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THE EXPECTED ONE

While Egypt was immersed in its own power struggles, in the provinces of its empire in the Sudan a rebellion was gathering momentum. The overthrow of Ismail as khedive in 1879 at the behest of European governments had damaged Egypt’s authority there, creating a power vacuum which enabled a charismatic Muslim preacher, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah, to spread the message of revolt. In September 1882, the month when British troops took possession of Cairo, Muhammad Ahmad’s Ansar army laid siege to the Egyptian garrison at El Obeid, capital of Kordofan province, where sporadic uprisings had started the year before.

The man who would become known as the Mahdi was born in 1844 on a small island in the Nile near Dongola, a provincial capital in Nubia. The son of a boat-builder, he received a traditional education under religious sheikhs, showing an early aptitude for study. As a young man, he became a devoted adherent of a Sufi sheikh, Muhammad Sharif Nur al-Daim, the head of a celebrated mystical order named the Sammaniyya. His novitiate lasted seven years. In 1868, he was granted a preacher’s licence and moved to Aba Island on the White Nile, about 150 miles south of Khartoum, where he lived the life of an ascetic hermit, making occasional peregrinations to surrounding areas and gaining a reputation for extreme piety. He dressed simply in a white cotton shift, a jibba, which he repaired with dyed woollen patches when frayed or torn rather than replace it to signify his contempt for material possessions. He was also said to possess supernatural powers. His teaching of Islam became increasingly puritanical. He broke with his mentor, Muhammad Sharif, for permitting dancing, feasting and music at his son’s circumcision and attached himself to a rival sheikh.

Rumours were rife in many parts of the Sudan at the time that the turbulence and mayhem the country was suffering heralded the coming of a mahdi, the messianic figure said to be sent by God to prepare the world for Judgement Day. In March 1881, after experiencing a series of visions, Muhammad Ahmad disclosed to an inner circle of disciples that he was the Expected Mahdi. Among the disciples was a Baqqara tribesman, Abdallahi Muhammad, the son of a soothsayer of the Taaisha, who had set out from Kordofan in 1880 on a journey to seek the Mahdi and made his way to the Nile after hearing reports of Muhammad Ahmad’s reputation. Abdallahi was to become the most prominent of the Mahdi’s military commanders.

In June 1881, shortly after his thirty-eighth birthday, Muhammad Ahmad publicly claimed to be the Mahdi and sent letters to leading clerics all over the Sudan asking them to rally behind him and signing himself ‘Muhammad al-Mahdi’. The Sudan, he declared, needed to be purged of its corrupt Egyptian and Turkish rulers and returned to the austerities of the true faith. Anyone who did not accept his divinely appointed mission would be ‘purified by the sword’. In Khartoum, the Egyptian governor-general responded by dispatching a fully equipped military force to Aba Island to arrest the Mahdi, but his small band of fanatical followers, armed only with spears and clubs, routed it. The Mahdi’s victory was hailed as a miracle.

Rather than wait for further reprisals, the Mahdi ordered his followers to head for the Nuba mountains of southern Kordofan, citing the example of the Prophet Muhammad’s hijra from Mecca to Medina twelve hundred years before. He had visited Kordofan twice before, preaching to local tribes and making contact with local leaders disaffected with Egyptian rule. At his remote refuge at Jebel Qadir, he gathered a variety of followers – Ansar, as he called them, a name the Prophet had used. Some accepted him as the true Mahdi, the Expected One, the direct successor of the Prophet, who had come to restore justice and harmony after years of oppression. ‘We shall destroy this and create the next world,’ the Mahdi told them. Others who flocked to his banner included slave dealers, boatmen and soldiers of fortune, aggrieved by Egypt’s efforts to prohibit the slave trade, which Islam allowed. But the mainstay of his following were Baqqara cattle-nomads who had long resented the Egyptian yoke. The message the Mahdi preached to them was simple: ‘Kill the Turks and cease to pay taxes.’ The Baqqara also saw opportunities for plunder. The patched jibba was adopted as the uniform of the Ansar as a sign of equality.

Led by Abdallahi and two other khalifas, the Mahdi’s Ansar army embarked on a jihad to overthrow Egyptian rule, overrunning one Egyptian outpost after another in Kordofan and defeating a well-equipped Egyptian force sent by Khartoum. By September 1882, only the garrisons at the provincial capital at El Obeid and one other town had managed to hold out. After a frontal assault on the garrison at El Obeid failed, the Mahdi set up camp on the outskirts of the town and settled down for a siege.

