Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Gordon miscalculated hugely. His fellow passengers Colonel Stewart and General Graham did their best to dissuade him. The Mahdi did not need to attack Khartoum. Its populace had only three months’ supplies, and would soon be starving. Nor was it obvious that a British government, faced with a revolt on two fronts, would send troops to Khartoum instead of the Red Sea ports. A man of faith, Gordon ignored their advice.

  His third assumption was that the Mahdi was a mere bandit. Gordon decided that he would go to the Mahdi, and treat him to a dose of charisma and a bribe of ten thousand pounds. Then Gordon and the Mahdi would divide Sudan between them as Egyptian governors, with Gordon governing the Nile Valley from Khartoum, and the Mahdi as governor of Kordofan. After that, Gordon could build up an army of Sudanese troops, sack their corrupt Egyptian officers, read out the firman announcing the withdrawal, and hand over control to Zubair Pasha.

  Hardly believing his ears, General Graham repeated Gordon’s own words from the Gazette interview. Even without Zubair’s help, such a strategy would create “deluge, anarchy and slavery.” Ignoring Graham, Gordon announced that when he had completed his Sudanese mission, he would proceed to the Congo, to force Britain and Belgium into an antislavery alliance.56

  “Rather wild,” Baring admitted to Granville.57

  “As you aware, General Gordon is rather hasty,” wrote Stewart, exasperated. “I shall be glad we are actually in Khartoum and face to face with the situation.”58

  On the last day of January, Gordon and Stewart left the river for the desert. From the village of Korosko, they would bypass the Second, Third, Fourth Cataracts and the great loop of the Nile, taking a 260-mile desert track to Abu Hamed. General Graham walked them out of Korosko, then said good-bye. Climbing a black volcanic hill, he watched Gordon, Stewart, and their Arab guides in his telescope until they shrank into dust specks. Then they disappeared.

  AS GORDON CROSSED the desert, his advice diverged from the policies of both British and Egyptian governments. On February 8, he informed Baring that Egypt should keep all the Sudan and rule it with Egyptian officers. He reasoned that as the khedive’s authority derived from the caliph at Constantinople, his religious “prestige” might buttress Egypt against the “violent and protracted commotion” that would follow the evacuation of Khartoum. The revised British policy should be “evacuation, but not abandonment,” and Zubair Pasha was “the only man who is fit for Governor-General of the Sudan if we wish it to be quiet.” The next day, Gordon requested that Baring publish all his cables to Cairo. This decision would inflame public opinion in Britain more than it would help the British government. It turned Gordon’s mission into a public drama. Not for the first time, he sought to use his admirers in the press to pressure the government.59

  While these instructions were on their way to Cairo, Gordon attempted to make his recommendations a fait accompli. He offered the sultanate of Kordofan to the Mahdi. Gordon had been forbidden to meet the Mahdi; Baring feared he would be abducted. Regardless, Gordon wrote to the Mahdi at El Obeid and requested a meeting.

  “Know, respected sir, that I would like to be in your presence on terms of the utmost affection and cordiality,” Gordon wrote. “My intentions are nothing but good.”60

  No less respectfully, he wrapped the letter in silk, and sent it off with a parcel containing a scarlet cloak and a fez, the adornments of a Turkish governor. Giving the Mahdi the detested costume of the Turkiyya showed how little Gordon understood his rival. Sudan was vast, but to Gordon it was big enough only for one prophet. The Mahdi had to be a fraud. Gordon’s offer of Kordofan derived from the same miscalculation. Egyptian rule was collapsing all over the Sudan. Why should the Mahdi settle for Kordofan?

  Next, Gordon reversed his strategy entirely. At Berber, an insomniac Gordon woke Stewart at 0530. Having “pondered all night,” Gordon announced that it was time to open “the Pandora Box,” and proclaim “the divorce of the Sudan from Egypt.” Before Stewart could stop him, Gordon revealed his secret, second firman to the local Egyptian authority, Hussein Pasha Khalifa, whom Stewart suspected as a Mahdist agent. The following day, Gordon declared Berber’s independence from Egypt and appointed himself its first governor-general. Naturally the first question on the lips of his new subjects was whether the Egyptian government’s antislavery ordinances still applied.

