic discourse. It developed laissez-faire—forms
of verbal and, later, physical violence that evolved around a system of conflict
and became a group-binding function for utter separation of the group and its
individual members from the outside world.
This is one of the most dangerous consequences of Islamism at large
and Ḥasan al-Turabi’s brand of Islamism in particular—that Islamists are
characterized by an image and practice of verbal and physical violence;
weirdness or fraudulence is a product and an arsenal of its political behavior.
For years, Sudanese bystanders directed pejorative designations of profane
culture and labels for them, such as kizan (tin cups), tujar al-Din (religion ven-
dors), and fascists. At the heart of this stream of epithets that some Sudanese
citizens fling at them is something perceived as a representation of a disin-
genuous, reprehensible faith. At the same time, it was clear that the Islamists
had been living a culture of distance, as most of them feel that they had been
under a state of social siege. Or as Paul Ritter puts it, they were in a different
setting, exercising “an instrument of censure”—especially as they were finding
themselves bombarded by such torrents of jokes, satirical remarks, and cari-
catures. All of this makes Islamism function as a political and social magnet
that attracts select individuals and groups for reasons other than personal piety
and makes climbing up the ladder of the organization to leadership positions,
or tamkeen25 and kasb, the true initiative. Many other Sudanese people describe
this as fasad (corruption), a vocational matter that requires conformity among
other mundane qualities and requirements rather than adherence to faith.
But beyond the violence that Islamists had directed toward almost every
single group of the Sudanese population, Ḥasan al-Turabi himself became its
subject and target as well—and he received it in abundance. Most importantly,
this became the core of an identity of a closed and self-satisfied political body
politic and the establishment of singular invocation. It is also what they
consider to be the truth, which continued to deny the public existence of the
Other and allowed them to see themselves only and often within the form of
domination. In reality, they never saw the incoherence of the experience that
such domination creates—that is, the invisibility of humanity and citizens’
rights as well as the apparent lack of imagining the Other within what Badiou
manifests as the state of the situation, or to use the Quranic term, al-Nfs al-
lawama, or “the reflective or blaming self.” From this emerges the dark side
of Islamism and its faceless vehicles of violence and commitment to banal
14 Chapter 1

evil. And because evil is rootless, and “because it has no roots it has no
limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep the whole world.”26
This worldview made the impulse of insensitivity toward their sur-
roundings a recurring phenomenon. In addition, the uncompromising stand
of al-Turabi and his Islamists against all shades of non-Islamists—from
Communists to other secular individuals and groups—makes no room for
the Other, who is perceived by al-Turabi and other Islamists as the main
threat within a Muslim society. Hence, it has become a primary goal of the
Islamists to keep secularists at a distance, expelled if possible, or eliminated
without remorse. These two impulses have opened the way for a callous and
never-ending war of attrition between the Islamists and their insignificant
Other—as the presence of each side is perceived as ephemeral. In retrospect,
we have seen within the last five decades that both sides have been living in a
“state of suspended extinction,” as each side has been turned by the other into
an object that should be eliminated through the state apparatus of coercion
or private violence. Both state and private violence grew and both the sides
continued to fortify their power pursuits, exploited and played out within
the rivalry between superpowers. The Islamists in power invented and put in
practice a new model or critical theory of savage separation of religion and
the state, where the state was designated to invent and exercise all and unlim-
ited forms of violence against its citizens. Some of the defining characteristics
and productions of this development, which are of great significance, mate-
rialized in (1) a complete withdrawal from the long-held Islamist ideology
of al-Islam hwa al-Hall (Islam is the solution) and a switch to violence as
the solution. Here, ‘Alī ‘Osmān and his collaborators of second-generation
Islamists established, championed, and ruled with no limit of domination,
by and large, with a centralized, regime power, exercising violence from
which no person, including the Islamists themselves and their shaikh, was
immune; (2) forcing the southern Sudanese people to walk away from the
Islamist regime and its oppressive state but not from Sudan’s field of action,
as they maintained the name, Sudan, in a part of the name of their new state;
(3) gradual distancing, by default and by design, from Sudan and cocooning
into ‘Abdel Raḥim Ḥamdi’s triangle, where their “imagined,” “core regime
supporters” were concentrated, neglecting the rest of the country; and (4)
the creation of a janjaweed force which devastated and pillaged Darfur and
other parts of western Sudan: a recognized and authorized counter-insurgent
military unit dedicated to pacifying the Sudanese population by killing wher-
ever dissent expressed itself.
The second phase of al-Turabi’s Islamism was the initiation of al-Turabi’s
strategic vision of waḥdaniyya or “oneness.”27 Later al-Turabi explained and
continued to promote this idea as the deep-seated, grand theory of what he
calls “Unitarianism,” which he has assumed, developed, and followed as his
 An Introduction 15

