First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (39 page)

It was on September 8, 1983 that President al-Numeiri brought the Sudan much closer to a return to the
Mahdyyah
, when he announced that the nation’s penal code would be linked “organically and spiritually” to Islamic common law, called the Sharia.
All criminal offences would now subject to judgment according to the Koran.
The penalties for murder, adultery, and theft suddenly became the same as they had been a century earlier.
Alcohol and gambling were once more prohibited.

In the 1980s, as drought overtook central Africa and famine set in, millions of refugees poured into the Sudan, particularly to the south.
Massive aid by the United Nations kept a tragedy from escalating into a disaster, but thousands still died as the Sudan’s agricultural base, though strong, was insufficient to support them all.
Once regarded as the potential bread basket of the Arab world, there were now food shortages throughout the country, even in the capital of Khartoum.

Discontent with al-Numieri grew as the famine worsened and the southern provinces, now chafing under an Islamic legal system they did not recognize as legitimate, once again rose in open rebellion.
In April 1985 al-Numieri was deposed in yet another military coup, this one led by Lt.
Gen.
Swar al-Dahab, who, in a departure from the norm for African and Middle Eastern politics, returned the government to civilian rule.
The new Prime Minister was Sadiq al-Mahdi.
A century after the Mahdi’s death, his great-grandson ruled the Sudan.

Like an Arabian fairy tale, the story of the Mahdi has become a fixture in the folklore and mythology of modern Islam.
The young religious scholar who became the great desert warrior, dedicated to cleansing Islam, who defied and defeated great armies and generals, and who caused powerful leaders in mighty nations to tremble at his name, still holds a powerful sway over the hearts and minds of countless Moslems.
Well into the twentieth century, the Mahdi remained a central figure in Sudanese history and myth, symbolic of a poor nation’s resistance to foreign aggrandizement and oppression.
Nor was the lesson of his successes lost on all Western observers: historian Anthony Nutting offered an incisive analysis of how the Mahdi’s appeal still remains potent: “A boat builder’s son from the Nile had shown the world how a group of naked tribesmen, armed physically, at first, with sticks and stones but inwardly always with faith and unity, could be united and obtain superiority to a point where the greatest power on earth was held to ransom.” In emulating the Mahdi’s doctrines, his spirit, his intolerance, and his ruthlessness, it has been a lesson that modern militant Islam has taken to heart.

EPILOGUE

It was September 11, 2001.

The twin towers had fallen.

On that terrible morning, without warning, a score of militant Moslem fundamentalists, filled with what they felt was a righteous rage and a hatred for the Great Satan of the United States, had seized the controls on a quartet of airliners.
They crashed them into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, into the Pentagon in Washington DC, and, when challenged by passengers who refused to be hapless pawns in the terrorists’ scheme, plunged the last aircraft into the ground in rural Pennsylvania.

In New York, little more than an hour after the first airliner had struck, the South Tower crumbled, disintegrating in a shower of concrete dust, shattered glass and splintered steel.
Less than thirty minutes later, the North Tower collapsed.
The death-toll was nearly three thousand.
In Washington an entire face of the Pentagon was engulfed in flames as civilian workers and uniformed military personnel struggled to escape suffocation or incineration.
In Pennsylvania an aircraft smoldered in an empty field, all its crew, passengers, and hijackers dead.

In a very real sense, these acts of slaughter were part of the legacy of the Mahdi.
Those responsible for the planning and execution of these terrible deeds soon came forward, the leaders of a militant Islamic organization that called itself Al Qaeda (“the Base”), a shadowy group of Moslems dedicated to bringing death and terror to the peoples and countries they perceived as threats to their own peculiar visions of Islam.
They would prove to be the most dangerous of a surprising number of spiritual descendants of the Mahdi who have made their existence known in the last decade.