  “No,” he replied, proclaiming, “whoever has slaves shall have the full right to their services, and full control over them.”61

  Already beyond effective communication with Cairo, Gordon had exceeded every aspect of his orders. Making policy as he went along, he dragged the British Empire up the Nile in his wake.

  At 0930 on Sunday, February 18, 1884, the steamer Tawfikieh, having survived Mahdist ambush at the Sixth Cataract, docked at the landing stage of the governor-general’s palace at Khartoum. As the Egyptian officials waited in their dress uniforms, a crowd of frightened, grateful citizens gathered. When Gordon disembarked in his gold-fringed uniform, hundreds pressed forward to kiss his hands and feet. The firman restoring him as governor-general was read out, and he gave a short speech.

  “I have come here alone, without troops,” he told them. “And we must ask Allah to look after the Sudan, if no one else can.”62

  Then he ordered the building of a huge bonfire in the market square, piled with Turkish whips, stocks, and tax records. Stewart rustled up a celebratory banquet of turkey and Bass’s Pale Ale from the stores, but Gordon spent that night at his desk planning his campaign. While cultivating a “mission of peace” among the local tribes, he would begin evacuating from Khartoum its fifteen thousand Europeans and Egyptians, described by Stewart as “the white element and the whitey-brown.” Barring interference from the Ansar, he calculated that he could evacuate them all before the level of the Nile dropped in October. In the meantime, he identified at least a third of the population as Mahdist sympathizers.63

  “I am watching these things closely, and you should not think I am ignorant of what is going on,” Gordon informed the townspeople. “The troops of the British government are now on their way, and in a few days will be at Khartoum.”64

  This was a lie, and it bound Gordon to the people of Khartoum. “Pray do not consider me in any way to advocate the retention of the Sudan,” he told Baring. “I am quite averse to it, but you must see that you could not recall me, nor could I possibly obey, until the Cairo employees get out from all the places. How could I look the world in the face if I abandoned them and fled?”65

  Yet even if evacuation succeeded, it could not help Egypt. Gordon’s recognition of the strategically obvious compelled him to recommend action unpalatable to the British government. “When evacuation is carried out, Mahdi will come down here, and by agents will not let Egypt be quiet. Of course, my duty is evacuation and the best I can for establishing a quiet government,” he telegraphed Baring. “If Egypt is to be quiet, Mahdi must be smashed up. Mahdi is most unpopular, and with care and time could be smashed. Remember that, once Khartoum belongs to the Mahdi, the task will be far more difficult; yet you will, for the safety of Egypt, execute it.”66

  “MORE LIKE THE Arabian Nights than real life,” Lord Granville wondered. Gordon was not the least of it. The bizarre events at Khartoum seemed less urgent than another Egyptian fiasco, one overlooking the southern approaches to the Suez Canal. At dawn on February 4, as Gordon had crossed the desert, Valentine Baker’s thirty-five hundred policemen had sighted Osman Digna’s tribesmen at the wells of El-Teb, on the outskirts of Suakin.

  In mist and heavy rain, Baker ordered his gendarmes to form a square. Their fire was so heavy that the whole area had disappeared beneath a fog of gun smoke, and no orders could be heard above the cacophony. Digna waited until smoke occluded the field, and then launched his horde from all sides. They killed more than two thousand of Baker’s men, many of them as they ran back to Suakin. On hearing the news, the seven hundred surviving members of the Sinkat garrison spiked their guns and attempted to reach Suak
in on foot. The Hadendowa caught them a mile from its gates, massacring all the men and most of the women and children.67

  Now only a small party of marines held Suakin, Britain’s last foothold on the Red Sea coast. To compound the government’s problems, a platoon of journalists reported on the siege from a Royal Navy ship anchored in Suakin harbor. With the India Route under threat, Gladstone’s “forward” ministers rebelled. From the India Office, Lord Kimberley demanded that British influence in Egypt should develop “a more formal character.” From the War Office, Hartington and Wolseley pushed for sending British troops to Suakin under General Graham. Queen Victoria joined in.

