First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (8 page)

On July 3, 1882, the European population of Alexandria was evacuated to the waiting fleet, and an ultimatum was issued to Arabi’s followers: surrender Alexandria’s forts to the British, or the Royal Navy would shell the city.
When the Egyptians failed to respond, the battleships and cruisers opened fire at 7:00
AM
on July 11.
It was little more of a gunnery exercise for the British, and an exercise in futility for the Egyptians, as the bombardment began systematically demolishing the harbor forts.
The Egyptians at first put up a brave return fire, but they had no guns heavy enough to seriously damage the British battleships, and by midmorning the last Egyptian battery had been silenced.

The next day, after setting fire to the city, Arabi’s men withdrew from Alexandria, heading southward to Kasr-el-Dowar, and the British landed marines and sailors to secure the city.
Within three days the British had established control over Alexandria, and after the Sultan refused to send his own troops to restore order in what was ostensibly his own domain, an expeditionary force was sent to crush Arabi’s rebel forces.
On August 25, 1882, 25,000 troops under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley landed at Alexandria.
After a brilliant series of feints, diversionary attacks, and raids, Wolseley concentrated his force on Kassassin and was ready to attack the rebels in their fortifications at Tel-el-Kebir in early September.
Choosing to avoid fighting in the brutal heat of the day, he launched a surprise night attack against Arabi’s position, throwing some 17,000 British soldiers and marines with 60 pieces of artillery against an entrenched Egyptian force estimated at as many as 30,000 regular infantry supported by 75 guns.

It was all over in less than an hour.
A division of Scottish Highlanders attacked first, charging the Egyptians’ first line and taking it at bayonet point.
Other British regiments came up in support and soon the entire Egyptian army was routed, with British cavalry in hot pursuit.
Meanwhile, some fifty miles southwest of Tel-el-Kebir, Cairo fell to a cavalry assault, some 10,000 Egyptian regulars surrendering without firing a shot.
It was the end of Colonel Arabi’s brief revolt.
He surrendered to the British the following day and was exiled to Turkey.
Great Britain’s position as the arbiter of Egyptian affairs was seemingly more secure than ever, and the puppet status of the Khedive was revealed for the world to see once and for all.

Whether it was by a quirk of fate or by some grand design–though no firm evidence of the latter has ever surfaced–the revolt in Cairo and Alexandria coincided with the rising of most of the population of Sudan in support of the Mahdi and his followers.
The Egyptian government’s position had already been badly weakened by a series of profound misjudgments made by Khedive Ismail before he was deposed, in an attempt to maintain some semblance of order in the increasingly unruly province.
Soon it would get worse.

In the west of the Sudan, a region called the Bahr-el-Ghazal had been overrun by Arab slave traders.
While they paid lip-service to their loyalty to the Khedive, the were in point of fact free agents, terrorizing the region and reducing the populace to a state of abject misery.
Just as the slaver Agad had set himself up with a government charter that granted him near-autocratic power over almost 100,000 square miles of territory, another slaver, Zobeir Pasha, had carved out an even greater realm for himself at the expense of the Sudanese as well as the Egyptians.
The Khedive, who in 1874 had sent out a column of troops from Khartoum to either arrest Zobeir or extract a promise of subservience from him, was horrified to learn that Zobeir’s forces had defeated them, and had in turn invaded the independent province of Darfur.
Zobeir claimed that he had annexed the province in the name of Khedive Ismail, and assumed the title of Governor-General.
When Cairo refused to recognize his claim, he went to the Egyptian capital to press his case, and was immediately detained by the Egyptian government.
But Zobeir continued to rule over his petty princedom through his son, Sulieman, who was, if anything, more ruthless and oppressive than his father.

