|
:: كــاتب جديـــد ::
|
كل عام وأنتم بخير
الشكر للأخوان فى سعيهم لحل مشكلة الأبلود، أرجو أن تنجح هذه المحاولة وأن تستمتعوا بالجزء التجريبى، كوبى اند بست، وكل سنة وانتو بخير....
[align=left][overline]The Memoirs of BABIKR BEDRI[/overline]
Translated from the Arabic by YOSEF BEDRI and GEORGE SCOTT
with an Introduction by P. M. HOLT
"[align=center]An autobiography contains stories of many kinds, some of no account except to amuse, and others of significance as examples to be followed or shunned [/align]
BABIKR BEDRI
London
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK TORONTO I969
Preface
This book which we have translated from the original Arabic is the first of three volumes of Babikr Bedri's autobiography. Four thousand copies of each of these volumes were published in Arabic in April 19 6 i . The author began writing the book in June 1944, when he was nearly eighty-five years of age, and finished writing it in December 19 53, seven months before his death at the age of ninety-four. The manuscript, in the author's own hand, is preserved in the library of the University of Khartoum.
After the battle of Omdurman`, with which this volume closes, Babikr Bedri, like many other faithful Mahdists, deserted the city, and after four years of wandering in the Blue Nile Province settled at Rufa'a, where in February 1903 he started a vernacular primary school through the help of the governor of the province and the ma'mur of the district. From this date up to the death on 4 July i954 Babikr Bedri gave himself to the cause of educating hi's fellow countrymen and women, and during the half-century from 1903 to 1954 became the outstanding Sudanese exponent of education. His textbooks and educational directives placed him among the ranks of the eminent educationists of his time. Through his vision and perseverance he was able to change a reactionary society into a progressive nation which believed in modern education as a tool for national development. In the second volume of his autobiography Babikr Bedri states that at the outset his efforts to promote education were confronted by three strong opponents; the first the traditional religious leaders, the second the reactionary tribal chiefs, and the third -though less vehement and more reconcilable-the reserved and cautious alien rulers.
The most significant and dramatic action of all his imposing achieve-ments took place in i 906, when he opened the first girls' school in the country, to which Sir James Currie 1 referred in his departmental reports of i9o6 and 1907. In i9o6 he stated: `If it [girls' education] were desired, it would as an experiment be possible to begin at Rufa`a, where the very efficient local Kuttdb (primary school) is under an ex-tremely competent and interesting local man, who is very anxious to be allowed to try the experiment.' In I 9o7 Sir James wrote: `In the mean-while a [girls'] school on a small scale has been established at Rufa`a, thanks to the energy shown by Sheikh Babikr, the headmaster of Rufa'a vernacular school, and a Sudanese of great intelligence and energy.'
In his nineties, 1948-S', babikr Bedri made a spectacular and historic tour all~over the Sudan by train and motor-car to raise funds through public donations, so that he could put up large modern buildings to accommodate over I,7oo pupils of both sexes. The response which he received from the public as well as from the state was really gratifying and rewarding. The new buildings of his college were inaugurated in February I952, and were later dedicated to his memory as a token of gratitude from a thankful nation and an appreciative government.
From this first volume of his memoirs the reader would never guess the nature of the author's subsequent history. With his keen insight and prodigious memory he has projected himself back into the ways he thought and spoke and acted in his youth, and has set them down with devastating frankness, with little attempt at self-defence, or an old man's comment on the shortcomings of youth-even, indeed, exag-gerating these to please his sense of humour. The vocabulary and style also of the Arabic which he uses in this first volume-very different from those of his educational writings or of his account of his later life -reflect the outlook of a young man in an unsophisticated and bygone environment. This power of imaginative and tolerant sympathy showed itself during his later life in his astonishing success with children and young people.
I consider it my duty to mention with thanks the indefatigable efforts which have been exerted by my collaborator George Scott, without whose guidance and assistance this translation would not have been possible. His zeal as well as his deep interest in the Sudanese people and their welfare during his term of office, I92I-49, brought him into close contact with them and made him understand them and share with them many views.
We offer this translation as a tribute to one whom_ we loved and admired-I to my father, and he to his friend.
