“This is the hour of need for which you have been created.” The spot he had chosen for his reflections was both the Sammaniya heartland and the epicenter of the chaos caused by Egypt’s repression of the slave trade. Aba Island lay one hundred miles south of Khartoum, on the border between Kordofan and Sennar, two provinces whose main business was slaving. The Turkiyya’s troops imposed two equally unpopular policies, stealing the profits of the trade, or repressing it violently. By the late 1870s, the Anglo-Egyptian Convention and Gordon’s war on the slavers pointed to a likely future. The government broke Islamic law, intercepting slaver boats on the Nile, executing leading slavers, and freeing legally held slaves. Traditional society was breaking down before Mohammed Ahmed’s eyes.5
Aba Island was heavily wooded, and well sited for the slave trade. His brothers moved their boatyard down to join him, and other exiles from Dongola followed. A settlement grew up on the island, funded by the boatyard but built around the charismatic holy man in his cave. Mohammed Ahmed became famous for his amulets, his piety, and his spiritual presence. The local people called him The Renouncer. He offered his visitors sweet milk, beatific smiles, and tears for the fallen world. In 1878, he moved into politics. His experience of Sufi factionalism had trained him for the fragmented tribal politics of the Sudan. Mohammed Ahmed was a natural politician: artful in his choice of alliances, and always preferring to negotiate with his rivals rather than fall into feuds. He married strategically. At Aba Island, he took two wives, one from the local Dinka tribes, another from the Dongolawi exiles in his camp. Secure at Aba, he turned to his power base, the Sammaniya brotherhoods, and attempted to overthrow his mentor, Sheikh Nur al-Daim.
Attending a party to celebrate the circumcision of the sheikh’s son, Mohammed Ahmed denounced the music, the dancing, the gorging on food and drink. His tactic misfired. The sheikh excommunicated him, cutting him off from his potential power base in the sect. Mohammed Ahmed donned a slave’s yoke, sprinkled his head with ashes and wrote apologetic poems. But Nur al-Daim, threatened by his protégé’s rising fame, withheld forgiveness.
“Get away, you wretched Dongolawi, who fears not Allah and opposes his master and teacher,” the sheikh shouted at his kneeling pupil. “You show the truth of the saying, The Dongolawi is the devil in the skin of a man. By your words you try to spread dissension among the people.”6
Mohammed Ahmed removed his yoke and stopped writing poems. He transferred his allegiance to Nur al-Daim’s greatest rival, Sheikh Qureishi, leader of the Sammaniyas of the Blue Nile. He married the daughter of the eighty-six-year-old sheikh, and when the old man died in the summer of 1878, he inherited his authority. His eminence among the Sammaniya became the foundation of a tribal coalition.
Mohammed Ahmed emerged from his cave and began to campaign for adherents. Again he eschewed tradition. Instead of making the haj to Mecca, he conducted a haj among his own people, a pilgrimage to resentful tribes and neglected principles. He used his brothers’ boats to jump the vast distances of the Sudan, south to Sennar, north as far as Dongola, west to Kordofan and the Gazelle River, often sailing in the company of smuggled slaves. Like an ordinary traveler, he slept in the homes and mosques of Sammaniya members. He preached piety, resistance, and redemption. He reached out to the disenfranchised, the desperate, and the mystical. He crafted alliances with tribal leaders, Sufi cults, and slavers.
Kordofan seemed the most susceptible area for evangelism. Gordon’s campaign against the slavers of the southwest threatened the future of two rival Muslim groups: the itinerant Jaalayin traders and the nomadic Baggara Arabs. In early 1880, while the Sudan swung leaderless after Gordon’s resignation, Mohammed Ahmed headed for its capital, El Obeid, the key station between the source of slaves on the Gazelle River and the start of the Forty Days’ Road at El Fasher.