operational, high-status stipulation. Unitarianism here represents the “funda-

mental principle that explains almost every aspect of doctrinal or practical
Islam.”
Hence, through time, the idea of Unitarianism, which started as a rep-
resentation characteristic of “leadership as one,” has extended to embrace a
total order of “not just that God is one, absolutely one, but also existence is
one, life is one; all life is just a program of worship, whether it’s econom-
ics, politics, sex, private, public or whatever.” Hence, leadership as one
was initiated and confirmed by “his new grip on the movement [that] was
dramatically demonstrated in the decision to issue a communiqué on Novem-
ber 2nd in the name of Ḥasan al-Turabi as secretary-general of Ikhwan.”
This move was “even more significant, given that no such post as Ikhwan
secretary-general existed then. In fact such a designation contradicted the
resolutions of the fifth congress of the party [which was held in 1962] that
insisted on collective leadership as a safeguard against what was seen then
as the abuse by [the previous leader al-Rashid] al-Ṭahir of his position.”
What is not surprising was the eagerness of the younger, college-educated
groups, most of whom supported Dr. Ḥasan and his new leadership. They
claimed to have drawn inspiration from the 1964 October Revolution which
would, in turn, be applied to the new image and prestige of the University of
Khartoum and its environment. This was a sentiment that al-Turabi and his
party continually reproduced, communicated, and accentuated particularly in
the decisive mobilization and promotion of their own self-image. Al-Turabi
repeatedly—especially when called upon to describe his group, mostly to
Western audiences of journalists and scholars—claimed that Islamism “is the
only modernity.” It is in this form that al-Turabi’s relationship with moder-
nity, as he perceived it, drew a “marked sense of self-awareness” and a clear
line between his and other forms of “traditional” Islamism—the Ikhwan in
particular—that adopted the term al-Amin al-‘Aām (the secretary general)
for al-Murshid al-‘Aām (the General Guide). From such an order (and the
body of politics that emerged out of it) came a very serious, foundational
consequence of al-Turabi’s theory of practice and his perception of people as
one. According to this, neither dissent nor disagreement could be tolerated.
In this sense, the “Other” has been regarded not only as the enemy but as a
threat and heresy from which society, held together with and sustained by the
power-as-one, should be protected. This concept constituted the foundation of
the Islamists’ totalitarian pursuit, and the violence that ensued was the prime
example of their regime from 1989 to the present.
When al-Turabi assumed leadership of the Islamic party in 1964, it was a
small organization of no more than a couple thousand members, who were
mostly students from universities, higher education institutions, and secondary
schools. The ICF advocated an “Islamic constitution” and an “Islamic state.”
16 Chapter 1

All of these factors added to al-Turabi’s personality cult, “grouping around him
some of the younger and more militant members, but at the same time alienat-
ing some of the old guards who clashed with him repeatedly.” ‘Alī al-Ḥaj
Moḥamed claims that those old guard members were not sidelined by al-Turabi
but rather sidelined inevitably by their own ineptitude. In his book, Min Tarikh
al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin fi al-Sudan 1953–1980 (From the History of Muslim
Brothers in the Sudan 1953–1980), ‘Iesa Makki ‘Osmān Azraq, one of the
elders of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, briefly describes some of these
clashes and how some of the movement’s leaders complained about the harsh
language of their new secretary general, Dr. Ḥasan al-Turabi. Azraq particu-
larly referred to an incident when some members of the executive committee of
the movement demanded an apology from al-Turabi for publicly insulting Dr.
Zain al-‘Abdin al-Rikabi, another professor, a member of the executive com-
mittee, and the editor of the movement’s paper, al-Mithaq. Al-Turabi refused
to apologize and according to Azraq’s story, said that he “has never been
used to apologizing in public.”28 Such an account holds significance because
this behavior continued to be al-Turabi’s norm, even when he was asked to
apologize to the Sudanese people for his role in the 1989 military coup and the
atrocities committed as a result of it. Again, he said he would not apologize and
stated that he apologizes only to ‘Allah. Hence, he has always placed himself
above individuals, colleagues, organizations, the nation, and the state. Accord-
ingly, we are here in front of a personality that floats above history. In his inter-
view with the Egyptian TV host, Muna al-Shazali, he explained that he does
not like to padlock himself to any political, partisan, or religious formation.
“I would like to talk to the human beings in the world and in existence,” he
echoed to his interviewer.
Ḥasan ‘Abdalla al-Turabi was as much an enigma, having shrouded
himself with mystery, to those who loved, respected, or feared him as he was
to those who disparaged him, competed with him, or hated him. Throughout
his political career, he has been accused—especially by former colleagues
and disciples—of numerous shortcomings that include condescension, cal-
lousness, opportunism, and even incredulity or kufr. Yet, no matter how
provocative, controversial, or even notorious some may have found him, he
has still managed to emerge as a key player in Sudan, the region, and the
world—as one capable of commanding the attention and support, if not the
strict allegiance, of thousands of Sudanese people who have streamed in
to listen to him for more than fifty years. He knew how to attract local and
foreign media attention more so than the presidents he served or opposed.
However, on the other hand, he received the harshest treatment from some
of his own disciples, who put him in prison for more time than his enemies
did. The late John Garang describes al-Turabi’s disciples and their actions
as similar to kittens who eat their fathers. Thus, while he was in prison, as
 An Introduction 17