YOLISEF BEDRI
1 Sir James Currie was the first British Director of Education in the Condominium Government, from iyoo to i9i^.
Historical Introduction
I. THE TLIRCO-EGYPTIAN REGIME
In the summer of 18 z o Muhammad `Ali Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, sent out an army which advanced southwards from Aswan and in the course of a few months reduced to submission the tribal kingdoms lying along the banks of the Nile. Their goal' was Sinnar on the Blue Nile, where for three centuries a Muslim dynasty, the Funj, had been recognized as high kings of the local rulers from the marches of Abyssinia to the Third Cataract-although the last Funj sultans since the middle of the eighteenth century had been puppets in the hands of their hereditary chief ministers. Another Turco-Egyptian army, striking westwards from the Nile, failed to achieve its original purpose of over-throwing the sultanate of Darfur, but succeeded in occupying its out-lying eastern province, the grasslands of Kordofan. These territories-Nubia, the Jazira (i.e. the peninsula between the Blue and White Niles) and Kordofan-formed the nucleus of an empire which came to be called the Egyptian Sudan. In the reign of Khedive Isma'il (18 63-7g), the grandson of Muhammad `Ali Pasha, the territories under Egyptian rule were enormously extended to the regions of the upper White Nile and the great basin of the Bahr al-Ghazal, where traders in ivory and slaves had established themselves since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Darfur was annexed in 1874 as the outcome of a war between its sultan and al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, a northern Sudanese merchant-prince who effectively controlled much of the Bahr al-Ghazal. The ancient Ottoman port of Suakin had already, in I865, been ceded to the Khedive, thus giving Isma'il control over both ends of the route from the Nile to the Red Sea-in spite of its difficulties, a more practical means of communication with Lower Egypt than the Nile, interrupted as it was by cataracts.
By the Turco-Egyptian rulers (as one may appropriately call Muham-mad `Ali, his dynastic successors, and their officials) this heterogeneous and expanding collection of territories and tribes was given for the first time the framework of a unified and centralized administration under a succession of governors-general. They were usually Turkish-speaking Ottomans in the service of the ruler of Egypt; none, perhaps, was a native-born Egyptian, one (General Gordon) was British. Under the governor-general in the administrative hierarchy were the provincial gov,prnors (sing, mudir), and the district officers (sing. ma'mur). Although' the holders of these posts were also for the most part Turco-Egyptians they included also Sudanese, such as A},unad Bey `Awad al-Karun Abu Sinn, governor of Khartoum from i 86o to 187o. Sudanese also held bureaucratic posts, and helped to staff the religious establishment of the mosques and the administration of Islamic law as qddis (judges) and muftis (jurisconsults). In addition the nomadic tribes retained a good deal of autonomy under their traditional chiefly families (such as the Abu Sinns of the Shukriyya), although the Turco-Egyptian administra-tion nominated and deposed the chief, who held the new title of ndzir, literally `overseer'.
The Turco-Egyptian period was for many Sudanese a time of oppor-tunity. Those who profited most were the sedentaries living along the main Nile, where a narrow strip of irrigable land could support only a meagre population. For centuries people from these regions had migrated as individuals or small groups to seek their fortunes elsewhere. They provided Cairo with its Berberine servants, Tuti Island (at the junction of the Blue and White Niles) with its cultivators, Darfur with its teachers of Islam and its caravan guides. Origin-legends of more than one Sudanese dynasty speak of an ancestor coming from the Nile. The spread of Turco-Egyptian rule, above all the opening up of the south, offered new opportunities to these riverain tribesmen, and during the sixty years preceding the Mahdia, there was a great new diaspora of the northerners into the south and west.