Like the Mahdi, the leadership of Al Qaeda is Sunni Moslem; most of them are also Wahhabis.
It should be little wonder then that their vision of the evils of the world, as well as their concept of the source of those evils and what is necessary to correct or eradicate them, should differ little from that of Muhammed Ahmed in the 19th-century Sudan.
Al Qaeda has declared that Islam has become morally lax and corrupt, succumbing to the extravagances and decadence of Western capitalism.
It has also perceived the actual territories of the faithful to be under veritable occupation by infidels.
It recognizes the only solution as a purging of all influences it deems dangerous to the faith.
As it was with the Mahdi, tolerance is not permitted and persuasion is an alien concept—Al Qaeda can only comprehend, and thus embrace, a purging of sacred lands through blood.
And much like him, while their pronouncements are laced with frequent declarations of the mercy and greatness of Allah, mercy is conspicuously absent in their actions: they define mercy only as a swift death, whether in the service of Allah or as a propitiation for unbelief.
It is a chilling echo of the Mahdi’s message to Gordon: “I have decided to take pity on some of my men and allow them to die as to obtain paradise.”

When the United States-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, a Shi’ite imam, Muqtada al-Sadr, chose to exploit the resultant chaos in the country to establish a semi-autonomous theocracy of his own.
Offering a disjointed but still deadly resistance to the coalition forces, al-Sadr styled his militia “The Mahdi Army.” It fought two pitched battles against Coalition forces, near the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and (ironically) now maintains a power bloc in the Iraqi parliament, because of free elections sponsored by the United States.

In the Sudan, the Mahdi’s descendants—spiritual and literal—have sustained a genocidal civil war for nearly two decades.
In 1988, Sadir al-Mahdi, Sudan’s Prime Minister and Muhammed Ahmed’s great-grandson, began a brutal civil war, as a century-long clash between the two cultures of the Sudan—one Arab-dominated and Islamic to the north, the other African and largely Christian in the south—once more burst into open flames, as millions of people were driven from their homes and at least two million were killed, most of them black Christians.

Empowering the Mahdi’s medieval Islamic theocracy with the tactics of a modern police state, the Arab-dominated government established “ghost houses” where the enemies of the regime were subjected to whippings, electric shock, castration, branding, starvation, and executions.
Tens of thousands of women were raped, children were kidnapped and sold into slavery (an institution that made its malignant reappearance in the early 1990s), and entire villages and towns were burned to the ground, their inhabitants often burned alive within.
The only two crimes of which the African Sudanese are guilty are that they are not Arab and not Moslems.

In Darfur province, once the site of Rudolf von Slatin’s spirited defense against the Mahdi, Baggara tribesmen, who still hold the memory of the Mahdi in deep reverence and take great pride in their tradition of being Muhammed Ahmed’s most trusted and fearsome warriors, have extended the war against the Christian and animist black Africans to their fellow Muslims.
Since its beginning in February 2003, this Sudanese holocaust has descended into what the United States government has openly described as genocide.
By September 2006, estimates of the death toll in Darfur had risen to 400,000.
When the United Nations attempted to intervene with an international peacekeeping force, officials of the Sudanese government—descendants of the Mahdi—absolutely refused to allow its intervention.
(Though it did allow a feeble African Union force to operate near the border.) The government’s opposition is hardly surprising, since it has been providing the tribesmen with arms, munitions, and supplies, tacitly giving the Baggara militias a free hand in their systematic slaughter of neighboring tribes.
The Mahdi’s war—along with his tradition of pointless bloodshed—continues in his homeland with as much brutality as ever.

Well over a century after his death, the Mahdi’s spirit is still being invoked to call fanatics to the ranks of Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other terrorist groups conducting campaigns of hatred and genocide.
The Mahdi’s deep and unquestioned devotion to Islam married the spiritual strength of his call to the faithful with powerful anti-colonial, anti-foreign, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic sentiments, a mix which modern Moslem terrorists such as bin Laden have embraced and propagated among their followers.
In their decrees and pronouncements, both rail against the perceived corrupting influences of Western culture; both offer a focus for the common people of Islam to give voice and action to their resentment toward the “outsiders” or “foreigners” who they perceive draw believers away from the true faith; and both believe that in order to “cleanse” Islam, it must be washed in the blood of infidels.

