First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (20 page)

General Gordon, who hadn’t yet resigned himself to a purely defensive posture, decided that the situation called for an aggressive action against the Arabs in order to rescue the garrison at Halfaya.
He was nevertheless cautious about it, writing in his journal, “Our only justification for assuming the offensive is the extrication of the Halfaya garrison.” While he was willing to move aggressively against the Mahdi for a purpose, he wasn’t about to fight for the sake of prestige or mere bravado.

On March 13 a sortie of twelve hundred men put out from Khartoum on board two grain-barges towed by a pair of river steamers.
The steamers were protected with rudimentary armor plate which rendered them fairly invulnerable to rifle fire, provided they stayed in mid-river, while the troops aboard the barges hunkered down below the gunwales when the Arabs began firing on the little convoy from the riverbanks.
At the south end of the oasis, Gordon’s troops quickly formed square and began a deliberate advance to Halfaya, where they linked up with the with the remaining five hundred men of the garrison.
Together the forces began a disciplined and systematic withdrawal, supported by the fire of the guns of the two steamers.
Losses were slight as the entire force made it safely back to Khartoum, bringing with them a large number of camels and horses.

Three days later, on March 16, Gordon decided to take Halfaya back from the Mahdi’s army.
Loading two thousand men into the same grain barges, he once more took them to the south end of the oasis, where they formed square and began advancing on the village.
The Egyptians were grimly forcing the Mahdi’s soldiers to retreat from the town, when Hassan Pasha and Seid Pasha, two of Gordon’s Egyptian officers, inexplicably rode toward the Arabs and called for them to come back.

The Egyptian troops, believing that they were about to be betrayed by their own officers, suddenly broke and fled after firing a single volley.
The Arabs pursuing the fleeing soldiers came to within a mile of Khartoum, along the way capturing two Egyptian guns along with their ammunition.
Gordon, livid with anger and wrapped in despair, wrote in his journal: “Sixty horsemen defeated two thousand men.” Worse, there were two hundred dead left behind.
Six days later, the two pashas were tried by court-martial.
When questioned as to their reasons for riding toward the Arab lines, they explained that they had been encouraging the Arabs to surrender rather than trying to betray their own troops.
Gordon would have none of it, and both men were swiftly found guilty and shot.
After this affair Gordon gave up any idea of taking further offensive action against the Mahdi.

But the summer heat meant that any large-scale actions by either side were out of the question.
There were a few exceptions, particularly a very determined attack in mid-April upon one of the steamers coming up from Berber, at the Salboka Pass.
In a running fight that lasted several hours, the Mahdi’s soldiers were eventually driven off after suffering terrific casualties.
The Egyptian soldiers fired off more than fifteen thousand rounds of Remington ammunition during the battle, and earned high praise from Gordon for their steadiness.
It also demonstrated the relative invulnerability of the river steamers, as the Mahdi’s artillery was too light and too antiquated to do much damage.
Thus there was still a way out of the city should Gordon choose to take it.

Gordon, however, had no intention of going anywhere.
Having assumed the role of defender of Khartoum, he was determined to see the siege through.
At first he hoped that diplomacy might succeed, as no one had yet attempted to actually treat with the Mahdi.
Soon the men began exchanging letters, in which Gordon offered to recognize Muhammed Ahmed as the ruler of Kordofan province, in exchange for a pledge not to advance against Egypt or further attack Khartoum.
It was an empty concession, admittedly, for it merely confirmed the Mahdi’s grip on what he already held, but it was a ploy Gordon was willing to try.

It was an offer the Mahdi promptly rejected.
Despite his sudden caution in the face of Gordon’s experience—somehow Muhammed Ahmed, who already knew of Gordon’s reputation as an administrator, discerned that he was not facing another William Hicks in command of the city’s garrison—his delusions of grandeur and sense of “holy mission” had grown to such a degree that compromise could not be part of his calculations.
There was no one in his camp who dared disagree with him, and no one to offer dissenting counsel or suggest alternative courses of action.
Once the Mahdi made a decision, it was to be carried out without question.
Singleness of purpose, an admirable quality in a leader, had become rigidity of thinking.
In some ways it was inevitable, for the inflexibility of the Mahdi’s religious views were bound to sooner or later infect his other perspectives.
If he was indeed divinely appointed to carry out this
jihad
to cleanse and spread Islam, why should he have to listen to the counsels and ideas of those who were not blessed by such a calling?
It was a mind-set that would prove the undoing of the Mahdi–and at the same time lead to the death of Gordon.

