First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (17 page)

When the
Tanjore
docked at Port Said, a message was already waiting for Gordon, requesting that he come immediately to Cairo, where he was to meet with the Khedive.
It was only a few hours’ journey by rail, and he arrived at the Egyptian capital late that afternoon.
Once there he first received further instructions from Sir Evelyn Baring, and the following day was formally appointed by Khedive Tewfik as Governor-General of the Sudan, with executive powers.
His next meeting was little short of surreal, for he called upon no less than Zobeir, of whom he had been so suspicious on the passage to Port Said.

The motives behind Gordon’s visit with Zobeir were little short of astonishing.
After having wrestled with the question of what form the government left behind in Khartoum would take, Gordon had come to an astonishing conclusion: he would offer the governorship to Zobeir!
It was such an unbelievable turn of events that Gordon did not even discuss it with Colonel Stuart beforehand.
His motives made sense in a strangely logical way, although it was a situation that would have never been acceptable to the British public once word leaked out.

When Gordon broke the news to Baring, the Consul-General was aghast.
Zobeir was Gordon’s sworn enemy, and held him personally responsible for the death of his son, Suleiman, five years earlier.
Moreover, his reputation as a slaver, no matter how frequent and fervent his claims that he had given up the trade for good, made him suspect, if not actually despised, in the eyes of most Britons.
The meeting between Gordon and Zobeir was awkward—Baring later wrote of it: “The scene was dramatic and interesting.
Both General Gordon and Zobeir Pasha were laboring under great excitement and spoke with vehemence.” Zobeir pointedly refused to shake Gordon’s hand, an indication of where the interview would go.
It ended with Zobeir walking out, the question of his assuming the governorship officially left open, but in practical terms very much an impossibility.

It had not been that unrealistic an idea, although Gordon’s basis for it was somewhat peculiar.
Upon arriving in Cairo he had, quite by happenstance, encountered Zobeir on the street, and suddenly felt himself overtaken by what he described as “a mystical feeling that this man [Zobeir] could be trusted.” Baring, supremely practical, had little time for Gordon’s intuitions, saying, “I have no confidence in opinions based on mystical feelings,” but he had to admit that there were few men with the knowledge and connections in the Sudan who could rival those of Zobeir, and that he had to all outward appearances indeed repented of his slaver’s ways.
Appointing Zobeir as governor of Khartoum was an idea that may well have worked, but it foundered on the man’s grief over his dead son, which itself may have been an indication of how ambition and greed no longer ruled his soul.

In any event, Gordon’s time in Cairo was nearly done.
The morning after his meeting with Zobeir, Gordon had one last audience with Khedive Tewfik, who presented him with a letter of credit for £100,000, along with two
firmans
(vice-regal prescripts).
The first confirmed Gordon’s status as Governor-General of the Sudan; the other proclaimed Tewfik’s determination to evacuate the country.
It read in part: “We have decided to restore to the families of the kings of the Sudan their former independence.” These were brave words masking what was in truth a defeat—Egypt did not possess the strength to stand up to the Mahdi.

Gordon and Stewart left Cairo the same day, traveling by steamer up the Nile to Khartoum, where they arrived on February 18.
The waterfront was swarming with the citizens of Khartoum, who greeted Gordon with the welcome of a returning hero, tinged with a sense of relief that they had been somehow delivered from the threat of the Mahdi.
Gordon did nothing to immediately disabuse them of that notion, knowing that an immediate display of any intention to withdraw from the city might result in a panic among the populace.
He did set about the task of sending the women and children, along with the sick and wounded, back to Egypt, and about twenty-five hundred souls were safely removed before the Mahdi’s forces closed around the city.

Time, however, was running out for Gordon if he was determined to actually accomplish the evacuation.
Daily, more Sudanese tribes were going over to the Mahdi, while a totally unrelated revolt in the eastern Sudan raised a new threat to the city.
Egyptian troops sent to put down this new insurrection in the vicinity of Suakin met with a series of defeats, and eventually a British force under the command of General Sir Gerald Graham was sent out, and handily routed the rebels in several hard-fought actions.

Gordon telegraphed Baring in Cairo, urging that General Graham and his forces be used to hold open the road from Suakin to Berber.
It was a reasonable request and one that Baring and the British military authorities in Cairo strongly supported, but it was refused by the government in London.
In April the garrison of Berber, seeing that there was no chance of relief, surrendered to the Mahdi, a hundred and fifty miles down the Nile from Khartoum.
Gordon, the city, and the Sudan had been abandoned to their fate.

