National Islamic Front
| Abbreviation | NIF |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1960s |
| Type | Political organisation |
| Purpose | Creation and maintenance of Sudan as Islamic state |
| Leader | Hassan al-Turabi |
| Affiliations |
National Congress Political Wing |
The National Islamic Front (Arabic: الجبهة الإسلامية القومية; transliterated: al-Jabhah al-Islamiyah al-Qawmiyah) was an Islamist political organization founded in 1976 and led by Dr. Hassan al-Turabi that influenced the Sudanese government starting in 1979, and dominated it from 1989 to the late 1990s. It was one of only two Islamic revival movements to secure political power in the 20th century (the other being the followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the Islamic Republic of Iran).
The NIF emerged from Muslim student groups that first began organizing in the universities during the 1940s, and its main support base has remained the college educated. It supported the maintenance of an Islamic state run on sharia and rejected the concept of a secular state. It took a "top down" or "Islamisation from above" approach of "infiltrating Sudan's state apparatus, army, and financial system". It demonstrated itself to be both politically adept and ruthless in its use of violence, in particular in the internal conflicts of the Second Sudanese Civil War and the Darfur conflict, as well in the provisioning of proxy forces such as the Lord's Resistance Army, West Nile Bank Front and Uganda National Rescue Front II against Uganda.
In the late 1990s, the Front changed its name to National Congress, and the "gross human rights violations" of the regime's early years gave way to "more subtle methods of social control such as restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, opinion, religion, association, and movement." In 1999 al-Turabi and his supporters were expelled from the Congress by Sudan's ruler Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and subsequently founded the rival Popular Congress Party which has remained in opposition.
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