Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  “He shall be cast out,” el-Ullaish decreed, “and in his place shall be named one who will watch over the law and defend it, and respect the rights of the Commander of the Faithful.” He cited the Koran, “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors;they are but friends and protectors to each other. He among you that turns to them is one of them.” 33

  As the Urabists rolled more cannon onto the ramparts, Dervish Pasha retreated to one of Tawfik’s palaces. Egypt appeared to be breaking loose from Constantinople on a nationalist wave that frothed with Islamic ire. From the harbor at Alexandria, Sir Beauchamp Seymour telegraphed to London, “Admiral wants more ships in consequence of earthwork erected opposite Invincible.”

  On June 1, Gladstone told the Commons that Urabi had “thrown off the mask.” The Egyptian national movement had revealed itself as a front for a military takeover. Conscience and the national interest demanded the restoration of “public law.” More British battleships steamed for Alexandria.34

  “Everything seems to be going on beautifully,” Blunt wrote in his diary. “Arabi acknowledged master of the situation in Egypt.”35

  “INTELLIGENCE FROM THE Sudan reports an affray between the population and the military, caused by the preaching of a ‘false prophet,’ the Times reported. “The rise of the Nile is satisfactory.”36

  While Egyptian eyes focused on the Nile Delta, the flight of a religious fanatic and his followers to the most distant corner of Kordofan barely registered in Cairo. Riaz Pasha’s economy drive had divided Sudanese affairs between the relevant ministries of the Cairo government and shrunk the army in both Egypt and the Sudan. Urabi’s agitations had secured the reversal of the army cutbacks, but the new regiments remained in the Delta, where Tawfik, Sharif Pasha, and Urabi all wanted them as leverage in the political struggle. Although the War Ministry was responsible for repressing the Mahdi’s revolt, Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi and Urabi ignored the Sudan in favor of their campaign against the khedive. As the ministries rose and fell at Cairo, policy disintegrated and funds dried up.

  As an Urabi sympathizer, Governor-General Mohammed Rauf Pasha’s first concern was to keep his position. Complacently, he had dismissed warnings from the Sammaniya leader Sheikh Nur al-Daim that the Mahdi was massing support for a revolt. Nor had Rauf Pasha sounded the alarm when the Mahdi had taken up arms against the government. His report to Cairo had downplayed the night battle at Aba Island as an “affray.” To Rauf Pasha, the Mahdi was a Mutamahdi, a false prophet. To crush him, Rauf Pasha had sent the governor of Kordofan and a thousand soldiers to Aba Island.37

  While the soldiers had marched northeast, the Mahdi and his followers had fled in the opposite direction. Finding Aba Island deserted, the soldiers had paused to burn down the entire settlement—mosque, village, and orchards—and then followed the Mahdi’s trail southwest. Spies had watched the column’s every noisy move. Traveling light, the Mahdi had easily evaded his pursuers. When the September rains had flooded the roads and riverbeds, the column had given up the chase and returned to El Obeid, leaving the Mahdi free to set up a new base in the Nuba Mountains.

  Simultaneously, Colonel Urabi had marched his troops up to Abdin Palace and pulled down Riaz Pasha’s government. For the next nine months, Rauf Pasha had ruled in a vacuum, deprived of money and orders, as the Sudanese conscripts that he had fired on Riaz Pasha’s orders flocked to the Mahdi’s camp. Most of Rauf Pasha’s officers were Egyptians sidelined in Sudan by discriminatory policies. Mutinously, they looked to the turnover of governments as an invitation to a cozier posting in the Delta. A visitor to Rauf’s office just after Urabi’s mutiny found him “despondent,” tinkering with plans as the army shattered into ethnic camps, and unable to decide which of his unreliable regiments to deploy.38

  The government’s next move misfired so badly that Rauf Pasha disclaimed any knowledge of it. The closest garrison to the Mahdi’s camp at Jebel Gadir lay at Fashoda, 150 miles to the southwest. Governor Rashid Ayman did not want to spend the rest of his career in malarial obscurity. Hoping that victory might get him out of Fashoda and into Rauf Pasha’s seat at Khartoum, Rashid Ayman set out for Jebel Gadir with four hundred troops and a mass of friendly Shilluk tribesmen. A woman from the unfriendly Kinana tribe hurried to the Mahdi’s camp and warned him of the approaching force.

