women to marry non-Muslim men, and allowing alcohol consumption in certain situations, in contradiction to historical Sharia law. He also embraced human rights and democracy in "a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn" of his views. One critic of Turabi complained to an American journalist in Khartoum of Turabi's ideological reversal, saying, "it is said in the daily papers and in the discussion centers here in the university that Turabi killed Ustazh Mahmoud", (i.e. liberal Sudanese cleric Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, hanged in 1985), "and now he’s stealing his ideas." Political career Early in his career, Al-Turabi took control of Islamic Liberation Movement under the name of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood. In 1964 he became secretary-general of the Islamic Charter Front (ICF), an activist movement that served as the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was elected to parliament in the mid-1960s. He headed the Front of the Islamic Pact and the Party of the Islamic Bloc from 1964–69. Following the military coup in 1969, Jaafar Nimeiry jailed al-Turabi for seven years. Released in 1977, al-Turabi became attorney general in 1979 and then Nimeiry’s foreign affairs adviser in 1983. Nimeiry put him back in prison in 1985; the new military government released him later the same year. Al-Turabi established the National Islamic Front (NIF) in 1985 as a replacement for the ICF. Al-Turabi held several ministerial positions in the democratically elected Sadiq al-Mahdi government, which the NIF joined in 1988 as a coalition partner, but he was never comfortable with this arrangement. National Islamic Front rule On 30 June 1989, a coup d'état by General Omar Hassan al-Bashir began a process of severe repression, including purges and executions in the upper ranks of the army, the banning of associations, political parties, and independent newspapers and the imprisonment of leading political figures and journalists. From 1989 until 2001, Turabi served as what observers have called the "intellectual architect", or "the power behind the throne", sometimes officially as leader of the NIF and sometimes as speaker of the parliamentary assembly. 1989 coup While there is a "pervasive belief" in Sudan that Turabi and the NIF actively collaborated with the coup-makers who called themselves the "Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation", in fact the RCC-NS banned all political parties following the 1989 coup and arrested Turabi, as well as the leaders of other political parties, and held him in solitary confinement for several months. Before long however,