Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  The intellectuals ignored or dismissed the most discontented Egyptians of all: the poor. While the beverages and conversation flowed at Mattatias café, the least literate, least educated Egyptians stirred without theoretical guidance. In his field in the Nile Delta, the ordinary fellah had borne the brunt of Ismail’s ineptitude. He paid the most tax, he ate the least food, he sweated in the Corvée, and he suffered random floggings and extortion at the hands of corrupt officials. His only recourses were to the khedive’s mercy, an increasingly limited commodity, and to the Islam that had been the backbone of Egyptian society before Ismail had wrecked it. Abstract ideas of nationalism bore no relation to fellahin life, but the continuity and consolation of traditional religion did. Many Egyptian Muslims saw their country’s crisis not as a result of Ismail’s folly or the caprice of the European markets, but as a divine punishment. Like the Crusaders of the past, the Faranji—“the Franks”—had taken over the economy and set up an illegitimate Christian government. Instead of rhetoric about parliaments and constitutions, popular rebellion took the simpler forms of native xenophobia and religious revivalism. To the fellahin, God’s diplomacy was not Free Trade, but what it had always been: religion.

  Ismail cared little for Islam and less for religious dissent. The Islamic clergy endorsed his line, and when they did not, he replaced them. But as the economy crashed and society unraveled, he lost control of his subjects. The Capitulations and the police no longer sufficed to protect Egypt’s privileged Europeans from the wrath of a starving public. Foreign consuls sensed a rumbling of popular resentment, and sporadic, spontaneous expressions of rising religious anger.

  During Ramadan of 1876, irate Muslims beat up an Italian who smoked in the streets of Cairo in daylight. The British consul reported rumors that arms were being stockpiled in the city’s mosques, and that unseen agitators were making “clever attempts” to direct popular discontent at Europeans. A Sufi from Mecca and his father, a Turkish war veteran, paraded through the center of Alexandria under the Prophet’s green flag, calling for an uprising and the slaughter of Egypt’s infidels. The police shipped them swiftly back to Arabia. One morning, residents in the Arab quarter of Cairo awoke to find their neighborhood plastered in decrees from one Sheikh Ahmed, who called himself the “servant of the Prophet’s tomb in Medina.” The sheikh had used the infidel telegraph system to exhort Egypt’s Muslims to abandon drink and sex for prayer. He warned that the Last Day, when the sun would rise from the west, was imminent.11

  “I WISH, I WISH the King would come again and put things right on earth,” Charles Gordon confided to his sister Augusta. Gordon could not resist Sudan. The grandeur and despair of his Equatorial adventure, the drama of corruption and redemption offered by the war on slavery, the power of his office, and the scale of his task all provided the cosmic drama he craved. Three months after resigning in disgust, Gordon returned to the khedivial suite at the Abdin Palace, charmed by a telegram from his “affectionate Ismail,” begging that he “complete the work which we began together.”12

  This time, Gordon would not settle for a provincial governorship and the thwarting of his work by his corrupt superior at Khartoum. “Either give me the Sudan, or I will not go,” he demanded.13

  Ismail gave it to him: absolute authority over seventeen provinces and a million square miles of territory, the rank of marshal, a uniform trimmed in £150 worth of gold lace, and orders for “the suppression of slavery and the improvement of the means of communication.”14

  Gordon was surprised by Ismail’s apparent surrender, but Gordon never bothered with politics. Ismail had British officials combing through his accounts, and British merchant shipping in the Suez Canal. He needed to demonstrate his suitability as a British client. The cheapest way to do this was to indulge Britain’s humanitarian lobby. Six months later, a similar blend of weakness and cynicism prompted his agreement to the Anglo-Egyptian Convention, the fruit of twenty years of humanitarian pressure. The convention emphasized Ismail’s obligation to suppress immediately all hunting and trading in slaves. It gave Egypt seven years to phase out the ownership of slaves, and its Sudanese empire twelve years. It also granted the Royal Navy the right of stop and search in the Red Sea.

