KHARTOUM, Sudan — Hassan al-Turabi, the Sudanese Islamist who played a key role in the 1989 coup that brought President Omar al-Bashir to power and who once hosted Osama bin Laden, died Saturday at the age of 84.
Al-Turabi championed radical Islam in the 1990s, inviting bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to Sudan, which became a safe haven for jihadists. He once called the United States the “incarnation of the devil” and hailed bin Laden as a hero.
But Sudan expelled al-Qaeda under U.S. and international pressure in 1996, and al-Turabi later remade himself as a mainstream politician.
Al-Bashir dismissed him as parliament speaker after he backed legislation aimed at curbing the president’s powers in 1999, and he went on to form the opposition Popular Congress Party and support rebels in southern Sudan and Darfur. Al-Turabi was jailed on a number of occasions and spent more than two years under house arrest from 2001 to 2003.
Born the son of a religious judge in 1932 in the northeastern state of Kassala, al-Turabi was a lifelong scholar of Islam. The oft-smiling, soft-spoken cleric was among the few Islamic scholars to argue that Muslim women could marry Christian or Jewish men.
Al-Turabi obtained a law degree at the University of Khartoum, and later studied in the U.K. before obtaining a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1964. In addition to Arabic, he was fluent in English, French and German.
He had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, rising to become their leader in 1969, but the group was dissolved following a military coup that year which brought Jaafar al-Nimeiri to power.
Al-Turabi reconciled with the strongman in 1977, and al-Nimeiri awarded the politically savvy ideologue the post of attorney general two years later.
The two began to introduce Islamic law in the 1980s, but al-Turabi did not fully succeed in securing the implementation of Shariah until al-Bashir came to power in a coup that was supported by the scholar’s influential National Islamic Front, which went on to enforce the new regulations.
“The NIF police state and militias committed many human rights abuses, including summary executions, torture, ill treatment, arbitrary detentions, denial of freedoms of speech, assembly and religion,” Human Rights Watch said of that era.
Al-Turabi “led the creation of the NIF police state and associated NIF militias to consolidate Islamist power and prevent a popular uprising,” the rights group said.
He was also an avid supporter of jihadists.
