Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Mohammed Ahmed had asked both his mentor Sheikh Nur al-Daim and the state-funded Khartoum sheikhs if one of them might be the Mahdi. None of them had taken up his leading question. Gradually, he realized that it must be his destiny to lead the redemption of the Islamic world. The first hint was visible to all: a series of comets in the night sky, heralds of the new Islamic century. The second had come when he was up a ladder, building the dome of Sheikh Qureishi’s tomb, burying his father-in-law as he praised him.

  A tall, thin Arab had appeared beneath the workers. Abdullahi al-Taishi was a Baggara from Darfur. His family lost their home to Zubair Pasha and Ismail’s troops. Although his father had taught religion, Abdullahi could barely recite a few Koranic phrases. His dying father had exhorted him to find a teacher, and to escape the impure Sudan by emigrating to Mecca. Abdullahi never acquired much religious expertise, but he had the tactical skills of a Baggara. The disintegration of Egyptian control had left the Sudan open to the strongest party. So he searched for the most powerful Sudanese he could find: Zubair Pasha, the only man capable of driving out the Turks. Abdullahi sought out the archslaver and told Zubair that he had dreamed that Zubair was the Mahdi. Zubair told him that he was not. So Abdullahi scoured the Sudan in search of a mentor. As he traveled east with his donkey, his waterskin, and his bag of corn, he heard about the Renouncer of Aba Island and tracked him to Sheikh Qureishi’s tomb. For several hours he waited at the foot of the scaffold, too timid to speak.

  “At length I plucked up courage, and in a few words told him my story. I begged him, for the sake of Allah and his Prophet, to allow me to become one of his disciples.” Mohammed Ahmed put out his hand for Abdullahi to kiss. “I swore entire submission to him as long as I lived.”15

  Abdullahi did more than carry bricks up a ladder. The Baggara were the fiercest and most independent of Sudan’s tribes. They were paramount in Kordofan, the site of Mohammed Ahmed’s political campaign. Any revolt against the Turks must either strike a deal with the Baggara or contend with them. Abdullahi would become Mohammed Ahmed’s general, the Baggara the key troops in his tribal coalition.

  In March 1881, not long after Abdullahi’s appearance at the foot of his ladder, Mohammed Ahmed initiated his inner circle into his great secret. The Prophet had revealed himself to Mohammed Ahmed. This occurred within a month of the riot at Urabi’s court-martial. Simultaneously, Riaz Pasha informed the Khartoum government that to save money, it would be incorporated into the Cairo government. There could not have been a better moment for divine intervention. “I was awake and in good health. I was not asleep or in a trance, nor under the influence of intoxication or madness,” Mohammed Ahmed testified. “No, I was in possession of all my faculties of reason—prepared to command what He commands and prohibit what He prohibits.”16

  Mohammed Ahmed returned to Kordofan and activated his network. On June 29, 1881, he dropped the “Ahmed” that did not conform to prophecy. Calling himself Mohammed al-Mahdi, he declared publicly that he was Allah’s messenger, come to redeem the Sudan and the world for Islam. Then he retreated to Aba Island, gathering his followers and waiting for the Turkish response.

  Gordon’s heir in the white palace at Khartoum was Mohammed Rauf Pasha. The son of a Nubian father and Abyssinian mother, Rauf had risen from Egypt’s menial underclass to become Sudan’s first Egyptian, Arabic-speaking governor; as in the British Empire, the less pleasant corners of the Egyptian empire abounded with opportunity. While Urabi and his friends protested discrimination in Egypt, Rauf spent his entire career in a region viewed by most officers as a punishment posting. As a young officer, he had been Samuel Baker’s chief of staff in Equatoria. He had served Gordon twice, and been sacked twice for corruption. As governor, his job was to mollify subjects driven to the edge of revolt by Gordon, and to implement Riaz Pasha’s cutbacks by reducing the Sudanese garrisons. He performed both duties with his usual mediocrity. Beyond following orders, he had little power. Riaz Pasha had centralized the imperial government and now ran the Sudan by remote control from Cairo. Mohammed Rauf Pasha did what he was told.

  When Rauf Pasha heard that the Expected Redeemer had manifested in his jurisdiction, he sent him a friendly letter, assuming that this holy fool could be paid off with a government stipend. The Mahdi went to the local telegraph station and fired back a message.

