An Introduction to Dr Hassan Al-Turabi's pamphlet
On the Position of Women in Islam and in Islamic Society
by Sean Gabb, Director of the Sudan Foundation

Dr Hassan al-Turabi

Dr Hassan al-Turabi was born in 1932 in Kassala, a town in Eastern Sudan. His father was a Judge and an expert in Islamic law.

After having received a traditional Islamic education at home, he studied Law at Khartoum University, graduating in 1955. From here, he went to study for a Master's Degree in London, which he completed in 1957, and then to the Sorbonne in Paris, where between 1959 and 1964 he wrote his doctoral thesis on the place of emergency powers within a liberal democracy.

On his return to Sudan, Dr Turabi was appointed Dean of the Law Faculty at the University of Khartoum. He left this position within a few months, to become a Member of Parliament and the Secretary General of the Islamic Charter Front, an organisation that desired a political system in conformity with the teachings of Islam. Electorally and intellectually, the Front's main rivals were the Communists and other socialists, who wanted a completely secular state able to modernise and develop Sudan along the lines then fashionable throughout the world.

In 1969, Sudanese democracy was overthrown by a leftist coup. The Nimeiri Dictatorship that resulted was unwilling to tolerate opposition, and so for the next eight years, Dr Turabi was to suffer repeated arrest and imprisonment. He was arrested again in March 1985, during the popular turbulence that preceded the overthrow of President Nimeiri.

During the next four years, Dr Turabi was a senior figure in Sudanese politics. He led the National Islamic Front, which emerged as the second largest party after the 1986 General Election. As a member of various coalition governments, he served as Attorney General, Minister of Justice, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Deputy Prime Minister.

After the coup of 1989, Dr Turabi was arrested again. However, as several members of the new Government were spiritually close to him, he was soon released, and was able to rise to a position of considerable eminence. Since 1991, he has been Secretary General of the Arab and Islamic Congress, an organisation with branches in 55 Islamic and Western countries. Since 1996, he has been Speaker of the Sudanese Parliament.

The precise extent of his influence is debatable. Some claim that he is the real head of government in Sudan, others that his function is almost wholly decorative. The truth probably lies somewhere between these extremes. Dr Turabi does seem to have had a profound influence over many aspects of Sudanese state policy - though the claims that he is behind every act of that State is almost certainly exaggerated.

The Pamphlet

Dr Turabi wrote his pamphlet On the Position of Women in Islam and in Islamic Society in 1973. Though short, it is held to be of the highest significance. It is seen as part of Dr Turabi's attempt to overcome the great crisis of the modern Islamic mind. It is a crisis that, to a greater or lesser degree, has been felt by most educated Muslims, and that has at times seemed able to overwhelm Islam as a living religion. Its cause is the collision between Islamic and Western civilisation.

In Western Europe, there have been repeated crises of faith during the past 700 years. First, there was the introduction of Islamic Aristotelianism in the 13th century. Though we now think of this as a fertilising influence that culminated in the work of St Thomas Aquinas, it was seen at the time as deeply subversive of the established faith. The religious authorities were unable to distinguish between Algazali, Avicenna and Averoes and their very different approaches to philosophy, seeing them all as a combined threat from an alien and intellectually superior culture. The Condemnations of 1277 had almost no intellectual effect, but were a political response from a threatened orthodoxy.

Then there was the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of the Greek and Latin classics and its realisation of their true meaning. Again, religious orthodoxy was troubled. No matter how long dead, here was a civilisation in which freedom of thought and personal judgement had been raised up as the highest goals. There was a stark contrast between the Socratic dialogues and the intellectual conformity demanded by the Roman Catholic Church. The earlier introduction of Islamic thought had only affected the intellectual lite of Western Europe. The discovery of printing allowed the Renaissance to give a new colour to the whole of Western civilisation.

The Reformation does not directly fit into our scheme, being as it was a dispute between rival orthodoxies. Its result, however, was the Enlightenment - that great rejection of orthodoxy itself that emerged from the clash of orthodoxies. This saw the detachment of natural and moral philosophy from their religious groundings. Its great precursors, Copernicus and Galileo, had already asserted the independence of scientific thought from religious control. Locke, Newton, Adam Smith and Darwin completed the movement.

Strong religious conviction remains possible in the modern West, but religion itself has been influenced by the mental shocks of the past 700 years, and an accommodation has been made between faith and the autonomous sciences. The churches have nothing to say about the possibility of life on Mars. Either it evolved their or it did not: the whole matter is in the realm of empirical reasoning. On the other hand, science has nothing to say about why life exists in the universe, or about the moral duties of intelligent beings: any scientist who trespasses into these areas is quickly revealed as a fool and a charlatan.

