First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (5 page)

Upon becoming a religious teacher, Ahmed married a remarkably charismatic presence to his gifts for scholarship and rhetoric, and he began advocating adherence to a branch of Islamic teaching known as Wahhabiism, a distillation of Islam to its most austere form, which discarded the formality and ceremony that had accumulated about Moslem worship over the centuries.
The Wahhabi sect had actually begun as a reform movement in Islam, essentially a purification of the Sunni sect, originating in Arabia in the middle of the 18th century.
First expounded by Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a Moslem cleric born sometime around 1703 in the heart of the Arabian peninsula, who gave the movement its name, Wahhabiism taught that all rituals and religious trappings, the veneration of holy persons, and any form of ostentation in worship, as well as the accumulation of wealth and personal luxury—all of which had begun to overtake Islam by the middle of the 9th century—were false and must be abandoned by the truly faithful.
As a result, Wahhabi mosques were simply constructed, built without minarets, and Wahhabi adherents were quite plain in their dress and did not smoke tobacco or hashish–a most unusual sacrifice among Arabs.

Al-Wahhab’s austere teachings, delivered with considerable force and conviction, quickly became unpopular in the city of Medina where he made his home.
The leading Moslem authorities in the city, who enjoyed their wealth, ostentation, and trappings of worship, soon drove him and his followers out of Medina and into the Nejd Desert in northeast Arabia.
It was there that they were found by a tribe of nomadic Arabs, the Saud.
Upon hearing Al-Wahhabi preach, the Saudi sheik became convinced that he had been given a holy mission to purge Islam of its corruption, and so declared
jihad
–-holy war–-and began the conquest of the neighboring tribes in the Arabian peninsula, sometime around 1763.
Within a half-century the Wahhabis, having come to dominate the Saud tribe, ruled all Arabia except for the province of Yemen, from their newly-founded capital at Riyadh.

The power of the Wahhabi message to move and inspire ordinary Moslems became even clearer when the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, who at least nominally ruled Arabia, repeatedly sent out expeditions to crush the Sauds and their tribal allies and vassals—who in turn repeatedly crushed the Ottoman forces.
It wasn’t until the sultan turned to his Egyptian viceroy, the great Muhammed Ali, that Ottoman supremacy was restored to the Arabian peninsula.
By 1818 the Wahhabis were once more driven into the deserts, this time into both the Nejd and the Sahara.
Wahhabi power experienced a brief resurgence in the 1820s and 1830s along the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf, but afterward it began to decline until the Wahhabis lost control of Arabia in 1884.

But Wahhabism was far from dead, and in finding a disciple in Muhammed Ahmed, it would undergo yet another transformation, eventually becoming a political and military power that would threaten the religious and social structure of the entire Middle East, and in doing so leave a spiritual legacy that would endure for the next century.
In a land as barren and daunting as the Sudan, the austerity of Wahhbiism had an inevitable appeal to Sudanese Moslems, and Ahmed’s teachings quickly began to make a virtue of the Sudan’s poverty while offering what appeared to be a way out of its suffering.

Ahmed began by teaching his Sudanese followers that they would never be free of misery and oppression unless they embraced a life of simplicity and piety.
Applying action to his words, Ahmed took to living in a cave on the island of Abba, located on the Nile near the city of Berber.
The sincerity of his teaching was borne out by the example he set: according to one tradition, when he first settled on Abba, Muhammed Ahmed began selling firewood in Khartoum, until he learned that one of his customers was using it to fuel a distillery.
The Koran forbids the consumption of alcohol, and to Ahmed it was as much a transgression to aid in its production, however indirectly, as it was to drink it, so he immediately ceased supplying wood to Khartoum.

It was from his new home on Abba that Ahmed began to openly proclaim how much he despised the venal Egyptian overlords who ruled the Sudan on behalf of the Ottoman Turks, but who plundered the already impoverished country for their own aggrandizement.
It was a grievance of long standing with Ahmed: when as a young man he learned that the food supplied to the students at the mosque where he was studying was provided by the Egyptian government, he never took another meal at that mosque.
He felt profaned by it, believing as he did that it had been purchased with extorted tax money.