  “I must reveal to you that my call to re-establish the way of the Prophet, and to reclaim our religion from its present evil ways, is mandated directly by the Prophet Mohammed. I declare that I am the Expected Mahdi, and that my arrival was heralded by heavenly signs. He who follows me will be victorious. He who refuses will be punished by Allah in this world and the next. The sermons preached to the faithful have been absolutely clear: He who does not believe in me will be purified by the sword.”17

  This was heresy and treason. Worse, it was beyond bribery. Rauf Pasha decided to summon the fakir to Khartoum for examination by the government’s theologians. He sent an old friend from his schooldays to fetch him: Abu Suud, the one-eyed slaver who had subverted both Baker and Gordon in Equatoria and now combined slave-trading with a post in the Khartoum government. If the troublesome sheikh had a worldly agenda, Abu Suud could strike a bargain with him.

  Sitting on a rush mat, the Mahdi and his inner circle received Abu Suud in the hut that was their madrassa. Abu Suud explained that the Mahdi must go to Khartoum and acknowledge that the chain of temporal authority led from Mohammed Rauf Pasha to Khedive Tawfik, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and Allah.

  “You misunderstand,” the Mahdi replied. “Who can be set above the Mahdi, personally selected by the Prophet? It is Rauf who is duty bound to obey me.”

  Abu Suud grew angry. “How can you hope to fight the government?”

  The Mahdi waved his hand. “If need be, I will fight the government only with those present here.” The disciples stirred, offering their lives for Allah, his Prophet, and the Mahdi. It was time for Abu Suud to leave.

  Three days later, Abu Suud returned by steamer with two hundred Egyptian soldiers, a cannon, and theological heavy artillery in the shape of Sheikh Ahmad al-Azhari, a government jurist. Arriving at dusk, they tied up a quarter of a mile from the Mahdi’s village and stepped into the shallows. As night fell, they divided into two companies. The officers had been promised promotion if they caught the false prophet. As they hurried forward in the dark, they lost contact with each other. The Mahdi’s men waited, hidden behind rocks and bushes. A heavy rain began to fall.

  The Egyptian troops heard a war cry from the darkness. Both columns fired a ragged volley toward the village. As they fumbled to reload, the Mahdists surged out of the night, ghostlike in their white jibbas. They fell on the soldiers, clubbing and hacking at them with spears, sticks, and knives. Panicking, the soldiers fled, scrambling through the mud and bushes toward their steamer. Its frightened captain cast off, leaving the soldiers splashing in the shallows as the Mahdists hunted them down. By dawn, the abandoned wounded had been killed where they lay. After the slaughter, the Mahdi led the dawn prayer. He had been shot in the shoulder by the first Egyptian volley, and Abdullahi had hidden the wound so that his men would not lose their faith in his immortality. The next day, they buried their dozen dead in the cave where the Mahdi had communed with the Prophet.

  The Mahdi knew that Mohammed Rauf Pasha would send a larger force. Just as the Prophet had hidden from the hostile tribes of Mecca and made his Hejira to Medina, so his heir would escape the Turkiyya’s soldiers. Using his brothers’ boats to ford the White Nile, the Mahdi led his followers southwest into the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan, a trek of seventy-nine days. He rallied his party by comparing them to the Prophet’s first adherents: They were the Muhajiroun, the exiles who blazed the trail for the Ansar, the followers who rallied to the Prophet at Medina.

  When the Mahdi’s secret shoulder wound had healed, he halted at a hill called Jebel Gadir. To conform to another precedent, the Mahdi renamed it Jebel Massa, after the hill in north
west Africa where a tenth-century Mahdi, Mohammed Ubaidallah, had declared himself.

  The fugitives built a mosque and a settlement. Their leader sent letters and messages across the Sudan. The Successor of Allah’s Messenger announced the end of the Egyptian tyranny. He called all Muslim allies, partisans, and enemies to his jihad. A new caliphate had arisen. The reign of the Mahdi had begun.

  WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT spent that summer at Crabbet Park, his country estate in Sussex. Surrounded by the blooms of the English summer, he worked quickly on a series of essays. He called them The Future of Islam.

