First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (13 page)

The path of Charles George Gordon’s life that would bring him to Khartoum, and finally end there, began on 28 January 1833, at, appropriately enough, Woolwich Arsenal, where his father, General H.W.
Gordon, Royal Artillery, was a staff officer.
Charles was the fourth son in a family of eleven children, five boys and six girls; his education began at Taunton School, and continued at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where he enrolled as a cadet in 1848.
He had hoped to follow his father into the Royal Artillery, however disciplinary problems attributed to his fiery temper caused him to be put back on his course of study, and instead he graduated in 1852, to be commissioned on June 23 of that year as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Royal Engineers.

Rather than a setback, this development was to young Gordon’s advantage: the Royal Engineers regarded themselves as the professional elite of the British army, and rightly so.
They were posted all over the Empire, responsible for building fortifications, erecting bridges, constructing railways, quays for ships, designing buildings, and undertaking siege work.
This proved to be an ideal environment for Gordon, who at Woolwich had shown himself to be hot-tempered, for the circumstances in which engineer officers were expected to work demanded that they be brave and impetuous.

Gordon followed his graduation from Woolwich with a course of instruction at the Royal Engineers Establishment, Chatham, and was promoted to lieutenant in 1854.
That autumn he was given the task of assisting in the construction of the defenses of Milford Haven, a port on the English Channel, but he had hardly gotten his hands dirty before the Crimean War intervened and he was ordered on active service, arriving at Balaklava on January 1, 1855.

Gordon first saw action at the siege of Sebastopol when he was attached to one of the British columns which assaulted the main Russian position on June 18, and was present when the city was finally captured on September 8.
He was immediately put in charge of the task of demolishing the Russian dockyard there, but when Russia and Great Britain were able to come to terms on a peace treaty a few months later, Gordon was ordered to join the international commission appointed to survey and set up the new boundary between Russia and Turkey in Bessarabia (now part of modern Rumania).
He then went on to similar duties in the Caucasus and Asia Minor.
It was an experience that would bear strange fruit many years later, for in the months he spent in northeastern Turkey, among the Armenian people, he had his first encounter with Middle Eastern culture, and was introduced to the doctrines and teachings of Islam.

It wasn’t until the end of 1858 that Gordon was able to finally return to England, and his stay there was to be relatively brief.
Immediately upon his arrival home he was promoted to the rank of captain and appointed an instructor at the Royal Engineers Establishment at Chatham in April 1859, but when war was declared on China in June 1860, Gordon was ordered to the Far East.
He arrived at Tientsin in September, in time to join the column that would occupy Peking, and he would remain with the British occupation force in northern China until April 1862.
That month the Taiping Rebellion broke out, and British troops, under the command of General Staveley, were ordered south to Shanghai to protect the European enclave there.
Though virtually unknown in England at the time, Gordon’s actions over the next two years would make his name a household word and a hero to the general population.
It would also set him irrevocably on the road to Khartoum.

By the time he arrived in China, the shape and scope of Gordon’s character was fully formed.
Like most literate Victorians, Gordon was an inveterate writer and kept a diary in which he made almost daily entries, on some occasions multiple entries in the same day.
These diaries allow succeeding generations a window into Gordon’s heart, soul, and mind that would be denied them in their study of the Mahdi.
Curiously, though not unexpectedly, there was much in common between Gordon and the Sudanese holy warrior.
Both were equally fearless, and each was a proven leader of men, possessing great charisma and powers of persuasion.
Each man was highly intelligent, the Mahdi being widely respected within a religious tradition long noted for the quality of its scholarship.
While his enforcement of Islamic law may have seemed harsh to outsiders raised with Christian traditions, the Mahdi’s rule within his realm was noted for its even-handed, if severe, impartiality, and the thoroughness with which it had been thought out and promulgated.
Although he made no pretensions to scholastic accomplishments or academic achievements, Gordon was as literate as Muhammed Ahmed, and his diary would one day prove him to be a shrewd and insightful observer of humanity.
And finally, both were deeply and genuinely religious, each feeling called by and bound to his God to accomplish some great mission on earth.
In quiet, introspective moments they even used similar terms to describe their view of how their Divinities were employing them.

