First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (7 page)

Cairo’s refusal to ease its economic stranglehold on the Sudan and thus its sensitivity to the Mahdi’s rising rebellion was due to the absurd level of mismanagement to which Egypt’s own economic affairs had fallen.
Muhammed Ali’s successors, while never quite as ruthless as he, shared little of his intelligence but all of his love of extravagance.
In the thirty years following Ali’s death, they managed to plunge what had been a dynamic Egyptian economy into recession and deep debt.

Muhammed Ali had hoped that his dedication to the development of Egypt—building factories, railways, and canals, and bringing in European architects and technicians to create a modern state-–would continue under his grandson, Abbas.
Instead, Abbas abandoned Ali’s system of protective tarriffs, opening Egypt to free trade—and consequent exploitation by European business enterprises—while at the same time closing schools and factories, effectively halting the momentum toward industrial development and economic self-sufficiency Muhammed Ali had set in motion.
Said Pasha, Abbas’ son and successor, tried to reverse the backward slide, developing Egypt’s infrastructure of roads, railroads, and canals, and most importantly brokering a deal with the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, who wanted to build a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea at Suez.

The Suez Canal was completed in 1869, by which time Said’s son Ismail had become the Ottoman viceroy, bearing the new title “Khedive.” Ismail was ambitious, both personally and for his country.
Under his rule old factories were reopened and new ones built; telegraph and postal systems were established; canals and bridges were constructed; and the cotton industry thrived, particularly during the years of the American Civil War.
But with expansion came a price: modernizing Egypt created a huge national debt, and when the bottom fell out of the cotton market in 1865 with the end of the American war, an economic crisis overtook the country.

Had Khedive Ismail been able to curb his own expensive habits, he and Egypt might have weathered the storm together, but Ismail had the regrettable habit of regarding the national treasury as his personal bank account.
No one would have questioned the wisdom of spending the money building railroads and irrigation canals, but Ismail, determined to become as thoroughly Westernized as possible, also chose to spend it on an opera house and theater in Cairo, on gifts of a steam yacht and diamond studded diner plate to the Sultan in Constantinople (who in return issued a
firman
, a rescript or decree, granting virtually autocratic powers to Ismail), as well as a half-dozen new palaces, a huge collection of French furniture, artwork, jewels, and an enormous household entourage of slaves and harem girls.
He traveled extensively (being received by Queen Victoria in 1867) and put on extravagant entertainments for royalty visiting one or another of his Cairo palaces.
It all came at a price, however, for just as Ismail’s spending reached its peak, the bottom fell out of the cotton market and Egypt’s national debt soared from a quite reasonable £3,000,000 to an incredible £100,000,000 in less than five years.

When Ismail defaulted on a series of loan payments, foreign bankers and businesses that carried Egypt’s (and Ismail’s) debt began making threatening noises about seizing Ismail’s assets and foreclosing on the Suez Canal.
Rather than retrench and curb his spending, Ismail saw as one solution to his economic dilemma an escalation in the ongoing rapine of the Sudan.
Determined to squeeze every last piastre out of that hapless land, Ismail had no tolerance for peasants who refused to pay their taxes, no matter how exorbitant, and authorized his troops to use force to extract payment.
It was a mistake that would cost him his throne and Egypt her sovereignty.
By 1879, Ismail would be forced to abdicate, while the influence of the Europeans, and in particular that of the British, would grow until Egypt became little more than a client state, and her new Khedive, Tewfik, a puppet of the European interests.

In contrast to the rather pathetic figures of Ismail and Tewfik, it was in these years that the Mahdi was at his best: his physique was still tall, sleek, and strong, and his features were still sharply handsome, as yet unmarred by a corpulence brought on by a life of unrestrained license and sensuality.
Further, his character was still untarnished by the corruption that victory would bring, his faith still pure and honest, untouched by the megalomania which would later engulf it.
There was still the strident ring of a genuinely righteous anger in his exhortations, as he urged his followers to act in the name of Islam for the good of Islam, without the unholy marriage of personal ambition and faith that was yet to come.
His message was still filled with exhortations to shun the vices of envy, pride, and neglecting daily prayers.
His followers, he stressed, should aspire to the six virtues of humility, charity, meekness of spirit, endurance, moderation in eating and drinking, and venerating the holy men of Islam.
It was an admirable message, delivered by a still-admirable messenger.

