"America incarnates the devil for Muslims. When I say Muslims, I mean all the Muslims in the world."
--Hassan al-Turabi, Saddam Hussein's close ally, Osama bin Laden's friend and one-time benefactor, as quoted in an interview with the Associated Press (1997)
WHEN SECRETARY OF STATE CONDOLEEZZA RICE visited Sudan last week, much of the press's coverage focused on the rough treatment her senior advisors and NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who was among the reporters traveling with the Secretary, received. Mitchell had questioned the Sudanese president, Omar el-Bashir, about his government's role in the current battle raging in Darfur, where an ongoing humanitarian crisis has drawn considerable attention. For this, she received Khartoum's version of hospitality: She was roughed up by Bashir's henchmen.Absent from much of the discussion in the press, however, is any mention of Hassan al-Turabi. This is curious since late last month the arch-terrorist was freed from his prison home by Bashir's government. His supporters have been accused of being directly involved in the Darfur crisis, which raises important questions about Bashir's willingness to end the carnage. But Turabi's freedom is disturbing for a variety of other reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that he is, in many ways, a founding father of the Islamist terrorist network we currently face. It was Turabi's apocalyptic vision for confronting the West, after all, which brought together Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden against their common enemy: the United States.
At first blush, Turabi's role as an international terrorist leader would appear to be an unlikely outcome of his educational background. Born in 1932, Turabi studied law at the University of Khartoum, then at the University of London and, finally, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Multilingual, charismatic, and western-educated, Turabi at first espoused a much more lenient version of Islam. According to Turabi, women deserved a greater degree of equality throughout the Muslim world and democracy was not inconsistent with the fundamental teachings of the Koran. But such comparatively moderate views were part of a superficial veil covering Turabi's deeper, more radical beliefs.