First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (4 page)

Responding to Edessa’s recapture by the Turks, Pope Eugenius III proclaimed a Second Crusade in 1145, while the king of France, Louis VII, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad III, announced that they would lead this new campaign.
Through no direct fault of the two monarchs, the effort was doomed to failure, as a Moslem army ambushed the German force of some 30,000 men near Dorylaeum in Asia Minor in 1147.
There were few survivors.
As the French advanced toward Antioch, they were continuously harried by Saracen armies and suffered severe causalities; less than half of the original force reached Jerusalem in 1148.

Once there, the remaining Crusaders joined with King Baldwin III of Jerusalem to attack Damascus.
After a siege of less than eight days the Crusaders withdrew, declaring that taking the city was impossible with the forces they had on hand.
In truth, conflicting ambitions on the part of the French and Germans, personal rivalries between Louis and Conrad, and a failure to cooperate with the subjects of the Kingdom of Jerusalem had undermined the efforts of the crusade.
It was becoming clearer with each passing season that the spiritual motives that had been the driving force of the First Crusade were mainly spent, and those of the Second had been little more than a religious veneer concealing the political ambitions of the French king and Holy Roman Emperor.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the goal of the entire saga of the Crusades, had forty years to live.

It was shortly after the end of the Second Crusade that the greatest warrior in all of Islam’s history appeared: Saladin.
Born in 1138 of Kurdish parents in the city of Tikrit, in what is now Iraq, in 1152 he entered the service of the Syrian Sultan Nureddin as a junior officer.
By 1164 he was demonstrating remarkable leadership as well as considerable military skills in three campaigns against the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and was soon named second-in-command of the Syrian army under his uncle Shirkuh.
Shirkuh became vizier of Egypt, but died just two months after his appointment, whereupon Saladin assumed his office.

He then spent the next two decades in a protracted political struggle as he consolidated his position as de facto ruler of Egypt, extended his power into Syria and northern Iraq, and skirmished with the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
By 1187 he felt strong enough to challenge the might of the Crusaders, and after a three-month campaign he defeated the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a fierce battle at the Horns of Hattin, near Tiberias on the Jordan River.
Among the spoils of the battle were the True Cross, the most sacred of the Crusaders’ relics, and Guy, the King of Jerusalem, whom Saladin held for ransom.
The remaining strongholds of the kingdom quickly fell to Saladin, and by the end of 1187, the only major city in the Levant remaining in Crusader hands was Tyre.

Responding to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Pope Gregory VIII proclaimed the Third Crusade in October, 1187, to be led by the English King, Richard Coeur-de-Lion (the Lion-Hearted); the French King, Philip Augustus; and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa.
Misfortune plagued the Germans once again, as Frederick drowned while crossing a river in Anatolia on his way to the Holy Land, and most of the German army then returned to their homes, having reached only as far as Antioch and never coming to battle with Saladin’s Saracen armies.

Richard arrived in the Levant after Phillip, having first taken Cyprus to use as a secure base for his supplies.
Together the two kings led their armies to the port city of Acre, on the Mediterranean coast, which was then under assault by the remnants of the army of Jerusalem, led by the now-ransomed King Guy.
After a prolonged siege, with almost no food left in the city and the walls crumbling after repeated attacks by the Crusaders’ engineers and miners, Acre surrendered in 1191, the city’s inhabitants offering themselves up for ransom.

Saladin at first refused to pay the sum demanded by Richard and Phillip Augustus, hoping that exhaustion would set in on the Crusader forces and compel them to allow the hostages to go free, but eventually he relented.
However, payment was delayed, and soon the Crusaders grew tired of waiting.
Richard ordered more than 3,000 Moslem captives—men, women, and children-–to be executed on a hillside near the city of Ayyadieh.
It was this one act more than any other that cemented the lasting enmity between Islam and Christendom, as Richard would be remembered as “The Butcher of Ayyadieh” among Moslems.
(For centuries Arab parents would silence unruly children by hissing at them, “Hush!
Or England will get you!”)

