Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Ismail’s despotic interpretation of his French inheritance had recreated the circumstances that had produced the French Revolution. A repressive Ancien Régime of aristocrats allied with tame clerics and corrupt landowners to tyrannize a starving peasantry. Urban intellectuals inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment agitated for accountable, representative government. The only element missing was a military strongman. In Urabi, the café rebels thought they had found their plaster Napoleon. But when the officers entered politics, they did not ally with the radical opposition. They aligned with Ismail. With discontent simmering at every level of Egypt’s fractured society, and no other option available, the khedive had turned to the refuge of the scoundrel, and now posed as a patriot.

  “I admire the khedive exceedingly,” Gordon had written. “He is the perfect type of his people, thoroughly consistent to all their principles—a splendid leopard! Look at the numberless cages out of which he has broken his way, when it seemed quite impossible for him to do so.”31

  By excluding Ismail from meetings of his own ministers, the commissioners had turned him into a guest of his own government. To shake off the Europeans in his ministries and regain control over Egypt, Ismail tried to turn Egyptian nationalism to his advantage. As Afghani, Abdu, and the most radical journalists had chosen to back Ismail’s uncle Halim, the khedive was spared the indignity of having to indulge their demands. Instead he maneuvered his traditional allies and instruments—the Turkish aristocracy and the army—back into his camp. He dusted off the Chamber of Notables. He promised a ministry to Sharif Pasha, head of the moderate aristocrats, and privately promised Urabi and his colonels the cancellation of cutbacks in their ranks and the payment of full salaries. Then he organized a riot.

  Over three days in February 1879, hundreds of sacked, hungry officers converged on Cairo to demand their overdue salaries. The Nubar Pasha government had no money: The Rothschilds’ £8.5 million had already been paid out to the Europeans. On February 18, four hundred officers staged an apparently spontaneous demonstration before the Finance Ministry, waving sabers and revolvers and demanding their salaries. Into this brew converged the carriages of Nubar Pasha and Rivers Wilson, on their way to a meeting at the ministry. When Wilson saw armed officers grabbing the reins of Nubar’s carriage, he jumped down from his own carriage and ran to help, hitting out at the rioters with his cane. The officers kicked and punched him back, pulling his beard. They knocked Nubar to the ground, cravat torn and fez awry. Then they dragged the rulers of Egypt upstairs into Wilson’s office, crying, “Death to the dogs of Christians!”32

  While the officers forced Nubar and Wilson to hear that their children were starving, the British consul raced to the Abdin Palace to warn Ismail that the revolution had begun. The khedive seemed unperturbed, and although Abdin was only five minutes’ drive from the Finance Ministry, two hours passed before Ismail went to his ministers’ assistance. Confident of the officers’ allegiance, Ismail rode alone to the ministry. When he stepped down from his carriage and strode into the ministry, the officers cheered him. He then appeared on a second-floor balcony and told them in Turkish, “If you are my officers, you are bound by your oaths to obey me. If you refuse, I will have you swept away.”33

  The officers duly dispersed. Nubar Pasha resigned. Rivers Wilson and de Blignières fell out over whose policies had caused the riot. The British consul, taken in by Ismail’s political theater, reported to London, “The Khedive alone is able to maintain order.”34

  Then Ismail sacked the commissioners.

  REPLAYING THE SCENE with which he had opened his reign, Ismail summoned the foreign consuls to his palace. Announcing the total reformation of the state, he produced three letters. One was from the Chamber of Notables; they expressed their gratitude at being invited to convene for the first time in three years by denouncing Anglo-French control of their finances. The second letter offered an alternative: Signed by many of the notables and several radical clerics, it demanded constitutional government. The third letter proposed a financial plan. It overestimated Egypt’s income, reduced its debt obligations, and omitted any mention of a limit on Ismail’s personal spending.