The Mahdi did appreciate what Gordon had attempted with his diplomatic overture, and responded with one of his own the next day.
On March 22, a handful of envoys advanced from the Mahdi’s camp toward Khartoum under a banner of truce.
Once admitted into the city they were conducted to the Governor’s Palace, situated close to the riverfront, where they were shown in to Gordon.
There they presented the Mahdi’s reply to Gordon’s offer of suzerainty over Kordofan–“I am the Mahdi” was Muhammed Ahmed’s reply, as if that were answer enough, which in the circumstances it was–and then in turn held out a cotton-wrapped bundle to the General.
Gordon took it, unwound the coverings, and found a tattered and patched jibba, an invitation to him to become a Moslem convert and follower of the Mahdi.
Accompanying the jibba was a letter from the Mahdi which read, “In the name of God!
Herewith a suit of clothes, consisting of a coat [the jibba], an overcoat, a turban, a cap, a girdle, and beads.
This is the clothing of those who have given up this world and its vanities, and who look for the world to come, for everlasting happiness in Paradise.
If you truly desire to come to God and seek to live a godly life, you must at once wear this suit, and come out to accept your everlasting good fortune.” Dismayed that the Mahdi should so underestimate him, Gordon dropped the bundle to the floor and declared the audience over.
He would not submit to the Mahdi, nor would he surrender the city.

As curious as the exchange between the General and the Mahdi might seem, it was not inconceivable.
A strange duality would come to exist between Gordon and Muhammed Ahmed: each recognized the deep religious convictions of the other, both understood that they were men of their word, and that within each man’s interpretation of duty also lay his definition of honor.
While the Mahdi might carry his sense of destiny to a higher level than Gordon—after all, the General felt that whereas he was God’s tool, he could be discarded by the Almighty whenever He chose, while the Mahdi believed his calling was divine and irrevocable—each felt a moral imperative to his efforts.
Gordon could have no more abandoned Khartoum than the Mahdi could have chosen not to take it.
The two men would conduct an intermittent correspondence for the next eight months, yet nowhere in their exchanges does an element of vitriol or vituperation appear.
Their letters are polite, almost familiar, giving the impression of an exchange between two men who could have been friends under different circumstances, but who now were pledged to each other’s destruction by each one’s sense of duty.

Though the Mahdi would make at least three more offers to allow Gordon to convert to Islam, and even as late as September he would be willing to allow Gordon to personally leave the city, there would never be any further talk of compromise or negotiations between the two men.
It was pointless: the Mahdi would not be satisfied until all had submitted to him, either through conquest or conversion to Islam.

On April 27, General Gordon received a report that may have caused him to finally understand the true gravity of his situation.
Valey Bey, the Egyptian governor at Mesalimeh, located halfway between Berber and Khartoum, surrendered to the Mahdi’s followers.
There they captured one of Gordon’s nine armed steamers, along with seventy shiploads of provisions and two thousand rifles.
The Mahdi’s power was now reaching far beyond the city, threatening Berber and raising the specter of cutting off all communications with the outside world.
It was not a reassuring situation.
Gordon, seeing farther and with greater clarity than either Baring or Gladstone, understood the essential nature of the Mahdi’s rebellion, and in doing so defined the key to answering the challenge of militant Islam one hundred twenty years later: the appearance of success gave it credibility, yet should it meet with a sudden reverse, or face strong and determined opposition, it would eventually falter and fail.
Not all of the Mahdi’s followers were religious zealots; success gave the Mahdi an authority which mere religion could not provide, but should he fail or be seriously checked, much of his army would waver and dissolve.
In the end Gordon knew that for all of his religious fervor, Muhammed Ahmed was little more than a petty tyrant, and that, as the Duke of Wellington once observed of Bonaparte, “His career is like that of a cannonball—he must constantly move from one success to the next; should he rebound he is finished.” It was with this thought in mind that Gordon wrote a prophetic warning to both Baring and Gladstone:

