First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (35 page)

Yet, it has to be said that if Gordon is a tragic figure, as he has almost invariably been depicted in print and film, the Mahdi was one as well, for it is difficult to perceive him as being much more than a grand failure.
Ultimately nothing to which he aspired came to pass and endured long beyond his lifetime.
True, the Sudan had been freed of the burden of Egyptian rule, but Cairo would reassert its authority over the country within a few years; the cleansing of Islam to which he had originally dedicated himself was never completed, and in truth was never sought outside the circles of extreme fundamentalist Moslems even in his day.
Perhaps if he had lived long enough to carry his
jihad
into Egypt, the widespread Moslem revolt so feared by Gordon might well have come to pass, but there is no way to be certain of it.
At the end of his life, which was by any standard abbreviated, the Mahdi had little to show for having expended so much effort.
A passage in one of the Scandinavian Eddas reads: “All things pass away but death and the glory of deeds.” For the Mahdi, his tragedy was that after his death, whatever glory his deeds had accrued would eventually fade away.

Although the
Mahdyyah
— the Mahdist state—was established by his successor, Abdullahi, who styled himself “the” Khalifa rather than simply “a” Khalifa—there would be no
primus inter pares
with the other two Khalifas for Abdullahi—the Sudan soon sank back into the chaos it had known under Egyptian rule as the
Mahdyyah
became a barbarous parody of itself.
Abdullahi was the first Khalifa chosen by Muhammed Ahmed, and long before the Mahdi’s death his position as successor to the leadership of the
Mahdyyah
was proclaimed.
Thus when the Mahdi died, there was none of the bloody quarreling and open warfare that had marked the death of the Prophet Muhammed and which left such a bitter legacy to Islam.
Abdullahi himself came from the Ta’A’Ishi branch of the Baggara tribe, one of the most loyal of all those following the Mahdi.
He was said to be tall, dark, and imperious-looking, much like the Mahdi himself; however, what might have been a handsome visage was marred by the scars of smallpox.
Though he was intelligent, he was more shrewd than intellectually gifted.
He was fundamentally ignorant and functionally illiterate, with little or no knowledge of the world outside the Sudan.

He was also ruthless and opportunistic.
He had buttressed his position as the Mahdi’s successor by marrying one of Muhammed Ahmed’s daughters, and after the Mahdi’s death he was careful to avoid asserting his authority by governing in the Mahdi’s name, as if he were only a steward or caretaker.
Even so, he essentially banished any member of the Mahdi’s family who might have been a rival to power.
Meanwhile, the Baggara tribe gradually assumed a position of pre-eminence in the Mahdist ranks, becoming something of a ruling clique as they took over every significant office within the
Mahdyyah
, further solidifying the Khalifa’s grip on power.

While Islamic law was harsh—and harshly applied—under the Mahdi, its application was for the most part even-handed.
Under his successor, Islam’s laws were applied at the whim of the magistrate charged with its enforcement.
The only appeal from the ecclesiastical courts’ judgements was to the Khalifa himself, and he rarely intervened.
The usual punishment for all but the most minor offenses was death by beheading.
The slave trade was not only resumed, it grew in scope and numbers.
Zobeir Pasha never returned to the Sudan, but at their worst his activities paled in comparison to those of his successors under the Khalifa.
Order in the Mahdist realm was maintained only through constant, ever-looming terror, or by incessant internecine warfare.
Typical of all tyrants, the Khalifa felt most secure when he could keep those whom he suspected of disloyalty under close scrutiny.
Consequently, during his years of power, the city of Omdurman, which he made his capital as the Mahdi had done, became the center of life in the Sudan, while Khartoum continued its decline into ruin.
Sometime in 1886 the Khalifa ordered the whole city abandoned, save for the boatyard and the arsenal.
At the same time Abdullahi ordered an elaborate tomb constructed in Omdurman for the Mahdi, surmounted by a white dome eighty feet high, visible to travelers still three days out of the city.
Before long, for Moslems in the Sudan, a pilgrimage to the Mahdi’s tomb became as holy an undertaking as the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca.

