The Sudanese politician Hassan al-Turabi, who has died aged 84, was Africa’s most active contemporary Islamic ideologue. He was involved in the imposition of strict Islamic law, and was an early mentor of Osama bin Laden.
As the long-time power behind the throne of Sudan’s despotic leader Omar Bashir, Turabi gave safe haven to Bin Laden in Sudan from 1990 to 1996; the US counter-terrorism expert and policy adviser Richard Clarke called them them “soulmates sharing a vision of a worldwide struggle to establish a pure caliphate”. In 1993 Washington designated Sudan “a state sponsor of terrorism” and the UN later imposed sanctions on Khartoum after Turabi’s agents allegedly aided an attempt to kill the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 1995.
Two years later Turabi declared: “America incarnates the devil for all Muslims in the world.” Throughout the 1990s he facilitated training camps in Sudan for militants from Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He also armed the child soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a murderous Ugandan Christian sect.
Setting the theocratic tenor of Bashir’s unelected regime in its first decade from 1989 (the BBC called him Sudan’s de facto leader), Turabi drove the start of Khartoum’s war in Darfur against secessionist rebels and often likened that conflict to a religious “jihad”. The war claimed almost 2 million lives and displaced another 4 million people, inflicting a terrible toll on Sudan’s Christian, Animist and ethnically African people in the south.
In 1999, however, he fell out with Bashir and was repeatedly imprisoned or confined to house arrest. Thereafter he recast himself, rather bizarrely, as a champion of parliamentary democracy agitating unsuccessfully for Bashir’s overthrow and demanding his indictment as a war criminal at the International Court.
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