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The Eleventh of September and the Sudanese Mahdiya in the Context of Ibn Khaldun’S Theory of Islamic History

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The Eleventh of September and the Sudanese Mahdiya in the Context of Ibn Khaldun’S Theory of Islamic History The eleventh of September and the Sudanese mahdiya in the context of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of Islamic history MALISE RUTHVEN Verily these Turks thought that theirs was the kingdom and the command was in their hands. They transgressed the command of God’s messengers and of His prophets and of him who commanded them to imitate them. They judged by other than God’s revela- tion and altered the Shari’a of our master Muhammad, Messenger of God.1 The ruling (fatwa) to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim … [People] even believe that this º situation is a curse put on them by Allah for not objecting to the oppressive and illegi- timate behaviour and measures of the ruling regime: Ignoring the divine Shari’a law, depriving people of their legitimate rights; allowing the Americans to occupy the land of the Two Holy Places …2 These two quotations bear an obvious similarity. The first is a proclamation of the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed, in 1882, raising the standard of revolt against the Egyptians, nominal subjects of the Ottoman sultan, and the British who occu- pied their country and led their armies. The same year nearly eight thousand men under Hicks Pasha, a retired Indian army officer, perished at Sheikhan; three years later General ‘Chinese’ Gordon, sent to avenge Hicks Pasha, died a hero’s death on the steps of the governor’s house at Khartoum. An engraving of the picture of Gordon surrounded by dervishes with spears, now hanging in Leeds Art Gallery, embellished many Victorian homes, imbuing the British public with a thirst for revenge. But thirteen more years passed before Kitchener finally defeated the forces of the mahdi’s successor, the khalifa, at Omdurman.3 1 Cited in P. M. Holt, The mahdist state in the Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 34. 2 The full text of the fatwa declaring jihad against Jews and Crusaders is printed in Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetnam, eds, Usama bin Laden’s al-Qaida: profile of a terrorist network (New York: Ardsley, 2001), appendix 1B, p. 103. 3 A. B. Theobald, The mahdiya: a history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1881–1899 (London: Longman, 1951) pp. 222–36. International Affairs 78, () ‒ 339 INTA79_2_07/Ruthven 339 1/3/02, 9:36 am Malise Ruthven The second quotation is from the fatwa against Jews and crusaders issued by Osama bin Laden, with four other Islamic leaders, in February 1998. The geo- graphical circumstances, of course, are different. The mahdi was objecting to the encroachments of the Egyptians, whom he refused to acknowledge as Mus- lims, referring to them only as ‘Turks’. Under the Khedive Ism’ail, a nominal subject of the Ottoman sultan, Egypt had endeavoured to extend its rule into the Upper Nile region. As a political–religious movement the mahdiya, drawing on eschatological or messianic themes that are latent in all three Abrahamic religi- ous traditions (they are also present in Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism), was built around the resistance of the Baqqara, cattle nomads of Arab origin who objected to Egyptian encroachments. Bin Laden and his colleagues were objecting to the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the ‘Two Sanctuaries’ (Mecca and Medina) and to the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. Despite these obvious differences, the resemblance between the two statements is clear: Foreigners are occupying the lands of Islam; nominally Muslim rulers who collaborate with them are not governing in accordance with the laws ‘sent down by God’.4 The atrocities committed on 11 September 2001 will go down in history as the worst act of terrorism or mass murder committed on American soil. The images of people jumping from those Twin Towers will remain ingrained in public consciousness for decades, just like that image of General Gordon. The scale and awesomeness of this atrocity are not measurable solely by the number of victims—in this case, approaching three thousand—for the calculus of death is never by itself a measure of an atrocity’s political gravity or cultural resonance. ‘The global scope of the media meant that the “deed” of 11 September had the largest-ever audience for a deliberate act of war.’5 In a world viewed mainly through the skewed and uneven lens of the media, out of sight is out of mind. Some ten thousand people were killed after the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982, while the world’s attention was on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which cost about seventeen thousand civilian lives. Other parallels are less obvious, but