Hassan al-Turabi

“The Islamists had correctly read the dominant regional trends,” Bodansky noted. Namely, political Islam “has already replaced nationalism and other Westernized ideologies. Most people genuinely believe that ‘Islam is the solution,’ even though ideas vary about what this ‘Islam’ is.” Muslim thinkers such as Hassan al-Turabi, the intellectual guiding light behind the Islamic regime that came to power in Sudan’s 1989 military coup, believed that

Islamism constituted the sole expanding positive and promising ideology. Turabi noted the rapidly growing number of thinking people—including diehard Marxists and thoroughly Westernized intellectuals—who were discovering, returning to, and adapting Islamism.

Turabi elaborated upon his ideas with French author Alain Chevalerias, who collected these discussions in the 1997 French “book fittingly titled Islam—the Future of the World,” Bodansky observed. He especially emphasized:

For the Arab world, Turabi noted, the key challenge was the accelerating decline of pan­Arabism as a political doctrine. In every area politicized pan-Arabism had entered an era of regression. This was an inevitable by-product of the decline of the Arab state in the Muslim era. Many of the ardent supporters of pan­Arabism were currently looking for ties of a different kind to unify the Arabs and revitalize their self-respect. Growing numbers of them had already entered a profound discourse with the Islamist parties in an effort to find common language and objectives. Consequently, Turabi argued, many of these formally pan-Arab entities had evolved to such a degree that it was difficult to distinguish if they now held a pan-Arab or a pan-Islamic position.