First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (2 page)

The rabble were the followers of the Mahdi, a Sudanese Arab holy man who had come to believe himself to be the Islamic messiah.
The Mahdi had a vision: a dream of a world driven at his command to embrace Islam, an Islam he had purged of its corruption and heresies.
It was a vision that he was prepared to carry out at the point of a sword—Islam would be cleansed and the infidels would either be converted or ruthlessly killed.

In the quiet grayness before dawn, as the garrison and inhabitants of Khartoum uneasily slept, their defiance was undone in a single act of betrayal.
One of the garrison’s officers, whether bribed or a true turncoat, opened the gates to the city and the Mahdi’s forces rushed in.
In a few hours of shrieking chaos, Khartoum was overrun.
Gordon and the rest of the garrison were slaughtered without mercy, while men, women, and children, Moslem and Christian, Egyptian and Sudanese alike, were put to death in an orgy of murder, rape, and plunder.
By nightfall nearly thirty thousand would die.
For the handful of women and young boys and girls who were spared, death might have been preferable, for they were fated to be sold into slavery.

They died even though they had not taken up arms against the Mahdi or his followers; even though they had not opposed his message or his faith; and even though they did not live on land unfairly taken from the Sudanese.
Their slayers were not a repressed people yearning to worship as they wished or trying to achieve their freedom.
They died because their vision of the world and their profession of their faith differed from that of the Mahdi.
The Mahdi had no interest in glory, land, wealth, or power: for him, all of life was a mission to impose his vision of Islam with the sword.

That morning was witness to more than the fall of Khartoum.
It was witness to the birth of a religious movement which would cast a shadow of death across the next century and beyond.

It was more than the triumph of the Mahdi—it was the dawn of militant Islam.

CHAPTER I

THE LAND AND THE PROPHET

If it could ever be said that a land and a religion were made for each other, it would be true of the Sudan and Islam.
The seemingly endless and almost empty, unforgiving landscape of the sub-Saharan region of Africa known as the Sudan found its spiritual reflection in Islam, born in the equally vast wastes of the Arabian Peninsula, with its starkly declared doctrines governing the most mundane aspects of daily life, and its sternly decreed punishments for transgressions against those doctrines.
Simple, subtle, remorseless, utterly lacking in grace, though not in beauty, the Sudan and Islam mirrored one another as if “they were anon twin halves of one august event.” It was a union pregnant with import and fraught with danger, for austerity is often the cradle of fanaticism and zealots.

It would prove to be so with the Sudan and Islam, when in the last quarter of the 19th century a Moslem holy man would declare his divinity, raise an army of ferociously loyal followers, and in the name of the Prophet Muhammed challenge the power of the greatest empire of his time.
More than a century later his spiritual descendants still seek to terrorize the world by bringing senseless death and mutilation to countless thousands.
Which was the greater influence, the land or the Prophet, is a question that can never be settled, but it is certain that without one the other would have never produced the charismatic and bloody persona of Muhammed Ahmed ibn Abdullah, known to history as the Mahdi.

It would be incorrect to speak of the Sudan of the mid-19th century as a country, as it possessed few of the attributes normally associated with nationhood; rather, it was more of a geographical notion.
Its borders were vague and fuzzy; the only firm political boundary was the one that existed to the north, between the Sudan and Egypt.
The Red Sea and the mountains of Abyssinia provided a rough and ready—though in the hills a highly imprecise—demarcation of the Sudan’s eastern marches, while in the south any sense of where the land began and ended was confined to a handful of Egyptian-garrisoned forts clustered along the Nile River, roughly level in latitude with the Tropic of Cancer.
To the west was only void, as the emptiness of the Sudan spilled into the vast wastes of the Sahara Desert.
Only along the Nile, which bisects the country as it meanders from south to north through the desert, is there to be found any relief from the apparently endless desolation.