  “I began life rather early,” Blunt admitted. A tall, stooping rake with a thick ginger beard, Blunt had served briefly as a diplomat, before an inheritance had allowed him to pursue his real passions: poetry, thoroughbred horses, radical politics, and Lady Anne King-Noel, the granddaughter of his hero Lord Byron. For five years Blunt and Lady Anne had traveled throughout the Ottoman East, from Turkey to Arabia and Egypt, structuring their exotic tours as business trips. The most successful bloodlines in English and American racing stemmed from a trio of eighteenth-century Arab horses—the Byerly Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian—and the Blunts were determined to create a stud at Crabbet Park. An obsession with origins was the common thread between their disparate interests. Both traced their bloodlines back to the Norman Conquest. Both derived their “sympathies of the cause of freedom in the East” from Anne’s grandfather Lord Byron, the poet who had sacrificed himself in the Greek war of independence from Turkey. Both viewed the politics of Islam through this aristocratic prism.18

  The Blunts found their horses, but their travels in the Ottoman Empire so radicalized Wilfrid that he left the stud farm to Lady Anne. The Ottoman government seemed “a moral plague” on the Arabs, “infecting its subjects with its own corruption.” Blunt empathized with the Arabs, especially the Bedouin, who, like the English gentry, valued tribalism, honor codes, and the company of horses over women. Blunt decided that as the Sick Man declined, the Arabs, like Byron’s Greeks before them, should be encouraged toward independent modern nationhood—“to champion the cause of Arabian liberty would be as worthy an endeavour as had been that for which Byron had died.”19

  Blunt’s infatuation with Arab society deepened in tandem with his disaffection from his own society. In Britain, money and merit were displacing birth and privilege. Commerce and industry had created a liberal middle class. Blunt considered it vulgar in origin and conformist in politics, and that the displacement of the gentry meant the death of “the patriotic idea.” Once, he had believed in Britain’s “providential mission in the East,” but now he saw Britain as complicit in tyranny, supporting the Ottomans in order to preserve British India and the balance of trade. He traced the moral decay of British foreign policy to the rise of “Semitic influence” at home: the “cosmopolitan finance” of Disraeli and his friends the Rothschilds, the “too powerful Hebrew house.” Blunt was not alone in his conspiracist reading of the global economy. In 1879, while the Blunts shopped for pure-blooded horses in Syria, the unemployed German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. He called his platform “Anti-Semitism.”20

  Although Blunt’s visions of Arab nationalism put him on the cranky fringe of Britain’s politics, his background gave him access to the private houses and clubs of its elite. When Disraeli’s government lost the 1880 election to the Liberals, Blunt’s close friend Eddy Hamilton became secretary to the new prime minister, William Gladstone; Blunt’s cousin Philip Currie performed the same duties for the foreign secretary, Lord Granville. Blunt refined his ideas in similarly refined circumstances, usually at parties hosted by fellow “Philo-Asiatics.”

  In the drawing room of “a fine lady’s house in Belgravia,” the Persian ambassador Malkum Khan described the Babi movement to Blunt. “I knew that it was useless to attempt a remodeling of Persia in European forms,” Khan explained, “And I was determined to clothe my material reformation in a garb which my people would understand, the garb of religion.”21

  Spellbound, Blunt realized he had started “at the wrong end.” If he was to help the Arabs, he must first understand their thinking. He hired as his teacher Jean Louis Sabunji. A Syrian priest who had converted to Islam and journalism, Sabunji edited The Bee, a minor Arabic newspaper that propagandized against the Ottoman Turks. Sabunji taught Blunt about “the Caliphal question and its modern aspects”: The caliphate must be returned to its rightful owners, and if the Arabs were to recover their spiritual independence from Turkey, they must create their political spiritual independence. Blunt decided to trace the caliphate to the source of Islam. “I am full of the notion of going to Arabia and heading a movement for the restoration of the Arab Caliphate. People have been called great who sacrificed themselves for smaller objects.”22

  En route to Arabia, Blunt stopped in Cairo to learn Arabic. One afternoon in January 1881, his tutor took him to “a little house in the Azhar quarter” to meet Mohammed Abdu, lately returned by Riaz Pasha from internal exile.