  Ismail addressed the consuls with a straight face. “My family has given up a large part of its landed estates in order to help the State. We are prepared to make still greater sacrifices. The jewels of the ladies of the Khedivial family are at the disposal of the creditors of Egypt. Every acre that we own and every diamond that we possess is at the beck and call of the bondholders. We refuse to admit that we are bankrupt.”35

  Ismail had launched a coup against himself. The portly leopard sprang so lightly from his cage that the Europeans were thrown. Of all the costumes in Ismail’s wardrobe, that of constitutionalist seemed the least fitting. But he had acted within his constitutional rights, if not within financial possibility. And precedent demonstrated that so long as he honored Egypt’s debts, he could manipulate the rivalries of the Great Powers and avoid serious common action.

  What Ismail underestimated was the possibility of unilateral action by a single creditor. To the Disraeli government, the internal economy and politics of Egypt could no longer be the sole interest of cotton traders and loan sharks. They were integral to the global security concept that, based on British India, defined the stability of the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal as key British interests. Now Britain held Ismail to account. A brief look at Egypt’s balance sheet showed that without further loans or a return to imposed austerity, Ismail would soon default again. It was obvious that his sacking of the foreign ministers and his conversion to constitutionalism were a smokescreen for an escape from foreign debt. Britain would not permit it.

  “This is a grave and apparently intentional breach of international courtesy to friendly powers,” Lord Salisbury warned Ismail from the Foreign Office. If Ismail ignored his debts and excluded Britain and France from direct control of the Egyptian economy, the two powers would use “an entire liberty of appreciation and action” to force Egypt into line.36

  At the same time, Rivers Wilson cut off Ismail’s last line of credit. Hurrying to Berlin, he denounced Ismail to the Rothschilds. When the Rothschilds passed on their alarm to the German financier Bleichroeder, Otto von Bismarck weighed in on behalf of Germany’s investors. Wilson had accidentally internationalized the crisis. Backed by Bismarck, Sultan Abdul Hamid II offered Ismail’s uncle Halim as an alternative khedive. The British and French refused to invite Turkey and Germany into Egypt, and they rejected Halim. Instead, they settled on Ismail’s shallow, timid son Tawfik. Lord Salisbury advised Ismail “officially to abdicate and leave Egypt.”37

  One by one the consuls trooped through the pink reception room. The representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the United States all begged Ismail to avert a public humiliation that might permanently compromise Egypt’s independence. The British and French consuls offered Ismail a large payoff and assured him that his debts would pass to Tawfik along with the khediviate.

  Ismail thought this was just another financial crisis. As usual, he dispatched a bribe to Constantinople and waited for it to take effect. In the meantime, he kept his new supporters happy by announcing the expansion of the army to 150,000 men and the launch of a megalomaniacal farming project that would flood the countryside around Alexandria. He believed that his debts, £93 million and rising, made him indispensable to his creditors. But he had misunderstood the corporate nature of the modern state. Ismail had signed for the loans, but they had been issued on the security of Egypt. Like shareholders overthrowing their chairman for the good of the share price, the British and French simply wanted to fire him. To preserve legal decorum, they forced his sleeping partner to do the job. On June 26, 1879, Ismail, the great modernizer and Grand Dilapidateur, received a telegram from Constantinople. Its contents were obvious from the address: “Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt.”

  “It has been proved that your maintenance at your post can
result only in multiplying and in aggravating present difficulties. His Imperial Majesty the Sultan has therefore decided, in conformity with a decision of his Council of Ministers, to appoint Mehmet Tawfik Pasha [the] Khedive of Egypt.”38

  At the same time, Tawfik opened an envelope to find he had been promoted. Ismail took the news with customary elegance. Containing his distress, he summoned his treacherous son and recognized him as the new khedive. At six-thirty that evening, a thunderclap of cannon fire from the Cairo Citadel called the local diplomatic corps to Tawfik’s investiture.

  Ismail did not attend. In his private quarters at Abdin Palace, he packed for exile. Having lately offered “the jewels of the ladies of the Khedivial family” to the cause of liberty, he now took back all the jewels he had bestowed on his harem, stripping the stones from their mountings to make them more portable. He rolled up the Aubusson carpets, boxed twenty-two dinner services of cutlery, lifted the silver sconces off the walls, selected his favorite mistresses. As the rejected members of his harem smashed the mirrors and furniture of their gilded cage, the khedive’s retainers lugged all his spoils to Cairo station. It took four days to load up the train. There was so much loot and luggage that a second train had to be found for Ismail and his retinue.