Three groups especially played a part in this. The Ja'aliyyun, whose homeland is on the main Nile south of its confluence with the river Atbara, were born traders. The most notable of these was al-Zubayr Ra}una Mansur, already mentioned, of whom Babikr Bedri has much to say. Commercial acumen might lead to political power and administra-tive position. Khedive Isma`il appointed al-Zubayr governor of the Bahr al-Ghazal. Ilyas Umm Birayr, a Ja'ali merchant of El Obeid, was for a time governor of Kordofan, and played an important part in the politics of the province on the eve of the Mahdia. The Danaqla, natives of Dongola province, were builders and navigators of river-boats, and gradually made their way up the White Nile as the more northerly supplies of timber were depleted. It was for this reason that the Mahdi's father, a boatbuilder, settled in the vicinity of Khartoum, and his brothers moved farther upstream to Aba Island. Other Danaqla, such as Muhammad `Uthman Abu Qarja, made their way to the south and served the great traders. One riverain tribe, the Shayqiyya, enjoyed the favour of the Turco-Egyptian regime, which they served loyally as irregular cavalry. The expansion of the administration into the south and west brought the Shayqiyya into these parts. Babikr Bedri's own tribe, the Rubatab, had its homeland on the main Nile between the territories of the Ja'aliyyun and the Shayqiyya, and his memoirs chronicle the southwards drift of his own immediate kin.
Although the Turco-Egyptian period saw the beginning of the uni-fication of territories out of which, ultimately, was to emerge the modern Republic of the Sudan, and the establishment of a regular and ordered administration, there was another side to the medal. Egypt itself in the nineteenth century was undergoing under Muhammad `Ali and his successors a rapid and forced modernization intended to trans-form a highly conservative and traditional province of the Ottoman Empire into a centralized and autonomous state, with its administration, its economy, and its educational system reorganized on Western models. This process, which was not accomplished without prodigious strains and setbacks, was extended to the Egyptian Sudan, which was thus the first region in the interior of Africa to experience (although at one remove) the tensions characteristic of Western colonialism. This general incompatibility between Sudanese traditional society and the new model derived ultimately from Europe engendered a revolutionary situation that was resolved in the Mahdia.
The attempts of Muhammad `Ali and his successors Eo carry out an administrative, social, and economic reorganization in both Egypt proper and the Sudan (and from 18 3 I t0 I 84.o in Syria as well) impossibly overstrained their resources of treasure and of manpower. Competent and reliable subordinates were few, and the best were not sent to the Sudan. The standard of administration was low. There was corruption, violence, and oppression, although not all officials were heartless tyrants, nor was the administration uniformly at fault. It must be re-membered that the experience of a modern administrative organization, regularly requiring the payment of taxes, was an unwelcome innovation to the Sudanese.
We have already seen that the Turco-Egyptian r6gime provided both economic and political opportunities to the northerners of the diaspora. Under Khedive Isma'il, however, a development occurred which turned many of these into embittered opponents of the regime. Prompted partly by ambition to extend his dominions, partly by the desire to show that he shared the humanitarian concern of contemporary Europe, Isma`il sought to bring under his administration the regions of' tha.upper Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal where the ivory- and slave-traders were eroding the tribal communities. He was, only partly successful, again largely because of the lack of money and dequate manpower. He had to use officials who, in one way or another, were implicated in the slave-trade, and in any case did not share the khedive's Europeanized sensibilities. To control such men, and to further his plans, Isma'il recruited Europeans into his service, two of whom, mentioned by Babikr Bedri, were General Gordon, and the Austrian, Slatin. The expedient proved advantageous in the short term: the expatriates were generally honest, loyal to the khedive's interests, and tolerably efficient. In the long run, the consquences were disastrous. Ignorant of the languages, religions, customs, and prejudices both of their colleagues and the peoples among whom they worked, they blundered noisily in the pre-carious structure of the Egyptian Sudan like bluebottles in a spider's web.
Above all they were living symbols of the ascendancy of Christian Europe in the dominions of the khedive and his master, the Ottoman sultan-caliph. To many Egyptians, long habituated to the presence of European merchants, priests, and travellers, this new ascendancy was offensive-how much more so to the Sudanese, few of whom had so much as seen a European before the nineteenth century! But the employ-ment of the European officials was only the last indication, to tradition-ally-minded Sudanese, of the decay of Islam and Muslim society.