one of his former disciples al-Tigani ‘Abdel Gadir said, al-Turabi wrote his
book, al-Syasa wa al-Ḥukm, “to establish a complete extrication from the
history of al-Ingath while condemning it without a fourth confrontation with
that past.”29 On the contrary, he directed his anger for more than a decade
toward disciples who “tarnished the image of Islam.” All in all, it would be
difficult to rule out Ḥasan al-Turabi as one of the most important political
figures in twentieth-century Sudan and the Muslim world. There might be
reasons for some to overlook this fact, some of which could be attributed to
Ḥasan al-Turabi himself. Yet, the fact that his personality did not match his
theory of value contributed to his importance. Nevertheless, his Islamism
has been missed in action and represents a desperate failure to provide an
objective formalization of itself (regardless of his denial of this). This fail-
ure, as well as many others, has undermined his Islamism from within and
without.
First, to understand this situation, we need to look deeply to its starting
point, which is al-Turabi’s failure to see and accept, as a moral, religious,
political, and civil value, the necessity of the process by which people as citi-
zens agree, according to their free will, without coercion or a military coup
or the violence that emerges from it. There are many sides to this picture. It is
not violence, antagonism, and exclusion that sustain Islam, it is solidarity,
togetherness, and respect for human dignity and citizens’ rights that make
it sensitive and responsive to the habits of the heart. Without and outside of
human rights, legitimate in collective life and growth, there is no salvation.
Second, until his last day, al-Turabi had not recognized that his theory
of value in practice, which was lost in action for ‘Alī ‘Osmān and his team,
produced a system that set aside the will of God, the nature of the human
being, and the dream and ability of the Sudanese citizens to create a system
that offers them comfort, dignity, and peace.
Third, with al-Turabi’s theory of value, though missing in action, his
disciples ended up producing a new form of savage separation of religion
and state where the state was designated as a field of coercion or a violent
system of control over the society. I describe this model of separation as
savage because the state is tailored to the security imperatives of the regime
for which the state operates as a coercive and violence-intensive structure to
subdue, appease, discipline, and even kill citizens, including the Islamists
themselves, when the need arises.
Fourth, the phases of his transformation transpired out of his evolving lead-
ership conditions. He transformed from Dr. Ḥasan, the university professor,
into the high leader Dr. Ḥasan, head of the political Islamists’ party, and then
into Shaikh Ḥasan, the uncontested leader—at least in appearance—who, in
the end, solidified into a totalitarian leader, taking steps toward an unfulfilled
Sunni Wilayat-e-Faqih.
18 Chapter 1