  “A blow must be struck,” she urged Gladstone, “or we shall never be able to convince the Mohammedans that they have not beaten us.” She backed the patriots at the War Office. “These are wild Arabs and they would not stand against regular good troops at all. The Queen trusts Lord Wolseley’s plan will be considered and our whole position remembered. We must not let this fine and fruitful country, with its peaceful inhabitants, be left a prey to murder and rapine and utter confusion. It must be a disgrace to the British name, and the country will not stand it.”68

  “Another element of trouble in the cauldron,” sighed Gladstone. Overruled in cabinet, Gladstone suffered further humiliation when the Conservatives launched a vote of censure in the Commons. Why, asked Lord Randolph Churchill, was Osman Digna to be punished for one rebellion, and the Mahdi rewarded for another? And why, if Gordon had been dispatched to negotiate peace in western Sudan, should British troops make war in its east?69

  For five days the debate raged. The government dived for cover, and its positions lost all consistency. Gladstone had previously insisted that Gordon had no executive powers, but now he announced that Gordon had been dispatched for the “double purpose” of overseeing an evacuation and creating a system of “petty Sultans.” Lord Hartington, who had been instrumental in creating Gordon’s executive role, now denied that Britain bore any responsibility for the Sudan. He claimed that the Red Sea ports, though technically part of the Sudan, were really a distinct geographical entity; therefore, intervening at Suakin could not be a Sudanese issue. Rather, as Gladstone explained, it was “a simple service for humanity.”

  The government survived the vote, and the troops went off to Suakin. After a brutal second round at El-Teb, General Graham quickly forced Osman Digna’s tribesmen back into the hills. His unsporting use of the latest Martini-Henry carbines, and the publication of battlefield sketches showing British soldiers bayoneting wounded “Fuzzy-Wuzzies,” further discomfited Gladstone’s party.70

  Next, Gordon’s plan to engage Zubair Rahmat detonated in the press. A government allergic to “sensation” came under attack from moralists of all stripes. The Anti-Slavery Society called Gordon’s scheme “a degradation for England, and a scandal for Europe.” The Liberal M.P. William Forster, the Quaker conscience of the pacifists, denounced Gladstone for undermining Britain’s historic campaign against African slavery. “For generations we have been the champion of the slave in every part of the world, and one of our boasted historical traditions has been that we have never ceased for many years to do what we could to stop this terrible evil.” Lord Granville thought that Gordon had gone “Oriental crackers.” Only Baring supported Gordon.71

  “Public opinion here would not tolerate Zubair,” replied Granville.72

  The Liberal Newcastle Chronicle laid out the dilemma. On one side, strategic and economic necessity; on the other, conscience. “Englishmen will stand a great deal for party interest, but they will be false to all their traditions and principles if they openly recognise the appointment of an unscrupulous and tyrannical slave-driver over the Sudanese.”73

  As he had done before in moments of crisis, Gladstone fell ill. He took to his bed with “strong perspiration,” a chest infection, and a copy of Disraeli’s Sybil. When the cabinet met to debate the engagement of Zubair, he communicated with it by passing notes to Granville. In one, Gladstone suggested that the government might be able to dodge domestic criticism if it claimed that Gordon had hired Zubair in his capacity as an employee of the Egyptian government; that way, the moral aspect of the crisis was Cairo’s problem. The cabinet rejected this fever dream.

  Four days passed. Gladstone and Granville played for time. Lord Hartington, afraid to face the Commons without Gladstone’s support, played along. On March 16, the waverers in the cabinet finally sided with Gladstone. The cabinet cabled its verdict to Baring: Zubair must not be engaged.

  By then, Baring could only contact Gordon through smuggled notes.