It was beside this tomb that an open-air mosque was built, and this became the center of the Khalifa’s government.
Sheikhs and emirs wishing to prove their loyalty were conspicuous by their daily attendance at prayers, while Abdullahi would announce what dreams and visions he had received from Allah and the Mahdi for the purpose of leading the faithful of the
Mahdyyah
.
Among these was one which told him that money was a distracting and corrupting influence, therefore no man should possess more than he required for his needs.
The excess was to be “donated” to the Mahdist state, where it became in essence the Khalifa’s personal fortune.
The injunction against acquiring and keeping wealth did not, of course, apply to him.

Abdullahi began to embrace all the trappings of petty despotism.
He surrounded himself with sycophants, and visitors to his court were expected to approach him on all fours and prostrate themselves when they spoke.
His personal bodyguard numbered five hundred horse-men, while some four hundred concubines were added to his harem.
He took a particular delight in humiliating and tormenting the handful of European captives he had inherited from the Mahdi: Father Ohrwalder and four nuns from his mission; the German merchant Neufeld; Rudolf Slatin, one-time governor of Darfur; Martin Hansal, the son of the Austrian consul, captured at Khartoum; and a number of Greeks.
Slatin was employed as an interpreter, but the others spent much of their time in chains, while the nuns in particular were tortured for their refusal to embrace Islam.
One of the captives, Frank Lupton, was worked to death in the Khartoum boatyard.

The Khalifa attempted to extend the Mahdi’s
jihad
, but with none of the success that Muhammed Ahmed had achieved.
While the Ansar and the Dervishes remained as brave as always, the Khalifa lacked the charisma that enabled the Mahdi to inspire his followers to feats of arms that seemed almost superhuman.
Abdullahi’s first venture into the realm of foreign policy came in 1886 when he rejected an offer of an alliance against the Europeans made by the King of Ethiopia, Yohannes IV, on the grounds that, as a Christian, Yohannes was an infidel and therefore not worthy of an alliance with the faithful.

A year later the Khalifa sent a sixty thousand-man army to invade Ethiopia, and it reached the ancient capital of Gondar, which was sacked.
The war would flare up intermittently for the next three years, but in 1889 the Khalifa withdrew his army and instead sent it down the Nile to Wadi Halfa, under Abd ar Rahman an Nujumi, his best general.
British-led Egyptian troops met the Ansar at Tushkah and soundly defeated them, ending the Mahdist threat to Egypt.
Next the Khalifa turned south, trying to conquer Equatoria, only to be turned back by the Belgians, and in 1893 the Italians repulsed an Ansar attack in Eritrea.

None of these setbacks diminished the Khalifa’s arrogance, however.
A quartet of Arab envoys was sent to Cairo with letters for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the Khedive of Egypt, and Queen Victoria.
In the letter to the Queen he reminded her of the deaths of Hicks and Gordon, and assured her that a similar fate awaited any other British general who dared oppose the faithful.
He then invited her to make a pilgrimage to Omdurman in order to embrace Islam, and submit to his authority.

Thy soldiers thought only of retreat from the Sudan with discomfiture and defeat, whereof they have had more than enough….
Thus thou hast erred in many ways, and art suffering great loss, wherefrom there is no refuge for thee save by turning to Allah the King, and entering among the people of Islam and the followers of the Mahdi, grace be upon him.
If thou wilt do thus, and yield all matter to us, then shalt thou achieve thy desire of perfect felicity and true repose, which is salvation before Allah in the blissful and enduring Dwelling, the like of which the eye has not seen, nor ear heard, or heart of man conceived.
But if thou wilt not turn from thy blindness and self-will, continue to war against the hosts of Allah thyself, with all thy armies and war-like equipment.
So shalt thou behold the end of thy work.
Thou shalt be crushed by the power of Allah and his might, or be afflicted by the death of many of thy people, who have entered on war with the people of God, by reason of thy Satanic presumption.