nonetheless instructive. Both the mahdi and bin Laden make caliphal or quasi-caliphal claims as messiahs or renovators (mujaddids) outside the formal channels of religious legitimation. The Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad broke with his spiritual superior, Shaikh Muhammad al- Sharif Nur al-Da’im, head of the Sammaniya branch of the Khalwatiya order, and established his own tradition. His mandate as messiah or mahdi was self- authenticated, having been conferred on him by the Prophet in a vision. Muhammad Ahmed’s claims were contested by a majority of the ‘ulama (religi- ous scholars) of his time.6 Both the leadership claims of bin Laden and the atrocities deemed to have been committed by Al-Qa’ida have been widely con- demned by ‘establishment’ or ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders, although he enjoyed 4 Cf Quran, e.g. 16: 1. 5 Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Third World War?’, Survival 43: 4, Winter 2001, p. 67. 6 Theobald The mahdiya, p. 33. 340 INTA79_2_07/Ruthven 340 1/3/02, 9:36 am The eleventh of September and the Sudanese mahdiya the support not only of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, but also of Shakih Mir Hamzeh, secretary of the Jamiat-i Ulama Pakistan, and Fazlur Rahman, amir of the Jihad movement in Bangladesh, both of whom are signatories of the fatwa quoted above.7 The attitude of the majority of religious and state authori- ties, however, is insufficient to diminish his appeal. Since the Islamist movement everywhere challenges the legitimacy of the state, religious condemnations issued by state-appointed ‘ulama carry much less weight than the appeal of the Muhammadan paradigm, the model of the Muslim Prophet as the archetypal religious–political reformer who takes on the forces of unbelief and idolatry. Islamic history provides numerous examples of bin Laden-like figures, often referred to as mujaddids (renovators), who created states on the basis of jihads declared against incumbent regimes deemed to have departed from the ‘straight path’ of Islamic rectitude. In the 1720s Fulani cattle-herders from Mali founded the West African states of Futa Jallon and Futa Toro on the basis of jihad move- ments. During the first decade of the nineteenth century the great Fulani reno- vator Shehu Usumanu Dan Fodio (1754–1817) founded an empire in what is now northern Nigeria by attacking and overthrowing the rulers of Hausaland, where Islamic practices had been grafted on to court rituals of pagan origin, using the argument that they ruled in such a way as to give proof that they were unbelievers.8 The same rationale was deployed in the formation of jihad-based states in the Caucasus (1785–1839), and Kashgar (1820–77) in Xinjang. A jihad, legitimized by designating Sufi devotional practices as ‘unbelief’, was instru- mental in establishing the Al Saud dynasty responsible for the creation of modern Saudi Arabia. In declaring the ‘Turks’ to be infidels who did not rule in accord- ance with divine commands, the Sudanese mahdi had numerous precedents to go by. The mahdist movement was only one of the many jihads launched against European or quasi-European rule during the nineteenth century. Almost invari- ably these movements had a religious underpinning in structures of religious authority moulded by the Sufi tariqas and buttressed by tribal identities. In times of peace, Sufis are quietist, giving priority to the ‘greater’ (spiritual) over the ‘lesser’ (military) jihad. However, when dar al-Islam (the Zone of Submission, i.e. the Muslim world) is perceived as being under attack by infidel forces, or forces that can be construed as infidel, the Sufi organization provides the inspir- ational and moral basis for military action. War has a spiritual dimension in the bonds of solidarity forged, of necessity, between fighting men. In tribal societies the bonds between fighters may be primarily genetic, with kinship as much as faith the basis of solidarity. Muslim leaders fully recognized this fact. In pre- modern times the Sultans recruited their armies in the peripheral regions— among the Turks of Central Asia, Nubians in the Upper Nile regions, Slavs in the Balkans, Daylamis in the mountains south of the Caspian and Berbers in the 7 Alexander and Swetnam, Usama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, p. 103. 8 Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), s.v. takfir; Malise Ruthven, Islam in the world (London and New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), p. 264. 341 INTA79_2_07/Ruthven 341 1/3/02, 9:36 am Malise Ruthven Atlas. Eventually such mercenary or slave armies proved unable to resist the superior weaponry and discipline of European armies;9 but, as the example of the original Islamic movement demonstrated, tribal solidarities could be transcended or subsumed within the larger solidarity generated by a charismatic leader who inculcated a common spiritual discipline.
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