What the two men did not share was fanaticism in their sense of mission.
Unlike the Mahdi, Gordon never fell prey to messianic visions of glory, and never felt called to cleanse the Sudan of what he regarded as pernicious influences.
His suppression of the slave trade was an act of common humanity, not a divine calling, while his determination to stand at Khartoum was taken to avoid a wholesale slaughter, not to defy and destroy some foresworn enemy or to overthrow a doctrine he held to be false.

On the other hand, by the time Muhammed Ahmed’s army had invested Khartoum, Ahmed had imbued himself with the belief that he was an Islamic messiah, destined to cleanse not only the Sudan of the impurities brought to it by the Egyptians, the Turks, and the Christian infidels, but to purge all of Islam from Western influences and restore the lost piety of the true faith.
How he distorted and twisted the
jihad
to be his means of accomplishing his “mission” was an illustration of how deeply his newfound power had corrupted him.
Gordon’s stand at Khartoum was intended to be an act of mercy; the
jihad
proclaimed by the Mahdi was not one that the Prophet Mohammed would have recognized, nor was it one to which the Allah of the Koran would have given His blessing.

This most fundamental of differences would manifest itself in a myriad of ways in the months to come as Gordon and the Mahdi fought their duel of wills before the city on the Nile.
Ultimately Gordon’s would prove to be the greater, though he would in the end be betrayed, not by his faith, but by his worldly resources—or lack of them.
As for the Mahdi, it was becoming evident even as the siege of Khartoum began that his head was already turned by the power he wielded, and his piety overshadowed by worldly temptations.

Above everything else, Gordon was a genuinely religious man, devout in his belief in God and steadfast in his devotion to what he understood were fundamental Christian principles.
His whole character sprang from that central core of belief: his devotion to duty, his sense of honor, and even his ability to recognize the potential for greatness in a mortal foe, as he would do with the Mahdi.
At the center of that faith was his belief in his own insignificance and unworthiness in comparison to God: as an individual, he was nothing unless animated by Divine will, and whatever merit his lifework might one day be seen to possess would be in spite of his good intentions rather than because of them.
As he put the case himself when writing of his victories in China, “I do nothing of this—I am a chisel which cuts the wood, the Carpenter directs it.
If I lose my edge, He must sharpen me; if He puts me aside and takes another, it is His own good will.
None are indispensable to Him.” He developed this theme further when he embarked on his first mission to Khartoum: “I have an enormous province to look after, but it is a great blessing to me to know that God has undertaken the administration of it, and it is His work, and not mine.
If I fail, it is His will; if I succeed, it is His work.
Certainly, He has given me the joy of not regarding the honours of this world, and to value my union with Him above all things.
May I be humbled to the dust and fail, so that He may glorify Himself.
The greatness of my position only depresses me, and I cannot help wishing that the time had come when He will lay me aside and use some other worm to do His work.”

It is also worth noting that there was an aspect to this faith that would have considerable influence on his decisions when he found himself besieged at Khartoum by the Mahdi’s forces.
The confidence he gained by his determination to carry out what he perceived to be God’s will imbued him with a self-denying sense of duty, which in turn created an aura of fearlessness.
If submission to the divine will would assure his own eternal happiness, then it followed that someone so faithful should have no fear of either consequences or death, particularly the latter, as a death in the line of duty would mean immediate transference to his eternal reward.
To Gordon, doubt—about his mission, about the legitimacy of his Divine calling, about his interpretation of God’s will—would be little short of blasphemous.
Personal bravery, then, even to the point of foolhardiness, was the inevitable by-product of his faith.
He would acknowledge this himself, in a phrase in one of his letters, where he says, “I am become what people call a great fatalist, viz., I trust God will pull me through every difficulty.” Put another way, conduct that in other men would have been seen as culpable recklessness was in Gordon simply his faith put into action.
Today it is a way of thinking, a moral compass, that is so rare as to be utterly remarkable, yet in Gordon’s day his faith was notable only for how literally he carried it out, not that he possessed it.

