First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam by Daniel Allen Butler

river to anyone it desired, cutting off trade or travel at will.An army advancing down the Nile could not conquer the Sudan without taking the city of Khartoum.An army seeking to defend the country could not hope to succeed without holding the city.
Although that part of the Sudan had been intermittently inhabited since the neolithic times, Khartoum and her two sister cities had a relatively short history.Prior to 1821, the region lacked any strategic or commercial value, and was essentially deserted.But with the conquest of the Sudan by Muhammed Ali came the need for a central administrative center to regulate taxation and serve as a focus for the slave trade, and so out of this necessity the city of Khartoum was born.It was established as a purely military outpost at first, not far from the ruins of the last Nubian kingdom of Alwa a few miles to the east on the Blue Nile.Khartoum grew rapidly in size and prosperity between 1825 and 1860—in 1834 it was officially made the capital of the Sudan, and in the fashion of political centers everywhere, accumulated layers of bureaucrats and administrators, who in turn attracted fortune-seekers, opportunists, hangers-on, and the associated businesses and trades that accompany them.
By 1860, the population of the city had reached close to a hundred thousand, roughly a third of the inhabitants being Egyptian civil servants, merchants, and their families, along with the garrison.Sudanese merchants and craftsmen, along with a mass of servants and slaves, made up the rest.European explorers bound for central Africa, which was still a large blank spot on the world’s maps, often made Khartoum the base for their expeditions.Khartoum was in a sense the last outpost of civilization sitting on the edge of a vast, wild emptiness.
More importantly, though, was the role that Khartoum played in the slave trade.Along with the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, Khartoum dominated the African slave trade in the middle of the 19th century: slaver caravans traveling south of the Equator generally made their way to the coast, while those north of it descended on Khartoum.Just as they had exploited every other aspect of the Sudan, the Egyptian overlords who ruled the land were quick to take advantage of this lucrative trade, despite growing roars of outrage from the European powers.The infrequent European adventurer passing through Khartoum in the mid-19th century found the greed of the Egyptian officials astonishing, akin to organized pillage, as most of the “taxes”—extorted by force in cash or kind with equal facility—went into the pockets and coffers of the Egyptian over-lords.
It was the slave trade that first brought Khartoum to the attention of the outside world.In 1807 Great Britain had abolished slavery within the British Empire, and successive governments had dedicated themselves to eradicating the vile practice throughout the rest of the world, with most of the European powers agreeing to end slavery within their own territories by the middle of the 19th century.But the abolition of slavery by the Europeans did not eliminate the practice in Africa or the Middle East, and the slave trade in the Sudan flourished.With the expansion of French and British power and influence in Africa, it was inevitable that the Sudanese slavers would come to the attention of Paris and London.The intensity of anti-slavery sentiment in Great Britain in particular would play no small part in the policies Her Majesty’s government would formulate for administering Egypt and responding to the question of what to do about the revolt in the Sudan.
One factor in the attitude of the Europeans—and especially that of the British public—toward the Mahdi and his followers that has often been overlooked or forgotten was a consequence of Islam’s doctrines and teachings regarding slavery.The Koran explicitly guarantees Moslems the right to own slaves, either as spoils of war or