صفحات من التاريخ…يعقوب صنوع (1838م -1912م): إعلامي يهودي مصري ناصر الثورة المهدية .. ‼

Quote: Even more, Sanu'a's writings on the Mahdi brought the Sudan into the public domain. Sanu'a discussed him possessively, claiming him as a hero not only because he fought for the Sudanese nationalist cause but also because he upheld Egyptian independence. From his perspective, in Paris, the protagonists in the struggle in the Sudan were grouped quite simply: the invading armies were British, the brave warriors were Sudanese, and the grateful cousins were Egyptians. There is little mention of the fact that there remained, in 1885, many Egyptian soldiers still fighting in the Egyptian army against the Mahdi's forces and that, in fact, the khedive saw the Sudan as an appropriate place to send the disgruntled soldiers who had supported 'Urabi.87 Instead, Sanu'a presents all confrontations between the Mahdist armies and the British generals as heroic tableaus of nationalism, from which the entire Nile Valley will emerge victorious. Most important, to an exiled nationalist shocked at a perceived complacency among his countrymen at home after the defeat of the Urabl revolt, the Sudanese tribesmen and warriors represented epic heroes. In this more classical vein, Sanu'a departed from his practice of writing in colloquial Arabic when giving voice to his Sudanese characters, as demonstrated on 27 June 1885 in an article about the doomed efforts of a British campaign in the Sudan: Summer approached, and the land set out for bitter fighting, the sun¬baked ground burning the hides, broiling the flesh, the brains rising to the top of the head, and in the far distance, the vast destination, the frightening road, the enemy hardened, the call to war a religious call, and those fighting would have exchanged their spirits without hardship, hopeful of meeting their lord and satisfied with his leaders, barricading the English from the road inch by inch, blocking the road step-by-step [marhalatan ba'd marhalatan]. The English have fought only small bands, getting from them a taste of the pain of torment, and they know what incredible strength the Mahdi possesses; they know what terrible battles will occur between them and the Mahdists, battles that baffle the mind [at-'uqul], causing it to break into bitterness, the heart crumbling. For that reason, the English have seen fit to appeal to Italy, asking her humbly to come to the rescue with soldiers from the direction of the Red Sea, in this way hoping to save themselves from the casualties that will befall them when they try to get out of the dilemma into which they have fallen.88 In an article written several months later, Sanu*a uses the Mahdi in a satiric attack on Khedive Tawfiq, in which the Sudanese leader stands with, and stands up for, the Egyptians who suffer under Tawfiq's rule. Sanu'a drew Tawfiq as puffy and useless-looking, tied to a tree and surrounded by his enemies, who by this time included just about everyone in the world. The sketch is followed by a rather long caption, in which each of Tawfiq's symbolic enemies explain why they are throwing rocks at him. The fallah stones him in the name of "the waters of the Nile that you have deprived me of, killing me and my land off with thirst, and not just for that but also for bringing the red demons here to destroy my property," "red demons" being a common Sanufa epithet for the British. The Egyptian soldier also throws a rock at him for the British occupation. The pious 'alim (religious instructor) stones him for contradicting the laws of the Prophet, for joining with the infidel British to destroy Egypt, and for betraying Islam. Then "al-Sayyid Muhammad Ahmad, hero of the Sudan" says to Tawfiq: I throw this rock at you, O enemy to the faith, first of all because of what you did to the poor fallah, and the Egyptian soldier, and the 'alim, learned in the Qur*an, and second because you handed over the treasures of your country to the greed of the British, then you made their priests rulers of Islam. Third, for your sitting on the khedivial throne, which is itself a contradiction of the Islamic sharia. You did not rightly inherit the throne.89 (See fig. 5.) These were very strong words for the time, that Sanu could afford to write only because of the luxury of distance his exile afforded him. This distance, however, also enabled him to conjure up an image of the Mahdi as protector of true Egyptian values, although it is extremely unlikely that the Mahdi would have supported any Egyptian soldier or any of the Egyptian 'ulamff who cast public doubts over his claims to the Mahdiya. In this satiric tableau, which included everyone in the contemporary political scene, from the fallah to the British politician to the British banker to Ismail, the former khedive, Sanu'a uses the Mahdi to raise the most unimpeachable doubts about the very basis of Tawfiq's