First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (34 page)

CHAPTER 11

THE DEATH OF THE MAHDI

With the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon, a sea change took place in the politics of the Middle East, although it would require more than a century for its nature to become fully evident.
While British and Egyptian officials blithely spoke of “Mahdism” when addressing the revolt in the Sudan, they failed to grasp the true significance of Muhammed Ahmed’s accomplishment.
Within their frame of reference, the Mahdi was merely another desert adventurer seeking to carve a name for himself among the Arabs of northern Africa.
What they failed to see—though for his part Muhammed Ahmed appeared to have perceived it on some level—was that the Mahdi had turned Islam itself into a potent political force.
Such a thing had not happened since the days of the Prophet Muhammed himself.

The Arabian and Ottoman Empires from the 8th to the 17th centuries had merely used Islam as a pretext and excuse for their expansionist ambitions—their goals were gain and aggrandizement under the guise of spreading the faith.
The Mahdi, on the other hand, like the Prophet Muhammed, who never ceased to be his inspiration and model, for better or worse, had no use for nor interest in temporal power or the accumulation of wealth, save only as it would further the spread of Islam.
For the Mahdi, the goal of simultaneously cleansing and spreading Islam transcended ethnic identities, national boundaries, and political divisions.
The Egyptians in the service of the Ottoman Empire were lumped together with their masters as “Turks,” not because the Mahdi had any particular antipathy toward the Turks, but because all those who opposed him were perceived as a single common enemy, in this case the corrupt and decadent Ottomans.
Likewise, even though the Egyptians and Turks were nominally Moslems, because their following of the faith did not correspond to his determination of what was true Islam, they were considered infidels.
Christians, of course, whether Coptic, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant were in their entirety regarded as beyond the religious pale, while Jews held no standing in his eyes whatsoever.

Both London and Cairo were at first surprised and then suspicious when the Mahdi did not immediately follow up his victory at Khartoum with a sweeping advance down the Nile and into Egypt.
Even though the Relief Expedition was conducting an orderly withdrawal down the Nile and could have delivered a serious check to the Mahdi’s army had it advanced along the river, it was neither organized, equipped nor supplied for a prolonged defense.
At the same time the fall of Khartoum had amply demonstrated the erratic quality and unreliability of the Egyptian Army.
It would be a month to six weeks before Great Britain could send additional reinforcements to Cairo, and when in March 1885 the Russians began acting aggressively in Afghanistan, it became uncertain if those reinforcements would be available at all.

It would be incorrect to describe the atmosphere in either capital as anything near panic, but there was a marked degree of apprehension in London and outright dread in Cairo.
Suddenly the Mahdi seemed far more powerful and threatening than he had been before Khartoum was captured.
However, as Muhammed Ahmed seemed content for the moment to simply consolidate his gains, for the moment both the British and Egyptian governments settled into a posture of watchfulness.

What the British and Egyptians did not comprehend was that the Mahdi’s apparent hesitation to advance down the Nile into Egypt was in part the same strategy that had served him so well in the previous three years.
Headlong rushes into battle were to be avoided; rather it was better to patiently wait for the enemy to make a mistake, as Egypt had done when sending the Hicks Expedition into the Sudan, or else gradually surround and cut off strategic points of his enemies’ territory, forcing them into battles of his choice and timing.
That had been the strategy that had succeeded at Khartoum, for the Mahdi had played a waiting game, waging a war of nerves with Gordon and Gladstone while blockading the city, and he had won, albeit by a margin of only two days.

Part of the consolidation the Mahdi was undertaking was a swift restoration of order in Khartoum.
When the news that the Relief Expedition was indeed retreating down the Nile reached the Mahdi, he quickly asserted his authority and ordered a halt to all plundering and looting, as well as an end to the killing.
Little significant damage had been done to the city during the siege, and soon shops and businesses were reopened, some by their original owners who had survived the sack of the city, others by the Mahdi’s followers.
The shipyards were quickly put to work repairing Gordon’s little flotilla of steamers, while more than £55,000 worth of gold coins of various mintings were restruck with Muhammed Ahmed’s image.
No sooner had the coiners gone to work than a lucrative counterfeiting business sprang up, and despite the Mahdi’s best efforts at suppressing it, including such drastic penalties as lopping off hands or heads, it was never completely put down.
Within weeks, Khartoum was again a functioning city, albeit a somewhat empty one, a condition that was not improved when smallpox broke out soon after the end of the siege.