  Blunt’s host wore the white turban and dark kaftan of an al-Azhar scholar. He was about thirty-five, of middling height, with a “quick intelligence revealed in singularly penetrating eyes” and a “manner frank and cordial and inspiring.” He told Blunt about Afghani, the “wild man of genius,” and the reformist vision. The Islamic polity, said Abdu, must resist hostile empires not by reform, but “total reformation.” For two hundred years, the Turkish sultans had cared “almost nothing for religion.” Holding the caliphate “only by right of the sword,” they had lost their spiritual authority. The caliphate must be reconstituted on a “more legitimate and “more spiritual” basis: returned to the Arabs. Most radically of all, it must be separated from secular law; to Abdu, revivalism was only a means, and the end was an Islamic version of the separation of church and state.23

  These ideas were the basis for Blunt’s Future of Islam, serialized in the Fortnightly Review while Urabi and his friends seethed at Cairo and the Mahdi fled into Kordofan. The Islamic world, said Blunt, was like Catholic Europe before the Reformation. The “bondage of a too-strict tradition” impeded its evolution. It needed “the freeing of its thought” by “a religious reformation.” Britain, heir to the Mughal Empire and protector of the Ottoman Empire, had a special responsibility. Rather than profit from Islam’s decline, Britain should encourage “the better elements of Eastern thought,” as embodied in Egypt by Mohammed Abdu. “In God’s name, let her take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue.” In the summer of 1881, while the Mahdi declared the advent of a new caliphate, Blunt gave Sabunji money for a new periodical, its platform evident in its title: The Caliphate. 24

  Blunt, Abdu, and the Mahdi could not have been less similar. Blunt was a European radical, ignorant of the Islamic world. Abdu was an orthodox Sunni scholar in the pay of the Egyptian government, secretly dabbling in forbidden ideas from the West. The Mahdi was a Sufi cultist inspiring local rebellion through religious reaction. But they had all arrived at the same conclusions. Only a renewed caliphate could save Islam from the West. Ottoman Turkey was the enemy, and its rule over the Arabs must be overthrown.

  AS IN THE SUDAN, in Egypt religion gave legitimacy to revolt. After the riot of February 1881, the rebellious Egyptian army colonels and the junior members of Sharif Pasha’s aristocratic reform faction formed a grand alliance with Mohammed Abdu’s religious rebels. In secret meetings at private houses, they worked out a common interest in forcing Tawfik toward reform.

  The aristocrats wanted to regain the fruits of office and obtain a constitution that would free Egypt from both Turkey and Europe. The colonels wanted an end to the long misery of the fellahin at the hands of the Turks: no more ethnic discrimination, and more Corvée. The religious politicians wanted a constitution that would protect their cultural revolution from the inevitable clerical backlash. Each group accepted the others not from principle, but from pragmati
sm: They all agreed that the most important policy of all was to get rid of Britain and France. So the Turkish aristocrats promised the colonels that they would end discrimination against Egyptians, and the colonels put the weight of the army and the peasantry behind the aristocrats’ call for a constitution. The religious reformers decided that both positions were compatible with a liberal Islamic republic. Privately, Abdu and Sharif Pasha both believed that Urabi was an ignorant peasant, that the Egyptians were not yet ready for liberty, and that they were most likely to reach it via their preferred strain of paternalism. Publicly, each faction in this awkward alliance spoke as the voice of the National Party.

  Although Khedive Tawfik had promised to reform the army, he and Riaz Pasha worked to break the colonels. Over the summer of 1881, Riaz Pasha’s spies shadowed the colonels, infiltrating their meetings and trying to provoke street brawls. The colonels dodged the provocations. So in early September 1881, Tawfik and Riaz sacked Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, the colonels’ ally in the War Ministry, and ordered the colonels’ regiments to the provinces.

  The colonels called an emergency meeting. One of Urabi’s supporters suggested that if the colonels boarded a train for the provinces, they would end up in the Nile at Karf ez-Zayat like Khedive Ismail’s unfortunate brothers. Sensing that they had been followed to the meeting, several officers admitted that they feared assassination by the police. Others mentioned a rumor that the sheikh of al-Azhar had given Tawfik a fatwa branding the colonels as traitors marked for death. Urabi was for marching on the Abdin Palace, but Mohammed Abdu spoke against military confrontation, and the Turkish aristocrats agreed with him.

  “A foreign occupation will come,” Abdu warned. “A malediction will rest forever on him who provokes it.”25