First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (10 page)

The destruction of Hicks’ army was also seen by the Mahdi himself as a sign of Allah’s blessing.
In an eerie foreshadowing of those who would follow in his footsteps more than a century later, the Mahdi dreamed of a world in which everyone in it would submit to the will of Allah and embrace Islam—if need be, at swordpoint.
He proclaimed that after taking the Sudan he would conquer Egypt, then Mecca (which he promised to restore to its former glory), then Jerusalem; next would come Constantinople, and eventually Europe.
The unfaithful of Islam, the infidels of Christendom, and the heathen and pagans of Asia would all bow before the scimitar of Islam, or else die by it.

And yet …

Few epigrams are as well known as Lord Acton’s dictum that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Rarely has the truth of Acton’s perception been revealed as starkly as in the meteoric career of the Mahdi.
The victory over Hicks’ Egyptian army at Kashgil appears in retrospect to have been a turning point in the Mahdi’s life, the moment which marked his departure from the path of a divinely guided mystic to instead follow the path of self-aggrandizement and glory.
It is where the Mahdi ceased to be holy and began to become worldly.
The beginnings of megalomania appeared, as he tightened the grip held by the concept of
Mahdyyah
(the Mahdi’s Realm) on his followers.

Gone was the thoughtful, introspective scholar of the early days on the island of Abba; in his place was the religious dogmatic whose every pronouncement is inspired of Allah and infallible; gone was the righteous anger of the wandering cleric, desiring by example to simply return worship in Islam to its original humility, unencumbered by the trappings of wealth and pomp.
In his place was a fiery evangelist determined to remake Islam in his own image.
Gone was respect for the Koran, as in its place the word of the Mahdi became both civil and spiritual law.
Surrounded by followers numbering in the tens of thousands and secure in his growing power, he turne his back completely on the gentle teachings of Sufism which had been so instrumental in shaping his early character.
He now proscribed all Sufi orders, fearing the Sufi as potential rivals for power in the Sudan.
Muhammed Ahmed no longer exhorted his followers; the Mahdi commanded them.

Yet the followers obeyed willingly, even gladly, for victory always generates its own enthusiasm, and the succession of victories achieved by the Mahdi’s army grew ever more impressive.
In Darfur province, in the extreme west of the Sudan, Rudolf Carl von Slatin, a young Viennese officer in the service of the Khedive, struggled to maintain a grip on the province.
He was completely cut off from supply or reinforcement after the fall of El Obeid, however, and finally surrendered to the Mahdi in December 1883.
A similar struggle took place in Bahrel-Gazal in the south, where the Egyptian garrisons, commanded by a former officer in the British merchant marine named Frank Lupton, were able to hold out until January 1884, when they were finally done in by hunger.
Both Slatin and Lupton were made prisoners by the Mahdi, while their troops were mostly slaughtered out of hand.

Wholesale killing had become a routine feature of the Mahdi’s regime.
Placing the strictest possible interpretation on the Koran, he declared that all infidels who fell into the hands of his followers were to be given the choice of submitting to Islam or being immediately put to death.
The Mahdi modified Islam’s “Five Pillars”–faith in the Oneness of Allah and that Muhammed is His prophet; observing the daily prayers; care and almsgiving to the needy; self-purification through fasting; and the pilgrimage to Mecca—to support the dogma that loyalty to him was essential to true belief.

The strictures placed by the Mahdi over the daily life of his followers would find an uncanny echo a century and quarter later in the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, prior to its overthrow by the United States in 2001.
His enforcement of Koranic law over those whom he ruled was harsh in the extreme.
In a proclamation to the faithful after El Obeid, the Mahdi declared:

Let all show penitence before Allah, and abandon all bad and forbidden habits, such as degrading acts of the flesh, the drinking of wine and smoking tobacco, lying, bearing false witness, disobedience to parents, brigandage, the non-restitution of goods to others, the clapping of hands, dancing, improper signs with the eyes, tears and lamentations at the bed of the dead, slanderous language, calumny, and the company of strange women.
Clothe your women in a decent way, and let them be careful not to speak to unknown persons.
All those who do not pay attention to these principles disobey God and His Prophet, and they shall be punished in accordance with the law.

Say your prayers at the prescribed hours.

Give the tenth part of your goods, handing it to our Prince, Sheikh Mansour [who the Mahdi had made governor of El Obeid] in order that he may forward it to the treasury of Islam.

Adore God, and hate not each other, but assist each other to do good.

Under the Mahdi’s rule, “forbidden habits” came to include marriage feasts and celebrations of any kind, and singing or dancing for any reason.
It became a deadly offense to read any books other than the Koran or the
hadiths
, or to wear anything but the humblest of clothing.
In short, any behavior that could not be construed as advancing the cause of the Mahdi was officially proscribed.
His enforcement of Koranic law over those whom he ruled was harsh in the extreme: the most frequent punishment for any of these transgressions was beheading or flogging to death; by comparison the penalty for stealing was mild—cutting off a hand or foot.
It was a way of life more suited to the 7th century than to the 19th, and the two eras were about to collide before the full view of the world at a heretofore obscure city sitting at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles—Khartoum.

CHAPTER 4

THE CITY BETWEEN THE RIVERS

If a traveler determined to trek the length of the Nile in the early 1880s were to pause in his journey just a few miles below the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, and take to one of those fantastical balloons being popularized by Jules Verne in his writings in Paris in those same years, he would look down on a remarkable sight.