Islam had been penetrating the Nilotic Sudan since the Arabs con-quered Egypt in the seventh century. Its firm establishment as the religion of the peoples of the north was, however, mainly a development of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the period when Funj power was at its height. Although contacts existed between the Nilotic Sudan and the great Islamic centres of Cairo, Mecca, and Medina, the Islam of the Sudanese was for the most part locally based and hospitable to unorthodox customs and habits of thought. The agents of its propaga-tion were holy men, known as fakis, who established schools, known as khalwas, in which they taught literacy and the rudiments of Islamic law and theology. The fakis also included teachers of Sufism, that is of ascetic and liturgical practices whereby initiates could enter into states of mystical ecstasy. Most fakFs indeed combined both these functions. Their prestige was enhanced by the popular belief that they were the channels of baraka, a divine power which was hereditarily transmissible, and could also imbue such objects as the possessions and tombs of dead fakls. For this reason among others, dynasties and clans of holy men came into existence, and had lasting influence over the masses of their followers.
In the Sudan, as in the Muslim world as a whole, the Sufis belonged to groups or orders (sing. tariqa) deriving their practices from one or other eminent mystic. The most widespread of the tariqas in the Funj period was that known as the Qadiriyya. This was an ancient order, widespread throughout the Muslim world. By contrast the Majdhubiyya was a local tariqa, centred in the Majdhub clan of holy men who lived at al-D'amir, in the north of the Ja'ali territory. In'the late eighteenth century a new order, the Sammaniyya, was introduced into the Nilotic Sudan and achieved much popularity: it was to this tariqa that Muham-mad Ahmad belonged before he proclaimed himself as Mahdi. Not long before the Turco-Egyptian conquest the last of the great orders to establish itself in the Sudan, the Khatmiyya, was introduced by its founder, Muhammad `Uthman al-Mirghani. The Khatmiyya had close, if unofficial, links with the Turco-Egyptian rl;gime, and gained many adherents, although the Mirghanis aroused the jealousy of some of the older-established holy families.
Under the Turco-Egyptian regime the situation of Islam in the IVilotic Sudan changed. Side by side with the old spontaneous and fragmented structure, which had the khalwa as its characteristic institution, and the holy family as its means of securing continuity, the new rulers created an official hierarchy of `ulamd' (i.e. jurists, theologians, and cult-officials) such as existed in Egypt and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Although the new establishment was an alien innovation, Sudanese were not excluded from its ranks--and indeed Babikr Bedri mentioned several who received an orthodox training at al-Azhar, the great university-mosque in Cairo, and then returned to serve in the Sudan. An interest-ing development occurred in the principal holy family of Kordofan, that of Isma`il al-Wali (d. 18 63) the founder of a local Suf i tariqa. One of his sons, al-Sayyid al-Makki, succeeded him in the headship of the order and subsequently became a follower of the Mahdi. Another, Ahmad, studied at al-Azhar, rose to a high position in the new Islamic hierarchy, and was killed in a fight with the Mahdi's followers. Yet although, so far as recruitment was concerned, there was no hard-and-fast division between the native Islamic organization and the alien establishment, there was potential tension between the two. It is significant that among the groups stigmatized by the Mahdi were `ulamd' al-su'-the evil `ulamd', who accepted pay and position from the Turco-Egyptian government.
For it was the government itself which aroused the anxiety of the pious Sudanese Muslims. Not only had it the obvious faults which have been mentioned, but it no longer conformed to the traditional norms of an Islamic government, Granted that the sultan and khedive were Muslims, that the administration supported a hierarchy of `ulamd' and subsidized the khalwas of many fakis, that its officials participated in customary Islamic observances-yet in spite of all this it was clear that in the Egyptian Sudan, as elsewhere, Islam was threatened by the new forces of modernization which were inspired from Europe. The Sudanese attitude was in part nostalgia for the days before the Turco-Egyptian conquest, in part regret for a golden age of Islam retrojected into the days of the Prophet and the first caliphs, in part anger at the short-comings of the administration combined with a sense of their own frustrations. But personal, political, and religious resentments con-verged. The regime was zalim, oppressive, both in the literal sense, and also in the sense that to a pious Muslim only a state founded and main-tained entirely on the Shari `a, the Holy Law of Islam, could be just and righteous. In this condition of affairs, many Sudanese were awaiting the manifestation of a divinely appointed guide, the Expected Mahdi (al-Mahdi al-Muntazar), who should restore the Islamic community, not in the Sudan only but universally, and should, in the words of an ancient saying attributed to the Prophet, `fill the earth with equity and justice, even as it has been filled with tyranny and oppression'.