“After midnight we heard recitation of a new dikr from the outskirts of town,” recorded his convert Yusuf Mikhail. “In the middle of the night, he would start with his disciples and circle around the town until dawn, when it would be time for morning prayers.” Mohammed Ahmed was intensely charismatic. When he prayed, he would go into a trance, collapse unconscious, or burst into a fierce sermon of redemption that stopped the faithful in the midst of their devotions. The people flocked to him, swearing allegiance to Allah, the Prophet, and Mohammed Ahmed, the renunciation of sin and material pleasure, the pursuit of eternal life through faith and jihad. “He was, so to speak, watering parched soil,” Yusuf Mikhail remembered of these early, glorious days. By 1880, Mohammed Ahmed commanded twenty thousand followers, more numerous and more committed than the entire Egyptian army in the Sudan.7
Aba Island became the center of a new cult. The third and smallest Sammaniya faction joined him; taking his fourth wife, Mohammed Ahmed again married the daughter of its leader. Delegations of Baggara Arabs came from Kordofan to swear loyalty and place their weapons at his disposal. Aided by the Egyptian postal service, a torrent of letters flooded out from Aba Island, spreading the word and steering his coalition. When government steamers stopped at Aba Island to reload with wood, the captain, crew, and passengers all knelt on the deck and prayed toward his cave. The fortunate disembarked for a cup of sweet milk and a blessing from the famous cave-dwelling sheikh. By late 1880, he was ready. The fasts, prayer vigils, meditations, and mortifications coalesced to mobilize a massive popular discontent. Sufi-style, the initiates were ready for induction into the great secret.
“Lights, good omens, prophetic secrets and instructions, divine revelations, all have appeared to me repeatedly,” he told his disciples. “I wrote to you earlier, before I received the supreme command, which has now happened. Happy are those who responded quickly and joined us with their families, sons and possessions. Those who ignore this command are outcasts, whom Allah and his Prophet will judge.”
“This affair is secret, a secret which is not meant to be revealed. It must be kept secret, for your eyes only, until Allah himself reveals it.”8
KHEDIVE ISMAIL had never liked his eldest son. Tawfik was a pampered, puppy-faced boy with a wispy mustache. An accident of Ismail’s scramble through the harem, he spoke no European languages and received little formal education. When they met at one of Ismail’s formal parties, they stood next to each other embarrassed and silent. It appeared that Ismail intended to rule forever.
Tawfik was a devout Muslim, a frugal administrator, and a uxurious husband. Inheriting the catastrophe that was modern Egypt, he did nothing to improve the country. Like his attributes, his failings derived from his fear of change. Isolated, inexperienced, and unsure that when he fell asleep, he would still be khedive when he awoke, he foundered. On the way up, Tawfik had promised everything to everybody. The native army colonels expected promotion. Sharif Pasha and the reformist nobility expected a constitution. Afghani and the rebels of Young Egypt expected even more. Tawfik delivered nothing. The “Dual Control” of Britain and France had installed him against the wishes of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and he stayed in the shadow of his European patrons.
The “Dual Control” wanted stability and debt repayment. To satisfy them, Tawfik ignored the Chamber of Notables, rejected the writing of a constitution, and fell back on the narrow but powerful support of the old Turkish aristocracy. To deal with the people, he clung to the paternal despotism of Ismail’s old adviser Mustapha Riaz Pasha, who clamped down on any opposition, and any criticism of the Europeans. Combing back issues of newspapers and journals for incriminating statements, Riaz Pasha closed down Young Egypt and imprisoned editors who objected. Most of Afghani’s circle went into exile. A foreign passport was no protection: when the French journalist Jules Barbier attacked the closure of Young Egypt in Reform, Riaz closed him down, too. The Freemasons avoided the purge by assuring Tawfik that their speculations did not include politics. To demonstrate their loyalty, they ejected Afghani from the Star of the East lodge.
Afghani had overplayed his hand. One night in Cairo’s Hassan mosque, he had harang
ued a huge crowd of four thousand, explaining that Tawfik was a pawn of foreign interests, that British annexation of Egypt was only a matter of time, and that the only solution was “revolution to save the independence of Egypt.” In Egypt, he had announced his conversion to republican democracy. He and his sidekick Mohammed Abdu moved to the top of Riaz Pasha’s list. In late August 1879, the secret police raided Afghani’s house. The director of publications—the government’s chief censor—announced the discovery of documents proving that Afghani had set up a secret society of “young thugs” with the aim of causing “the ruin of religion and rule.” At the same time, Afghani’s erstwhile allies in the Masonic lodges alleged that he had publicly denied the existence of a higher being. The police hustled the Sage of the East to Suez, and put him on a boat to Jeddah.9
Separating mentor and protégé, Riaz Pasha sentenced Mohammed Abdu to internal exile at the village of his birth. Abdu attempted to escape to Alexandria, but was detected. For a year, the promising scholar scuttled around the Delta as a vagabond, dodging the secret police. When Riaz Pasha permitted Abdu to return to Cairo, he completed the neutralization of Afghani’s dangerous legacy. Riaz appointed Abdu the editor of the government Gazette, and Abdu employed the remnant of his journalist friends. All had been chastened by Riaz’s crackdown. The revolution, it seemed, had been canceled.