  Ismail left the station that he had commissioned on tracks that he had laid, crossing the Delta irrigation channels that he had dug on bridges that he had built. On the waterfront at Alexandria, he shook hands and exchanged pleasantries as if he was only off for another European jaunt, fundraising in London, shopping in Paris, gaming at Cannes. Two million pounds in cash from the British and French may have helped. Ten years earlier, the Mahroussah had followed the Eagle’s ample stern into the Suez Canal. Now Ismail’s yacht edged past the sea wall and into the Mediterranean to another, more muted round of salutes. He sailed for Naples, never to return.

  4

  The Redeemer

  1881–82

  Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi.

  Permission has been given to us to revive religion among Muslims. Innovations have spread through the land and are being followed by both Muslim clerics and people. Nothing is left of Islam but its name; nothing of the Koran but its Arabic script.

  —Mohammed Ahmed, October 1880

  THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN something different about Mohammed Ahmed. He had trained with his three brothers in their father’s boatbuilding business, but his heart was in the other family tradition. They were among the Ashraf, those who claimed descent from the House of the Prophet. From the boatyard on an island in the Nile just beyond Dongola, the boy traced back his ancestry through thirty generations to Imam Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. Little Mohammed’s family tombs marched into the desert beyond Dongola, a lineage of sheikhs and scholars, adepts of the Sufi cults that had carried Islam up the Nile Valley. Legend blots out his childhood. Baby Mohammed spoke at two weeks of age. A virgin who carried him home lactated spontaneously. Once, when he trod on a thorn, a bird swept down and plucked it out.1

  Signs of corruption surrounded him. Egyptian tax collectors depopulated the countryside. Irrigation channels dried up and wells collapsed. Even the palm trees sagged. The sugarloaf dome of Dongola’s mosque glittered whitely over a waste of sand, but the regional center of northern Sudan had become an Egyptian military station. The governor, Hafiz Ibrahim Effendi, was a hunchbacked Greek-speaking Turk. Waited on by slaves bearing sherbet, coffee, and pipes, Ibrahim Effendi ruled from his divan. He enriched himself with fraud, torture, and grain speculation. As a modernizer, he replaced traditional methods of punishment—chopping off the hands and ears of criminals—with the bastinado. His subjects lived in a ramshackle smear of mud-brick hovels. Dongola was the penultimate stop on the Forty Days’ Road, the last halt before Wadi Halfa and the Egyptian border. Berber Arabs like Mohammed Ahmed scraped a living from the dry earth and passing slave caravans. North of the Egyptian camp, the crumbling ruin of a medieval Christian city mocked the broken present.2

  While the people suffered, Mohammed Ahmed’s father profited from the occupation. As the Turkiyya pushed south for slaves and ivory, demand rose for boats and boatbuilders. When Mohammed was five, his father secured a contract from the Khartoum government. Although Mohammed’s mother was heavily pregnant, the family packed its possessions and tools. They sailed for Kariri, just north of Khartoum, a riverside village surrounded by acacia hardwood. Mohammed’s father died on the way. His brothers took over the business. His mother named her new baby for her dead husband.

  Mohammed Ahmed withdrew into grief. He prayed constantly. It consoled him, like the single cloud said to have hovered over his head, protecting him from the pitiless sun. His brothers noticed his sharp mind and spiritual habits. Scholarship was a greater honor than carpentry. They used some of the Turkiyya’s money to pay for his lessons and board at a Khartoum madrassa. Mohammed rose before dawn, recited from memory the previous day’s koranic portion, then memorized the next portion. His lessons ran all day. The children paused only to pray, kneeling five times daily by their slates. If they made an error, they were beaten. At night they begged food in the alleys of Khartoum or scavenged firewood from the fields and citrus groves. At eleven, Mohammed was a hafiz, one who could recite the entire Koran from memory. By seventeen he was fluent in Islam: theology, koranic exegesis, sharia law, and the hadith, the reported sayings of the Prophet.3

  The young scholar left the madrassa for a Khartoum that was a fount of religious corruption, public drunkenness, and sexual license. The only two buildings in the Sudan with glass windows were the governor’s palace and his harem. The slave and ivory trades attracted criminals, Christian missionaries, and a scuffling underclass of hungry Berbers. Official Islam collaborated with the Turks, endorsing the governor’s every whim. Even the Sufi brotherhoods were on the Turks’ payroll. Just as the Turks had taken over the slave trade, they had overrun Sudanese Islam. They profaned it and turned it into a commodity.