His followers gave themselves over to his service with a readiness that went beyond devotion.
In the words of Alan Moorehead, “They never … questioned his authority, they thought him semi-devine, and from the most powerful Emir to the humblest water-carrier they were ready to die for him.”

The Egyptian authorities, in both the Sudan and Cairo, certainly had no idea of the whirlwind that was about to sweep over them.
The first attempt to counter the Mahdi’s influence was laughable for its comic-opera quality: in early 1881, a delegation of government officials went up the Nile to Abba Island in an attempt to persuade the Mahdi to temper his rhetoric and cease his agitation of the Sudanese.
The delegation simply vanished in the Sudanese wastes.
At last becoming alarmed at the rising threat posed by Muhammed Ahmed and his growing band of disciples, Cairo chose to resort to force to impose silence on the Mahdi.

That August, Abu Saoud, then the governor of Sudan safely ensconced in Khartoum, received instructions from Cairo to put an end to the annoying holy man on Abba Island who was creating so much trouble for the Egyptian overseers and tax-collectors.
Badly underestimating the forces arraying against him, as well as the devotion of the Mahdi’s followers to their leader, he sent a column of two hundred soldiers up the Nile to Abba, with orders to arrest or eliminate the Mahdi.

Armed only with clubs and rocks, swords and spears—and a fanatical belief in their leader and his teachings—the Mahdi’s disciples ambushed Saoud’s soldiers and literally butchered them.
Immediately after their victory, the Mahdi and his faithful, now between ten and twelve thousand strong with their motley armament augmented by the captured muskets of the annihilated Egyptian column, left Abba Island and headed for Mt.
Jebel Gedir, in the depths of Kordofan, intent upon retaking the Sudan in the name of Islam.

It was a ragtag force, impressive due to its sheer size rather than from any organizational strength or tactical abilities.
Still, the Mahdi would prove to have considerable natural skills in logistics and in moving masses of his followers over long distances.
When, in December 1881, a second column of some fourteen hundred Egyptian soldiers met with the same fate as the first, he rapidly began gaining an aura of invincibility.
Each victory, however small or large, brought in hundreds of new followers, while adding new weapons to the army’s arsenal and swelling its coffers with money, jewelry, and personal valuables looted from the bodies of the slain.

What had seemed for so long to be a smoldering rebellion against Egyptian authority now flared up into open revolt throughout the Sudan.
For reasons that were beyond the Mahdi’s control but from which he would benefit, the uprising was no longer just a “situation” but an all-out crisis for Cairo.
When the Mahdi finally faced Cairo’s next attempt to bring him to bay, it would be no small column of soldiers he would encounter—it would be an army.

CHAPTER 3

REVOLT IN THE DESERT

When the Mahdi declared himself and his followers in open revolt against the Egyptians in mid-1881, rebellion in the Sudan had already begun, but his proclamation of
jihad
, or holy war, against the “Turks” made him the rallying point for tremendous additional unrest that had been threatening to boil over for more than a decade.
In the process he gave the energy aroused from discontent a purpose and a direction.
Perhaps even more significantly, by proclaiming
jihad
, the Mahdi provided Sudanese defiance with a moral legitimacy, a spiritual underpinning that would not only sustain it but even increase its fury.

His proclamation was powerful, sweeping, and strident: “Verily these Turks thought that theirs was the kingdom and the command of Allah’s apostles and of His prophets and of him who commanded them to imitate them.
They judged by other than Allah’s revelation and altered the Shari’a of Our Lord Muhammed, the Apostle of Allah, and insulted the Faith of Allah and placed poll-tax (
al-jizya
) on your necks together with the rest of the Muslims….
Verily the Turks used to drag away your men and imprison them in fetters and take captive your women and your children and slay unrighteously the soul under God’s protection.” He then went on to issue his call to arms: “I am the Mahdi, the Successor of the Prophet of Allah.
Cease to pay taxes to the infidel Turks and let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.”