It is only along the Nile, in fact, that there is any real vitality to the Sudan.
For a few miles inland from either of its banks the country is fertile and green; the few towns and cities of any size to be found in the Sudan are sited on the river’s banks.
Unless a traveler chose to journey by caravan, the only reliable transportation in the country was found on the river.
In essence this meant that whoever controlled the Nile controlled the Sudan.
As a consequence, the towns along the river often assumed a significance out of proportion to their size.
But once away from the fertile ribbon of the Nile’s banks, the abiding impression of the Sudan is not one of hostility to human existence, but utter indifference to it.

And yet people lived there, some ten million in 1880, although that number could have fluctuated either way by as much as a million, so imprecise were the land’s borders and so inept was its administration.
Save for small numbers of merchants, who eked out their existence by maintaining a loose network of trading posts at the oases scattered across the Sudanese landscape, the people were herders, living a nomadic existence as they moved to and fro across the county in search of adequate grazing for their flocks.

Archeologists and anthropologist have found evidence that humans have lived in the Sudan for at least nine million years.
It may well be that the valley of the Nile, which wanders more than 4,000 miles from the lakes of central Africa to the Mediterranean, is the real cradle of civilization rather than the Euphrates.
If that is so, then in a strange juxtaposition, technology, the handmaiden of civilization, has never really come to the Sudan at all: in some ways the country carries on in the beginning of the 21st century much as it did a half-dozen millennia ago.
About five centuries before Christ, the ox-driven water wheel, which is still an essential part of the Sudan’s mainly agrarian economy, was introduced along the banks of the Nile.
At the same time came camels, brought by the Persians when Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, invaded Egypt in 525
B
.
C
.

Homer knew of the Sudan, as the Greeks came there to trade, bartering cloth, wine and trinkets for gum arabic, spices and slaves.
In Roman times the Emperor Nero sent a legion to explore far up the Nile, but the commander’s experience with the “sudd”–the Arabic word for “obstruction” from which the country derived its name—a vast and impenetrable papyrus swamp in the southern Sudan, quickly put paid to any thought of conquest.
When he returned to Rome, he reported a patchwork of petty kingdoms and principalities scattered across the land, populated mostly by Arabs in the north, by Negroes in the south.
It was during the reign of Justinian that many of these northern Sudanese kingdoms converted to Christianity and churches began to appear along the sweep of the Nile—until the spread of Islam in the territory during the 16th century.

The history of the southern half of the Sudan before the 19th century is obscure, and it appears as little more than a large blank space on contemporary maps.
European explorers, venturing into the heart of central Africa for the first time in the 1850s, found primitive, post-Neolithic cultures that literally had no awareness of a world beyond their own horizons.
In inexplicable contrast, from remote antiquity until the 16th century
A
.
D
., the northern region of the Sudan, known as Nubia, was well known throughout the Mediterranean world.
Having taken the shape of an independent kingdom some three millenia before Christ, Nubia began to fall under Egyptian sway during the period of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, about 2600–2100
B
.
C
.
By 1550
B
.
C
., under the 18th Dynasty, Nubia had been reduced to a vassal state.
A Nubian revolt in the 8th century
B
.
C
.
brought Egyptian over-lordship to an end, but the land between the Nubian Desert and the Nile River still remains strewn with monuments and ruins dating from the centuries of Egyptian dominance.
A succession of independent kingdoms subsequently took the place of the deposed Egyptians.
The most powerful of these, Makuria, was founded in the 6th century, centered at Old Dunqulah, near the site of modern Khartoum.

As Christianity spread south into Africa, first into Abyssinia and then into Egypt, it soon made its way into Nubia.
Most of the people had converted to Coptic Christianity by the end of the 6th century
A
.
D
., and by the 8th century the petty kingdoms reported to Rome by Nero’s centurions were flourishing.
Strong enough to resist repeated incursions from Egypt, which had fallen under Muslim rule in the 7th century, these small kingdoms were eventually undone by peoples from the north—mostly Egyptians and Arabs–who came as traders and craftsmen and who brought Islam with them.
They gradually began to outnumber the Christian population until, between 1300 and 1500, the Christian states collapsed and Nubia became Muslim.