  Even Gordon saw the contradiction it created in British policy. “It is rather amusing to think that the people of Cairo are quite oblivious that in 1884 their revenue will fall to one-half, and that the country will need many more troops to keep it quiet. Seven-eighths of the population of the Sudan are slaves, and the loss of revenue in 1889 will be more than two-thirds.” Order would never come to Sudan if the convention dismantled Egypt’s imperial economy. “Here slavery touches everyone. How can you deal with it so as to avoid a servile war or a rising of the people?” If Britain imposed legislation without offering the alternative of legitimate trade, and the Egyptians still insisted on their taxes, there could only be one outcome: “If the liberation of slaves takes place in 1884, and the present system of Government goes on, there cannot fail to be a revolt of the whole country.”15

  Uncertain if the physical world merited redemption or destruction, Gordon forced a crisis. He saw the likely consequences of British policy and did his best to make them inevitable. Returning to the Sudan, he found it on the verge of breakdown. Starved of funds and soldiers from Egypt, Gordon’s kingdom ran at a loss of ninety-seven thousand pounds per annum. Most of its territory was beyond government control. To the east, Ismail’s war with Abyssinia had turned the borderlands into militia fiefdoms. To the south and west, the slavers had only to dodge the patrol boats on the Nile to rampage more freely than ever. Even in the north, government authority was so weak that a Greek impostor who had awarded himself “a grand uniform and plenty of decorations” was able to con bribes from the locals by passing himself off as a pasha. The Khartoum government maintained its authority over a delinquent population through random public floggings, and it exercised its judgment according to the size of its petitioners’ bribes. When Gordon took over the governor’s palace, he found that the sister of his predecessor Ismail Ayoub Pasha had smashed all of its 130 windows and “cut the divans in pieces.” Ismail’s Sudanese empire was falling apart.16

  “With the help of God, I will hold the balance level,” he promised Augusta. As he and Baker had done in Equatoria, Gordon divided his plan into two stages. First he would establish order in the government, then he would use it as a springboard for a war on the slavers. He canceled the floggings, fixed the windows, pinned up a box to gather his subjects’ petitions, and passed the bribes to the empty treasury. Then he left for an extended camelback tour of his kingdom, accompanied by a small bodyguard. “The people want justice,” he wrote hopefully.17

  Riding thirty miles a day through “torrid wastes,” sunburn, saddle sores, and chest pains, he felt the camel’s gait rattle his liver and lungs loose and tied a sash around his waist and under his armpits to keep them in place. Gordon believed that the sudden appearance at a country barracks of “a single dirty, red-faced man on a camel, ornamented with flies” had an inspirational effect on Arab rebels, Egyptian soldiers, and African tribesmen alike. Yet after correcting the local abuses that caught his eye on the day of each visit—a sleeping sentry, a slaving officer, a mosque stocked with militia rifles—Gordon vanished into the bush with a whiff of Warburg’s Tincture. The garrisons drifted back into their corrupt slumber.18

  Gordon barely possessed the means to impose occasional order. He had the Convention of 1877, which called slave-hunting “robbery with murder.” He had a decree from Ismail that slaving carried a five-year prison sentence. He had permission to execute any slave catchers and dealers who offended him. But he also had a letter from Nubar Pasha, reminding him that while the Convention banned the taking of slaves, their sale and ownership in Egypt would remain legal until 1884. Gordon had only half the law on his side, less of the economic balance, and none of his Egyptian subordinates. They subverted him at every turn, and he responded with wholesale sa
ckings. In May 1878 alone, he fired one provincial governor, three generals, a brigadier, and four lieutenant colonels. Soon he had sacked fourteen of his seventeen provincial governors. He replaced them with inexperienced Sudanese or Egyptian officers, and passing European mercenaries.19

  Alienated from his own administration, Gordon fell back on personal magnetism, arbitrary assertions of strength, and sordid pragmatism. Among the “furtive, polecat race” of Abyssinian brigands and the heavily armed Darfur slavers, Gordon’s drive for “justice” crumbled into Ismail’s tactic of legitimizing local tyrants with a government stamp. In Darfur, he licensed the slavers of the Baggara tribe to intercept their rivals in the trade, the itinerant Jallaba merchants. Returning to Khartoum, he shot without trial a suspected murderer, and a slaver for “mutilating a little boy.” Claiming to strike “daily deadly blows against the slave trade,” he called his wild methods his “Government of Terror.” The description was more accurate than he realized.20