rule over Egypt. In the same issue, Sanu'a celebrated, in stately classical Arabic, the miracle of someone like Muhammad Ahmad rising up and rescuing the Sudan. After a lengthy discussion of the mysteries of God's designs on earth, Sanu asks his readers, Who would have thought that al-Sayyid Ahmad Muhammad /sic/, a poor man from Dongola, would achieve the rescue of the Sudan from the clutches [hi thamamihi tnin aydi al-zhulma] of oppression, in spite of the British tyrants defeating armies and scattering populations. Who would have imagined him resisting, with his little dagger, the powerful cannon; cutting down with his knife British stallions with all their excellent weapons and their military training? Yes, this is the work of God, who supports His will with victory. God saw a violation of his will; the result is the miracle of worship. Isn't God He who created the rifts between Russia and England while the British prepared their troops, and made them come here to oppose the black leader of the blacks [qa'id al-iswid al-sud], who claimed he was not of this humble world, and who then defeated someone like Gordon, in Khartoum?90 The Mahdi's humble origins thus enable him, in Sanu'a's construction, to be even more the embodiment of a divine miracle that revolutionizes the confining social constructions resulting from British imperialism. There are 5. The khedive attacked by the Mahdi and others, depicted in Abu Nazzara Zarqa, September 1885. some echoes here of the fallah Faraj and the matchmaker Mabruka, who marveled at the behavior of Sudanese who tried to lift themselves from tra¬ditional roles. Even more important, Sanuca, unlike the more skeptical al-Afghani, accepts Muhammad Ahmad's efforts to change the Sudan spiritually. He refers to him as the Mahdi, which al-Afghani never did, and he himself cloaks all descriptions of Muhammad Ahmad in religious terms, often in classical Arabic. Like al-Afghani, however, Sanu'a elected himself the Mahdi's spokesman in Europe, particularly to the French audience to whom he increasingly directed his work after the defeat of the 'Urabi revolt. For the benefit of the Europeans, to whom the Mahdi had come to symbolize a despotic, fanatical, and wildly popular Islam, Sanu'a tried to transform the Mahdiya into a branch of the more stately and refined Islamic intellectualism of al-Afghani and Shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh. The Mahdi's very identity became fertile ground for fiction. For instance, in a statement published in French in late 1885, Sanu'a declared that he had himself met the Mahdi at the home of one of his then colleagues, from the Polytechnic School (this alleged meeting, for which there is no basis in fact, would have taken place in the early 1870s). The Mahdi was traveling around Cairo on his way to Mecca. Sanu'a found him, he wrote, "un litterateur arabe fort erudit et un remarkable theologien."91 Through this alleged personal contact, Sanu'a elected himself a spokesman for the Mahdi, manipulating the latter's voice to make it comprehensible to both Egyptians and Europeans, thus framing him within the context of religious and nationalist legitimacy, as if the roughness of the Mahdi's language made no sense without Sanu'a's translation and interpretation. Sanu(a claimed to be sorting through the Mahdi's image as a fanatic. What complicated the Mahdiya, Sanu'a explained, was not the leader's fanaticism but the fanatical feelings the Mahdi inspired in people, which resulted from the fact that, since the times of the Fatimids, the Abbasids, the Muwahids, and the Murabits, political authority had been deeply entwined with the concept of a Mahdi. The result of this, said Sanu'a, was that "there are not yet, among Muslims, free thinkers. That is what has made the Sayyid Muhammad Ahmad successful, rendered even greater by his fighting the English, hated by Islam."92 The Mahdiya was the personification of nationalism run slightly amok, among people not quite ready for the disciplined communal activity of self-government. The Sudanese thus provided an important model for their more civilized cousins, the Egyptians, of what nationalist fervor could accomplish; but they also demonstrated the dangers of untutored uprisings. Ironically, into this realm of traditional and unquestioning adherence to religious authority stepped a number of Sanu'a's old colleagues and fellow 'Urabists, many of whom, he and other sources claim, joined the Mahdiya after their defeat at Tel al-Kabir in 1883.93 In the Abu Nazzara Zarqa of 7 February 1885, Sanu'a addresses "the chiefs of the Nationalist Party," in the French section of the paper (which was by then divided into two linguistic halves: one in Arabic, the other in French), saying: Observe that I don't blame at all those among you, former soldiers and officers of 'Arabi, who have joined the Mahdi, to fight the common enemy