II. THE MAHDIA
In June I88 c, a faki named Muhammad Ahmad ibn `Abdallah, who had his khalwa on Aba Island in the White Nile, publicly announced himself to be the Expected Mahdi. This manifestation was by no means preci-pitate or unpremeditated. Muhammad Ahmad was in his late thirties, and he had long had a high reputation as an ascetic, as a rigorist in his adherence to the Shari `a, and as a miracle-worker. Like other celebrated teachers, he had attracted adherents, and he had friends as well as enemies among the leaders of the Sammaniyya order to which be belonged. In two recent visits to Kordofan he had established contact with malcontents in a province ripe for revolt. When, therefore, he sent a letter (or perhaps a telegram) to the governor-general, Muham-mad Ra'uf Pasha, announcing his mahdiship, the ground was already prepared for the revolt that broke out almost immediately.
After a skirmish in which he defeated troops sent to arrest him, the Mahdi withdrew from Aba to the remote hill of Qadir in the south of Kordofan. Secure in this natural fortress he defeated two expeditions sent against him, and received numerous adherents, especially from the nomadic Baqqara tribes, who were feeling the pressure of the Turco-Egyptian administration and saw in a holy war an opportunity to gain booty and freedom from governmental control. Meanwhile his agents (sing. `amil), who were bound to him by an oath of allegiance (boy'a), were fomenting sporadic risings in the Jazira (as described by Babikr Bedri) and in Kordofan. In the latter province, the control of the Turco-Egyptian administration rapidly crumbled, and in the late summer of 18 82 the Mahdi led his followers from Qadir to attack El Obeid. The provincial capital fell after a long siege in January 1883, giving the Mahdi both a capital for his nascent territorial dominion and a strategic centre for the expansion of his power over the western Egyptian Sudan. A last attempt by the khedivial government in Cairo to suppress the rising failed with the defeat of Hicks Pasha's expedition at Shaykan, south of El Obeid, in November 18 83. Slatin in Darfur, and the English governor of the Bahr al-Ghazal, Lupton, soon capitulated. Meanwhile, among the Bija tribes of the Red Sea Hills (who, like the Baqqara, resented the Turco-Egyptian administration), revolt was being organized by `Lithman Diqna, a man of local origin. He profited from the influence of Shaykh al-Tahir al-Tayyib al-Majdhub, whose family tariqa, the Majdhubiyya, was feeling the competition of the Khatmiyya, controlled by the Mirghanis, who were (as mentioned above) associated with the government.
The key to the Sudan was Khartoum, the capital which had grown up since the Turco-Egyptian conquest at the junction of the Blue and White Niles. In February 1 884 General Gordon, who had (as previously mentioned) served as one of Khedive Isma'il's expatriate officials, arrived as governor-general. Within a few weeks he found himself de-fending a beleaguered and isolated city. Local rebels, under such leaders as Shaykh al-`Llbayd walad Badr, were stiffened by the arrival of a force under a commander appointed by the Mahdi, Muhammad `LIthman Abu Qarja, and then in September 18 84 by the vanguard of the Mahdi's main army under `Abd al-Rahman al-Nujumi, of whom Babikr Bedri has so much to say. The Mahdi himself encamped opposite Khartoum in Octo-ber, in the midst of a vast and motley host, including not only men of the settled riverain communities, such as Babikr Bedri himself, and tribal warriors, from the Baqqara in particular, but also a body of regular troops-government soldiers of southern Sudanese origin, captured in war and now reconstituted as a unit under their old name of jihddiyya.
The fall of Khartoum and death of Gordon on 25 January i 885 virtu-ally marked the end of the revolutionary war. Within the next few ~ months the Mahdist state expended to its widest extent, including virtu-ally the whole of the northern part of the former Egyptian Sudan south of Halfa, including Darfur. The southern acquisitions of Khedive Isma`il's reign, including the Bahr al-Ghazal, were not retained, al-though the Mahdists managed to keep open river communications up the White Nile, and held a few garrison-posts, of which the chief was al-Rajjaf. The town of Suakin was never captured, but `LIthman Diqna occupied its hinterland. Khartoum was deserted, except for its gardens and dockyard, and the encampment of the Mahdist army on the opposite bank of the Nile acquired the permanence and institutions of a town. It was there, in his new capital of Omdurman, that the Mahdi died after a short illness on 2 2 June 18 8 S.
