First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (11 page)

One factor in the attitude of the Europeans—and especially that of the British public—toward the Mahdi and his followers that has often been overlooked or forgotten was a consequence of Islam’s doctrines and teachings regarding slavery.
The Koran explicitly guarantees Moslems the right to own slaves, either as spoils of war or purchased in a slave market.
This is unsurprising, as the Prophet Muhammed was a slaveholder, owning dozens of men and women; in his later years, having become a wealthy man through the tithes of the faithful, he frequently bought and sold slaves at the market in Medina.
Some of the misogyny inherent in Islam is evident in Muhammed’s treatment of women taken captive in warfare: “Whenever Muhammed took a woman as a captive, if he imposed the veil on her, Moslems would say he took her as a wife, but if he left her unveiled they would say, ‘He owned her as a slave’; that is, she became a property of his right hand.”

As the teachings of Islam developed, it became an accepted doctrine that only children of slaves or non-Moslem prisoners of war could become slaves.
Freeborn Moslems were never to be enslaved, although that was an injunction usually honored more in the breach than the observance.
In the Sudan, permitting the taking of slaves as prizes in war eventually led to the concept of
jihad
being twisted into an awful perversion: Arabs regularly raided black tribes to the south—especially Coptic Christians—or even neighboring Moslem tribes for the sole purpose of taking captives to sell at Khartoum or Zanzibar, all in the name of “holy war.” There was never an unequivocable denunciation of slavery within either the Shi’ite or Sunni factions.

While Islamic law—the
sharia
— laid down strict rules for the proper treatment of slaves, historically there were no fixed penalties for masters who abused their slaves, leaving them at the mercy of clerical “judges” who had no codified body of law to constrain them and who could be entirely capricious in applying justice.
Slaves, of course, had no legal rights whatsoever, not even the right to appeal for judicial relief against abusive owners.

In a passage that reveals one of the darker sides of Islam, particularly how it institutionalized the inferior status of women, the Koran declares that a freeman should be killed only for another freeman, a slave for a slave, and a woman for a woman; it is startling to note both that women rank below slaves in importance, and that there is no female equivalent of “freeman.” One
hadith
explicitly states that “a Moslem should not be killed for a non-Moslem, nor a freeman for a slave.” Islamic teaching also permitted a Moslem slaveowner to enjoy the sexual services of his female slaves.
(Women were not permitted to own property, hence they could never be slaveowners.)

Many of the African males taken as slaves were made eunuchs.
While castration was against Islamic law, this was just one more minor legalistic obstacle to be overcome by the slavers, usually done by taking their captives outside Moslem territory where Islamic law was not considered binding to perform the mutilation.
For African captives, nothing short of “castration level with the abdomen” would do, rather than simply removing the testicles, which was the common practice with Slavic and Greek captives.
The reasoning behind this extreme violation of the slave’s body is lost today, but whatever it was, it made African males who were subjected to this brutality especially prized as harem guards.

By the time of the Mahdi’s revolt, these details were known throughout the palaces, legislatures, salons, and pubs of Europe, and as European influence grew in Egypt so did pressure on the Egyptian government to bring an end to the slave trade in the Sudan.
Under Ismail’s rule that wasn’t likely to happen, for much of the Khedive’s fortune came from the payments made to him by the slave traders in exchange for almost complete immunity.
When dealing with the Europeans the Khedive would pay lip service to ending the slave trade, but as usual he proved long on words and short on action.

It wasn’t until the British and French took over financial control of the country and imposed a series of European governors for the provinces of Sudan on Ismail—and later on Tewfik—that any progress was made.
Frank Lupton in Bahr-el-Gazal, Rudolf von Slatin in Darfur, and Romolo Gessi in Kordofan were ruthless in their pursuit and prosecution of the slavers; there was little mercy shown, most of the slavers being executed, the few exceptions being men like Zobeir Pasha or Agar Pasha, who had tremendous influence in Cairo.
The most dedicated of these foreign governors was General Charles Gordon, who was first sent to the south of the Sudan, to the region known as Equatoria, then later moved to Khartoum when he became Governor-General of the Sudan.
He was relentless in pursuing the slavers, and was so successful in his efforts that Khartoum, which had been falling into decay over the previous decade as the Sudanese in the region became demoralized by the depredations of the slavers and began resettling elsewhere, experienced a revival and recovered much of its lost prosperity.

