The Irony Of Being Hassan Al-Turabi – altmuslim.com:

One man’s extremist is another man’s progressive. And sometimes they can be both at the same time. Take Sudan’s Hassan al-Turabi, for example. Long derided in the West as an “Islamist extremist” that, as speaker of Sudan’s National Assembly, provided Osama bin Laden with a save haven in Sudan for five years (calling him a “hero” in the process), Turabi is probably best known for his involvement in imposing sharia law on Sudan, a move which exacerbated the 20-year north-south conflict that claimed thousands of lives and was only recently resolved.

Nice piece. Kudos to Shahed Amanullah for making the dichotomy between Turabi’s pre- and post-exile statements so stark. How does a bin Laden supporter go on to say stuff like this:

And now, embracing ideological points that cost fellow scholar Taha his life, Turabi has now gone on record supporting a host of liberal legal reforms regarding women, including allowing Muslim women to marry Christian and Jewish men (citing the experiences of female Muslim Americans), making hijab optional, allowing the testimony of women to equal that of a man, and (just when you thought this debate was over) allowing “pious scholarly women” to lead mixed-gender prayers. “When there is a pious woman,” explained Turabi, “she should lead the prayers and whoever is distracted by her beauty should be deemed sick.”

Of course, some people think he’s out of bounds. Indigo Jo (via altmuslim) writes:

By advancing ideas like these which are against the well-known scholarly consensus, which forbids handshaking between unrelated people of the opposite sex and mandates the headscarf, he only makes life more difficult for people who wish to live by Islam as it is, not as some reformers wish it was. The fact that Turabi is a supposedly “Islamist” politician gives his false claims a spurious authority, but in fact Turabi is just a politician, not an Islamic scholar. He comes from a family of scholars, as a Sudanese shaikh told me personally, but went against his scholarly background. When I asked who his shaikh was now, an onlooker said “Shaitaan”, and the shaikh did not object.

Inayat Bunglawala should know better than to give this man and his deviant ideas undeserved publicity. His job is to represent the Muslims of this country, not to represent foreign “Islamic thinkers” to us or to the wider public on blogs.

Turabi: Progressive or fundy?