in the ranks of his army. If you are not of the same country, then you are of the same faith. Patriotism has its despairs, and the English have the bad grace to reproach you for it, they who, in Spain, united with the fanatics of the Inquisition in order to defeat the Napoleonic invasion. But allying with fanaticism has its limits. Do not ever cross them. Do not permit that in Egypt people follow the Russian nihilists, the "Fennians" of England, and the anarchists of France. No one has ever made their cause victorious, or liberated a nation, by cowardly murder and foolish destruction. May your hearts be strong.94 Five months later, however, Sanu'a found a different apology for his colleagues fighting in the Sudan. Discussing his extreme hatred of Khedive Tawfiq, he again raises the issue in the French section of his journal, saying, "The former officers of'Arab! who, in the Sudan, have passed into the ranks of the rebellion and have given, bit by bit, a regularized organization to the Mahdist bands, have done so out of hatred for the British, with no doubt, but they have also done it, principally, out of resentment against Tawfiq's betrayal of them."95 Tawfiq's betrayal of the Egyptian nationalists to the British thus provided their excuse for defecting from Egypt to join the Mahdiya; yet the same nationalists continued to perform a civic duty by providing the "bands of the Mahdi" with some kind of organization, in a sense taming the fanaticism of the dervishes. According to Sanu'a, Egyptian soldiers rarely found a fair fight in African wars. Either they were sent by the khedive to fight people who had never waged war against them, as 'Ali Effendi mentions in the sketch about Khulkhal Aga, or they were used as cannon fodder in the front lines by their British commanders, as Sanu'a insisted was common practice.96 If Egyptians fought in the Sudan under the British, an issue that Sanu'a increasingly wrote about in the 1890s while the British parliament debated the recon-quest of Omdurman, then they were taking up arms against "brothers," a kinship that Sanu'a claimed originated in their common faith.9' Sanu(a thus openly prayed that the Sudan would prove to be a sinkhole for the British, and that Africa on the whole would be as inhospitable to their expansionism as the continent was to Khedive Ismail's similar ambitions. He mocked these efforts in a fascinating scene in Yalla Etna ila as-Sndan (Let's Go to the Sudan), in which General Kitchener, the commander of the Anglo-Egyptian forces that have conquered Berber, decides to send the captured dervishes to London to present them to Her Majesty the Queen. He orders the translator to tell them where they are going, and the translator, in a subversive scrambling of his meaning, says to the prisoners, "O joy! We're going to the land of the pretty Englishwomen who are enchanted with our love. There we can drink the expensive brandy they'll give us, out of love for us. O what luck! Where's our stuff? Let's gather it together and travel to the land of the beauties."98 How quickly the much vaunted religious zeal of the Mahdi's followers evaporates, in Sanu'a's imagination, when challenged by the world of libertine women that exist, in his imagination, in London. They seem to be echoing the prejudices of Sanu'a's other character, Banbah, with all her ideas about Sudanese licentiousness. THE MAHDT, STILL A SERVANT Although his journal continued to be read with enthusiasm in Egypt, Sanu'a's constructions of Egypt, particularly in regard to Egypt's relationship to the Sudan, grew more distanced and idealized as the years of his exile elapsed. The lively depictions of Sudanese and Nubian servants that he sketched during the 1870s from social circumstances witnessed in Cairo and Alexandria also changed with the dramatic events in the Sudan during the following decade. Whereas at first a private and domestic empire, Egypt's Sudan became the Mahdi's Sudan, ushering in a fiery and eloquent new character among the Sudanese that had previously peopled Sanu'a's literary repertoire. The Mahdi picked up the nationalist gauntlet dropped by the 'Urabi rebels, and, in Sanu'a's construction of events, used it to challenge and defeat the British. As Sanu'a's sketches show, in some ways the Mahdi became more Egyptian than the Egyptians, personifying all the traits of courage and patriotic resistance Sanu wished for his fellow Egyptians. But in other ways, the Mahdi retained aspects of the traditional roles ascribed to the Sudanese in Sanu'a's Egypt. His bravery was garnered in defense of Egypt, his martial genius mobilized against the British. Yet he remained a gate¬keeper, a guard defending the Egyptian household. Even though the Mahdi was portrayed as more admirable, virile, and eloquent, he stood as steadfastly against the door, protecting Egyptians, as had 5anu'a's earlier character, Muhammad the Nubian