Taking Candy from the Sheikh: Some Useless Regrets from my Last Conversation

with Turabi
Three years ago, Hasan Turabi, known affectionately by his followers and ironically by
his enemies as The Sheikh, offered me some candy. I glanced up to see him holding out
the bowl, eyes modestly downcast, and bowing elegantly in his white Sudanese robes, his
beard white, trimmed and pointed. Charming. There was something absurdly Faustian
about that scene in a living room in Khartoum. I hesitated. Then, I reached out a hand and
took some candy.
I was there to interview him for my Ph.D. dissertation, and there was something
frightening about the notion. Not fear that he would be frightening, but fear that he would
not. He is extremely, my uncle had told me, darkly, when he heard I was going,
Convincing. And then, You had better be careful. I knew that one already. Islamism
in the Sudan could be blamed on no one if not on young Sudanese men, studying serious
things in British universities, visiting the house of Hasan Turabi. And so I prepared my
defenses as best I could and arrived at his house. I walked past security guards into a
quiet house, with a living room full of row after row of foldable metal chairs, with no one
sitting in them, every single one facing an empty stage, and into a small private room to
begin one of many conversations over the next few days. The conversation that day was
to continue through the morning, past noon, into the afternoon and end shortly before
sunset. After the candy, he set the bowl down and sat, for almost a full minute, without
looking at me, looking down at his hands, quietly. I had asked a friend of mine once who
had joined the Brotherhood while still a child how it had happened. Well, he had said,
remembering, he used to go to this place, and there was this old man. Every time he went,
he would give him a piece of candy. He was very nice. A great guy, beautiful,
respectable, kind. And he teaches you some Quran and some hadith and he gives you
some candy, all of which are things that are all very nice all, in and of themselves, very
positive things I am sure you would agree Who, in their right minds, does not like any
of these things? He kept going to see him and then, one day, he found he was part of the
Brotherhood.
I sucked on the candy, and watched the old man warily. He seemed shy, painfully so, and
had the look of someone standing backstage before the curtains were drawn, but as he
began to speak about politics a curious thing began to happen. I had never cared for him
as a speaker, even though he was known to be a good one, when I had watched him on
television. He had a honeyed, almost saccharine manner, about him. He laughed too
often, and too placatingly. In person he was contagiously, almost boyishly, excited about
politics. Oh dear, I thought, as soon as he began to speak. Democracy, not as a
mechanism, but as a real, living and direct practice. The right and the responsibility
which people have to decide their own fate. The freedom of the market. How little
government should interfere in the best of worlds, and how necessarily, at times, in ours.
Freedom and equality. The law. Its limitations. Islam. Of course. Oh for Gods sake, I ask

myself, desperately, how the hell is someone supposed to come to a fight armed against,
at one and the same time, both liberal democracy and Islam.
Not that there was a difference. I found out, as the taste of candy lingered on my tongue,
that Turabi found the necessity of the free market economy and minimal government both
in Adam Smith, and in Surat al-Nisa. The sovereignty of the popular will was found in
the Prophetic history before arriving, without explanation, in Rousseau. Equality and
freedom of association sprang at us sometimes from the pages of Locke, and, sometimes,
from Madina, where I myself had found them many times. The more we talked, the more
charming he became. He had all the natural egalitarianism of a modern European
academic, the concern with manners of an Azhari scholar, and the generosity of a desert
Arab. Or perhaps it was the egalitarian of an Arab, the generosity of an Azhari, and the
manners of a European. In any case, all this was a pleasure to hear and experience and,
mesmerised by all this, I dont remember when the taste of candy disappeared from my
mouth.
It may have been when I stepped out of his house, or it may have been before that, or
after, as I walked in the harsh Sudanese sun and the dust, or later when I returned home to
the history books. One way or another I found that I had come to regret taking that candy
and all I had left as I read the history was the bitterness that comes over the tongue after
something excessively sweet is taken, and, it being Sudan, the taste of dust. I tasted it in
my mouth, and it had covered the books in the few hours I had left them on the table.
Remembering the interview, I feel guilt. In June of 1989, Turabi had seized total power
over the country by military coup. The story of the next two decades has been told too
many times, and, like all acts that words do not encompass, the words only seem to insult
the people who suffered them. War, electrocution, genocide, rape, murder, poverty,
humiliation, injustice. There are words for that kind of thing, but sometimes all words can
do is to draw a veil over the reality of a thing. And sometimes thats a kind of mercy,
maybe, to only see the effects of things through the gentle, partial drawing of a veil.
Now, the effects of these particular things had reached even that small, middle class
apartment, in Korba, behind Cinema Normandy and the kiosk that still sells, for some
reason, one worn, used, copy after copy after copy of Great Expectations, and where my
grandfather had finally settled to spend his last days, quietly reading secondhand books
written by long dead Englishmen. A particular type of man often arrived at that
apartment, soldierly, at the door. They came in a steady stream. There was rarely anything
too formal about them but you could always tell them from other men. There was a kind
of weight to their waiting at the door, their requests to see the General, and their practiced
patience as the General prepared himself for the audience. Though my grandfather and I
rarely required a space between us, these were times when I always seemed to find
myself on the far side of the curtain that separated that old living room with its view high
above Cairo, from the rest of the house. But the curtain was old too, and almost always
there was a parting that showed the General at his armchair somewhere between a
witness and a judge, the young soldier across the room from him somewhere between a
subordinate and a son, and an air heavy with regret. Men cried in that room I think. But

