Armies of God

Title: Armies of God – Islam and the Empire on the Nile 1869 – 1899

Author: Dominic Green

Publisher: Arrow Books, 2008 (First published 2007)

ISBN: 9780099487050

Pages: 370

After Britain consolidated her colonial stranglehold on India, the trade route linking the two countries assumed strategic importance and had to be protected at any cost. The naval route around the Cape of Good Hope was sufficiently fortified by a series of ports on both coasts of Africa. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to find a stable alternate route to India led to a race between Britain and France over the control of Egypt. The digging and opening up of Suez Canal in 1869 under French supervision and management reduced the distance to India by 4000 miles. With this, Egypt became the pivot on which British imperialist designs rested in balancing its careful exclusion of other European powers from its sphere of influence and marketing of the colonial produce. As the Suez carried 70% of British steamer ships to India, their statesmen detached Egypt from the influence of Ottoman sultans and invested its puppets as Egypt’s rulers under the honorific ‘khedive’, whose scope ended up somewhere between a sultan and a vassal. Egyptian society was the most socially advanced in Africa and the people resented the British game of running the land behind the façade of an impotent khedive. The native soldiers rebelled against British power and Turkish nobility which treated them as outcastes. All these rebellions were mercilessly put down by the British. At this pitiable state of affairs in the nation’s mainstream politics, the dark forces of religion raised its ugly head. A Sufi mystic arose in Sudan, which was annexed to Egypt a few decades before, and claimed himself to be a prophet of god. His warriors fought with diabolical vigour and utmost religious fanaticism. The origins of modern jihad in the Middle East may be traced to this religious upstart. He won a few battles at first, inflicting heavy losses on the British. But a retributive force was soon assembled that decimated the jihadis in a battle between their medieval army brandishing spears and swords with a few rifles against the world’s most sophisticated military power with high-speed machine guns. This book tells the story of British interventionism in Egypt from the opening of the Suez in 1869 to the aftermath of the victory in Sudan in 1899. Dominic Green is a scholar of English literature and Jewish studies who is currently the Mandel Fellow in Comparative History at Brandeis University.

Ours is an age of science and enlightened idealism. Even though each person can’t individually live up to the lofty heights of ideal behaviour, it is an accepted moral that each should at least strive for it. Religion also has assumed the mantle of benevolent altruism as if it had been its preserve over the ages. This is plain wrong. All religions followed evil such as slavery as long as it was a socially acceptable custom in the society in which it thrived. Slavery was wiped off the face of the earth not by calls to fraternity and divine love professed by the religions. In fact, they tried to cling on to this heinous custom citing divine sanction in the holy books. The author presents the case of Egypt in 1857 when the Ottoman sultan Abdul Mejid banned slave trade under British pressure. Islamic law allowed slave hunts and trading as long as a Muslim didn’t enslave a fellow Muslim. They were allowed to wage jihad, capture infidels or Christians, enslave them and use them in further jihads to expand the dar al-Islam (land of Islam). This was so conventional and commonplace that the slave raiders used the term ghazwa to describe their campaigns as in early Islam in Arabia. The condition of the slaves was pitiable in the extreme. They were chained, whipped, and deprived of food and water. The elderly were left to die by the wayside and very young infants who couldn’t walk simply thrown aside. The male slaves were castrated by cutting off the entire genitalia at the abdomen and cauterized the wound with boiling butter. The eunuchs were a cherished commodity to guard the extensive harems of sultans. As soon as the slave trade was banned, the business interests and religious conservatives in Mecca set off a jihad against the Ottoman authorities.

The much trumpeted ‘White Man’s Burden’ consisted of civilizing the black people of the world. The British believed in ‘Three Cs’ for African enlightenment – Christianity, commerce and civilization. But the local ethos in Africa had not grown much beyond loyalty to one’s own tribe fortified with Islamic precepts. This was obviously poorly assimilated. Fraternity among Muslims naturally rose up when they faced a common Christian enemy, but in his absence, they fought each other. Shiism expects a redeemer to appear at the end of time. Called Mahdi by the adherents, the redeemer is thought to conquer the world and establish a kingdom of god on earth. Mohammed Ahmed, a mystic from Dongola claimed himself the Mahdi and established a theocratic state at Khartoum, enslaving the whole of Sudan. The author presents a clear narrative that brings out the tenuous links Sudan maintained with Egypt and remarks insightfully that in religious societies where religion doubled as politics, messianism was the politics of despair. Ansar, the Mahdi’s troops of loyal followers, sacked Khartoum and brutally decapitated its British Governor Charles Gordon. His lieutenants roamed the city and countryside in jihadi style – looting, raping, pillaging and murdering the defenseless citizens not following the conquerors’ religious sect. Captured women were congregated in the market place and the jihadi leaders took their pick. The Mahdi’s plan for women is given in the book. He wanted the women not to go outside unless ‘strictly necessary’ and not to speak in public. She could not speak to a man unless she wore a veil. When she did speak, she must whisper. If she uncovered her hair ‘even for the blink of an eye’, she received 27 lashes. If she used ‘obscenity’, she received 80. Her duty was to put her womb at the service of jihad (p.128). Judging from the reports emanating out of the regions of the Middle East where the ISIS hold sway, we have to admit that nothing has changed in the Islamic world in the last 150 years!

British response to the defeat at Khartoum was slow in coming, but well calculated. When at last the retribution came, it depended more on scoring a point over the French rival force that set out to capture and control the headwaters of the Nile. Anyone who regulated the flow of Egypt’s life force of the Nile controlled the economy of the country as well. The intervening period saw the ‘Scramble for Africa’ when the European powers openly bandied about their imperialist ambitions. Britain sat somewhat contented counting on her vast white colonies of Australia and Canada and also its eastern jewel of India. But lesser powers like Italy and Belgium were desperate to make a foothold in Africa which was abundant in natural resources and raw materials of all kinds. The book describes the vagaries of British politics during the period. Readers lose sight of the figures in a melee involving Gladstone, Lord Salisbury and Rosebury. Green presents the portrait of an ineffective, indecisive and openly incoherent administrative apparatus that ran the country. Leaders are accountable to the people in a democracy, but the wild rush behind populism extols the dangers of leaders who have other agendas and personal shopping lists. The punitive force was assembled after a gap of fifteen years. General Herbert Kitchener decimated the Dervishes of the Khalifa’s army, as the Mahdi had died in the meantime and power turned over to a caliph representing the spiritual preceptor. The fight was an uneven one. The local fighters’ captured rifles were no match for the Maxim machine guns of the British which spewed out bullets at a rate of 500 a minute. 10,000 soldiers of the Khalifa were killed in just three hours of fighting and another 16,000 were badly wounded. Not surprisingly, Kitchener unfurled the British flag over Sudan thereby opening up another chapter in the history of colonialism and exploitation by the European powers.

The book is delightfully written with a clear strain of humour and wit permeating its every page. The subtle humour makes us laugh as well as think hard at the fickleness of human character even though the person might be occupying a highly dignified seat. Prime ministers Gladstone, Salisbury, the khedives of Egypt and the military commanders are all the receiving end of Green’s sarcastic best. A lot of monochrome plates and a number of maps are included. Extensive notes are given at the end of the book. A good bibliography and a nice index add to the attraction.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star