Eventually Richard’s and Saladin’s armies met in at Jaffa in 1192, and after a bitter, hard-fought battle, the Moslems withdrew in defeat.
The casualties on both sides were so severe that Richard lacked the strength to recapture Jerusalem, while Saladin was unable to drive the Crusaders into the sea.
The two warriors, who had come to admire and respect one another as kindred souls, concluded a treaty which established fixed borders between the Latin lands and Moslem territories, and which allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem.
A month later Richard departed the Levant forever.

Forty years would pass before another military expedition on the scale of the first three Crusades was attempted.
Meanwhile, the Fourth Crusade, launched in 1204, was a fiasco, serving as little more than a pretext for a mercenary army in the pay of Venice to sack and burn Byzantium, the greatest Christian city in Asia Minor, crippling the city as a financial rival to the Venentian lending houses.
Though condemned by the Church in the strongest possible terms, the sack of Byzantium left a Venetian puppet on the throne of the Eastern Empire for the next sixty years.

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II vowed in 1215 to lead a crusade, but repeated delays in his preparations and departure led to his excommunication by the Pope in 1227.
Frederick finally set out for the Levant in 1228, where his crusade was characterized by its diplomacy rather than by its militancy.
Having negotiated the recession of Jerusalem to Christian rule and a ten-year truce, Frederick was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1229.
Had subsequent Crusaders followed Frederick’s example, the history of relations between Christians and Moslems might have taken a very different turn, but because of his excommunication his bloodless policies were received with little regard among the European nobility, and so the religious slaughters would continue.

In the autumn of 1248, Louis IX of France, who would become known to history as Saint Louis, sailed to the island of Cyprus where he spent the winter preparing for an attack on Egypt that was launched in the spring.
After capturing the port of Damietta, Louis’ army moved on Cairo, but the Crusaders left their flanks unguarded, allowing the Egyptians to close in behind them as they advanced.
By knocking down dikes and opening floodgates on reservoirs behind the French forces, the Egyptians created floods that isolated the crusading army on low ground.
Disease soon ran rampant, forcing Louis to surrender, the only European monarch to be captured by the Moslems during the whole of the Crusades.
When his ransom was paid, Louis went directly to Palestine, where he spent the next four years strengthening the defenses of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, finally returning to France in the spring of 1254.

Louis’ efforts were for naught, however, as one by one, the remaining cities and castles of the Crusader states fell to the Saracens.
Antioch surrendered in 1263, Tripoli in 1289.
Acre, the last major Crusader stronghold, was taken in March 1291, as well as Tyre that May, and Haifa and Beirut in July.
The Europeans had been driven from the Levant.
Aside from a few castles and fortifications, and a handful of churches scattered across Asia Minor, little remained of two hundred years of bloodshed caused by the Crusades.
However, the scars left on the minds and hearts of the Moslem faithful would prove to be enduring.

At the same time a distinct change came over the motivation driving Islam’s expansion in the centuries that followed the Crusades.
There was an unmistakable element of vendetta in the Moslem campaigns against the remnants of the Byzantine Empire over the following two centuries.
Constantinople was seen as the staging point for every Crusader incursion into the Levant, while the Empire’s continued official proscription of Islam seemed to be an openly defiant attitude, if not a direct challenge to the Moslem world.
If that were so, it was a very foolish stance for the Byzantines to take, for Constantinople no longer possessed even a fraction of the power it once held.
The sack of the city during the Fourth Crusade and the more than half a century of Latin rule weakened the Eastern Roman Empire such that it could no longer fend off the repeated incursions of the Turks, who, led by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed, finally captured Constantinople in 1453, renaming it Istanbul.

Yet, by then it was no longer the imperative to holy war that fueled the Turks’ efforts to take Constantinople, or that compelled the next two hundred years of struggle in the Balkans, from where the Ottoman Turks ultimately drove to the gates of Vienna.
No longer did Islam embody a drive to conquest in order to spread the word of the Prophet and so turn all of the world to the rightful worship of Allah.
The facade of
jihad
had been largely stripped away from Ottoman ambitions by then, and the wars in the Balkans were was as much a consequence of the desire for conquest and vengeance as it was a means of spreading the faith.