An Austrian priest, Father Joseph Ohrwalder, who had been captured at a mission station in the Nuba mountains, was taken to see him there. Ohrwalder was to be held the Mahdi’s prisoner for ten years. He recalled:

His outward appearance was strangely fascinating; he was a man of strong constitution, very dark complexion, and his face wore a pleasant smile . . .

Under this smile gleamed a set of singularly white teeth, and between the two upper middle ones was a V-shaped space, which in the Sudan is considered a sign that the owner will be lucky.

His mode of conversation too had by training become exceptionally pleasant and sweet. As a messenger of God, he pretended to be in direct communication with the Deity. All orders which he gave were supposed to come to him by inspiration, and it became therefore a sin to refuse to obey them; disobedience to the Mahdi’s orders was tantamount to resistance to the will of God, and was therefore punishable by death.

The Mahdi demanded that his followers adhere to a strict and austere lifestyle. He forbade alcoholic drinks and tobacco, banned marriage festivities and dancing, and ordered women to cover their faces. Other prohibitions included ‘the clapping of hands’; ‘improper signs with the eyes’; ‘tears and lamentations at the bed of the dead’; ‘slanderous language’; and ‘the company of strange women’. A common punishment for transgression was flogging: ‘A woman with uncovered hair, even for the blink of an eye, deserves twenty-seven lashes’; ‘Smoking, chewing or sniffing tobacco – all deserve eighty lashes’. Thieves had their right hand cut off for a first offence, their left foot for a second.

In January 1883, El Obeid finally surrendered, giving the Mahdi control of Kordofan. Having initially dismissed his revolt as a minor disturbance, Khedive Tawfiq belatedly realised that unless he took decisive action to crush it, it might spread to other areas of the Sudan and threaten Egypt’s hold over the whole region. With Britain’s permission, he sent a large expeditionary army southwards, hiring a retired British officer, William Hicks, to command it; a former Indian Army colonel, Hicks had neither experience of the Sudan nor any knowledge of Arabic. Moreover, his 11,000 men, though well-equipped, suffered from low morale and poor discipline; most were unwilling conscripts. Advancing from Khartoum towards El Obeid in November 1883, they were annihilated in the forest of Shaykan in Kordofan. Fewer than 300 men escaped with their lives. A lone messenger carried the news to Khartoum.

The Mahdi’s victory at Shaykan persuaded other provinces that the time was ripe to join his rebellion. In December 1883, Darfur fell to the Mahdi; in April 1884, Bahr al-Ghazal. The revolt spread to the Beja tribes of the eastern Sudan, severing the caravan route from the Red Sea port of Suakin to Berber on the Nile. Foreign residents in Khartoum – merchants, missionaries and consuls – departed in droves down the river for Egypt to escape trouble.

In Cairo, when news of the disaster at Shaykan reached the British embassy, Sir Evelyn Baring, the consul-general and effective ruler of Egypt, concluded that it sounded the death-knell of sixty years of Egyptian rule in the Sudan. He saw no benefit in trying to hold on there and favoured a full evacuation of all Egyptian garrisons, retaining only the Red Sea port of Suakin. When Tawfiq’s Council of Ministers objected, Baring forced their resignation and installed more amenable ministers.

In London, the British government concurred with Baring but called in General Gordon, the former governor-general, regarded as an expert on the Sudan, for consultation. Gordon had already made clear his views in a recent press interview. He argued that the Mahdi had only limited support; the revolt underway, he claimed, was the result of Egyptian mismanagement since his departure. What was needed was the appointment of a new governor-general in Khartoum with the remit to relieve the garrisons there, not to evacuate them. British ministers were determined to avoid any direct military involvement in the Sudan. They also harboured misgivings about Gordon’s impulsive nature. But they believed he would be ‘useful’ if sent on a reporting mission to the Sudan. In a meeting with ministers in January 1884, Gordon was given instructions to report on the best way of withdrawing the garrisons and to provide any further assistance that might be required. He was told that under no circumstances would a relief expedition to be sent to the Sudan.

Gordon arrived in Cairo one week later. At an audience with Khedive Tawfiq, he apologised for referring to him in a press interview as ‘a little snake’ and was duly elevated to the rank of governor-general of the Sudan, a role that had the prior approval of the British government. He was furnished with a firman proclaiming the khedive’s intention of evacuating the Sudan. ‘We have decided,’ it read, ‘to restore to the families of the kings of the Sudan their former independence.’ It was left to Gordon to decide under what circumstances the firman should be made public.

