Islam and the European Empires (The Past & Present Book Series) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

BEYOND BRITISH INDIA

The Northwest Frontier of India was not the only place where the British empire faced resistance in the form of religious revolt. Indeed, within the borders of their South Asian empire, there were innumerable examples of resistance to colonial authority both justified and motivated by religious rhetoric and led by religious figures.33 What is remarkable, however, is how the story of resistance on the Northwest Frontier repeated itself in multiple, geographically distant, and culturally distinct locales around the so-called periphery of Britain’s global empire. Many of these other incidents of resistance and revolt employed similar language as that seen on the Northwest Frontier of British India. As importantly, they resulted from similar circumstances and challenges which the advent of British imperialism wrought in these spaces. It was no accident that these far-flung corners of empire reacted in much the same way to the challenges they faced. Three examples are representative of the trend of revolt along the periphery of empire which closely mimicked the story of the Afghan Frontier: the Mahdist rebellion in the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s; the ‘revolutionary’ Mahdist uprising following the collapse of the Sokoto caliphate at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the revolt of Muhammad ‘Abd Allah Hasan in Somaliland in the early years of the twentieth century. By looking at each instance in turn, one can see the obvious similarities linking the outbreaks of violence both to one another and to the far-distant Northwest Frontier.

In 1884, the death of General Charles Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the forces of Muhammad Ahmad (1845–85), the self-proclaimed Mahdi of Sudan, shocked the British public (Fig. 11). Not only had a popular and highly regarded advocate of empire died, but also his death had been at the hands of ‘uncivilized’ Muslim ghazis, whose ‘crazed’ devotion to the Mahdi was regarded by the metropolitan public as fanatical.34 While the rise of the Mahdi in the Sudan in the early 1880s resulted from a complex political and social story, the British press had little time for or interest in it.35 Instead, the Sudan was depicted as a land of fundamentalism and Muhammadan bigotry, much like the Northwest Frontier of British India. The only way to properly deal with such crazed and fervent adherents of irrationality was with force; the British would have to subdue the Sudan the same way it forcefully suppressed the uprisings of the Pashtun tribesmen. Of course, the Sudan was different from the Northwest Frontier in that it was not itself a British colony, nor did it border one. Rather, it was an Ottoman-Egyptian colony and the British action against the Mahdi was in support of the Ottoman-Egyptian campaign to re-establish control of this recalcitrant backwater. While retaining its formal independence though, the paramount influence of the British cannot be underestimated.

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