  At sunrise on December 8, 1881, the Egyptians rose for their dawn prayers. The Mahdists had already finished their devotions, and waited, arrayed in a crescent, with the Mahdi’s boatmaking brother Mohammed poised at the center. Over their white jibbas they wore oddments of medieval armor, loose-ringed chain mail shirts, helmets from Abyssinia, and padded armor from Darfur. In their hands they held sticks, spears, knives, broadswords, and throwing stars. Rashid Ayman, confident in his troops’ white uniforms and Remington rifles, ordered his bleary men forward. They fired a volley at short range. The Muhajiroun held their ground, then charged into the Egyptian troops, slashing with spears and knives. They killed Rashid Ayman and cut off his head to show the Mahdi. A few soldiers ran away fast enough to escape. The rest were enslaved into the Mahdi’s army.

  The Mahdi appeared later in the day. Although nobody had seen him at the battle, he wore a bloodstained jibba. He also had a growing arsenal of government rifles. He banned his followers from using the infidels’ Remingtons. “The Prophet has repeatedly informed us that our victory is through the spear and the sword, and that we have no need for the rifle.” Yet he did not destroy his stash of modern weaponry. He centralized it in the hands of Abdullahi, his Baggara general. “After the collection, we shall see what Allah wills.”39

  THE ROUT OF Rashid Ayman fueled the legend of the Mahdi. Letters went out from Jebel Gadir, spreading the word. Sticks and spears had overcome government rifles. The Muhajiroun’s chanted prayers had turned Egyptian bullets to water. The wrath of the Mahdi caused corpses to catch fire where they lay. Like the Prophet at the Battle of Badr, the Mahdi had smashed a superior force with only 313 men. Fighters arriving too late to die in the jihad had wept in grief. The Mahdi’s name appeared on stones, eggs, and watermelon seeds. His camp overflowed with limitless food and water.

  Kordofan and Darfur hummed with expectancy, not all of it theological. Many tribes had resisted the Mahdi’s religious call, but now almost all responded to his political call. Overthrowing the Turks meant relief from taxation and control of the slave trade. The Mahdi’s core supporters had come from the tribes settled along the Nile, but now his camp swelled with Baggara nomads. Although the Nile tribes derided the Baggara as recent, ignorant converts to Islam who still worshipped rocks and trees, the Mahdi adopted the Baggara as the backbone of his army. Just as he had prophesied, the Ansar had arrived.

  The Mahdi inducted recruits divided by lifestyle and language into a martial regime designed to obliterate all difference. Sufi cultists, Egyptian deserters, riverain farmers, and desert nomads all received the patched white jibba. All received a copy of the Mahdi’s ratib, cobbled together from Sammaniya ritual and the Mahdi’s favorite quotations from the Koran. “I seek refuge in Allah. I commit myself to Allah. How good Allah is. There is no power but with Allah.” All hung their ratibs around their necks as an amulet and prayed from them five times daily, chanting and breathing themselves into hypnotic fury. All chanted “He gives life and death and is almighty” one hundred times, and “There is neither might nor power but with Allah” 101 times.40

  The Mahdi invoked the tribes’ common bonds, Islam and resentment, to forge the sword of the Prophet. He directed it toward the Turks. The “ultimate aim” was jihad, “the attainment of martyrdom” in battle. The ultimate owner of all property was the Mahdi. As the Prophet had laid down, “Those who love me love to follow the two virtues of poverty and jihad.” All dissent was banned: The Mahdi was in “a permanent state of beholding the Prophet without screens,” and his word was the word of Allah.

  Tradition was an error that had to be purged. The Mahdi had studied the fou
r legal schools that medieval Islam had built upon the Prophet’s revelation. Centralizing all authority in his person, he destroyed their texts and annulled their judgments, dissolving the traditions that made the Prophet’s vision workable. He canceled all prior legal judgments, except those concerning four financial categories: fraud, debt, the property rights of orphans, and the manumission of slaves. Laying waste to a thousand years of Islamic culture, he attempted to reconstruct the society of the Prophet, building a fanatical simulacrum of seventh-century Arabia on a Nubian hillside. He regressed to a fantasy of Prophetic inspiration, when the ideal society existed for war in the name of Allah.41