Thousands died, both among the surviving inhabitants and within the ranks of the Mahdi’s followers.
Hundreds more languished in Khartoum’s dungeons, where they were thrown after being convicted by one of the Mahdi’s ecclesiastic courts.
In yet another foreshadowing of the totalitarian states of the 20th century, a flourishing subculture of spies and informants thrived by keeping the population in a state of abject subjugation through intimidation and terror.
To be reported as an infidel, denounced as a “Turk”—which came to include anyone who had cooperated in any way with the Egyptian authorities—or merely suspected of disloyalty was an assurance of being hauled before one of the harsh and usually arbitrary Islamic courts.

The Mahdi himself was not content in Khartoum.
For reasons never adequately explained, he felt ill at ease in the city.
It was said that this was due in part to the fact that Gordon had been killed within its walls, contrary to the Mahdi’s express orders that he be spared, and so Muhammed Ahmed felt the city to be cursed.
At times he even gave voice to the belief that he himself had been cursed by Allah because of Gordon’s murder.
Whatever the real reason, in February the Mahdi withdrew his household from Khartoum, crossing the Nile to Omdurman and there making a new home.

By now he unquestionably led a luxurious existence.
The ascetic traits that Muhammed Ahmed had shown in his youth and early manhood had all but vanished, and as middle age overtook him, the lean, predatory figure he had presented to the world had grown fat and decadent.
In the privacy of his own tents and house, the patched and tattered jibba, which he had so long worn as a way of identifying himself as one of the faithful, gave way to scented drawers, shirts, and robes of fine cotton and linen, and he took to wearing makeup in order to enhance his appearance.
Stretching out on elegant pillows, surrounded by thirty or more of his wives at any given time, Muhammed Ahmed was waited on literally hand and foot.
While some of his concubines would gently fan the reclining figure, others would massage his feet and hands, while still others stood by awaiting his instructions as to what whim or pleasure he desired fulfilled.

Ethnically, the Mahdi’s harem encompassed the spectrum of peoples living in the Sudan.
Father Ohrwalder wrote that “Almost every tribe in the Sudan supplied its representative.” There were even Turkish girls, some younger than ten years old, who had been captured when El Obeid fell and Khartoum was taken, and had been brought into the Mahdi’s harem.
The only interruptions permitted to this daily routine of sensuality were the ever-shorter councils of war he held with the Khalifas.

This was not, however, the face the Mahdi presented to his followers.
Whenever the Ansar demanded that he present himself, in particular during the holy month of Ramadan, when all Moslems were expected to fast during the daylight hours, Muhammed Ahmed would once again don his jibba, girdle, and turban, and present himself to the faithful as their devout and fiery leader.
His corpulence could not be disguised, yet such was the power of his personality that his charisma remained.
The path he would follow to the Omdurman mosque for daily prayers would be lined with near-hysterical crowds; women would throw themselves to the ground behind him, prostrating themselves across his footprints, believing that their image would bring health, fertility, and a multitude of other blessings.
The Mahdi’s public appearance was a grand performance, yet it begs the question: was that all it really was, a performance?

It is easy, perhaps too much so, to dismiss the Mahdi at this point as being exactly what Cairo and London believed him to be: a desert rogue, an Arab scoundrel, an adventurer seeking to accumulate power and wealth but no more.
Had he actually degenerated into a poseur, maintaining the fiction of his dedication to his holy mission of purifying Islam and bringing
jihad
to the infidel wherever he could be found?
Had he succumbed to the very luxury, opulence, and ostentation that he had once so fiercely condemned?
Had he confirmed Lord Acton’s dictum about power and corruption?