The chaos that gradually overtook the Sudan in the 1870s led to a succession of minor interventions by the British, who mainly pressed various soldiers and officials onto the Egyptian government as replacements for corrupt or inept Egyptian officials in an effort to restore order.
In 1878 a singular British officer, Major-General Charles Gordon, was appointed governor of Khartoum and given a mandate to suppress the slavers after fresh uprisings in Darfur and Kordofan.
Gordon, acting swiftly and aggressively, broke up several companies of slave-hunters in both provinces.
At the same time, Sulieman Zobeir, acting on the instructions of his father in Cairo, had broken out into open revolt against the Egyptians, in the same province as his father, the Bahr-el-Ghazal.
Gordon entrusted Romolo Gessi, an Italian explorer and soldier of fortune who was possessed of remarkable courage and competence, with the task of crushing Sulieman.
After a grueling campaign across some of the Sudan’s most forbidding terrain, Sulieman was cornered and captured by Gessi.
When Sulieman refused to renounce the slave trade, Gessi ordered his execution.

But the best that Gordon and his lieutenants could do were hardly more than straws in the wind, for what little order existed in the Sudan was fast crumbling.
In one of his last acts of folly, Ismail quarreled with Gordon over questions of authority and pay, and Gordon resigned in disgust.
When he left the Sudan he was succeeded at Khartoum by Raouf Pasha, already known for his venality and corruption, who happily revived most of the old abuses of the Egyptian administration, including the slave trade.

The disarray left by Colonel Arabi’s revolt understandably distracted both Egyptian and British attention from the growing chaos to the south in the Sudan.
When an Egyptian column of some fourteen hundred soldiers was massacred by the Mahdi’s followers in 1881, Cairo began to take the revolt seriously, and sent a column of troops up the Nile from Khartoum to hunt the Mahdi down and restore Egyptian control over the Sudan.

By the autumn of 1881, after the defeat of the Khedive’s punitive expedition to Abba, Muhammed Ahmed became even more open and confident in his proclamation of his divine calling.
At times, the confidence spilled over into arrogance, as when he declared, “Cease to pay taxes to the infidel Turks and let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.” Because the Egyptians were so closely identified with their Ottoman rulers, to the Mahdi and his followers, the word “Turk” had come to denote any enemy, regardless of nationality or faith.
It was becoming more and more evident that any vestiges of the tolerance and compassion of the Sufi beliefs the Mahdi once embraced were rapidly vanishing from the his teachings, while the sense of persecution embraced by the Shi’ites was rapidly merging with the austerity of the Wahhabi, in the process forming a dangerous paranoia.

After each military success of the Mahdi and his followers, now known as the Ansar (the name also taken by the followers of Muhammed), his ranks and prestige grew, particularly among the Baggara, the nomadic Arabs of the western Sudan who most especially resented the Egyptians.
In Muhammed Ahmed the Baggara found a leader who could be used to shake off Egyptian rule, and so their allegiance to him was quickly cemented.
It was further assured when he took wives among the daughters of the Baggara sheikhs, and later decreed Abdullah, a sheikh of the Taaisha tribe, as his chief Khalifah.
What the Baggara did not perceive was their usefulness to the Mahdi: their numbers alone gave him a power and authority that was unchallengeable by any other would-be leader in the Sudan, and made him sufficiently strong to openly defy the Egyptian government.
The Baggara were to be the primary instrument of the Mahdi’s
jihad
.

Followers numbering in the tens of thousands had flocked to his banner; the Mahdi proclaimed a
jihad
throughout the Sudan, and began to wage war on those he declared to be infidels.
The Mahdi was now regarded by his followers as the only true leader of the faithful, the successor to the Prophet, and blessed with divine authority to spread Islam throughout the whole world.

Chillingly, though, for those who still cherished the belief that the Mahdi was devoted to purifying Islam, there were signs that he had begun to drift from what he had once held as a truly divine mission.
In what he would have regarded as an act of blasphemy only a few short years earlier, the Mahdi altered the recitation of the
shahada
, the Moslem creed, adding the coda “and Muhammad Ahmad is the Mahdi of God and the representative of His Prophet” to the time-honored (and powerful) recitation of “There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is His Prophet.”

Zakat
, that is, almsgiving, was no longer an act of voluntary charity, but rather became a tax paid to the
Mahdyyah
.
The
hajj
, or pilgrimage to Mecca, a holy obligation of all Moslems ordained by Muhammed himself, was replaced by service in the Mahid’s
jihad
.
The Mahdi also began modifying Islam’s five pillars of faith in such a way that they came to support his dogma that loyalty to him was essential to true faithfulness.
When a few courageous souls dared question him about these actions, the Mahdi justified his actions by declaring that he was acting on instructions from Allah that had come to him in visions.

