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

Tewfik—that any progress was made.Frank Lupton in Bahr-el-Gazal, Rudolf von Slatin in Darfur, and Romolo Gessi in Kordofan were ruthless in their pursuit and prosecution of the slavers; there was little mercy shown, most of the slavers being executed, the few exceptions being men like Zobeir Pasha or Agar Pasha, who had tremendous influence in Cairo.The most dedicated of these foreign governors was General Charles Gordon, who was first sent to the south of the Sudan, to the region known as Equatoria, then later moved to Khartoum when he became Governor-General of the Sudan.He was relentless in pursuing the slavers, and was so successful in his efforts that Khartoum, which had been falling into decay over the previous decade as the Sudanese in the region became demoralized by the depredations of the slavers and began resettling elsewhere, experienced a revival and recovered much of its lost prosperity.
But when Gordon left Khartoum in 1880 all of the excesses and abuses—as well as the slave trade—returned with his Egyptian successor.Although the slavers could no longer be as flagrant in their practices and their violations as in the past, and the Egyptian administrators in Cairo, now carefully watched by British overseers, could no longer be so blatant in their graft and corruption, it was still demoralizing to the Sudanese.It was a situation ripe for rebellion, and when the Mahdi’s forces advanced out of Kordofan, the countryside around it rose up in sympathetic revolt—not because the Mahdi promised to bring an end to the slave trade, but rather because he put the slavers on notice that he expected them to conduct their trade according to the laws of Islam.The slave traders, some who truly feared the Mahdi as a genuine holy figure of Islam, others who simply feared the size and power of his army, agreed to comply.This was a measure of protection that the people of the northern Sudan had not known for decades, and thousands of new followers flocked to his black and green banners.
At the same time, the people of Khartoum were faced with the threat of being cut off from the outside world, a prospect which held terrible import for the city’s Egyptian population and garrison.Although they were nominally Moslems, the Mahdi had already declared that because they had not already embraced his cause, renounced their worldly ways, and adhered to Islam as he taught it to be practiced, they were regarded as infidels to be put to the sword without mercy.More than thirty thousand men, women, and children were threatened with a bloody execution if Khartoum fell to the Mahdi.
Such decrees were becoming part of the Mahdi’s image and a means by which he held sway over his followers.By reminding them that he held the power of life or death over thousands, he bound those followers ever closer to him, lest they find themselves similarly proscribed in the future.To underscore his position as the Sudan’s new ruler, Muhammed Ahmed set up his administrative capital in El Obeid.From there he began issuing summonses to all the various Arab tribes who had not yet joined his revolt, had new currency minted with his own name and image on them, and set about re-ordering the Sudanese way of life.He gave instructions that all newspapers were to be banned and all books except for the Koran, compilations of hadith, sharia legal texts, and books of Islamic theology be burned.He believed that such publications were the means through which corrupting “Western” ideas were introduced into the minds of the faithful.His social and religious “reforms” consisted of a series of proclamations which systematically forbade all of the customs and practices introduced by the “Turks” and in their place established the his own teachings, leading to the usual litany of instructions concerning ritual, prayers, moderation in food and clothing, and the behavior of women.
The status of women in Islam, as interpreted by the Mahdi, was little more than