CHAPTER 6

THE SIEGE BEGINS

When Gordon arrived at Khartoum on February 18, 1884, the welcome was more than tumultuous: it was a hero’s welcome, a latter-day Roman triumph.
Thousands of civilians crowded the waterfront as the General’s steamer docked, cheering themselves hoarse, almost delirious with joy.
An honor guard from the garrison presented arms as Gordon stepped from the gangplank, and as he walked toward the Governor’s Palace, he was crowded on all sides as the people reached out to touch him, as if to assure themselves he was real.

The British Consul in Khartoum, Frank Power, cabled Evelyn Baring in Cairo that afternoon: “Gordon arrived here this morning, and met with a wonderful demonstration of welcome on the part of the population.
The state of affairs here, since it was heard that Gordon was coming, gives every promise of the speedy pacification of this portion of the Sudan.
His speech to the people was received with the greatest enthusiasm.”

For all of the political machinations of Gladstone, Granville and Hartington, sending Gordon to Khartoum was a masterstroke.
He alone possessed the moral authority to be able to command not only the garrison but the civilian populace.
The memory of his fair-minded and even-handed governorship was still strong, and the memory of the chaos and cruelty of the five years after his departure strengthened the citizens’ affection.
While his mission might have been nigh-hopeless–and London firmly believed it was, since sending Gordon to Khartoum was intended as nothing more than a political sop to public opinion in order to relieve popular pressure on Gladstone—if there was ever a right man in the right place at the right time, it was Gordon in Khartoum during this crisis.

Perceptive observers would have detected a note of hysteria in the city’s welcome, and Gordon, even while basking in the adulation, was most perceptive.
Even putting the best face on the circumstances, the future facing the garrison and population of Khartoum was bleak.
Contact with the outside world was only maintained by river steamer and a single telegraph line running to the north.
The loss of either one would be crippling, as critical news of developments in Cairo and London might be delayed or lost altogether; the loss of both would be devastating, as no word of the city’s condition could get out, and no information regarding any relief efforts would be able to get in.
If that happened, Gordon and Khartoum would be on their own.

The loss of the river passage already appeared to be inevitable.
As his steamer made its way up the Nile, it became evident that the Mahdi’s reach was spreading further and faster than Cairo believed possible.
The situation changed almost daily, as Gordon had learned as he was passing up the Nile.
His steamer had reached Korosko, just fifty miles from the Sudan border, without serious incident on February 1, but there were already straws in the wind.
Before they had even passed Aswan, Gordon and Stewart had quarreled, the General accusing the Colonel, with some justification, of being Gladstone’s spy, specifically assigned to Gordon to be sure that he didn’t exceed his orders or authority.
When Stewart would not deny Gordon’s allegations, tensions ran high between the two men for a few days.
Common sense gradually prevailed and they effected a reconciliation.
Stewart would eventually become Gordon’s most trusted confidant and an effective second-in-command.

A bit more disturbing was a petty dispute which sprang up between Gordon and the Emir Abdul-Shakur.
Shakur, whose shiekdom was in Dongola province, was one of the chieftains on whose loyalty Gordon was counting.
It would have been a significant blow to the Mahdi’s prestige among the Sudanese had Shakur remained firm in his friendship with Gordon, as Dongola was the city where he was born.
The exact nature of the two men’s disagreement was never revealed, but it was enough to affront Shakur to the point where he left the steamer at Aswan and made his way overland to Dongola.
While he would not go over to the service of the Mahdi, he was never fully trusted by the British or the Egyptians again.

The arrival at Berber on February 11 was marked by more dramatic and ominous developments.
The sheiks around Berber were wavering in their loyalty to Egypt–the Mahdi seemed to be a very real threat to them, and indeed some of his followers had already been making their way that far north.
A firm declaration of Britain’s support and Egypt’s determination to stand against the revolt could have kept the sheiks out of the Mahdi’s camp, but Gordon, still feeling bound by his instructions from Gladstone and the Khedive, could offer neither.
Instead he publicly declared that his mission was to evacuate the Sudan, not fight the Mahdi.
Then he took what for him was an extraordinary step: he announced that while he was in Khartoum he would do nothing to interfere with the slave trade.
“Whoever has slaves,” he said, “shall have full right to their services and full control over them.
This proclamation is proof of my clemency toward you.”