The Mahdi carefully cultivated his followers’ enthusiasm, making them feel they were an essential part of his plan to sweep aside the “Turks” and Christians.
He began by styling his followers
dervishes
, from an Arab word originally meaning “doorway” (to the spiritual realm) but which came to mean a religious mendicant.
They were thus identified as “the faithful.” To further proclaim his followers’ status, Muhammed Ahmed encouraged them to wear a patched
jibba
, a loose-fitting robe of indifferent cloth and quality, as their “uniform.” The poverty implied by the jibba proclaimed the purity of their Islamic faith.
Later he commanded the faithful to call themselves
ansar
, “helpers,” referring to their coming role in the fulfillment of his personal ambition.

At the same time, Muhammed Ahmed was not unmindful of the duties required of him by Moslem doctrine and traditions as the true Mahdi.
In a move as politically shrewd as it was religiously correct, Ahmed, in accordance with the tradition which required the Mahdi to have four deputies, proclaimed Abdullah el Taashi, a Baggara tribesman of somewhat dubious provinance, Ali wad Helu, a sheikh of the Degheim and Kenana Arabs, and Mahommed esh Sherif, the Mahdi’s own son-in-law, as
khalifas
.
Curiously, the fourth khalifaship, when offered to Sheikh es Senussi, was declined.
Though he gave no reason for his refusal, it may well be that el Senussi saw even deeper than did Ahmed, and realized to how great a tragedy the
Mahdyyah
would lead.

For the “
Mahdyyah
” was what Muhammed Ahmed was now openly proclaiming—the coming of the kingdom of the Mahdi.
By making them his
khalifas
, Ahmed bound the futures and fortunes of Abdullah, Ali wad Helu, and Mahommed esh Sherif so closely to his own that it was inevitable they would rise or fall together.
Therefore it became a matter of some urgency for the three
khalifas
that the Mahdi be maintained, then enhanced, by any means they could manage.
By announcing the
Mahdyyah
, Ahmed provided his revolt with the stamp of religious legitimacy that his followers lacked the sophistication to challenge, let alone refute.
In doing so Ahmed established the pattern for generations of militant Moslems to come: the assertion of divine authority for acts of violence carried out against infidels.

Armed with swords, spears, and a ragtag collection of farm implements hastily modified into weapons, the Mahdi’s army, now swelled to more than fifty thousand strong, systematically laid siege to the Egyptian garrison towns in Kordofan.
The provincial capitol, El Obeid, held out for nearly six months in the last half of 1882.
Starvation finally accomplished what the Mahdi’s followers couldn’t–by January 17, 1883, the defenders were too weak to resist a determined assault and the rebels overran the city in an hour.
Gruesome scenes followed hard on the heels of the city’s fall.
Women and children were hacked to death, others raped and carried off to be sold to the Arab slavers; Egyptian officers and men were brutally executed, with a handful of surviving soldiers press-ganged into the Mahdi’s forces.
Despite the injunction once given by the Prophet Muhammed himself that Moslems should never kill or wage war on fellow Moslems, El Obeid was swept by an orgy of quasi-legitimized murder, as the Mahdi’s disciples offered their victims the choice of renouncing whatever religion they followed and embracing the cause of the Mahdi.
Those who refused were killed on the spot.

For more than a year there had been seemingly endless but indecisive skirmishing between Egyptian forces sent to hunt down the Mahdi and his motley army of those he deemed “the faithful.” It was in February 1883, when word of the fall of El Obeid reached Cairo, that Khedive Tewfik decided to attack the Mahdi with what he regarded as overwhelming force, to retake the Sudan from these religious fanatics who dared flaunt Egyptian rule.
The Khedive turned to Col.
William Hicks, a British officer who had formerly served with the Indian Army, giving him command of an Egyptian expeditionary force numbering seven thousand troops of very indifferent quality, most of them the sweepings of Egyptian jails, along with a number of cavalry squadrons and some artillery.
With this force Hicks was expected to work a miracle.