Later, some of his remaining loyalists boasted that he taught his renegade
disciples libs al-shal wa istimal al-jawal (how to wear the neck shawl and use
a cell phone). One can see more in this commotion than in that insinuation,
especially when other developments, such as style, taste, and modernity, were
not freed but added to the weight of new and old images.
On March 5, 2016, Ḥasan al-Turabi died in Khartoum at the age of 84 and
was reportedly working in his office, planning fearlessly for battle against
former disciples who turned, from intimate friends, into real enemies through
what he called al-nizam al-Khalif (the alternative system). Until his last day,
al-Turabi never gave up, though his final fight proved fateful. Nevertheless,
Ḥasan al-Turabi might be one of the most important political personalities
in postcolonial Sudan, the region, and the Muslim world. There might be
reasons for some to overlook this fact. Some of these reasons could be attrib-
uted to Ḥasan al-Turabi himself. Yet, what makes him important is his failure
to see and accept, as a moral, religious, political, and civil value, the necessity
to pay attention to the processes by which people as citizens agree according
to their free will, without coercion or a military coup (and the violence that
emerges from it). It is not violence, antagonism, and exclusion that sustain
Islam or create an Islamists’ state, but solidarity, togetherness, and respect
for human dignity and citizens’ human and civil rights. Ḥasan al-Turabi has
remained an albatross around the Islamists’ movement, and Islamism has
remained an albatross around him in return. The debate here could be settled
or continued in a manner as quiet and simple, or as violent and radical, as its
beginning (at the students’ forums of high institutions of learning in Sudan
from the 1960s onward). It started as a counterrevolution in performance
and as Islamism in practice—as a representation of the only Islamists’ State
in the Muslim world. It is true that such a “performance always exceeds its
space and its image, since it lives in its own doing.”30 However, the events
that marked al-Turabi’s Islamism, when it functioned as a political doctrine
and regime, might lead us to conclude that al-Turabi’s Islamism has added
nothing new or of value to the Sudanese human experience, in particular, or
to that of Muslims worldwide, over all contemporary discourses and modes
of existence. They have demonstrated the failure of Islamism in theory and
practice and have swept away everything that could have given it value.
There is, in reality, no “al-Turabi Islamism” or Islamism in general, either
as a worldview or social movement. Like other isms, which attempt to limit
human action with straightjackets, one could conclude that there is no system
or doctrine called Islamism. That is to say what all isms have in common
and what they indicate by their nature, to borrow from Alain Badiou, is “the
closure of an entire epoch of thought and its concerns.”31
This study aims to show that, through the internal and external and sub-
jective and objective developments and demonstrations by which Ḥasan
 An Introduction 19

al-Turabi represented himself as well as his Islamism within local and

regional fields of action, this human experience might be a reliable guide and
analytical tool that tells us how Islamism has been deprived of meaningful
significance. Here, Ḥasan al-Turabi and his Sudanese project were guilty of
all elements of failure. From this, it is important to realize that other models
express the same nature and reveal the same shape of the ventures of his
Islamism and its representations, as a collective, and failures, as an outcome,
in Sudan and elsewhere. A political sociologist, Hazem Kandil, confirms in
his work, Inside the Brotherhood, that “the reputation [of the Brotherhood]
established over eight decades collapsed in less than eight months.”32 This
interpretive claim and other inquiries of Islamists’ modes of existence, as
Frederic Volpi says, represent an effort to transform the traditional approach
and other approaches “from rigid, analytical frameworks” into what amounts
to “making sense of the modern developments in light of, but not predeter-
mined by, the past.”33
From Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Daniel Bell’s The End of
Ideology to Francis Fukuyama’s highly controversial book The End of History,
the literature on the demise of regimes and their ideologies is massive and
wide-ranging. Narratives and counter-narratives from this repertoire of
knowledge have been making an “effort to provide a coherent set of answers
to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings in the passage
of their lives.”34 The end of Islamism as a social and political ideology—what
is impatiently foreseen by many as inevitable—is a project and order coming
to fulfillment. Many would argue that the Arab Spring35 was a self-fulfilling
prophecy and self-justifying objective that revealed the power of the active
forces of the corrosive actions of inner, covert, and overt realities incongru-
ous to the ones shimmering at the top. Such realities manifest themselves in
alternative realities that continue to interrogate, challenge, and confront the
essence of Islamism. Hazem Kandil reported that he “asked the old, bearded
man standing next to me in Tahrir Square why he joined the protests. ‘They
promised us that Islam is the solution,’ he replied. ‘But under Muslim Broth-
erhood rule we saw neither Islam nor a solution.’ The country that invented
Islamism may well be on its way to undoing its spell.”36 Many would argue
that, in addition to the brothers’ dismal performance in power, the poor
performance of the Sudanese Islamists was an eye-opener for 33 million
Egyptian citizens who marched against the Islamists’ rule.
This study will address these issues, largely through a sociological, ana-
lytic biography of this era in the Sudanese, post-October human experience.
In this experience, the Sudanese Islamists’ movement can be viewed, in part,
as a continuance of political Islam or Islamism—but in all its transformation,
it could be seen as “al-Turabi Islamism.” This human experience has been
seeking sociopolitical change that could colonize the religious, social, and
20 Chapter 1