But in Islam, there has not been this gradual process of accommodation. After a long age of brilliance, Islamic civilisation went into a decline just as Western civilisation was beginning to move forward. When the two civilisations came into close intellectual contact during the 19th century, Islam was in every sense the weaker party. Rather than gradually introduced, as had happened in Western Europe, the whole body of Western scientific and social thought hit Islam all at once. Concepts that had evolved over many centuries, and that had ceased to shock as they had been incorporated into a coherent view of the world, were suddenly revealed in their fullness to cultures that had no room for them - and at the same time no answer to them.

The result was a mental division that has troubled Islamic societies all through the present century. On the one hand, there are the modernisers. These are in love with Western science, and have an often uncritical veneration for Western political thought. For them, the past is dead. Government action is all a matter of sweeping aside the remnants of the dead past and replacing them with a legislated copy of Western civilisation - usually a highly authoritarian or even Communist version of the West. Look at the Turkish and Iranian modernisation projects of the early 20th century, in which men and women were forced by law to adopt Western dress in the hope that, in looking Western, they might eventually become Western.

On the other hand, there are the religious conservatives. These reject the West in full, maintaining doctrines and customs that are either false in terms of scientific reasoning or inappropriate to a modern society. Look at the highly restrictive moral legislation of countries like Saudi Arabia, and the rejection or even ignorance of much of biology and economics by some conservative Islamic thinkers.

Relatively few educated Muslims have embraced either extreme. Even so, the suspicion has been there, of an incompatibility between faith and reason. Few people have been actively troubled by this apparent incompatibility: most have come to a personal compromise. But the ability of the human mind to hold two contradictory propositions at the same time is never exercised without cost. To be stuck between two worlds can have a terrible effect on an individual's creativity or personal development.

It is the closing of this division that seems to have been the main intellectual concern of Dr Turabi. He begins with two propositions:

First, Western science and many other aspects of Western thought are demonstrably true; and Second, Islam is a religion absolutely true in all its essentials.

These propositions made, any contradiction between them must be due to a misapprehension of one or the other that can be corrected by taking careful thought. Sometimes, the mistake lies in Western thought. Sometimes, it lies in a confusion between the essentials of Islam and the specific traditions of those cultures in which Islam has developed.

We see this method at work in the work here republished. As in many other societies, the position of Sudanese women was considerably improved during the 1960s and 70s. As never before, women were able to gain school and university educations and to enter the workforce on terms roughly equal to those of men. This was at first seen as a threat to the Sudanese Islamic movement. It was trapped in a past where the position of women was unambiguously in the home. It was confronted by a leftist, secular movement that appeared very friendly to the advancement of women. Not surprisingly, the majority of educated Sudanese women rejected the Islamic parties and voted instead for the Communists.

The first Islamic response to this electoral problem was to ignore it. When it persisted, and even became more acute, some pragmatic softening of the traditional line was tried. Meetings were held at the University of Khartoum. In 1964, the National Women's Front was set up to represent the views of Muslim women. However, this strategy was flawed by an obvious incoherence. Its lack of foundations was easily exposed; and it had little effect on the political loyalties of Sudanese women.

Then in 1973, Dr Turabi set about solving the problem. He came down decisively in favour of women's equality within Islam. There was for him no question of an Islamic retreat in the face of economic and social modernisation. He instead sought clearly to show that the inferior status of women within Islamic society had nothing to do with Islam itself, but was a consequence of traditions that were alien - and perhaps even hostile - to the true model of Islam as revealed in its fundamental Scriptures.

Those of us who are Christians, and whose theological expectations derive from the long chains of deductive reasoning used by the mediaeval scholastics, will find Dr Turabi's method of argument unusual. It is based on a close examination of the sayings of Mohammed as recorded in The Koran, and on his actual deeds as recorded in the Hadith. 

[Editor's note:  Muslims actually believe that the Koran is not the sayings of Mohammed (pbuh) but the direct Word of God Himself revealed via the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed.  The Hadith are the sayings of Mohammed, his deeds are known as the Sunnah.]

