or dinosaurs
ISIS, 1885
The Mahdi uprising of 1881-1899 was a Muslim revolt that captured Sudan from the British & Egyptians, and established a vast caliphate replete with strict Sharia law. The most dramatic moment was the 1885 fall of Khartoum and the murder of dashing British national hero General Charles Gordon.[^1]
Causes: Alan Moorehead’s reflections (in the White Nile) on the environmental causes of fanaticism are fascinating in the light of the recent (and distant) history of the Middle East:
Perhaps it is the very austerity of life in these arid wastes that predisposes the people to worship. Mecca lies only a short journey away across the Red Sea, and the Prophet Mohammed himself lived and received his inspirations in just such an environment as this. An immense silence possesses the surrounding desert. The heat is so great it stifles the appetite and induces a feeling of trance-like detachment in which monotony dissolves into a natural timelessness, visions take on the appearance of reality, and asceticism can become a religious object of itself. These are ideal circumstances for fanaticism, and a religious leader can arouse his followers with a devastating effect. All at once barriers are swept aside, revolt becomes a holy duty, and it can be a shocking and uprooting thing because it makes a sharp break with the apathy that has gone before. The long silence is broken, the vision is suddenly translated into action, and detachment is replaced by a fierce and violent concentration.[^2]
Of course, there were also assorted political circumstances. Sudan was huge, desperately poor, anarchic (endless tribal warfare) and perpetually being pillaged by Arab slave traders. (Some of these slave traders commanded small private armies, and traveled from village to village destroying and enslaving). In 1881, Sudan was a part of Ottoman Egypt but, due to the complicated politics of Egypt, it was administered by mostly British governors. The locals viewed the occupiers as corrupt (Egyptians) or infidels (British), and the administration had alienated the locals with frequent (and exasperated) resort to brutality as a means of controlling the constantly warring tribes.
The uprising: The demagogue of the day was Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd Allah. Reportedly, he was a man of extraordinary charisma and magnetism who inspired fanatical reverence amongst his followers. “There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overwhelming passion in the torrent of his speech.” He was described by European prisoners as always wearing a pleasant smile and with a “mode of conversation that was exceptionally pleasant and sweet.”
Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi, a prophesised redeemer of Islam who will rule briefly before the Day of Judgement. Then, in 1881, he raised the cry for a Jihad. Like a sandstorm, the cult of the Mahdi swept across the Sudan, capturing each of the administrative regions (Darfur, Equatoria) and each of the major administrative strongholds and towns, butchering or enslaving the inhabitants and executing any Europeans who wouldn’t convert to Islam. By May 1884, the Mahdi controlled a region the size of France, Spain and Germany combined. A modified version Sharia law was imposed and trivial offenses (eg smoking, drinking) were punished with amputation or death.
[^1] With infinite stiff-upper-lip, Gordon held out through a year-long siege. The tragedy took on an added poignancy when the British rescue force arrived only two days after the city was sacked & he was murdered.
[^2] There’s more good stuff: “It would seem there is little enough to thank God for in these appalling deserts, and yet the poorest and most wretched of the inhabitants will be seen throughout the day to prostrate themselves upon the sand with a simple concentrated fervour that is hardly known in the green delta of Egypt. No village lacks its minaret even if it be nothing more than a ramshackle scaffolding of poles, and the muezzin, calling the people to prayer, at once brings to a halt all sound and mvoement on the ground below. Here very precept of the Prophet, every injunction that governs the great fasts and feasts, appear to be observed to the letter.”