economic aspects of the population by taking hold of the state and using it as a
vessel, reaching this end through violent and nonviolent ways. Al-Turabi and
his Islamism, in reality, produced a full-fledged, counter revolutionary effect
that far exceeded what Islamism al-Islam hwa al-Hall (Islam is the Solution)
was aiming for. In this sense, not only did it not put an end to Islamism, but,
most importantly, it gave rise to serious questions that we are all now forced
to attempt to answer. These questions, from which Islamism has since been
able to draw substance contributing to its use of violence, instead became, in
practice, the solution and, in turn, shaped a highly regimented, new model
of savage separation of religion and state. In this new model, the state was
responsible for regulating and distributing old and new forms of violence,
making it one of the most violent forms that the Sudanese had ever experi-
enced. It is no wonder that Ḥasan al-Turabi was not saved from this violence,
as he became one of its major victims. But what happened with Ḥasan al-
Turabi, the person, was precisely a displacement of the system in transfor-
mation. Though the answer to the questions and objectives of Islamism are in
practice, which one cannot but reject, which represent in part what happened
to the Sudanese, it is only one part of the dark side of Islamism and it dis-
contents or is a representation of al-Turabi Islamism in action.

NOTES

1. Some accuse Dr. Ḥasan al-Turabi of lying about his academic, doctoral degree.
According to many sources, chief among them Moḥamed E. Ḥamdi who published
his long interview with al-Turabi under the title: The Making of An Islamic Political
Leader: Conversation with Ḥasan al-Turabi, al-Turabi spent four years preparing
for his doctoral thesis in French on “States of Emergency in Constitutional Juris
Prudence.” The front cover page in Appendix 1 tells about an MA thesis defended in
1964, the year he came back to Sudan.
2. The Supreme Council of the state is a ceremonial office composed of five,
public personas created by the postcolonial parliamentary system in Sudan. It was
meant to represent the national unity of the country, not to guide day-to-day gov-
ernment activities or to exercise any political authority. The real political power
resided in the council of ministers with the position of the prime minister. The first
Supreme Council was dissolved by ‘Abboud’s military rule to be replaced by a ruling
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces under the presidency of Major General Ibra-
him ‘Abboud. The Supreme Military Council, or the council of the head of the state,
became the standard model in Sudan with minor modifications during democratically
elected parliamentary systems.
3. The origin of the war in southern Sudan, which is called the Southern Problem,
dates back to the 1950s before Sudan was officially declared independent on Janu-
ary 1, 1956. On August 18, 1955, the Equatorial Corps, a military unit composed of
 An Introduction 21

southerners, mutinied at the southern city of Torit. The mutiny spread to the other
three provinces in southern Sudan. By 1963 the insurgency escalated to a serious war
during which southern guerrillas roamed the countryside while government forces
melded the cities. In August 1964, desperately attempting to find a solution to the
enervating campaign in the South, ‘Abboud’s regime appointed a 25-man commis-
sion to study the problem and give proposals for a solution. When the commission, in
turn, asked for public dialogue on the issue, the community of the University of Khar-
toum engaged in debates that started with the one mentioned here and later escalated
to confrontation between the students and the police who were brought into campus
to disperse the demonstrators. One student named Ahmed al-Qurashi was killed when
the police fired at the demonstrators. The civil disobedience continued and success-
fully unseated the ‘Abboud’s regime.
4. The 16, one-hour long, episodes of interviews by Aḥmed Mansour’s program
Shāhid ‘Alaa al-‘Asr (A Testament to the Times) was recorded by al-Jazeera, a TV
station, in 2010 but aired in April 2016, after al-Turabi’s death in March the month
before.
5. Moḥamed ‘Ali Ṣaliḥ, Wathiq Amrecia ‘An Thawrat October (8), al-Rakoba
website, October 2014.
6. Cliff Thompson, “Days of the October Revolution.” Unpublished Manuscript.
7. One of the remarkable achievements of the October Revolution was the Round
Table Conference, which convened in Khartoum, March 16–25, 1965. It brought
Sudanese politicians from the North and South into agreement upon a solution to the
southern Sudan question.
8. Austin Dacey, The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
(Amherst, Prometheus Books, 2008) 25.
9. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonial-
ism (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998) 1.
10. Abdelwahab el-Affendi, Turabi’s Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan
(London, Grey Seal Books, 1991) 65.
11. Ahmed Abdel Rahman Mohamed, one of the closest members to al-Turabi out
of the many Islamist leaders from day one, reminded al-Turabi that “he turned the
Islamist movement into a Sufi ṭarīqa [sect] and [he] became its Shaikh” (see chapter 3).
12. Author’s interview with ‘Alī al-Ḥaj, June 2014, Bonn.
13. The community of the state represents a new organization of power that
emerged out of the rise of a small class of publicly educated Sudanese citizens which
continued to grow through the expansion of public education since the colonial times.
This community, which was created to serve the state, included white, blue, and
khaki-colored state employees in addition to white arraigned peasants of new, state-
controlled farming projects, especially the al-Gezira scheme. This community of the
state continued to find legitimization with its invention of a progressive self-image
and cultural identity as an important part, if not the sole part, of modernity in Sudan.
See Abdullahi Gallab, A Civil Society Differed: The Tertiary Grip of Violence in the
Sudan (Gainesville, FL, University Press of Florida, 2011).
14. Ahmed Khair, Kifah Jil: Tarikh Harakat al-Khirijin wa Tatawurutha fil-
Sudan, 2nd edition (Khartoum, al-Dar al-Sudaniyya, 1980) 18.
22 Chapter 1