The letters were returned to the envoys with a simple message for the Khalifa: none of the three monarchs could be bothered to make any reply.
Nothing could have more clearly demonstrated that the
Mahdyyah
no longer possessed the strength or momentum to be able to challenge the European powers or any of their client states.

Among the British public there was still running a current of discontent over the failure of the Relief Expedition to arrive in time, as well as regret for Gordon’s death.
The people weren’t unmindful of Gladstone’s prevarication and the near-certainty that it was the cause of so much of the delay that eventually led to the expedition being a fruitless effort.
While the issue of the Sudan was not one that could have brought the Gladstone government down, it did lose the Prime Minister a few key political allies in the House of Commons.

The desire to “avenge Gordon” still ran strong in much of Great Britain, as did the hostility toward the Mahdi and his successor.
The Anti-Slavery Society in particular took great pains to ensure that every rumored atrocity and alleged barbarous act attributed to the Khalifa received wide press.
Yet none of these sentiments were powerful enough to compel the British government to retake the Sudan and bring an end the Mahdist regime.
When that decision was finally made, it would be for entirely different reasons.

In early 1892, Herbert Kitchener, now a major-general, was appointed Sirdar, or commander, of the whole of the Egyptian army, which had been thoroughly reformed and reorganized in the years following the fall of Khartoum.
About this same time the British government under Lord Salisbury decided to occupy the Sudan, and ordered Kitchener to begin preparations for the expedition.
Circumstances had changed very dramatically for Britain since 1885, both domestically and internationally.

Gladstone had been forced to resign as Prime Minister in the summer of 1885 as a direct consequence of his efforts to get a Home Rule Bill for Ireland passed by both the Commons and the House of Lords.
To many, there was a certain element of revenge for the Khartoum fiasco in the vote that brought his government down.

Lord Salisbury, the last British Prime Minister to sit in the House of Lords rather than the House of Commons, was a protégé of Benjamin Disraeli, and like him firmly believed in the Empire.
Simultaneously filling the offices of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Salisbury was emphatic about the direction that British foreign policy would take under his leadership: “France,” he said in 1888, “is, and must always remain, England’s greatest danger.” Consequently it came as no surprise that when British, French, and Belgian colonial claims unexpectedly clashed at the Nile headwaters in the southern Sudan, Salisbury was determined to assert Britain’s authority in the region and prepared to back up its claims, if need be, with force.
The aggressiveness of the Khalifa did not bother Lord Salisbury; rather it was the instability of his regime that was cause for concern.
The British were worried that the other colonial powers would take advantage of the muddled state of the Sudan’s politics to carve off territory that was, nominally at least, annexed to Egypt.

In addition to these political considerations, plans for an irrigation dam to be built at Aswan were already in hand, which when built would transform the entire southern half of Egypt, more than doubling the available farmland and making the region an even more attractive prize for an adventurer such as the Khalifa.
The region, and even the dam itself, would be under constant threat if the
Mahdyyah
were allowed to continue.
And as always any threat to the Suez Canal, however remote, could not be ignored.
Lastly, as Britain carved out a string of colonies along the eastern spine of Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to the Nile Delta, maintaining the security of these colonies made control of the entire length of the Nile a necessity.
As long as the Mahdist state continued to exist, it presented threats to all of these imperial ambitions.
The
Mahdyyah
would have to be swept aside, not because of its continued hostility toward Egypt and Britain, but simply because it had become an inconvenient obstacle.

In 1895 Kitchener was formally authorized by the British government to prepare a campaign to reconquer the Sudan, with Britain providing men, equipment and supplies, while Egypt contributed troops and underwrote the costs of the expedition.
When his plans were completed, the simply-styled “Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force” included twenty-six thousand soldiers, of whom eighty-six hundred were British.
As with Wolseley’s expedition, there were contingents from the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, and the Royal Marines, along with the Camel Corps, while a flotilla of half a dozen gunboats manned by the Royal Navy would accompany the force up the Nile.
The balance of the expedition’s strength was made up of Egyptian units that included six battalions of black Africans recruited in southern Sudan.