what I will always remember is that one man, serene with his dignity gathered around
him, whom I let in.
Later, as I walked by on the way to the kitchen I saw through the parting in the curtain,
the man standing very tall, baring himself to my grandfather, his shirt stripped off, his
back, with its dark Sudanese flesh, muscular and ravaged and undone by deep wounds,
furrows, disorderly and frenzied and cruel. He stood there for a while, naked and
helpless, with nothing between him and the world. My grandfather, who had made his
own mistakes, chin up, eyes looking past his regal aquiline Arab nose, looking at him
with the gravity, sadness and generosity that can only be given by a man of command
who both regrets and does not regret that he no longer has the power to give anything
except the fullness of his attention. And that was the tableau. And then I turned away.
But in our subsequent meetings, after we were done with the Ph.D. and the questions,
after I had asked him formally and objectively what he had done, and why, and how, and
had recorded it on the unforgiving device between us, and as we were served bitter, black
Sudanese coffee, I found myself wondering. If a man could regret taking it, then perhaps
another man could regret offering candy. I noticed more and more as the conversation
went on, that the slow hum of the air conditioner, the softness of the lights through the
thick curtains, the rows and rows of empty seats outside were all hypnotic with regret. I
heard myself asking him, and, although it was a cruel thing to ask, I found that I asked it
of him without judgment, What went wrong?
I remember that he never hesitated. Even as his whole demeanor changed completely
from the man who had offered me the candy to something less charming, less shy, more
certain and more sad, he said, We never changed our selves. And that seemed to him to
be the root of his regrets. And he told me sad stories, about power. It seemed important to
take it, he said. We were focused so much on taking power, we never really thought
about what would happen after we got it. These things change people. He was talking
about the military. Because do not forget that there were enemies. America would not
allow them the opportunity to come democratically to a position of governance. Their
fellow Sudanese plotted against them. His most implacable enemy, and brother-in-law,
Sadiq al-Mahdi. So many others, too. Power, then, and then everything could be made
right. Power first, and then we would see. I didnt even know Bashir. Never even laid
eyes on him. The night before the coup, they brought him to me and he put his hand in
mine and took an oath, that he would act in the interests of the country. And that was
that. But once someone has power, he told me, like someone conveying a revelation,
they refuse to be told what to do. He went on: After a while, we told them it was time.
People can decide for themselves now, we have put in place the right conditions. But an
army officer cannot accept that. Have these civilians order me about, he says. Never. He
makes a helpless gesture with his hand, and shakes his head.
Not just power either. Everything changed people. People you had known for a long
time. People you had put in certain positions precisely because you knew that they had no
interest in money, for example, had never had any interest in money. You would find that
they had stolen, or taken bribes or favored one thing over another because of the money.