Leaving Cairo on 28 January, Gordon crossed the Nubian desert by camel, reached the town of Berber and decided to issue the proclamation then and there. It was a fatal error. Gordon had expected that he would win support by announcing the end of an Egyptian regime that was widely detested. But he merely cut the ground from under his own feet. For the Nile tribes now had no reason to oppose the coming of the Mahdi and thereby expose themselves to retaliation once the Egyptians had departed.

By the time Gordon arrived in Khartoum on board a river steamer on 18 February 1884, accompanied by a lone British officer, the noose around the town was already beginning to tighten. Tribal leaders to the north decided to join the Mahdi’s campaign. Khartoum itself had been infiltrated by Ansar agents in a bid to foment rebellion among its 26,000 residents. On 12 March, Ansar forces occupied Halfaya, nine miles north of Khartoum, and cut the telegraph-line to Berber, severing Gordon’s main communications link to the outside world. In April, an emissary from the Mahdi stirred revolt in the province of Berber; in May, the provincial capital of Berber fell, leaving Khartoum isolated.

Gordon held out for nearly a year in Khartoum, sending out messengers on foot and by boat with urgent appeals to Cairo and to London for assistance. Standing on the flat roof of the governor-general’s palace, with its commanding views of the surrounding countryside, he scanned the horizon with his telescope day after day for any sign that a relief expedition was coming up the Nile to the rescue. With a garrison of 8,000 men under his command, he built defences around the city, fortified a small fleet of paddle steamers and organised raiding parties for food supplies. He was determined to remain in Khartoum rather than attempt to escape.

For month after month, no relief expedition came. In London, ministers dithered, anxious above all not to become embroiled in a war in the Sudan. Public opinion, however, eventually forced the British government to act. In September, an expeditionary army of 10,000 men – the Gordon Relief Expedition – was assembled in Cairo to make the 1,500-mile journey to Khartoum. Its orders were simply to ‘bring away General Gordon’ and avoid any further ‘offensive operations’.

By then, Gordon’s position had become far more perilous. In September, an advance force of the Mahdi’s army began to take up siege positions on the outskirts of Khartoum. The Mahdi himself arrived in October and established his headquarters close to Omdurman, on the west bank of the White Nile. He sent a letter urging Gordon to surrender before it was too late: ‘For after the beginning of the battle were you to surrender, it would be from fear, and that will not be accepted.’ Gordon retorted: ‘I am here, like iron.’

Gordon was aware that a relief expedition was heading towards him, but as it lumbered its way slowly up the Nile, fighting desert battles along the way, his frustration mounted and the messages he managed to smuggle out of Khartoum became increasingly desperate. By the end of December, the town had run out of maize supplies and its occupants were reduced to eating dogs, donkeys, monkeys and rats. Adding to the misery of starvation and dysentery was constant bombardment. Hundreds lay dead on the streets. By mid-January, the nearest British column was still a hundred miles away.

Warned by messengers that British troops were preparing to advance on Khartoum, the Mahdi ordered his army to attack. In the early hours of 26 January, under cover of darkness, thousands of Ansar warriors swarmed into the town, overrunning its defences, massacring men, women and children in an orgy of violence. Gordon died in the governor-general’s palace, fighting to the last. His head was cut off and taken to the Mahdi’s camp.

When two paddle steamers from the British expeditionary force fought their way to Khartoum on a reconnaissance mission two days later, they discovered the town had fallen and pulled out, running the gauntlet of fire once more as they headed downstream. Rather than commit itself to another war, the British government decided to cut its losses and withdraw from the Sudan altogether.

The Mahdi was left in control of virtually the whole of the Egyptian Sudan. All that remained in Egyptian hands were the port of Suakin and a handful of garrisons in Equatoria, protected by the vast swamps of the sudd. Disliking Khartoum, the Mahdi transferred his headquarters to Omdurman. He had ambitions to carry his holy war to Egypt and the Muslim world beyond. But on 22 June 1885, after a sudden and short illness, he died. His designated successor, Khalifa Abdallahi, made the announcement to a stunned congregation at the mosque in Omdurman.

The Mahdi was buried beneath the room where he died. A magnificent tomb with an eighty-foot dome was built there and became a shrine for visitors from afar. Thirteen years later, it would be demolished on the orders of a British general.