  The only law was sharia in its crudest form. A man who called his fellow Muslim “a dog, a pig, a Jew, a pimp, a dissolute, a thief, an adulterer, a fraudster, cursed, an infidel, a Christian or a homosexual” received eighty lashes and a week in prison, as did a man caught in possession of alcohol. Tobacco, the Turkish habit, was expunged from the face of the earth: A man caught smoking, chewing, or even taking snuff received eighty lashes. A man who donned the jibba but refused to pray would suffer eighty lashes, a week in prison, the confiscation of all assets, and if he was still alive after that, death. A revolt whose followers rebelled against the Turkish kourbash imposed its law through whippings, stonings, judicial mutilation, and public executions.42

  The Mahdi rewarded men with the holy task of jihad and its guarantee of heaven. He punished women for their existence. At five years of age, a girl had to be fully veiled. She could not go outside “unless strictly necessary.” She could not speak in public. She could not speak to a man unless she wore a veil. When she did speak, she must whisper. She was banned from “wailing and lamenting” at a funeral. If she uncovered her hair, “even for the blink of an eye,” she received twenty-seven lashes. If she spoke “with a loud voice” or “immodestly,” she received another twenty-seven lashes. If she used “obscenity,” she received another eighty. Her duty was to put her womb at the service of jihad. If she refused to have sex with her husband, she forfeited her property. If she disobeyed him, she was “confined in a dark house or hut,” and if she did not repent, she was left to die. The Mahdi’s order to a woman who had passed child-bearing age was “let her wage jihad with her hands and feet.”43

  Men and women had equality before the sharia in two rulings only: Adulterers were stoned to death, and everyone was expected to inform on his or her neighbor. Claiming to defend traditional society, the Mahdi subverted the family by turning its members into informants. Then he reconstituted the broken pieces on military lines. He promoted his carpenter brother Mohammed to commander of the armies. Imitating the Prophet, he named four khalifas, caliph-generals, each named for his koranic forerunner, each commanding a wing of the Mahdist league. The western Baggara followed the black flag of Abdullahi, rewarded for his long loyalty. The eastern Baggara followed the green flag of Ali wad Helu, a small, hirsute al-Azhar graduate. The riverain tribes and the Mahdi’s Ashraf relatives followed his Dongolawi son-in-law Mohammed al-Sharif.

  The fourth khalifa refused the honor. Hoping to export the revolution, the Mahdi had sent an offer across the Sahara to his Senussi namesake in Libya, Mohammed al-Mahdi. Receiving no reply, the Sudanese Mahdi wrote again, and heard nothing. The Libyan Mahdi spurned him totally. After receiving the first letter, Senussi envoys had ventured into the Sudan to examine the Sudanese Mahdi’s claims. Instead of a koranic paradise on earth, they found a bloodbath inspired by “idle yarns, fables and falsifications” and “a burning country, dying and reeking of death.”44

  BREAKING THE BAD NEWS of Rashid Ayman’s death, Rauf Pasha requested that Khedive Tawfik send reinforcements. But in December 1881, Tawfik needed all the loyal troops he could muster. Three days after Rauf asked for help, Urabi, Abdu, and Blunt launched their National Party manifesto. Tawfik was more worried by radical Islam on his doorstep than in the Sudan. When the French editor of L’Egypte called the Prophet Mohammed “a false prophet,” death threats forced him to flee the country. At al-Azhar, Mohammed Abdu’s increasingly restive allies had overthrown their prokhedive rector. Rauf did not get his reinforcements.45

  When the Sharif Pasha ministry fell in February 1882, hapless Rauf Pasha fell with it. Distrusting his new war minister, Ahmed Urabi, Tawfik turned the Sudan back into a separate government ministry. If Urabi incited a revolt of the Sudanese garrisons, the khedive would lose his empire as well as his throne. Tawfik entrusted the garrisons to Abd al-Qadir Pasha, a loyal Turk. Rauf Pasha left Khartoum in early March, but Abd al-Qadir Pasha took eleven weeks to arrive in his new post. The governorship passed to one of Gordon’s protégés, Carl Giegler, a lanky red-bearded telegraph engineer from Germany.

  Egypt was in turmoil. The throne in Khartoum was empty. The Mahdi sensed his moment. By the time Abd al-Qadir Pasha arrived in Khartoum, a thousand Ansar had moved north and surrounded El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan and the key to western Sudan.