Though the Sudan had fallen under Egypt’s sway several times in the past millennia, the present domination of the land by the Egyptians dated from 1821, when the Ottoman Viceroy in Cairo, Muhammed Ali, sent his armies down the Nile to subjugate the Sudanese.
Ali’s rule over Egypt had begun when the French evacuated the country in 1805, and by many standards Ali was a progressive, enlightened ruler.
Abolishing the feudal aristocracy, he produced a program of reform and modernization that left Egypt virtually autonomous within the Ottoman Empire by the fourth decade of the 19th century.
Farmers were forced to abandon methods that dated back to Pharaonic times as agriculture was modernized and diversified into cotton, sugar, and tobacco, while farm machinery, seeds, and fertilizers were introduced, yielding enormous increases in crop production.
Ali also brought industry to Egypt, in the form of textile mills and factories for munitions production.

The latter proved to be significant, for Ali—once characterized by English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham as the Peter the Great of the Moslem world–-had designs for conquest running through his mind, and so set about expanding, reorganizing, and reequipping his army.
The first target for the revitalized Egyptian forces was the Sudan, which Muhammed Ali invaded in 1821, bringing an end to the four centuries of Funj rule.

From the moment the first Egyptian troops crossed the border into the Sudan, it was clear that Ali had no intention of bringing the same sort of reform and progress to the Sudan that he had introduced to Egypt.
The Egyptian occupation was neither gentle nor enlightened, and Ali had no desire to make the Sudan an integral part of Egypt, preferring to keep it a subject, or vassal, state, ripe for periodic plundering.
In 1823, when Ali’s son Ismail was killed by a local chief from Shendi, his death was avenged by Ali’s son-in-law, Defterdar, who in reprisal massacred thirty thousand civilians in Kordofan.
Utterly cowed by such ruthlessness, the Sudanese meekly accepted the Ottoman and Egyptian colonizers, who set up a central government in Khartoum, from whence corruption, exploitation, and the slave trade flourished.

Muhammed Ahmed scorned the Egyptian overlords for their weakness and corruption, and was equally derisive of the Ottoman Turks for allowing their nominal vassals to continue their oppression of the Sudan.
Nor did scorn stop there: when British and French influence began to grow in Egypt after the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, Ahmed declared that the Christians’ luxurious lifestyles, love of money, and failure to embrace the true faith of Islam made them as morally corrupt as the Egyptians or Turks.
In their anger and frustration, the Sudanese people were more than receptive to Ahmed’s teachings.

Yet despite his railings, and the popularity with which they were received, if he had been an ordinary man, Ahmed might have been forgotten by history, just one more of a countless number of provincial holy men of various doctrinal shades and sectarian colors who have ranted against established powers and traditions for whatever obscure reasons motivated them.
But Ahmed was not an ordinary man.
By the time he reached manhood, the remarkable charisma that he would come to use in charming so many of his followers began to appear.

Certainly he was an attractive figure physically.
Father Joseph Ohrwalder, an Austrian missionary to the Sudan who would one day spend seven years as Ahmed’s prisoner, wrote of him, “His outward appearance was strangely fascinating, he was a man of strong constitution, very dark complexion, and his face always wore a pleasant smile.
He had singularly white teeth, and between the two middle ones was a vee-shaped space, which in the Sudan is considered a sign that the owner will be lucky.
His mode of conversation, too, had by training become exceptionally pleasant and sweet.” To the end of his life, Father Ohrwalder, himself a man of considerable courage and conviction, who would suffer near-starvation and considerable physical abuse as the Mahdi’s captive, remained fascinated by Muhammed Ahmed as both a man and a religious leader.

It was while he was in his self-imposed semi-exile along the shores of the Nile from 1874 to 1879 that Muhammed Ahmed came to consider the idea that he had personally been chosen by Allah to lead a holy war with the purpose of first liberating the Sudan, then sweeping the entire realm of Islam clean of corrupting Western ways and washing their influences from the faithful.
At the same time such cleansing would facilitate the further spread of the “pure” Islamic faith.
It was not a mere delusion that overwhelmed him, then swept him away on his holy crusade: during the time he spent living on the island of Abbas he traveled widely up and down the coast and along the Sudanese Nile, teaching his doctrine of austere piety, exhorting the Islamic faithful to follow the “path of God Almighty.”