After decades of absorbing the incursions of warriors from the central Asian steppe, Islam had been coopted to serve as the religious camouflage for overt wars of territorial expansion.
The purpose of the Islamic sword was no longer conversion but conquest: foreign lands were subjugated in the name of Allah, but for the greater glory of Empire.
The Moslems had learned well the lessons of their Crusader teachers three centuries earlier, and were now empowered to teach new ones.

But the Sudan was a long way away from the Levant, and what news came to that arid land of the struggle between the two faiths were only rumors of wars.
And yet, the two centuries of warfare between Christians and Moslems were bound to leave their mark, and that which was left on the Moslem world was an indelible impression of hostility toward Islam on the part of Christendom.
For the common people of Islam what would resonate for the eight hundred years that followed the Crusades was not how the faith had become a tool of the politically ambitious, much as had happened to Christianity.
Instead, what they would come to believe was that Christianity and all who tolerated it were forever outside of Islam’s “realm of peace.”

CHAPTER 2

THE COMING OF THE MAHDI

The tales of the passing centuries have been replete with charismatic religious and political figures whose origins are lost in obscurity, shrouded in controversy, or otherwise deemed “mysterious.” And fittingly enough it could not be otherwise for Muhammed Ahmed ’ibn Abdullah, known to the world as “the Mahdi”—“the Expected One.” He would materialize unheralded out of the sand-blown desert of the Sudan, and like a meteor burn a scar across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe to sear Islam and Christendom alike, and then suddenly die within months of his greatest victory.

Unlike so many figures of the past, however, the obscurity of Muhammed Ahmed’s origins were not fabrications deliberately contrived to enhance his mystique or add to his stature through tenuous claims of divine or royal descent.
The cloudiness surrounding his early years stems from the region in which he was born and attained maturity.
He was born sometime between 1840 and 1844, the latter date being the most widely accepted, although there is some debate over its accuracy within Arab and Moslem tradition.

Almost without doubt his birthplace was Dirar, an island just above the Third Cataract of the Nile River, off the Sudanese city of Dongola.
It is widely accepted that his family was of mixed Arab and Nubian heritage, and that he was the son of a shipbuilder, although there is some sketchy evidence that there were some religious figures of note in his ancestry.
His grandfather in particular was said to be a “shariff” known for his good works among the people of Dongola.
Tradition held that his father was named Abdullah and his mother Aamina.
As early as the age of five he began to show a comprehension of the sometimes complex and subtle doctrines of Islam that was far beyond his years, and from then on his education began to focus on theological studies.
By early manhood Ahmed was widely admired among the Moslem clergy of the southern Sudan for his piety and asceticism.
He learned the Holy Koran in Khartoum and Kararie and later he studied
fiqh
under the patronage of Sheikh Muhammed Kheir, a northern Sudanese nobleman.
Muhammed Ahmed mastered different aspects of Islamic studies and was known for his Sufi tendency among his mates.
In 1861 he approached Sheik Muhammad Sheief, the leader of the Sammaniyya Sect of the Sufi, and requested to become one of his students to learn more on Sufism.

Sufism, while today regarded by many Moslems as being outside the realm of Islam, was at that time seen as the inner, esoteric, mystical dimension of Islam.
In its simplest form, Sufi practice was quite simple: it was surrender to God (Allah), in love, embracing each moment of the soul’s consciousness as a gift from or manifestation of God.
It was, in short, a gentle philosophy, a far cry from the fiery brand of Islam Muhammed Ahmed would ultimately embrace.
Muhammed had shown a great deal of devotion and dedication to his Sheikh and teacher as well as a great deal of faith which distinguished him from his colleagues.
When Sheikh Muhammed realized Muhammed Ahmed’s dedication and devotion he appointed him
shaykh
(teacher) and permitted him to give instruction on
Tariqa
and
Uhuud
(guidance to the spiritual path to God) to new followers wherever he happened to be.