  Giegler the amateur succeeded where Mohammed Rauf had failed. In the Jazira, the district south of Khartoum, Giegler crushed the tribes loyal to the Mahdi and stuck their leader’s head on a spike in Khartoum’s marketplace. But when Abd al-Qadir Pasha arrived, he displaced Giegler in favor of a political appointee: Brigadier Yusuf al-Shallali, a Sudanese who had fought for Gordon on the Gazelle River. In early May 1881, al-Shallali gathered 3,000 infantry, 500 cavalry, four field guns, two rocket launchers, a train of 600 camels, and a mass of porters. As they set out into the wooded foothills of the Nuba Mountains, Mahdist spies shadowed their advance, even infiltrating their ranks and stealing their horses. To rally his apprehensive troops, al-Shallali chopped off the arms and legs of four captured spies.

  On the night of May 29, 1882, ten days after Admiral Seymour steamed into Alexandria harbor, Brigadier al-Shallali camped in a wood near Jebel Gadir. His men cut down spiky acacia branches and stacked them into a rough zariba, but he was so confident that he did not bother to post sentries. As the army slept, the Ansar crept up.

  At dawn, thousands of “almost naked” warriors descended on the zariba before the Egyptians awoke. The thorn walls became a trap for their defenders, who were slashed and stabbed as they fumbled for their rifles. Still in his underclothes, Brigadier al-Shallali was hacked to death at the door of his tent. Some of the troops formed up and fought their way out of the zariba, only to disappear under a human tide. The entire expedition was slaughtered, their weapons, slaves, animals, and food looted.

  The Mahdi took a fifth of the loot and established a Beit al-Mal, a treasury for his sharia state. He now controlled all of southern Kordofan. The garrison at El Obeid subsisted on rats. Egypt was in revolution. Nothing could stop him. “My progress to Mecca is guided by the Prophet at the time ordained by Allah.”46

  That summer, a succession of comets fired the night skies. Fifty miles south of Asyut, a British expedition led by Professor Arthur Schuster took the first photograph of an Eclipse Comet. They named it “Tawfik” for the khedive. Schuster identified it and the previous summer’s comet as part of a sequence of Kreutz Sungrazers, giant fragments of a greater comet that had broken up centuries earlier, their orbits plunging into the sun.47

  AT ALEXANDRIA, the morning of June 10, 1882, dawned hot and bright. On the harbor wall, Urabi’s men returned to their fortifications. On HMS Superb, Admiral Seymour returned to his telescope and gave his batman Strackett a day’s shore leave among the seamy delights of the Orient. In the city, the British missionary H. P. Ribton decided to take his five-year-old daughter on a boat trip.

  In the Carcacol Laban—the “White Quarter” by the harbor—a Maltese trader decided to spend the day crawling the bars. To save valuable drinking time, he hired an Egyptian boy with a donkey cart to ferry him around. As the noonday sun reached its apogee, he fell into a slurred dispute with the boy outside the Café et Gazaz. A crowd gathered, the Maltese grabbed a cheese knife and stabbed the donkey boy in the stomach, and the boy fell dying to the café floor. A brawl eru
pted between natives and foreigners, and a mob of angry Egyptians forced the Europeans back into their houses. Breaking out the guns they had hoarded in expectation of disorder, the Europeans fired indiscriminately into the crowd. The Alexandria Riot had begun.48

  The Mustafezzin, or city police, were ready. Their leader, Omar Lutfi Pasha, was a Tawfik loyalist. When the Mustafezzin heard shooting, they broke out their stocks of wooden naboots, passing them from the windows of their police stations to mobs of irate Bedouin. When the Mustafezzin reached the riot, they joined in, attacking passing Europeans with knives and bayonets. Lured by a request from Omar Lutfi Pasha, the British consul Charles Cookson appeared at the scene. Rioters clubbed him to the ground, but he escaped to sanctuary in a police station. Then Lutfi Pasha appeared, having swapped his pasha’s uniform for plain clothes. He left without giving any orders. The rioters needed no guidance. A cry went up, “Kill the Christians!”

  The rioters clubbed to death a five-year-old boy outside the Austrian Post Office and a well-dressed man they found staggering along the Rue des Soeurs covered in blood. Further down the street, they shot one European in the head, stabbed another in the chest, and fractured the skull of a third, stripping him of his shoes and socks as he lay dying. Looting shops and cafés, the mob spilled along the Rue des Soeurs toward the Place Mehmet Ali, surging around the equestrian statue of the founder of modern Egypt as the air rang with gunfire and smashing glass. Beneath the metal gaze of Mehmet Ali, one policeman walked down the street holding a chandelier; another a toy horse; and a third a stack of trousers.