  On March 12, as Gladstone finished Sybil in bed, four thousand Ansar had routed the Khartoum garrison’s northern outpost of Halfaya. They cut the steamer route to Berber and severed the telegraph cable connecting Gordon to the outside world. As soon as Gordon heard, he wrote to Augusta.

  “This may well be the last letter I send you, for the tribes have risen between this and Berber and will try to cut our route. They will not fight us directly, but will starve us out. What I have to do is to submit my will to His, even however bitter may be the events which happen to me.”74

  The siege of Khartoum had begun. If the Mahdi held Gordon hostage, so Gordon held Gladstone.

  8

  Armies of God

  1885

  Sheikh Mohammed Abdu.

  Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

  —Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” 18951

  ON THE DAY KHARTOUM was cut off, in a Paris attic eight feet square Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abdu read the first issue of their new journal. Taking its name from the Koran, The Indissoluble Bond called every Muslim in the world to unite against “the Root of Corruption and the Source of Foulness”: Western materialism, which subverted Islam through variegated perversions like the Anglo-Ottoman alliance, socialism, communism, nihilism, Free Trade, Darwinian evolution, international banking, and sex. Afghani wrote the editorials, Abdu wrote most of the articles, and the French government was the likeliest source of its funds. Curiously, the name of their journal doubled as the title of their latest, and supposedly secret, society.2

  Afghani planned to use Western communications technology against Western power. In the attic, bales of “journals and clippings” awaited export to “the remotest corners of the Islamic world.” Cheap steam and rail travel would spread “the spirit of insurrection.” In 1884, while the teenager Mahatma Gandhi was learning English at high school so he could follow his father into government service, Afghani prophesied, “England believes it has made a great political stroke by imposing the English language on the Hindus, Muslims, and idolaters. She has made a great mistake. Today they understand the newspapers published by their conquerors, and make themselves perfectly aware of the state of subjection to which they have been reduced.”3

  While planning the revolution, Afghani and Abdu enjoyed themselves among the materialists. When Wilfrid Blunt came to visit, he found Abdu “somewhat Europeanized.” Abdu no longer shaved his head, wore a fez instead of a turban, and spent much of his time in cafés. His mentor Afghani had publicly debated with the philosopher Ernest Renan. Responding to Renan’s scathing assessment of the gulf between Islamic tradition and modern science, and addressing skeptical Christians in French, Afghani had effectively endorsed Renan’s analysis. “In truth, the Muslim religion has tried to stifle science and stop its progress. It has thus succeeded in halting the philosophical or intellectual movement, and in turning minds from the search for scientific truth.”

  Like an Enlightenment philosophe, Afghani cited the Church’s persecution of Galileo, concluding, “Religions, by whatever names they are called, resemble each other. Religion imposes on man its faith and belief, wher
eas philosophy frees him of it totally or in part.” Afghani’s idea of freedom was not the secular paradise of the Enlightenment, but the freedom to domesticate Western methods in order to empower the Islamic world. A thoroughly modern jihadi, his true passion lay in killing the thing he loved: the modern, secular West.4

  In Paris, he had no shortage of visitors: Urabist exiles, Catholic nationalists, Irish revolutionaries, religious cranks, and Wilfrid Blunt. When Blunt visited in March 1884, he found the Sage of the East lecturing “a very curious party of strangers.” They were led by Madame Helena Blavatsky, the Russian Jewish inventor of Theosophy, a fashionable medley of Spiritualism, personality cult, and quasiscientific search for the common origin of all religion. Blavatsky saw Afghani as an authentic Persian mystic, one of those “Aryans” who seemed somehow related to the Theosophical quest. He was also the ex-master of the Star of the East lodge at Alexandria, many of whose founders had been inspired by Blavatsky when she had visited Egypt to study Sufism.

  Both shaping new ideologies to bridge East and West, and both convinced of their imminent global triumph, Blavatsky and Afghani met to discuss a third mystic. What, asked Blavatsky, did Afghani think of the Mahdi? She thought he must be “a humanitarian,” because he fought against the Ottoman and British empires, but she was troubled by his “attachment to the slave trade.”