Looking first to the east he would see the rolling plain of the Nubian Desert, jagged and rocky, far different from the Sahara to the west.
As he looked further east the traveler would see the plain turn to hills on the far side of the green belt of the Atbara River, eventually rising into the scrub- and scree-covered mountains of northern Abyssinia.
Turning one hundred eighty degrees, looking west, the traveler would be confronted by the same vastness that defeated William Hicks: the northern reaches of Kordofan province and the empty waste that marks the eastern edge of the Sahara Desert.
There is little there on which the eye can focus, simply endless vistas of rolling sand dunes, twisting wadis, and rocky outcroppings.
This is the land of the Baggara, nomadic Arab tribes, who follow tracks and trails through the desert that only they can see, making their living in the slave trade.

It takes little imagination to understand how, by venturing into such a featureless plain of sand, Hicks came to his undoing, or to wonder why he chose to go there in the first place.
To the north, the traveler would see the gently curving arc of the Nile gradually bending off to the northeast where it encounters the Sixth Cataract on its way to Berber, an important refueling stop for the picturesque paddlewheel steamers that ply the stretches of the Nile between the various cataracts which prevent the river from being navigable for its full length.
If the balloon were high enough, the traveler could see the great S-shaped bend in the Nile where it winds its way around the Nubian Desert before crossing the border into Egypt at Wadi Halfa.

But it is what is below and to the south of the balloon that would command the traveler’s full attention, for he would be looking down at a striking complex of towns and settlements, all of them centered around the city of Khartoum.

Khartoum was actually one of three sister cities built at the convergence of the Blue and White Niles: Omdurman to the northwest across the White Nile, North Khartoum to the north on the bank of the Blue Nile, and Khartoum itself on the south bank of the Blue Nile, not far from the triangle formed by the Blue and White Niles, a point known as the Mukran.
A little farther up the Nile, in the middle of a large oasis, sat the town of Halfaya.
A handful of small villages were scattered about the area, most notably Buri to the east of Khartoum, and Tuti and Khojaki in the plain above North Khartoum.

What gave the city of Khartoum its significance during the Mahdi’s revolt was a basic fact of desert warfare.
It was something learned by armies as far back in antiquity as the conquests of Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus, and would be relearned by Britain’s Desert Rats and Germany’s Afrika Korps in the Second World War, and relearned by the United States and its allies in 1991 and 2003.
Successful desert warfare has little to do with simply occupying territory; rather, it is a function of possessing certain key geographic features and strategic focal points.

Khartoum was exactly such a focal point, located at just such a geographic feature.
Though there were numerous far-flung settlements and towns throughout the Sudan—through control of which a conqueror or occupier could gain at least a temporary dominance of the Sudan—they were all tied together in one fashion or another by the two Niles, the White and the Blue.
Some were simply situated on one of the rivers, others were connected to them by caravan trails and trade routes; in the end, though, the two Niles were the determining factor.
The two rivers, the White Nile in particular, were the living heart of the Sudan, and whoever controlled the Nile would eventually rule the land.

Khartoum was the great prize in any plan to conquer the Sudan because of its location at the confluence of the two rivers: an army holding the city could effectively deny the use of either river to anyone it desired, cutting off trade or travel at will.
An army advancing down the Nile could not conquer the Sudan without taking the city of Khartoum.
An army seeking to defend the country could not hope to succeed without holding the city.

Although that part of the Sudan had been intermittently inhabited since the neolithic times, Khartoum and her two sister cities had a relatively short history.
Prior to 1821, the region lacked any strategic or commercial value, and was essentially deserted.
But with the conquest of the Sudan by Muhammed Ali came the need for a central administrative center to regulate taxation and serve as a focus for the slave trade, and so out of this necessity the city of Khartoum was born.
It was established as a purely military outpost at first, not far from the ruins of the last Nubian kingdom of Alwa a few miles to the east on the Blue Nile.
Khartoum grew rapidly in size and prosperity between 1825 and 1860—in 1834 it was officially made the capital of the Sudan, and in the fashion of political centers everywhere, accumulated layers of bureaucrats and administrators, who in turn attracted fortune-seekers, opportunists, hangers-on, and the associated businesses and trades that accompany them.

By 1860, the population of the city had reached close to a hundred thousand, roughly a third of the inhabitants being Egyptian civil servants, merchants, and their families, along with the garrison.
Sudanese merchants and craftsmen, along with a mass of servants and slaves, made up the rest.
European explorers bound for central Africa, which was still a large blank spot on the world’s maps, often made Khartoum the base for their expeditions.
Khartoum was in a sense the last outpost of civilization sitting on the edge of a vast, wild emptiness.

More importantly, though, was the role that Khartoum played in the slave trade.
Along with the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, Khartoum dominated the African slave trade in the middle of the 19th century: slaver caravans traveling south of the Equator generally made their way to the coast, while those north of it descended on Khartoum.
Just as they had exploited every other aspect of the Sudan, the Egyptian overlords who ruled the land were quick to take advantage of this lucrative trade, despite growing roars of outrage from the European powers.
The infrequent European adventurer passing through Khartoum in the mid-19th century found the greed of the Egyptian officials astonishing, akin to organized pillage, as most of the “taxes”—extorted by force in cash or kind with equal facility—went into the pockets and coffers of the Egyptian over-lords.

It was the slave trade that first brought Khartoum to the attention of the outside world.
In 1807 Great Britain had abolished slavery within the British Empire, and successive governments had dedicated themselves to eradicating the vile practice throughout the rest of the world, with most of the European powers agreeing to end slavery within their own territories by the middle of the 19th century.
But the abolition of slavery by the Europeans did not eliminate the practice in Africa or the Middle East, and the slave trade in the Sudan flourished.
With the expansion of French and British power and influence in Africa, it was inevitable that the Sudanese slavers would come to the attention of Paris and London.
The intensity of anti-slavery sentiment in Great Britain in particular would play no small part in the policies Her Majesty’s government would formulate for administering Egypt and responding to the question of what to do about the revolt in the Sudan.