  In Sudanese eyes, Gordon’s Turkish fez and Egyptian soldiers marked him as merely the latest dictatorial import from Cairo. While Gordon dreamed of justice, the Egyptian soldiers slogging along behind his camel grabbed children from the roadside as if stealing chickens. In districts where he stopped the slave trade, the tax collector’s kourbash still flogged the Sudanese tribes. His British uniform and Christian faith advertised the intrusive reach of an infidel empire, and its pact with Ismail’s tyranny. Always skeptical of the Evangelical trinity of “Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization” as a universal cure, he could not help but empathize with his subjects and enemies. “Consider the effect of harsh measures among an essentially Mussulman population, carried out brusquely by a Nazarene,” he explained to Augusta, “measures which touch the pocket of everyone.”21

  The Muslims clung to slaving as their religious and historical right, and the animists seemed impervious to evangelism. Faced with the murderous paradox of the Sudan, Gordon retreated to the conventional explanation of his day: “I look upon the Negro races as I would on children of three or four years of age, incapable of understanding these truths.” Contrary to the Evangelical vision, Sudan was no running battle between humanitarians and slavers, Christian universalism and Islamic obscurantism. These incompatible ideologies did not make direct contact. They were mediated through Ismail’s Egypt, which aspired to the former while profiting from the latter. “His Highness never punishes the men I send down. They appear at his balls with the greatest coolness.” Much as Gordon hoped his Sudanese ordeal was a divine calling, he could not ignore the evidence that he was the voluntary instrument of a corrupt regime. Worse, the “hermaphrodite administration” that the European bankers had imposed on Ismail showed no interest in Sudan, slavery, and salvation. In the choice between “God or Baal,” they chose Baal and the next debt payment.22

  “The only thing I can do to these slave dealers is to flog them and strip them, and send them like Adams into the desert.” Within eighteen months, most of the south and west of Sudan erupted in slaver revolts. Gordon responded in kind, taking over two thousand troops into the Gazelle River region. On the road across southern Darfur, the enormity of the trade became clear. A torrent of small caravans streamed north for El Obeid and the Forty Days’ Road. Every petty trader had his handful of exhausted, dying merchandise. “Nothing could exceed the misery of these poor wretches. Some were children of not more than three years’ old. They had come across that torrid zone from Shaka, a journey from which I on my camel shrink.” He flogged the slavers and set their cargo free. One morning Gordon woke to find a female slave had crawled into his tent at night to escape a caravan. When he encountered emissaries from the slavers offering a truce, he executed them. The campaign ended with the execution of their leaders by firing squad.23

  “I wish the great mystery of evil was revealed to you,” he complained to Augusta in faraway Southampton. His campaign barely dented the slave trade. By his own count, in 1878 he intercepted just over two thousand slaves from the estimated thirty thousand exported that year. All the elements that made Sudan a slaver’s paradise remained in place: massive demand from the Islamic world, an absence of local alternatives, and an exploitative, corrupt Egyptian government. Gordon’s forceful tactics exacerbated Muslim hostility to the Turkiyya and tipped Egypt’s tense accommodation with the slavers into open warfare. Alert to the volatility of the situation, yet personally and logistically unequipped to solve it, Gordon turned a mess into a crisis. Rather than establishing justice, Gordon had accelerated Sudan’s slide into anarchy.24

  Within two years, he had repeated his equatorial tangent. “The long crucifixion that a residence in these horrid countries entails appals me. I do not think I can face the cross of staying here on physical grounds.” His legs were scabbed with sores from over eight thousand camelback miles. He ate little more than dates munched in the saddle. His liver ached from the brandy. He suffered fevers, prickly heat, boils, and recurrent attacks of malaria, one of which sent him staggering through the corridors of his empty palace at night, pursued by hallucinatory petitioners. He smoked so heavily that he developed heart problems: pains across his chest, numbness in his arms, and dizzying panic attacks. “A rush of blood takes place to the head, and you think all is over. I may say I have died suddenly over a hundred times.” He concluded he had finished his task, or that his task would finish him.25