If Egypt is to be kept quiet the Mahdi must be smashed up.
Mahdi is most unpopular, and with care and time could be smashed.
Remember that once Khartoum belongs to Mahdi the task will be far more difficult; yet you will, for the safety of Egypt, execute it.
If you decide on smashing Mahdi then send up another £100,000, and send 200 Indian troops to Wadi Halfa, and send an officer up to Dongola under pretense to look out quarters for troops….
I repeat that evacuation is possible, but you will feel effect in Egypt, and will be forced to enter into a far more serious affair to guard Egypt.
At present it would be comparatively easy to destroy Mahdi.

This would be one of the last direct communications the outside world would receive from Gordon, as on March 19, the telegraph line between Khartoum and Cairo was cut by the Mahdi’s forces.
Gordon was completely cut off from London and Cairo, and could only hope and guess at what was being done about the plight of Khartoum.
The only contact the city would have with the outside world in the next ten months would be a handful of messages smuggled in and out.
Only time would tell if the governments in London and Cairo would heed Gordon’s warning.

CHAPTER 7

LONDON AND CAIRO

Although the tempo of life moved much more slowly in the Victorian Era than it does today, a contemporary observer looking back on the drama that unfolded in London and Cairo during the three-hundred and seventeen-day siege of Khartoum would find little surprising in the responses of the British and Egyptian officials who found themselves compelled to react to the crisis.
The dreary pattern that would within a few decades become all too familiar to Western nations confronted by aggressive tyrants first played itself out in London and Cairo in 1883 and 1884: the denial of the existence of a crisis, the evasion of responsibility, the slow acquiescence to public opinion, and the inevitably ill-timed and ineptly-executed response.

What was genuinely perplexing and peculiar was Gladstone’s perception of the Mahdi and the rebellion he led.
From the beginning the British Prime Minister seemed determined to misunderstand the nature of the uprising in the Sudan.
Judging from his public statements and debates in the House of Commons, he appeared to regard the underlying causes of the Sudanese revolt as social and racial–the consequence of Egyptian exploitation of the Sudan.
The Mahdi he regarded as a national leader attempting to achieve national aspirations.
Yet Gladstone repeatedly failed to comprehend that Muhammed Ahmed’s ambitions were driven by religion rather than politics.
While the resentment the Sudanese felt toward the Egyptians was intense and deep-rooted, they had no real sense of being a distinct “people,” nor did they have any concept of the Sudan being a “nation” in the accepted Western sense.
In point of fact, the Sudanese were not a distinct people, but rather two peoples, the Moslem Arabs in the north and the animist and Christian black Africans in the south.
The Mahdi’s rebellion embraced only the Sudan’s Moslems; the black Africans were in his mind consigned to the fate of being an endless supply of raw material for the Arab slavers.

Gladstone only saw the Sudanese rising against their Egyptian overlords; what he failed to see was that the Mahdi had encouraged the rebellion and eventually hijacked it for his own ends.
It was not the case where, in what was one of Winston Churchill’s least perceptive political judgements, “Within their humble breasts the spirit of the Mahdi roused the fires of patriotism and religion.” Perhaps it may be that Gladstone, for all his genuine devotion to Christianity, did not regard Islam seriously enough, or it may be that he could not recognize that a religion might be something for which men were not only willing to die, but for which they were also willing to kill.
Perhaps he had become too much of a politician himself, and so could no longer view world events save through the prism of politics, thus could not see any other motives.

Whatever the causes for the Prime Minister’s myopia, it led him to make one of the most disastrous pronouncements of his political life, declaring, when asked if the Mahdi’s rebellion was a popular political uprising, “Yes, those people are struggling to be free, and they are rightly struggling to be free.” This was followed later by other speeches where he told the House of Commons that a military expedition to the Sudan to relieve Khartoum would be “a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free,” while in still yet another defense of his policy toward the Sudan he recommended “the leaving alone of a brave people to enjoy their freedom.” This was absurdity, and Gladstone knew it: the concept of “freedom” was meaningless to the Mahdi, who openly condoned the institution of slavery and was doing nothing to curb the slave trade within the territory he controlled.