The slaughter of thousands of innocents the day Khartoum fell gave the Mahdi’s revolt a face of terror that no amount of latter-day revision will erase.
When Osama bin Laden announced his own version of
jihad
against the world with atrocities on the morning of September 11, 2001, he was merely echoing the ideals and sentiments of the Mahdi.
Bin Laden and his followers have become as convinced that their version and vision of Islam is the only true interpretation of the faith as Muhammed Ahmed had been a century and a quarter earlier when he was the “Expected One,” destined to lead Islam back to its original purity.

Here then is a lesson for both the Western nations who have become the targets of militant Islam and the moderate and progressive elements within Islam—the majority of Moslems—who have renounced violence as an essential element of Islamic doctrine.
The perception within the Moslem world that terrorists like bin Laden are carrying on the tradition of an Islamic hero such as the Mahdi cannot be allowed to continue giving such people a credibility and appeal that they do not deserve.
Only when Islam itself chooses to make a determined effort to purge itself of its modern fanatics and ceases to glorify their spiritual forebears can civilized peoples from every continent hope to live in peace.
Until then, the ghost of the Mahdi will still haunt the world.

But if the Mahdi’s spirit still lives, so does that of Charles Gordon.
Today, in Southampton, an old port city on England’s Channel coast, where Gordon lived for many years off and on between his adventures, there is a memorial to Charles George Gordon in Queen’s Park.
An historical marker can be found on the house at 5 Rockstone Place, once Gordon’s home.
Gravesend is the site of a statue of the General in Fort Gardens, as well as a Gordon School and a Gordon Mission Church, all of which were established in part as a remembrance of the General’s spirit of kindness, generosity, and sense of social responsibility that were the products of his faith.
Another school, the Gordon Boys School, was established in Surrey.
There is still a statue of Gordon on the school grounds—it depicts the General seated atop a camel.
The statue originally stood in front of the Governor’s Palace in Khartoum, and was removed to Surrey after the Sudan became independent in 1956.
Another statue of Gordon, this one in London, was erected in Trafalgar Square, later moved to the Thames Embankment.

And it is in London that perhaps can be found the great, fundamental, and irreconcilable difference between the Mahdi and Gordon and everything they represented—the contrast between their dreams for the world, their hopes for the future, and their visions for humanity.
It can be seen in the words carved into a memorial tablet that sits in the nave of St.
Paul’s Cathedral.
It reminds anyone who reads it that General Gordon was a man “who at all times and everywhere gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As curious as it may seem, this book was not written as a reaction or response to the tragedies of September 11, 2001, or subsequent events, although its contemporary relevance is far greater now than I ever imagined it might be when I first gave thought to its writing back in 1999.
My lifelong fascination with maritime subjects has been paralleled by an equally abiding—and equally deep—interest in military history.
I knew of the story of the Mahdi, Gordon, and the siege of Khartoum long before I ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda, and for me it has always been a compelling tale.

But there was always an annoyance, which grew with the passing years, with the excessive—to me—emphasis that was always placed on General Charles Gordon, as if he were the only character of any significance or stature in the drama that unfolded at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles.
I had always admired Gordon, particularly from the time I had grown up enough to be able to look beyond his obvious heroics and appreciate the underlying character of the man.
Though he was frequently portrayed as the stereotypical, two-dimensional Victorian “hero,” Gordon was simply too big a man to be bound by such conventions, and so the full dimensions of his persona, good and bad, always seemed to emerge no matter what.
At the same time, however, the Mahdi was all too often cast in the role of the equally stereotypical, two-dimensional Victorian villian, the requisite “bad guy” to serve as the necessary foil to Gordon.
There seemed to me to be something wrong with this inequity, not because of a commitment to political correctness, which I cordially despise as being intrinsically dishonest, but rather it seemed to me that an individual who could—and did—serve as the counterpart to a man of Gordon’s moral and professional stature had to be someone of equally impressive character.
As a consequence, I began looking deeper into the life of Muhammed Ahmed ibn-Abdullah—the Mahdi—and discovered an extraordinarily powerful historical figure.