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| Africa Horn |
| Yesterday's Islamist still makes sparks fly among Muslims |
| 2006-04-25 |
| For a man considered by some as yesterday's Islamist, Hassan al-Turabi shows little inclination towards a quiet retirement. The 74-year-old former eminence grise of the Sudan regime and one-time host of Osama bin Laden has been infuriating Muslim traditionalists worldwide, earning accusations of apostasy on Sunday by Sudan government-approved clerics. He has provoked their anger by championing equal rights for women, including the right of Muslim women to marry outside their religion, pray alongside men and adopt a more liberal attitude to the veil. Mr Turabi also managed to cast a shadow over last month's annual summit of Arab leaders in Khartoum with the suggestion that highly placed officials in the host regime were implicated in a 1995 assassination attempt on Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. In an interview at his Khartoum residence, where the foyer still has enough chairs to host a parliament of America's enemies, Mr Turabi preaches freedom of expression and women's rights. His efforts in the 1990s to unite the US and Israel's enemies by bringing together Arab nationalists, leftists and radical Islamists from both Sunni and Shia Islam, earned him a reference in the report on September 11 as a precursor to al-Qaeda's global jihad. But today, he plays the pragmatic ally of globalisation and supporter of the moderating influence of democracy. "If you allow freedom, anyone who appears with a very exceptional, extreme view, his views will not sell actually. He would realise he is isolating himself so he has to integrate into society by moderating his programmes and his attitudes. That is better for us and better for humanity," he says. Last year, Mr Turabi emerged from jail, where he has spent a good part of the last five years since losing out in a power struggle with Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, his former ally and understudy in political Islam. But while he may now be on the receiving end of the autocratic methods he, as the regime's chief ideologue, helped institutionalise in Khartoum, he senses he is on the right side of history in the wider region. In 2000, Mr Turabi's project to Islamise Sudan under Shariah law and unite radical Islamists from across the Muslim world in opposition to the west had lost much of its allure. As one of only two Islamist movements to win power by force in the Sunni Muslim world, Mr Turabi's National Islamic Front along with the Taliban in Afghanistan had muddied political Islam by association with intolerance and dictatorship. Mr Turabi shows little remorse and blames the oppression and tyranny of other governments in the region, with the complicity of the US, for fuelling the violent manifestations of political Islam. As Sudan's foremost theologian, whose political career has dazzled at times with Machiavellian brilliance, many Sudanese still see Mr Turabi's hand in every conspiracy - from the Darfur rebellion to the revolt in Sudan's east - and believe it is too soon to write him off. |
| Posted by:ryuge |