His travels took him as far as Dongola in the north, along the banks of the Blue Nile region, to Kordofan in the western reaches of Sudan, and Sennar in the east.
While it can be honestly said that Ahmed was wandering the Sudan as a sort of itinerant holy man, serving the poorest of the Sudanese as a healer and scribe, the overly-romantic misconception that in return those he aided filled his begging bowl with food does him a disservice, for it downplays the position held in the Sudan by learned Islamic clerics: he was neither a beggar nor poverty-stricken.
Everywhere he went he made disciples among people who heard him teach, many of whom made their way to Abba Island, where he would give them further instruction, eventually sending them back out into the countryside to carry his message of piety and simplicity.

Wherever his wanderings took him, Muhammed Ahmed found that the Sudanese people’s discontent with the rule of the Ottomans and Egyptians mirrored his own, and in their desire to break their bondage they began to look for the appearance of “the Mahdi” to save them.
So great was their desire for the guidance of this “Expected One” that whenever a teacher appeared possessing great knowledge, dedication, and devotion to Islam they would readily believe him to be the Mahdi, though no one had yet proclaimed themselves to be him.
Ahmed himself began to preach of a “mahdi” who would first cast out the infidels and heretics from the Sudan, then purge all Islam of its excesses and venality, returning it to the path of true righteousness.

In the theology of Islam, the “Mahdi” is a savior figure, a pre-messianic messenger, sent to prepare the world for the appearance of the actual messiah, who will bring justice to the earth, restore true religion, and usher in a short golden age before the end of the world.
Yet it is no small point to note that any doctrine concerning the figure of the Mahdi or his mission cannot be found anywhere in the Koran, and there is little among reliable
hadiths
(the sacred teachings of the Prophet Muhammed’s successors) about such a personage either.
The idea of the Mahdi seems to have evolved during the first two or three centuries of Islamic history.
Many scholars have suggested-–in particular regarding the Shi’ite doctrines of the Mahdi—that a clear inspiration for the Mahdi comes from Christianity and its ideas of a judgment day in the hands of a religious renewer.

In 19th-century Sudan the conflict between Shi’ite and Sunni Islam, which assumed vital geopolitical importance elsewhere in the Middle East, was not a major factor to devout Muslims such as Muhammed Ahmed.
In fact, it can be seen that Ahmed, who rose as much from the Sufi tradition as Sunni, was able to borrow, if unconsciously, Shi’ite concepts of what it meant to be the “Mahdi.” In Sunni Islam, which included the Sudan, a “mahdi” is simply a particularly enlightened teacher, while the “Mahdi” of Shi’ite Islam has a real eschatological importance, and is in the future an essential figure for Islam as well as the world.
At this point an understanding of the schism within Islam is important to understand, not only for a perspective on Muhammed Ahmed’s rise to power but as it increasingly affects the West at its current flashpoint in Iraq.

Thirty years after the death of the Prophet Muhammed, Islam was plunged into a civil war which eventually produced the three major sects of the faith.
Uthmann, the third Caliph, or successor to Muhammed, was killed by mutineers in Mecca in 656 AD, and within months open warfare erupted across Arabia as three distinct groups emerged from the ranks of Islam’s faithful, each fighting for power within the faith.
It has been suggested that the Caliph’s assassination was simply a pretext for the struggle, which pitted the Muslims of modern-day Iraq and Egypt, who resented the power of the third Caliph and his governors, against rival factions of the mercantile aristocracy in the rest of the Middle East.
Whatever the actual motives for the killing, it precipitated a bloody conflict—part civil war, part religious conflict—and left a divide within Islam.
The war ended with the establishment of a new dynasty of Caliphs, who called themselves Sunnis, who ruled from Damascus.
In reaction to them there emerged two other factions: the Shi’ites and the Kharijites.

The Sunnis held themselves as the true followers of the
sunna
(“practice” or “way”) of the prophet Muhammed, from whence they derive their name.
Sunnis also maintained that individuals and congregations within the Islamic community (the
ummah
) could not possess their own spiritual autonomy but must always be guided.
To this end the Sunnis were willing to recognize the authority of the Caliphs, who maintained rule by law and persuasion, and by force if necessary.
The Sunnis became the largest division of Islam, establishing themselves in positions of dominance throughout most of the Middle East and Asia.