15. Andrew Natsios, Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to
Know (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012) 86.
16. Ahmed Kamal al-Din, a recorded phone interview with the author, recording,
Bahrain, March 2012.
17. Abdel Rahim Omer Muhi al-Din, al-Islamiuon fi-l-Sudan: Dirasat al-Tatour
al-Fikri wa al-Siasi 1969–1985 (Beirut, Dar al-Fikr lil Tibaa wa al-Nashr, 2004) 127.
18. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism
(San Diego, A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1985) 72.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Tarbiya is an Arabic word that linguistically means upbringing, refinement,
and/or growth. For Islamist movements, as defined by Ḥasan al-Banna, the founder
of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, it is a method used to groom members
and to instill in them a sense of mission.
23. Arthur L. Lowrie, Islam, Democracy, the State and the West: A Round Table
with Hasan al-Turabi (Tampa, The World & Islam Enterprise, University of South
Florida, 1993) 13.
24. Ibid.
25. Tamkeen is a Quranic term associated with “those who [even] if we makanahm
(firmly established them) on earth remain constant in salah (prayer) and render zakah
(alms levy), enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid the doing of what is wrong;
but with God rests the final outcome of all events.” Al-Hajj 22:41. For the Sudanese
Islamists, tamkeen represented a takeover by means of the state to extract as much
wealth as possible and to climb up to the highest level of political and state power by
appropriating the most senior positions to their members.
26. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on Banality of Evil (Lon-
don, Penguin Books, 2006).
27. One of al-Turabi’s final publications was his Tafsir of the Quran; he called
it al-Tafsir al-Tawhidi. In 2004, the first volume of Tafsir was published by al-Saqi
publishers in London. It includes his analysis of the first third of the Quran as well
as a comprehensive introduction to what he calls ‫النظریة التوحیدیة التجدیدیة‬, his Unitarian,
modernizing.
28. ‘Iesa Makki ‘Osmān Azraq, Min Tariekh al-Ikhwan al Muslimin Fil-Sudan
1953–1980 (Khartoum, Dar al-Balad Publishing, n.d.) 109.
29. Al-Tijani Abdel Gadir, Ikhwanuna al-Siqar wa Mashariihim al-Kubra (Khar-
toum, al-Sahafa Daily, 2006).
30. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performances: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor,
MI, University of Michigan Press, 2005).
31. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London, Bloomsbury, 2015) 1.
32. Hazem Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood (Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2015) 1.
33. Frederic Volpi, Political Islam Observed (New York, Columbia University
Press, 2010) 42.
34. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, Basic
Books, 1978) xv.
 An Introduction 23

35. The Arab Spring refers to democratic movements that started with an uprising
of sustained street demonstrations which spread across the Arab world in 2011. The
movement originated in Tunisia and quickly spread to other parts of the Middle East.
By the end of early 2012, rulers were removed from power in Tunisia, Egypt, and
Yemen.
36. Hazem Kandil, “The End of Islamism” (London, LRB, July 4, 2013: http://
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/07/04/Hazem-Kandil.the-end-of-Islamism/#more-16058).
died specially bear

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