Gordon’s courage cannot be dismissed as merely exaggerated religious mysticism, however, for it proved to be highly contagious among those with whom he came into contact.
In China, his example of dash and indifference to odds would inspire his soldiers with a fiery courage of their own, while at the same time spread a demoralizing influence among his enemies’ forces such that they would be halfway toward collapse before they were even attacked.
Nor was Gordon slow to exploit this advantage.
Combining an innate tactical and strategic shrewdness with a keen appreciation of human frailty, he learned to strike quick and hard, and even whenever possible, to attempt to anticipate and thwart an enemy’s plans, knowing that the weakened state of his opponents’ morale would make their response slow and hesitant.
His confidence in the inevitability of his victories assisted in making them possible.

Also characteristic of Gordon was his self-reliance.
At first this may seem at odds with the belief of a man who felt that he was fully submissive to God’s will, but it is in no way contradictory: having once decided on a course of action, no power on earth was able to deflect him from it, for hand-in-hand with his sense of divine purpose was the notion that if God chose him for a particular task, it was meant to be his alone to accomplish.
Consequently he could not and would not rely on anyone else in order to achieve his purpose.
Consistent with his self-reliance based on his perception of himself being the instrument of God’s will was Gordon’s sense of also being the instrument of God’s justice—as opposed to being an instrument of judgment.
That he appreciated the distinction and saw that his concept of God as a loving God required that mercy be exercised as well as chastisement was never clearer than the attitude he took toward the slave traders in the Sudan.
“It is much for me to do to keep myself from cruel illegal acts towards the slave-dealers,” he wrote, “yet I think I must not forget that God suffers it, and that one must keep to the law.
I have done the best I can, and He is Governor-General.”

Gordon was likewise sympathetic to those who suffered through no fault of their own, particularly those who were the victims of despotism and the capricious rule of tyrants.
“Residence in these Oriental lands tends, after a time, to blunt one’s susceptibilities of right and justice, and, therefore, the necessity for men to return at certain periods to their own countries to reimbibe the notions of the same.
The varnish of civilized life is very thin, and only superficial….
Man does not know what he is capable of in circumstances of this sort; unless he has the lode star, he has no guide, no councillor in his walk.” An essential element of his sympathetic nature was his capacity to admit to just how thin that varnish of civilized life truly was, or as a friend of some thirty years put it in a letter to the Times of London on February 20, 1884, “What in his mental constitution had struck me most was the manner—some people might even think the brutal manner—in which he sees through and cracks the crust of cant with which the world in general likes to envelop its doings.”

Gordon was equally realistic about war.
At one point he wrote, “People have little idea how little glorious war is; it is organized murder, pillage and cruelty, and it is seldom that the weight falls on the fighting men—it is on the women, children, and old people….” At the same time, he was an acknowledged master of battle.
His stint in the Crimea had seen him primarily engaged in the tasks of an officer of engineers—building fortifications, constructing siege works, demolishing captured enemy positions—so it wasn’t until he was sent to China in 1860 that he actually led troops in action.
His opportunity came when the long-smoldering Taiping revolt flared into blazing insurrection in 1860.

The revolt, which in several notable ways would bear an uncanny resemblance to the Mahdi’s uprising twenty years later, had begun in 1850 in China’s Kwangsi province.
Led by a sort of mystic, at once both political and religious, named Hung Sin Tsuan, the rebels swelled their ranks by playing on the lower class’s feelings of oppression and exploitation by the Chinese nobility.
Imperial troops sent to suppress the revolt were repeatedly defeated, and the revolt spread north through the provinces of Hunan and Hupeh, and down the valley of the Yangtze-kiang as far Nanking, which fell to the rebels in 1853.
It was in Nanking that Hung assumed the title of Tien Wang, or Heavenly King, and before long his troops were conducting sporadic raids into neighboring territories.
For the next five years a sort of semi-permanent state of war existed between the Imperial government of China and Tien’s loyal followers, who styled themselves “Taipings,” from “Taiping tien-quo”—the “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace,” the name the insurgents gave to their movement.