  Once again Gordon had driven himself to collapse, defeat, and a ghastly epiphany. “I have brought it on myself,” he confessed, “for I have prayed to God to humble me to the dust, and to visit all the sins of Egypt and the Sudan on my head.” The clouds of altruistic glory parted. “It would be little to say, take my life for theirs, for I do earnestly desire a speedy death. I am weary of the continued conflict with my atrocious self.”26

  “THERE IS NO DELIVERANCE except in killing,” Afghani raged, “there is no safety except in killing.” Afghani and Abdu planned to kill the khedive, the wicked pharaoh whose death would spark revolution. Every day, Ismail took his afternoon constitutional. An assassin would be waiting for him with a bomb when his carriage slowed to turn onto the Kasr el-Nil bridge. This cast-iron symbol of Ismail’s claim to the Nile would be the site of a political murder. It was a scene from the Russian playbook, an emulation of the nihilists and anarchists who had tried repeatedly to kill Czar Alexander II, and would succeed in 1881.27

  “I strongly approved,” Abdu recalled, “but it was only talk between ourselves, and we lacked a person capable of taking a lead in the affair.”28

  Afghani and Abdu were scholars, not soldiers, and for all their revolutionary interest in the masses, elitists in concept and deed. While the mosques fizzed with resentment and the fellahin grew lawless in starvation, they operated on the tattered fringe. Lacking a popular power base or military strength, their Masonic rites, reading circles, and high-placed patrons were more likely to assist a palace putsch than inspire a popular revolt. Afghani’s transit from religion to politics had swapped one passive daydream for another. He felt diminished by the loss of consolation. “If a philosopher puts on rough clothing, lengthens his prayer beads, and spends his time in the mosque, then he is a mystic,” he admitted, “But if he sits in Mattatias’ coffee house and smokes the hubble-bubble, then he remains only a philosopher.”29

  ALTHOUGH AFGHANI AND ABDU did not realize it, the missing muscle of their revolution already existed: the army. Its ranks divided like Egyptian society: The senior officers were Turkish, the rank and file were fellahin and Sudanese slaves, and the middling officers were the Egyptian graduates of the new systems of education and military schooling. The Turkish generals discriminated against these fellahin officers. Though they were more likely to be sent to a Sudanese outpost or an Abyssinian battlefield, none of them ever rose beyond the rank of colonel. In 1876, a handful of frustrated fellahin officers had formed a secret society under the robust title Strong Egypt. Its members drifted through the Masonic groups and salon reading circles of Afghani
’s ideologues, their radicalization accelerated by the government’s inability to pay their salaries. When the foreign commissioners sacked twenty-five hundred officers and placed the rest on half pay, the disaffected fellahin officers grew mutinous. A group of colonels emerged as their leaders, with Ahmed Urabi at their head.

  “The first book that ever gave me ideas about political matters,” recalled Urabi, “was an Arabic translation of the Life of Bonaparte.’ A lanky, ponderous fellahin from the Delta, Urabi was deliberate in gesture and heavy in limb. Although he looked more like a farmer than a soldier, his life read like a précis of the reforms and failings of Ismail’s Egypt. The son of a country sheikh superannuated by the new bureaucracy, Urabi passed through Ismail’s village schools and, via two years’ religious education at al-Azhar in Cairo, into the army at fourteen. Rising rapidly to the glass ceiling as a colonel in the transport corps, the ambitious Urabi came home from the “disastrous” Abyssinian campaign to find the starving Delta “in a fearful state of oppression.” Returning to al-Azhar, he fell in with Afghani’s circle, taking instruction from Afghani’s deputy Mohammed Abdu and joining Yacub Sanna’s Society of the Lovers of Knowledge. “After this, I thought much about politics.”30