The spectre of Hasan al-Turabi and political Islam in Sudan

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 brought the concept of political Islam to the attention of the West. Ever since then, social scientists have struggled to define political Islam, and, more recently, the Islamic State. Were these new concepts, postcolonial legacies that suddenly emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a challenge to liberal democratic order? Or were Muslims simply speaking on the international stage in the languages and vernaculars that they had always used, but for the first time Western audiences were finally forced to hear their thoughts? Writing of his fieldwork in Sudan during the early 1980s, the sociologist Steve Howard depicts himself as confronting a familiar quandary for a visiting American. He reflects on his sense of wonder that 'this poor African society could produce these advanced religious thinkers' (p. 58). How should we understand Sudan's religious thinkers, men such as Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Hasan al-Turabi and the functionaries and ideologues of the Islamic Salvation Regime that came to power in 1989?

Part of what has bedevilled social scientists when writing about political Islam or the Islamic State has been a curious desire to dissect these terms as if politics as an ideal type could be separated from Islam, or, even more troubling, as Noah Salomon points out in his insightful introduction, the fruitlessness of Wael Hallaq's assertion in The Impossible State that Islam and the modern state are irreconcilable (Salomon, pp. 22–3). All three of the books under discussion dispense early on with ideal types of Islam–the state or the political–and get into the often messy if generative history of the men and women who have spent their lives debating what it means to be Sudanese and Muslim.

During the final quarter of the twentieth century, perhaps no one was more synonymous with Sudanese Islam than Hasan al-Turabi, and his presence or absence in the three books discussed here becomes an acute lens through which to see how the authors tackle the meaning of political Islam and the Islamic State. W. J. Berridge's thorough and informed recent biography of Hasan al-Turabi is an obvious place to begin. Berridge starts by addressing the mystery of al-Turabi; was he a brilliant liberal reformer of Islam or an Islamic extremist all too willing to condone violence and authoritarianism? Part of the difficulty in answering this question clearly relates to the tendency of analysts to attempt to divide Islamists into reformers and radicals–or, in the words of Mahmood Mamdani, 'good' Muslims and 'bad' Muslims. Berridge relies on Youssef Choueiri's dichotomy between Islamic 'reformism' and 'radicalism'. For Choueiri, '"Islamic Reformism" and "Islamic Radicalism" are epochal as well as qualitative terms'. Reformism extending from the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century preceded Islamic radicalism as the epoch in which we currently find ourselves. Reformism meant the reinterpretation of Islamic concepts and the appropriation of European intellectual traditions. Choueiri, however, posited that 'Islamic Radicalism is a politico-cultural movement that postulates a qualitative contradiction between western civilization and the religion of Islam' (Berridge, p. 13). Al-Turabi, of course, crosses these boundaries. Instead of focusing on al–Turabi the intellectual, the image that emerges from Berridge's careful reconstruction of his life from Sudanese newspaper sources is al-Turabi the master of the Sudanese political sphere. While words were his weapon of choice, by the end of Berridge's reconstruction of his career the reader is left with the overwhelming impression that al-Turabi is not remembered because he offered a developed and systematic philosophy, but because he was able to...