First, an extensive quotation from the book “3 Empires on the Nile.”
In the hours after the fall of Khartoum, the Ansar [army] had massacred, mutilated, and decapitated thousands of its inhabitants. They had enslaved thousands more, and had driven many out of the city and into the desert. [Chief British official] Gordon’s mutilated remains had been thrown down a well. After the slaughter, the Mahdi’s three khalifa’s had rounded up the female survivors, brought them to his camp at Omdurman, and divided them into groups according to skin color. Penned up under the sun, many still spattered with the blood of their murdered husbands and sons, they had awaited their division among the Ansar’s leaders.
The Mahdi chose first, taking all the girls of five years of age for future service in his harem. Then his three khalifas chose their concubines, followed by the rest of the Ansar. Those women who were not enslaved were left to starve. For weeks after the fall of Khartoum, women wandered naked through Omdurman’s market, begging for food. Mothers who had given birth in the street lay dying with their babies.
The Mahdi’s emirs took the best gardens in Khartoum. Khalifa Abdul-lashi camped in the grounds of Gordon’s palace; Khalifa Sharif in the Catholic Mission; and Khalifa Ali wad Helu took the house of Albert Marquet, a murdered merchant. The Ansar moved into the houses of the poorer Copts and Egyptians. Mirrors and fine china were destroyed with axes, cloth was hacked into squares to decorate jibbas, and gold and silver were stacked in the Mahdi’s personal treasury.
Smashing up General Hick’s stables for materials, the Mahdi built two wooden houses, one for him and one for his harem. Publicly he continued to urge moderation on his followers, but in private he indulged in Turkish sensualities. The Mahdi developed a taste for Persian rugs. He dressed in fine linen shirts and an embroidered silk cap. After years of sleeping rough, he took to sleeping in a bed taken from the house of a Khartoum merchant. After the hunger, he treated himself to colossal feasts. He had always been heavy set, and the splendour and savories made him enormously fat.
He acquired so many concubines that they could no longer to crammed into their quarters and had to be accomodated in Gordon’s palace. Occasionally he ventured into Khartoum for “pleasure and debauchery” in the palace of his enemies; as in the days of his youth, the largest building in Khartoum was again a seraglio. He received his inner circle reclining on a gold-brocaded pillow; while female attendants fanned him with ostrich feathers or massaged his feet, hands and neck. When he washed, the dirty water was distributed among those fortunate enough to drink it for its magical powers; the palace eunuchs also sold small pouches of the earth on which he walked. When he presented himself to the faithful at the mosque, he changed into his old jibba, waddling through the crowd as his eunuch attendants cleared a path with whips, and women fell to kiss his footsteps. When he returned to his hut, he took off his jibba.
Outside the Mahdi’s hut, a shanty town spring up at Omdurman. In the heat of early summer, with unburied bodies still littering Khartoum and Omdurman, these ramshackle huts become a hive of disease.
Disease is what killed the Mahdi, likely typhus from a flea from one of the many rats in the area.
Several points. First, in our air conditioned homes, equipped with telephones we can use to call the police, refrigerators filled with food, and an alert and well armed military to protect us, we forget that history is filled to overflowing with scenes like this one.
People who literally fear to hurt a fly, in their ignorance, countenance scenes like this. An excellent example is our loss in Vietnam. Scenes much like this played out throughout Vietnam and Laos, and spread to Cambodia, once Pol Pot used our abandonment of the Cambodian government to seize power. There may not have been harems, but can anyone doubt that cruel men–with the literal power of life and death–did not exact “favors” from the women under their control, whether given voluntarily or not? Of course they did.
To do good in the world, you must understand how it works. You have to grasp that evil is an endemic human condition, and that much or most of the evil done is done in the name of the Good. This does not negate the utility of the word Goodness, but it means you have to look at details prior to taking any label at its stated value.
Secondly, this rough process is how Islam was spread. Like Napoleon’s a thousand or so years later, Muhammad’s armies were paid in booty. They got to keep what they “liberated”. They got to set themselves up as rulers, take whatever they wanted immediately–importantly, including as many women as they could handle–and exact special taxes from all non-Muslims and regular taxes from everyone else, like rulers everywhere for all of recorded history. Islam, quite literally, was a way of moving up in the world.
Third, the Mahdi was a saint, according to his followers. He is the namesake of the “Mahdi Army”, which faces us and the Iraqi government even today. And his behavior is here recorded. Most of us would find it repugnant. Colonialism was an evil, but there are many times and places where the British were far, far more just and humane than had been the previous rulers, or than the autocrats who followed them.
Fourth, in pondering various religions, one is struck by the models offered. In Christianity, Jesus heals the sick, says to turn the other cheek, and to love your neighbor. You have a vivid picture of an individual figure doing acts of charity. For most of us, we picture Muhammad on a horse leading military campaigns. There is no picture of him doing good deeds, smiling at small children.
Yet, Islam is not without calls to mercy, charity, and goodness. Here is a piece I found on the internet, that I found encouraging.
For the modern and Islamic worlds to integrate, we need to agree that Goodness is something which is not found within any single religion, and that all religions can and have been perverted from what one hopes were good starts. As an example, the Old Testament records accounts of the Jews putting towns “to the ban”, which meant they slaughtered every man, woman, and child.
Certainly, Christians were scarcely “Christian” in the slaughter that attended the reconquest of Jerusalem. In fact, it likely looked much like the picture we saw above with the Mahdi.
Religion, as I see it, is a template within which perception operates. As I understand it, the core of Islam is simply declaring that there is one God, and that his name is Allah. Saying this several times makes you a Muslim. In addition to this are the pilgrimage to Mecca, 5 daily prayers, charity, and adherence to Ramadan.
None of this is incompatible with Goodness, with sincerity, empathy, and goodwill. In fact, viewed properly, all of these things can work to build better human beings. It is the claim that Islam does just that that causes the faithful to be faithful.
At the same time, it seems to me that people with common sense decency can agree that slavery is wrong, and particularly sexual slavery. It is still practiced in the Middle East and Africa. It is authorized by the Koran, but it is wrong, and I think most reasonable people should be able to see that.
We often see this distinction between “radical Islam”, and “moderate Islam”. To my mind, the distinction is that between trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, and commiting acts of evil in the name of God. No religion has been exempt from this, but at this moment in our planet’s history it seems to me Islam is, of all the religions, most in need of self reflection on this point.
Here are the four core beliefs which to my mind would confirm moderation:
1) The affirmation that Arab nations owe their brethren who were made refugees in the war they started back in 1948 a place in their collective homes, and that Israel has the right to exist.
2) That intentionally targeting and killing non-combatants for political ends is contrary to the Islamic code of combat, international law, and common decency.
3) That Sharia law is subordinate to the laws of the nation in which they live.
4) That slavery is wrong.
Self evidently, it is quite reasonable for Americans to find cause for anxiety when Islamic leaders fail to condemn the intentional mass murder of civilians. Worse still, of course, is when lunatics like Ahmadinejad call for the destruction of entire nations, while working to develop the means to do so.
It is my sincere hope that significant members of the Islamic community do in fact take charity and decency seriously enough to begin to work to build a better world for all of us.