While shocking at first glance—Gordon’s reputation in the Sudan had been made by the ferocity with which he had suppressed the slave trade—in truth it was an empty gesture.
He had no authority to interfere with the trade, and he apparently thought that it might cause the vacillating sheiks to feel more favorably disposed to him and his mission.
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
The Arab tribal leaders around Berber now began to drift into the Mahdi’s sway, as it became clear that neither Egypt nor Britain could offer them any protection from the Mahdi’s wrath.
Only a few months would pass before Berber would fall without a fight to the Mahdi’s army.

By the time Gordon arrived at Khartoum on February 18, the countryside around the Sudanese capital was swarming with the Mahdi’s vast army.
No determined assault had yet been made on the city or against its outlying positions, although there was minor skirmishing almost daily.
Still, everyone within Khartoum’s walls knew the fate that Muhammed Ahmed had decreed for them, and understood the fanatical zeal with which his followers would carry it out if given the opportunity.
A sense of almost palpable dread had begun to grip the city.

It is difficult if not impossible at this remove to understand the fear, the sheer terror, created by the Mahdi and his proclaimed goals in the Sudan and Egypt, and how grave the concern was becoming in the capitals of Europe.
It was an experience completely outside the experience of any of the related parties.
Western societies in the opening years of the 21st century have become so well acquainted with the violence intrinsic to Islamic extremism that while it still possesses the power to shock, it no longer seems unbelievable or unthinkable.
Indeed, when considering what militant Islamic fundamentalists may attempt in their efforts to impose their will on an unwilling world, thinking the unthinkable has become the natural response.

The succession of slaughters at the hands of militant Moslems has become something familiar, almost a litany of death and destruction: the bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, with its intent to kill tens of thousands; the loss of TWA Flight 800 that same year, where all two hundred and thirty aboard died; United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania torn apart by bombs that same year with more than two hundred were killed; Egyptian Flight 990, its copilot repeatedly crying out “I am in Allah’s hands!” as he sent the airliner into its death dive and killed the two hundred seventeen people aboard; the attack on the U.S.S.
Cole
in 1998; time bombs set by Al Qaeda aboard commuter trains across Spain in 2003, the resulting explosions shredding railroad cars and claiming one hundred ninety-two more lives; two hundred fifteen killed by explosions ripping through tourist resorts and hotels in Bali and Egypt in 2002 and 2004; the London subway bombings of July 2005 that killed fifty-three; and the ultimate horror, September 11, 2001.
The willingness of Moslem fanatics to take innocent lives-–even those of fellow Moslems, in utter defiance and disregard of the strictures of the Koran—without warning or provocation has translated into a terrible reality that has become part of the fabric of life in the 21st century.

But it had never been so before the Mahdi.
Even the most dedicated Wahhabi disciple determined to bring “renewal” to Islam had never envisioned coercion on the scale of that conceived by Muhammed Ahmed.
Just as terrifying for many of Egypt’s ruling class–as well as mystifying for the British and French in Cairo, London, and Paris—was how truly genuine were the Mahdi’s motives: his dedication to spreading his vision of Islam and coercing the world into embracing it was complete, total, and unequivocating.
While he may have begun to succumb to the physical pleasures of power, the Mahdi never gave any indication that he had lost faith in his divine calling.
To the end of his life he believed he was on a mission from Allah.
Not for him was Islam merely a convenient smokescreen to hide his personal ambitions, nor was it a sop to his followers to appease their religious sensibilities while he used them for his own political ends.
This was a dynamic, dangerous, militant Islam that Europe had not encountered in nearly a thousand years—arguably it never had, for it was an entirely new phenomenon, not only to the nations of the Western world, but within Islam itself.
Not since the days of the Prophet himself had a holy man arisen within the Moslem world with such purity of vision and dedication of purpose.
Never before had a Moslem leader appeared who possessed such utter ruthlessness, for there were no moderating influences on the Mahdi, none of the restraints that are inherent in political ambitions, none of the forbearance incumbent on one who seeks harmony and dialogue with his neighbors, for he had no neighbors: he knew only those who submitted to his authority and those who did not.
If they did not they were enemies.
There would be no compromise; instead, there was only his burning vision of Islam, pure and unsullied, which was his mission on earth to bring into being.