With the repression of the intellectuals, opposition devolved to two groups: mildly reformist Turkish aristocrats led by Sharif Pasha, and the native army colonels. The aristocrats had served in Ismail’s nationalist government, but now Riaz Pasha sidelined them in favor of tight collaboration with the British and French. In November 1879, they responded with a reform program: the exclusion of Europeans from the government, the nationalization of Ismail’s private lands—at the time mortgaged to the European banks—and the reduction of Egypt’s debt repayment schedule. To avoid Riaz Pasha’s wrath, they retreated to Helwan, a rundown spa village near Cairo. Though they claimed to speak in the name of al-Hizb al-Watani, the National Party, their manifesto was in French, not Arabic; one elite group spoke to another. Their hideout gave them a name more appropriate to their narrow interests, the “Helwan Society.” Riaz Pasha barely bothered with them. He had already silenced the journalists, expelled Afghani, and emasculated Abdu. His police state would not be ruffled by a few bored aristocrats. He miscalculated. Through the deputy minister for war, Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, the Helwan Society made contact with the native army officers.
Ahmed Urabi and his friends did not have the luxury of biding their time at a spa. The army, their only hope of preferment in a society run on ethnic discrimination, was disappearing before their eyes. In 1875, at the height of Ismail’s Abyssinian ambition, the army had numbered 90,000. By Tawfik’s accession, it had halved to 45,000. Now Riaz Pasha’s economy drives shredded it to 18,000. To sack almost an entire army was to create a militia in waiting. Worse, Tawfik’s new war minister, Osman Rifki Pasha, persecuted the remaining native soldiers. Regarding the fellahin as cannon fodder, he passed a law limiting military service to four years, effectively denying them the possibility of promotion. He fired most of the Egyptian officers and restored the officer corps to the Turkish elite. He hired out fellahin soldiers as forced laborers on Tawfik’s estates. Even his installation at the War Ministry reeked of corruption and favoritism. Rifki Pasha had commanded Ismail’s Abyssinian fiasco. William Dye, an American mercenary who had served under him, thought that Rifki Pasha’s incompetence merited not promotion, but a firing squad.10
Urabi had not been promoted in nineteen years. He and the other native colonels had petitioned Tawfik, protesting against discrimination and the use of their men as forced laborers. Their complaints went unanswered. Salaries and pensions went unpaid, and families unfed. At a barracks banquet in early 1881, he heard that Osman Rifki Pasha intended to purge the Egyptian colonels. With Ali Fehmi, colonel of the palace guard, and Abd el-Al, colonel of the Sudanese regiment, Urabi drew up a second petition. They took it to Riaz Pasha.
“Your petition is a hanging matter,” said Riaz. “What is it you want, to change the ministry? And what would you put in its place?”11
Tawfik and his ministers took the petition as a direct challenge to Turkish authority. On February 1, 1881, Osman Rifki Pasha summoned the colonels to the War Ministry. Rifki Pasha claimed that he wanted their assistance in planning the parades for the upcoming wedding of Tawfik’s daughter.
“We were on our guard,” wrote Urabi, “and made the preparations necessary for our rescue.”12
Instead of planning Princess Jamila’s wedding party, Osman Rifki had prepared a court-martial. As the three colonels entered the ministry, Circassian officers disarmed them, abused them, and marched them into a temporary courtroom. Rifki’s generals sacked all three for sedition. Just as these commands were issued, the court’s deliberations were interrupted by the sound of marching. Junior Egyptian officers loyal to Urabi and the colonels had led their troops into the streets. From his balcony, Tawfik watched in disbelief as a battalion appeared on the parade ground outside Abdin Palace. Two more battalions surrounded the War Ministry. The soldiers stormed the ministry and freed the colonels. Osman Rifki Pasha climbed out of a window and ran away. Drums beating, the troops carried their colonels back to their barracks in triumph.