The helplessness, even when in power, to change the people and events he had begun,
came next. We tried to change things. We offered people money. We said to them, here,
here is your official salary, and here, take this, take this, all this money, and if you need
more we can give it to you, only dont steal, just dont steal. We hoped that would stop
them from stealing. But it didnt. There was something painful about the simplicity of
the realization. Greed, he said, still bewildered. It was all the more painful to see
because no one- not his self-righteous liberal critics, not his covetous Islamist partners
and later rivals, not even my father who carried after all these years the bitterness of an
ex-Communist whose whole revolution had been hijacked and aborted by this one man
nor the General who had in his own way left because of the coup- none of these people
had ever accused him of caring about money.
I didnt really care about the content of these regrets, not because they were not true, but
because they were too apparently true. It was too little, came too late, and perhaps for the
wrong reasons. Also, I both believed him and didnt believe him. In any case, I knew, and
who knows, maybe he did also, that these were not in fact the roots of the problem at all.
The regret itself was the thing. It filled the room slowly and completely, like a sweet taste
in the mouth, and, as the conversation went on, it seemed that we had never really been
doing anything but making an incongruous collection of the memories of one mans
minor regrets. It began with what still seemed to be political questions. When I asked
him, cruelly, about why he had betrayed Carlos the Jackal to the French authorities, after
extending him his guarantee of safety, I expected him to tell me, as he had told me
repeatedly over the past days, that this was simply the nature of politics. Instead, I felt
him draw away as if in pain. I told him, he said, I said to him please, we will take you
wherever you want to go. Name a place, and we will arrange it. But he just wouldnt
listen. He paused. When you have influence people think you control every little
thing. He said quietly. But you dont. Even his own brothers would not listen
anymore. I went to Cairo right after Mubarak was gone to speak to the Brothers. I told
them, dont take it yet, everything is too uncertain. Dont make the mistakes we did. But
they only said, the things that happen in a place like Sudan, cannot possibly happen in a
place like Egypt. He shook his head. You know how Egyptians are, he told me. They
never listen.
The regrets recalled things more and more distant, drew farther and farther away from his
own moment of power and towards his childhood, in such a manner that I wonder now
how its possible that I did not have a premonition of his death. I asked him, because I
had all sorts of clever theories, about the effects of the tensions between the strict and
modern education he received at the British Gordon Memorial College on the one hand,
and on the other the strict and traditional education at the hands of his father that had
filled his after school hours and his vacations. He answered me with his own clever
theories, and then he said, You know, I never wanted to be made different from my
friends this way. What I really wanted, and here he gave me a wistful, shy and childlike
smile, was to play football after school. And that one tiny, childish regret is enough to
make anyone understand things they would otherwise only have read in books. Not just
about Turabi, but about his enemies, and everything else. About my father, and about the

General. How difficult it is to live two lives. One for the English boarding school, and
one for home. One for God and one for Adam Smith. One for your family at the farm
picking cotton in the sun and the dust, and the other for Karl Marx. How difficult to know
that you are not being educated, but groomed. How difficult to be at home. I wonder if
there is a difference between a man seeing himself at a distance like this, and hubris.
Either way, its a painful thing it seems to me. It must have been difficult, the erudite
Sudanese academic and former Communist Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim wrote once, for Turabi
to have seen his father the venerable scholar valued by the community, the sheikh and the
sharia judge, being dismissed as a sad remnant of some old way of life by children his
sons age who understood nothing. To serve a foreign, British, state as a man of deep
Arab and Islamic roots. To see learning that he must have considered alien and
disturbingly superficial take the children of his generation. The old man, who has a
reputation for learning and wisdom called the elite graduates of the College, the future
leaders of the country, awlad saakit, just children, just immature children. But he sent his
son to be one of them. Ibrahim thinks that the experience of these contradictions is a
cause of the whole bloody recent history of the country. I realized something, while
hearing his regrets, that Turabi, my father, my grandfather and everyone else had known
all along. That all of us were implicated in these regrets, and God only knows going back
how far. Who are your people? Turabi asked me, near the end. I told him. He looked at
me coolly, and for the first time since we had spoken there was a distance, perhaps of
blame, perhaps of something else, to his regret. Your grandfather, he said, meaning the
Generals grandfather was my fathers teacher. He looked at me. He is the one who
made my father take that job as a judge. My father hated the idea. It frightened him. But
your grandfather insisted.
In any case, theyre all dead now. Turabi and the old General, their fathers and
grandfathers and all the young men and women who because of the civil wars, and
revolutions, and governments foreign or otherwise that some of them started or supported
or fought. My own defense against the sheikh held, though it took over three hundred
pages to elaborate. Some things I know I should have done differently, probably. I should
have been tougher on him, more honest, more courageous. I should have told him about
that man, half-naked, scarred and helpless in our living room. I should have been kinder
to him, and not asked him that question about Carlos. One thing I dont regret, but only
because it passed, and because through what came after it I find that now I know that we
are not so different him and I and also that I want nothing for him but mercy. I dont
regret having taken in the first place, but only for one single, finite and dangerous
moment, some candy from the sheikh.