While it is undeniable that in the last months of his life the Mahdi allowed himself to enjoy the trappings of power earned through his success, it would be incorrect to say, as some historians have maintained, that he descended into debauchery.
His lifestyle was not significantly different from that of any other Arab tribal leader or chieftain of similar rank.
While Arab culture respects the ascetic holy man, it also demands that its leaders surround themselves in a certain level of luxury as a method of establishing their status and importance.

The victory at Khartoum caused large numbers of minor tribal chieftains who were yet undecided as to where their loyalties should lie to suddenly throw in their lot with the Mahdi.
Thousands of new followers began drifting toward Khartoum and Omdurman, settling in the cities and along the banks of the Blue and White Niles.
For the most part they clustered around Omdurman, as Khartoum began to fall into decay.
Fervor for the Mahdist cause remained high, and even grew after the fall of Khartoum, and had he chosen to advance into Egypt, the Mahdi would have commanded a willing force of more than a hundred thousand fighting men.

Then, in midsummer 1885, came an event as sudden and unpredictable as the rise of the “Expected One” four years earlier.
On June 22, five months after the fall of Khartoum, while at the pinnacle of his power and influence, Muhammed Ahmed died under mysterious circumstances.
There were rumors at the time and in the years to follow that he had been poisoned by a member of his own household in retribution for his increasingly harsh rule.
Others speculated that an early demise was to be expected of a middle-aged man worn out by sensuality and the physical strain of attending to his growing harem.
Both are possible, though not likely, and most historians believe he simply died of typhus, which, along with smallpox, broke out in Khartoum in the weeks following the massacre.

When Muhammed Ahmed died, his dream died with him—his vision of purifying what he saw as a corrupt and decadent Islam, and then sweeping all of Christendom before him in the cleansing fury of
jihad
.
With his death the driving power behind the
Mahdyyah
was lost.
While his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, would maintain the existence of a Mahdist regime for another fourteen years, aside from an abbreviated war with the kingdom of Ethiopia, a few attacks on his neighbors, and one brief excursion into Egypt in 1888, its expansion ceased.
The Khalifa was too preoccupied with securing his position to be able to devote time and energy to continuing the
jihad
.

While the Mahdi quickly became an historical figure of almost mythical proportions among militant Moslems and Sudanese Arabs, he was soon all but forgotten outside of the Sudan and the Middle East.
This was in no small part because of cultural differences: while the Mahdi was—and remains—a charismatic, almost romantic, figure of mystery to Arab Moslems, there is little about him that moderate Moslems or Westerners find appealing.
His devotion to his faith, his sense of honor, his values and morals, all in some way seem alien, as if their basis and perspective were just slightly out of focus or misaligned.
He seems to have enjoyed the harshness and frequent cruelty of his rule, and the ecclesiastical justice it dispensed, just a bit too much.
It is almost as if he knew he was a despot, however divinely motivated or appointed he believed himself to be, and took a perverse pleasure in that knowledge.
It’s not that he was corrupted by his power, but rather that he reveled in it; instead of reluctantly assuming the burden of leading his
jihad
and regretting the blood shed and lives lost, he gloried in all of it.
Even his death just months after his greatest triumph has often been regarded among his followers and descendants as a sort of divine justice, particularly as a retribution for the death of Gordon.

It is Gordon who over the decades has had his reputation burnished and his historical place secured as a tragic figure of political betrayal who nevertheless faced death with courage and dignity.
He has become the quintessential Victorian hero—and as such, a figure of tragedy.
It’s not an undeserved reputation, for Gordon’s tragedy—which translated into tragedy for Khartoum—was that he could not conceive that respectable men who occupied positions of great authority and responsibility could stoop to playing petty political games with human lives.
Sacrificing lives, figuratively and sometimes literally, is at times an unfortunate part of the political process even under a democracy, yet the very nature of a democratic system places a responsibility on those who must make these hard choices, believing they will do so for the very noblest of reasons.
Gordon’s tragedy is that he expected those to whom he looked for leadership and support to do exactly that.