Modern Egypt had been built on the army. Tawfik’s British and French handlers advised that if he could not fight the native colonels, he must compromise. Promising to reform the army, he reinstated the colonels and sacked Osman Rifki Pasha. The Helwan Society’s Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi became the new war minister. Without firing a shot, the reformers had taken over the army and the War Ministry.
The riot at the court-martial turned Urabi from obscure officer to nationalist icon. While Sharif Pasha and the Turkish aristocrats of Helwan saw him as a blunt instrument with which to menace Tawfik, the villagers of the Delta looked to him as their savior. Alone among the oppressed Egyptians, Urabi had resisted the tax-hungry Turks and won. They called him El Wahid: The Only One.
FOR A WEEK Mohammed Ahmed had refused all food and drink. His disciples waited as he emerged from his cave in the riverbank.
“I am empty,” he told his disciples. “I am powerless. But I have received an order from Allah through his Prophet. I am al-Mahdi al-Muntazar.”13
Al-Mahdi al-Muntazar: The Expected Guide. The Prophet had not mentioned a messiah in the Koran: His was the final revelation. But the messianic idea was central to Judaism and Christianity, and it soon appeared in Islam, too. In religious societies where religion doubled as politics, messianism was the politics of despair. The Abrahamic faiths all agreed that God acted through history. Religious authority gave divine sanction to the social divisions and customs of a society. When that society collapsed, the disintegration of the familiar world became a harbinger of the end of history itself: A local catastrophe indicated a total apocalypse. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had all produced would-be messiahs. They rose at times of crisis, when established custom and authority collapsed, unable to respond creatively to rival values and armies. Their careers tended to be brief and fiery, ending not in redemption, but in miniature apocalypse.
Islamic messiahs fared no better than their Christian and Jewish counterparts. One after the other, they sprang to failure whenever a dynasty wavered, a society crumbled, or a hostile horde invaded. An elaborate Mahdist literature grew up in the hadith, the collected sayings attributed to the Prophet. The Mahdi would be a descendant of the Prophet. He would have the same name as the Prophet, and his father would be called Abdullah, like the Prophet’s. He would be tall, balding, and have a brown, Arab complexion, an aquiline nose, and a gap between his front teeth. He would appear at the end of a century when Islam had fallen into corruption and weakness. He would restore Islam just as the Prophet had spread it, by military conquest of the enemies of Allah. He would fill the earth with justice and equity where it had been overrun with oppression and tyranny, and would r
educe the rate of taxation to the 2.5 percent recommended by the Prophet. He did not have much time in which to conquer the world, as he would rule for only seven years.14
The Christian year 1881 was the Islamic year 1298. The thirteenth Islamic century was drawing to a close, and with disaster on every front. From Africa to India, Muslim societies failed to adapt to modern technology and communications, and seemed paralyzed before modern banking and science. Intellectuals like Afghani investigated the sources of the infidels’ strength, but alliances of religious and monarchic conservatives ensured that their conclusions remained marginal. More powerful was the call to revival, its urge for strong leadership so amenable to the millenarians’ dream of a redeemer and a war of redemption. The Wahhabis of Arabia eschewed the Mahdist idea as an impure deviation. But other revivalists, often primed by Sufi influence, were ripe for it. In Libya, the followers of Mohammed al-Senussi speculated that he was the Mahdi, and though al-Senussi denied that he was, he did not punish them for their heresy. In west Africa, the jihadi Usman dan Fodio claimed that personal visions of the Prophet had commanded him to set up a sharia state.
In Egypt and the Sudan, the influence of traders from Libya and pilgrims from West Africa fueled popular hopes. Mohammed Ahmed was not the first of the khedive’s subjects to declare himself the Mahdi. In 1865, one Ahmed the Good had challenged Khedive Ismail’s hold on the Upper Nile. Ahmed called for the overthrow of the Turks and their allies from al-Azhar, and the redistribution of property. When his followers drove off Ismail’s tax collectors with stones, the troops went in. They destroyed whole villages, shooting every man, woman, child, and animal, burning every building. Like the Romans in Judea, they sowed the land with salt to render it barren.
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