During the 16th century, a people who called themselves the Funj formed a powerful Islamic state in what had been Nubia, and the city of Sennar became one of the great cultural centers of Islam.
The glory of the Funj kingdom lasted a little more than two hundred years, as in the closing decades of the 18th century religious dissension among the Funj tribes left the kingdom weak and divided.
In 1820, Egypt, which by this time was part of the Ottoman Empire, again invaded the Sudan, and by 1822 the land was conquered by armies led by the Ottomans’ Egyptian viceroy, Muhammad Ali.
This Turkish-Egyptian rule, which would be marked by increasingly heavy-handed administration as the Egyptians continued to expand southward, would endure for the next sixty years before it was undone by revolution in Egypt and revolt in the Sudan.

It was the introduction of Islam in the 15th century, and its subsequent domination of the land, which would eventually cause the Sudan to cease being an obscure backwater and bring it briefly to a position of prominence in the eyes of the world.
Islam is a religion distinctly Arab in origin, the name itself derived from the Arabic word “salaama,” which has a two-fold meaning: peace, and submission to God.
Anyone who follows Islam is known as Moslem, a term that comes from the Arabic word signifying a person totally devoted to the will of God.
Likewise, the Moslem word “Allah,” meaning “the one True God,” is also of Arabic origin.

The history of Islam centers around the Prophet Muhammed, the Messenger of God.
It was sometime around 610
A
.
D
.
that one man’s mystic vision in the Arabian desert forever changed the world.
In what is now Saudi Arabia, in a cave outside the city of Mecca, a 39-year old trader named Muhammed is said to have had a life-changing religious experience.
Just why he was in the cave in the first place, and how long he stayed there, is unknown, but when he emerged he claimed to have had a visitation from the angel Gabriel.
The angel told him he was to become a prophet and revealed to him the first few words of what would become the holy book of Islam, the Koran.

Muhammed spent the next two years meditating and thinking, allowing his vision and the thoughts it inspired to coalesce and take shape as a coherent body of religious thought and teaching.
At the time the people of the Arabian peninsula were largely animistic, worshiping trees, rocks, wells, springs, and caves; some tribes practiced idolatry, others sorcery.
Eventually Muhammed began taking his teachings to the streets, telling the Arabs of Mecca that they should no longer worship idols and objects but devote their faith and belief to “Allah,” the “one true God.” This teaching became the core of Islamic doctrine–“There is no God but Allah.” Outside of his wife and a handful of family members, Muhammed made few converts, instead becoming the object of severe persecution by local tribes in and around Mecca.
This became so severe that he and his followers fled to the nearby city of Medina in 622.

The flight to Medina, the “hejira,” became the pivotal point of the nascent religion that Muhammed was creating.
The date became the first year of the Islamic calendar, while all Islamic history traces back to Muhammed’s arrival in Medina.
It also marked the beginning of a profound change in how Muhammed proclaimed his message, as began to choose a more dynamic and often outright violent method of proclaiming that Allah was the one true God, Islam the one true faith, as he coerced his hearers into accepting the beliefs he taught.
A skilled swordsman and a fierce fighter, Muhammed trained his handful of followers as fighting men, and began to raid the caravans and settlements of his enemies, literally waging war on them, demanding that they renounce their idolatrous beliefs and embrace his teachings under pain of death.
One recorded incident tells of Muhammed slaughtering seven hundred men in one caravan and selling their wives and children as slaves.
Within ten years Muhammed and his followers were the masters of Arabia.

The precedent set by Muhammed in these early years—he did not make his converts by his teaching or example, but literally with the point of his sword-–would have a far-reaching effect on Islam, and its consequences would still be felt in the 21st century.
When Jesus Christ was arrested before His crucifixion, he rebuked one of his disciples who tried to resist; the founder of Islam, however, chose to kill rather than be persecuted.
Thus the concept of “conversion by the sword” became one of the early fundamentals of Islamic doctrine.
There are passages in the Koran which condemn aggression, but others openly exhort acts of violence against those who are perceived to be persecuting or oppressing Moslems.
In Surah 2:191 it says “to be persecuted is worse than committing murder.” (Some translations record it as saying persecution is worse than “slaughter.”) In other words, it is better to kill than to be persecuted.