But when Gordon left Khartoum in 1880 all of the excesses and abuses—as well as the slave trade—returned with his Egyptian successor.
Although the slavers could no longer be as flagrant in their practices and their violations as in the past, and the Egyptian administrators in Cairo, now carefully watched by British overseers, could no longer be so blatant in their graft and corruption, it was still demoralizing to the Sudanese.
It was a situation ripe for rebellion, and when the Mahdi’s forces advanced out of Kordofan, the countryside around it rose up in sympathetic revolt—not because the Mahdi promised to bring an end to the slave trade, but rather because he put the slavers on notice that he expected them to conduct their trade according to the laws of Islam.
The slave traders, some who truly feared the Mahdi as a genuine holy figure of Islam, others who simply feared the size and power of his army, agreed to comply.
This was a measure of protection that the people of the northern Sudan had not known for decades, and thousands of new followers flocked to his black and green banners.

At the same time, the people of Khartoum were faced with the threat of being cut off from the outside world, a prospect which held terrible import for the city’s Egyptian population and garrison.
Although they were nominally Moslems, the Mahdi had already declared that because they had not already embraced his cause, renounced their worldly ways, and adhered to Islam as he taught it to be practiced, they were regarded as infidels to be put to the sword without mercy.
More than thirty thousand men, women, and children were threatened with a bloody execution if Khartoum fell to the Mahdi.

Such decrees were becoming part of the Mahdi’s image and a means by which he held sway over his followers.
By reminding them that he held the power of life or death over thousands, he bound those followers ever closer to him, lest they find themselves similarly proscribed in the future.
To underscore his position as the Sudan’s new ruler, Muhammed Ahmed set up his administrative capital in El Obeid.
From there he began issuing summonses to all the various Arab tribes who had not yet joined his revolt, had new currency minted with his own name and image on them, and set about re-ordering the Sudanese way of life.
He gave instructions that all newspapers were to be banned and all books except for the Koran, compilations of hadith, sharia legal texts, and books of Islamic theology be burned.
He believed that such publications were the means through which corrupting “Western” ideas were introduced into the minds of the faithful.
His social and religious “reforms” consisted of a series of proclamations which systematically forbade all of the customs and practices introduced by the “Turks” and in their place established the his own teachings, leading to the usual litany of instructions concerning ritual, prayers, moderation in food and clothing, and the behavior of women.

The status of women in Islam, as interpreted by the Mahdi, was little more than medieval.
Even the average housewife in London or
hausfrau
in Berlin had more rights than did a woman in the Mahdi’s Sudan.
Concubinage was legal, and arranged marriages were the custom rather than the exception.
Women were forbidden to own property, and possessed no economic or legal rights whatsoever.
Girls were not permitted to go to school, but remained at home to learn the domestic skills necessary to make them suitable as wives.
Adultery, which the Koran taught was a sinful act by men or women, was largely ignored if the offender was a man, while a woman accused of adultery would be put to death by stoning.
A husband could divorce his wife without pretext and without notice, simply by giving her a writ of divorce, leaving the woman destitute and homeless; a woman was never permitted to divorce her husband.

As the Mahdi’s army approached Khartoum, it became ever more clear that some sort of showdown was in the offing, either between the Mahdi and the Egyptians or, more likely, their British masters.
Two men who would never set eyes on the city began to exert an influence over the events as they transpired, one of them in Cairo, one in London.
They were Evelyn Baring, the British Agent for Egypt, and Prime Minister William Gladstone.