  Mohammed Ahmed turned from this sleaze. He left his brothers to their collaborators’ contracts with the government. He looked back to the local tradition displaced by the Turkiyya: the mystical Sufi sects. Developed in the thirteenth century by minority Shia as a refuge from the legalism and politicking of the Sunni majority, the cults had been integral to the spread of popular Islam in Africa and India. Sudanese Islam, though Sunni, bore a Sufi influence: a belief steered by saintly holy men, ascetic miracle workers, and a mystical belief in direct intervention from Allah. Much of this cultish mysticism derived from contacts with other religions. If the preachers who had carried their faith up the Nile in the fifteenth century resembled the mendicant friars of medieval Christianity, their emphasis on mysticism, poverty, and seclusion bore a further monkish trace. The Sufi brotherhoods were organized like monastic orders. The novice apprenticed himself to a sheikh; the sheikh derived his authority from his own teacher, and so on back to the founder of the sect. Blending conventional Islam with the precepts of its saintly founder, each sect collected its prayers and quotations in a ratib, a unique anthology.

  Sailing into the political vacuum beyond Khartoum, Mohammed Ahmed went south. One hundred miles down the Nile lay the base of the Sammaniya order, a sect ascetic by even the bare standards of Sudanese life. Swearing loyalty to its sheikh, Mohammed Nur al-Daim, he donned the jibba, the Sufi’s rough garment of patched wool, and renounced the world. For seven years he starved himself, proving his humility through grinding grain and gathering firewood. In imitation of the Prophet, he stood alone through the night reciting the Koran. He learned the Sammaniya dikr, the rhythmic combination of koranic quotation and the ninety-nine names of Allah. Like the Whirling Dervishes who made Sufism famous throughout the world, he worked himself into an ecstatic trance through breath control, physical movement, and repetition of the dikr. Sheikh al-Daim was impressed. “How he fasted! How he prayed! How he recited the word of Allah, tears running down his face! How he prayed long into the night, through to mid-morning!�
�4

  Throughout the Islamic world, Muslims reacted to the intrusion of Western ideas and technology with a revivalist call for purification and restoration. In the Sudan, three ancient trade routes crossed, and each carried a revivalist message that appealed to a society destabilized by modernity. Wahhabi puritanism floated across from Jeddah to the Red Sea ports. The Senussi ideal of retreat into the desert crossed the northern Sahara from Libya. Sokoto militancy, inspired by a sharia state in West Africa, crossed the arid belt below the Sahara. In the Sudan, the mixing of these currents gave rise to a revolutionary maelstrom. Aided by Egypt’s imperial infrastructure, its ripples spread across huge distances, and across tribal lines. Soon, Mohammed Ahmed refused to eat the communal Sammaniya meal if it had been paid for by the khedive’s subsidy.

  At twenty-eight he graduated from Sheikh al-Daim’s order, with a license to teach his own adepts. He could do little else. With no experience of work or women, he was so zealous that he could not earn a living. He failed as a wheat trader, because he did not want to profit from others’ hunger. He failed as a charcoal vendor, after discovering that his customers used it to brew sorghum beer. He rejected the government salaries that tempted other brilliant but less scrupulous Sufis. He rejected study at al-Azhar University, where Sudanese scholars had their own quarters, because al-Azhar compromised with the Egyptian government. He felt driven to the radical fringe. In 1869, the year of Ismail’s parades and parties at the Suez Canal, Mohammed Ahmed again moved against the current. Like the Prophet, who had taken to a cave near Mecca, Mohammed Ahmed took to a cave in the riverbank of an island south of Khartoum, fasting, praying, and waiting for revelation.