At the same time, he added yet another aspect to his proclamations, one that would be a cornerstone of militant Islam for generations to come: xenophobia and a hatred of Christians.
Because Great Britain, and to a lesser degree France, had become entangled in Egyptian politics, and were perceived as the real strength propping up a weak and venal Egyptian Khedive, they–and by extension all Christians–were added to the Mahdi’s growing list of those who had, either directly or simply by reason of their existence, defiled the faith and thus were cursed as “infidels.”

Prior to the construction of the Suez Canal, Great Britain had little interest in Egypt, regarding it essentially as one more province of the Ottoman Empire.
But because of the canal’s strategic importance in maintaining Britain’s sea lanes to her Far Eastern empire, in particular India, indifference to Egypt was not a position the British government could any longer maintain.
By 1878 Her Majesty’s Government was inextricably drawn into the quagmire of Egyptian affairs by the continuing financial folly of the Khedive Ismail, which finally bankrupted the Cairo government in 1878.
Control of Egypt’s finances was given over to an Anglo-French debt commission, which was also saddled with the responsibility for settling the Khedive’s debts.
The commission forced Ismail to liquidate all his holdings in the Suez Canal Company, and at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Great Britain bought all of the outstanding shares, which in one deft stroke gave the British a controlling interest in the Canal.
It was a decision at once shrewd and fraught with peril: regardless of whatever legal niceties may have existed, the cold, hard political reality of the situation was that whichever nation controlled the Canal controlled Egypt.
By 1879, when the British and French persuaded the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to depose the impecunious Ismail and replace him with his son, Mohammed Tewfik, the notion of Egyptian sovereignty was quickly becoming a rather transparent fiction.

Control of the Canal allowed Britain unhindered exercise of her seapower, which was vital to maintaining her economic, political, and military positions abroad, but it also meant that Britain’s policies toward both Egypt and the Sudan would for the next three-quarters of a century be determined by the need to protect the Suez Canal and the lifelines to the eastern marches of the Empire which passed through it.
With the Khedive and his government perceived as little more than clients of the British and French, it was a situation that did not sit well with many Egyptians, particularly the Egyptian ruling class.
These people resented European administration of what had been their responsibilities–in particular the Europeans’ far more even-handed taxation, which of course eliminated much of the graft on which the Egyptian nobles had built their fortunes.

But of more importance than the resentment of the nobles was the anger of the common people, who clung to their dreams of an independent Egypt, or at the least of an Egypt ruled by a Khedive who was not perceived to be a Christian puppet.
While the mass of Egypt’s populace was composed of barely literate peasants, each of them was conscious in some way of the greatness of Egypt’s past, and took pride in the knowledge, however imperfect, they possessed of Egypt’s role as one of the earliest and most enduring of mankind’s civilizations.
That such a proud and ancient people should be ruled, however indirectly, by foreigners whose ancestors were still huddling in caves when Egyptians were building Luxor, Abu-Simbel, Memphis, and the Pyramids was a spiritual burden that weighed heavily on the Egyptian soul.
As the Europeans’ influence increased and became more open and obvious, so did the resentment felt by the Egyptians.
By 1882, it had reached a fever pitch, and an open revolt broke out within the Egyptian army.

The army was under the control of the Under-Secretary of War, Lieutenant-Colonel Ahmet Arabi.
There had been rumblings of discontent among the officers and other ranks alike, and soon talk of open rebellion, toppling Tewfik and replacing him with someone who would defy the “Christians”—as the Europeans were called—or even throw them out of the country entirely, was heard in the streets of Cairo.
In May 1882, the Royal Navy, in the form of eight battleships and eleven cruisers, steamed into Alexandria Harbor as a show of support for Tewfik.
It was an ill-chosen gesture, for it seemed to confirm the viewpoint of those who felt that the new Khedive sat on his vice- regal throne only at the sufferance of the Europeans.
Throughout May and June, chaos overtook Alexandria and Cairo, resulting in the massacre of several Europeans.
By now the Egyptian army, openly led by Lt.-Col.
Arabi, was in full revolt against Tewfik, the British, and the French, refusing all orders to disperse or disband, and seizing several key fortifications overlooking Alexandria Harbor, from which they threatened to shell the British ships anchored in the bay.