This makes it very hard for non-Muslims to determine whether Dr Turabi is right. The style of reasoning is similar in many repects to that used in the English Common Law. To know whether St Anselm or Algazali succeeded in demonstrating the existence of God, it is unnecessary to know anything about Christianity or Islam - or even to be religious. The conclusions either follow from the premises or they do not; and the test of whether they follow is absolutely independent of faith. The arguments of Dr Turabi, on the other hand, can only be evaluated by those who are already expert in the Islamic
Scriptures.

This being said, the work was extensively reviewed by the experts. It emerged from discussions within Khartoum University, and was subjected to close examination by Islamic scholars outside Sudan. Though not universally accepted, it has gained sufficient acceptance for us to take it as a valid alternative to the traditional views on the position of women within Islamic society.

In Sudan, its effect was rapid and complete. Without any rejection of or compromise over essentials, Islam was transformed into a vehicle of women's liberation. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese women dropped the alien and otherwise unattractive doctrines of Communism, and returned to their Islamic roots. Educated women who in other countries were leading the revolt against Islamic values were now to be found among the strongest advocates of Islam.

Other Aspects of Dr Turabi's Thought

Though the work here republished has been called the most influential thing ever written by Dr Turabi, it does not stand alone. As said, it proceeds from a clear view of the relationship between faith and reason. Intellectually and culturally, he is outside the defensive traditionalism that produced the late Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and the fundamentalist rebels in Afghanistan. In Islamic terms, he is a liberal. In a recent interview, for example, he explained himself thus:

What would an Islamic Government mean?... The model is very clear; the scope of government is limited. Law is not the only agency of social control. Moral norms, individual conscience, all these are very important, and they are autonomous. Intellectual attitudes toward Islam are not going to be regulated or codified at all. The presumption is that people are free. The religious freedom not just of non-Muslims, but even of Muslims who have different views, is going to be guaranteed. I personally have views that run against all the orthodox schools of law on the status of women, on the court testimony of non-Muslims, on the law of apostasy. Some people say that I have been influenced by the West and that I border on apostasy myself. but I don't accept the condemnation of Salman Rushdie. If a Muslim wakes up in the morning and says he doesn't believe any more, that's his business. There has never been any question of inhibiting people's freedom to express any understanding of Islam. The function of government is not total.

(Quoted in Milton Viorst, "Sudan's Islamic Experiment", Foreign Affairs, Washington DC, Volume 74, Number 3, May/June 1995, p.53.)

"The function of government is not total." These are not words that we should expect to hear from a man who has been characterised in much of the Western media as a religious totalitarian who is directing Sudanese Islam into a jihad against the Christian and Pagan minorities within the country, and against Sudan's neighbours. When a man's constantly repeated words fail to correspond with his reputation among his enemies, someone, somewhere, is guilty of ignorance or perhaps of bad faith.

The Sudan Foundation has not the intellectual means of defending Dr Turabi against his Islamic critics. Nor is it any part of our mission to propagate his ideas in the West. However, it is part of our mission to promote understanding and better relations between the British and Sudanese peoples; and we are therefore proud to have the honour of publishing this highly influential work of Dr Turabi on the position of women within Islamic society.

Sean Gabb
Director
The Sudan Foundation
London
July 1997

President Omar al Bashir of Sudan
(left) and Dr Hassan al-Turabi

Update March 2001
by Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, Editor, Islam For Today dot com
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir seized power in a military coup in 1989 together with his close ally, Islamist ideologue Hassan Turbai, long thought to be the power behind al-Bashir's regime.

Al-Bashir was elected in 1995 for a five-year term. In 2000, the president ousted Turabi from his post as parliament speaker and stripped him of his political power. Al-Bashir accused Turabi of undermining his power.

Turabi later formed the opposition Popular National Congress, which joined other opposition groups in boycotting the presidential and parliamentary elections of December 2000.

Al-Bashir comfortably won as president and his ruling National Congress Party took an overwhelming majority in parliament. Opposition leaders complained of widespread rigging in the elections and discredited the results.  In February 2001, Dr Turabi was detained and CNN quoted his wife as saying that he was being held in solitary confinement in degrading conditions.

Turabi: Sudan heading for revolt
Sudan's opposition leader Hassan Al-Turabi said he feared any uprising could turn bloody and spread beyond the streets of the capital.
Arabia.com News, January 6, 2001

For latest BBC news on Dr. Hassan al-Turabi, click here.  The features invariably portray Dr Turabi as an Islamic fundamentalist, which makes his essay on Women in Islam all the more remarkable.  The fact that Dr Turabi has such a reputation gives his championing of women's rights within Islam significant weight and credibility.  It's a case of "Only Nixon could go to China".