Evelyn Baring, who would eventually become the first Earl of Cromer, was one of those remarkable individuals with which the 19th century abounds: the wild rake who becomes the pillar of respectability.
Born in Norfolk, England, in 1841, into a great British banking family, he was, by his own admission late in life, a high-spirited, even wild boy who received very little formal education.
That was a circumstance that could be circumvented by families with the right connections, and in young Baring’s case it didn’t prevent him from obtaining a commission in the British Army at the age of eighteen.
All the same, it could have stifled his career once he left the army, as might his hedonistic, spendthrift ways while he was still in uniform.
As he later told it, the combination of the love of a good woman—his first wife, Ethel—and the example set by his fellow officers, most of whom were much better educated than he, caused Baring to transform himself into a sober, dedicated, and talented Colonial Office administrator.

Baring’s childhood was not entirely wasted on play and pranks, as it seems that somewhere he acquired a fair knowledge of and skill at international finance.
It was this talent which led to him being named the British representative on the Egyptian Commission of Public Debt in 1877, at the age of thirty-six.
His success there led to his appointment as finance minister to Lord Ripon, the new viceroy of India, in 1880, a post he would hold for three years.
It was during this time that Baring became aware of Prime Minister William Gladstone’s dedication to the entire concept of “reform,” as Ripon had a complete agenda for India, endorsed by Gladstone, which he intended to carry out.
Baring, in an unusually profound moment of insight, summed up Gladstone’s entire attitude toward the Empire when he wrote to a friend, “I do not think that English statesmen…quite sufficiently recognize that the final cause of British rule in India is to teach the people to govern themselves.”

When the opportunity came to return to Egypt in 1883, Baring took it with alacrity.
Appointed as the British Agent for Egypt—in effect making him proconsul—he would come to regard the twenty years he would spend in Egypt as an exemplary demonstration of how a misgoverned country was rescued by a handful of dedicated men from the British Foreign Office, whose reforms brought order, justice, and prosperity to a chaotic country, and with some justification.

It’s difficult to not see the ultimate results of British rule in Egypt as an example of what was best about the Empire, although there would be some quirks among those responsible for administering it.
Baring, for example, developed a most peculiar attitude toward Egypt—he believed that there was no such thing as a “nation of Egypt,” rather he saw it as a heterogeneous collection of wholly-Arab peasants and semi-European pashas, making up what he called the “dwellers of the Nile.” It was an attitude that manifested itself in assorted ways, some trivial, others significant: Egyptian contemporaries would come to laud Baring for re-establishing Egypt’s economy and introducing financial responsibility, while at the same time they would condemn him for a lack of educational opportunities and for denying them the right of self-governance.
In particular, they took offense at his frequent comments about the rigidity and lack of sophistication in Islam.
These were attitudes that seemed far removed from his earlier observation about India.

Whatever policies he put into practice, Baring did not have the authority to develop them himself.
Instead he was expected to govern according to directives received from the Foreign Office, which in turn took its instructions from the Cabinet, which in its own turn essentially reflected the policies of the Prime Minister.
In 1883, that meant the policies of William Gladstone.

William Ewart Gladstone was one of the towering figures of 19th-century British politics, and the dominant personality of the Liberal Party for almost thirty years.
Deeply religious, always he combined his high sense of morals with a mastery of oratory and a genius for finance to produce some of the most far-reaching social legislation enacted by any parliamentary body in the world, ever-attempting to bring compassion to the face of the Empire.
It could be said that in many ways he represented the best qualities of Victorian England.

Gladstone entered Parliament in 1833 as a Tory, curiously enough–he was the protégé of then-Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, who made him Undersecretary for War and the Colonies.
In successive Peel governments he moved to the Board of Trade, then to the Colonial Office.
A split within the Tory ranks found him moving ever closer to the Liberals, and when named Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British equivalent of the United States’ Secretary of the Treasury), he was vocal and eloquent in proposing and supporting free trade.
Believing that it was a disgrace that less than one-fiftieth of Great Britain’s working class was eligible to vote, he also adopted the cause of parliamentary reform.