The Mahdi had regarded his movement as a recapitulation of the early days of Islam. He saw himself as the successor (khalifa) of the Prophet. Four of his companions were to have the status of the successors of the first four caliphs. In the event, three only were so appointed: `Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, his closest confidant and chief adviser, who came from the Ta'aisha tribe of the Baqqara; 'All ibn Muhammad Hilu (usually called `Ali walad I;Iil(i), a man of eminent piety; and Muhammad Sharif, the Mahdi's young cousin. On the death of the Mahdi it was clear that the headship of the state would pass to one of these three khal fas. It was assumed by `Abdallahi, who commanded the largest division of the army, the Black Flag composed of Baqqara tribesmen. Thus power passed from the family of the Mahdi (the Ashrdf as they were called), and the riverain tribes who supported them, to the Khalifa `Abdall-ahi, his half-brother Ya'qub, his Ta'aisha kinsman and their clients. The Ashraf and their supporters, the Danaqla and other riverain peoples, resented the change, for they regarded the Baqqara as uncouth barbarians. On two occasions, in 1886 and 189i, they conspired unsuccessfully against the Khalifa. Babikr Bedri mentions the second revolt of the Ashraf. In the later years of the Khalifa's reign his son, `Llthman Shaykh al-Din, began to play a part in the affairs of state, as Babikr Bedri mentions.
The first few years after the Mahdi's death saw attempts to carry the Holy War into Abyssinia and Egypt, as well as to strengthen the hold of the new state over Darfur (where there were attempts to restore the sultanate) and the southern regions. Although Mahdist forces invaded Gondar in i888, and killed the Abyssinian ruler, John IV, in battle in the following year, they made no permanent or significant territorial gains, and, a few years later, the Abyssinian monarchy revived in the person of Menelik II. The invasion of Egypt, planned before the death of the Mahdi, but not attempted until 1889, was even more disastrous. Al-Nujumi in spite of (or perhaps because of) his earlier prestige as a warrior, was mistrusted by the Khalifa, and his command of the expedi-tionary force was subordinated to that of a Ta'aishi, Yunus al-Dikaym. Babikr Bedri, who was in the army that was defeated by Anglo-Egyptian forces at Tushki, has described at length the hardships undergone by the troops of al-Nujumi. 18 89, the year of the defeat at Tushki, and of the great famine, was a turning -point in the history of the Mahdist state. The Khalifa abandoned his expansionist policy and sought safety in isolation. When Babikr Bedri returned to Omdurman in 18 9 i after a period of captivity in Egypt he found, as his narrative makes clear, a changed atmosphere. The religious enthusiasm which had brought the Mahdi to victory had ebbed, the Holy War which was to carry the revival of Islam beyond the bounds of the Sudan had failed. What re-mained was a territorial monarchy, ostentatiously Islamic but in practice no more righteous than the preceding regime. A new elite was ruling a mass of subjects, the standard of administrative morality was no higher than in the past, and traders and peasants felt no compunction in evading the tax demands of the Mahdist Government. Nevertheless, after the suppression of the revolt of the Ashraf in 189 i , it was basically a stable polity. Its overthrow came from the outside, when for reasons con-nected with the international relations of the great European powers the new Egyptian army under Kitchener was launched across the frontier. In 1896 the province of Dongola was reconquered. During the next two years, Kitchener's railway line was constructed across the desert from Halfa to Abu Hamad, and then up the Nile. The great army under Mahmud Ahmad, summoned by the Khalifa from Dar-fur, was destroyed at the battle of the Atbara in April 18 98, and in the following September at the battle of Karari north of Omdurman, the Mahdist state was over-thrown. Babikr Bedri describes its death-htruggle. The Khalifa `Abdallahi escaped, to be hunted down with his last fugitive adherents by Wingate at the battle of Umm Diwaykarat, in November 1 899.
P. M. HOLT[/align]
|
