THE MARDI ONCE MORE.
WE are approaching, we think, to a more accurate know- ledge of the Mahdi, Mahommed Ahmed, of El Obeid. Mr. O'Kelly, whom the Daily News sent to the Mahdi's capital, though a violent Parnellite in the House of Commons, is outside those walls a brave man, who has seen many lands, and is a very keen observer. He has been delayed, we believe, on his journey to El Obeid by some official stupidity or notion that he might assist the Mahdi against England, the authorities in Cairo not understanding that, even if their idea was correct, European counsels could only weaken an Asiatic movement ; but he has irached Dongola, has inquired on all sides, and has sent home ly far the most reasonable-looking of all accounts of the False Prophet and his position. His view is confirmed on some essential points by Mr. Stern, who writes .a dully truthful paper in the Nineteenth Century ; and to any one familiar with the history of Islam, he mIlies the policy of the Mahdi almost certain,—all the more that he is frequently unconscious of what he is saying. Whether the Mahdi is a mere impostor ; or, as the Catholic priests who have talked with him think, a man convinced of his mission ; or, as is more probable, a man in whose mind a half-belief is intensified by desire to believe,—his action is, according to these accounts, abundantly clear. He proclaims himself the expected "Messenger," who is bound to subdue the Mahomedan peoples, rejects ordinary titles of sovereignty, and strives in every way to revive the military organisation of the Arabs, through which Omar and Othman mastered. the Oriental world. He has, first of all, made himself absolute. Whether he was at one time a tool of the slave-catchers or not, may remain undecided, though it is most improbable, they being as incapable of making a Mahdi as Irish Catholics of making a Pope ; but the Mahdi, as Messenger from above, is necessarily Sovereign ; and from the moment his mission was certified, in his followers' eyes, by victory, he became an unquestioned master. He can sentence to death whom he pleases, and uses that power relentlessly ; and, what is a much greater proof of authority, can spare those whom his followers have doomed. He did so spare the Catholic priests when they said that as he must, on his own creed, be followed by Jesus as well as Mahommed, they would wait for Jesus to testify to him. He has even re- imposed the tithe demanded by the early Khalifs, and with it has restored their earliest organisation for war. With- out formally breaking the authority of the clan chiefs, he has reinstituted the regiment, with its separate flag and separate hierarchy of officers,—who may be his own nomi- nees, as they certainly are in his own force of 40,000 men ; or may be Sheiks, as they probably are when any of the eighty desert tribes who acknowledge him come up to reinforce his army. While on service, he pays to all alike, out of his tithe, and out of the share of plunder he secures for himself, three shillings a month each, which Mr. O'Kelly thinks is inadequate, but which suffices for daily maintenance, as twenty years ago it would have done in India, the soldiers not being cheated, as Mr. O'Kelly probably is, but served at a fixed price, and being fed before the civil population. Pay, no doubt, is given in addition, as in Omar 's first campaigns, in the shape of a portion of the plunder, which includes all property and is regularly taken as a right, and not as an evil accident 'of victory. Under this system, the Mahdi does not command, as the gossips some months ago alleged, an army numbering hundreds of thousands, but he draws together as many men as he wants and can feed, and when they are ex- pended refills his ranks from the tribesmen behind him, believed to number 300,000 adults, and probably greatly exceeding that number,—Mr. O'Kelly's informants having evidently reckoned the Arab clans, both pure blood and half- caste, but omitted.all mention of the negroes. This scheme, while it leaves the Mahdi unburdened with huge masses of followers to be fed and paid, allows him to resume the ancient fighting tactics of the Khalifs, which were based upon the prilaciple that as the dead who die fighting for Islam go at once to Heaven, waste of life in securing victory is good, and not bad. The men, are commanded to use only steel, the only strategy employed is intended to bring them safely within touch of the enemy, and the only tactics consist in a tremendous charge, which, as we saw at Tamanheb, shakes even Europeans pro- tected by Gatlings, and which if successful ends in a universal massacre of tha foe. The system is wasteful of life to the last degree ; but neither the Mahdi nor his followers consider that, and every victory brings in new tribes, whd furnish further recruits to fill up gaps. Moreover, victory is always complete, for the enemy is annihilated, swept, as it were, off the board ; and, with all but the very bravest enemies, such a mode of fight- ing,involving as it does not a serious risk of death, but an abso- lute certainty of death if defeat happens, exercises a paralysing effect, which, as regards the unarmed population, is irresistible. Our own troops did not like the same peculiarity in Zulu war- fare ; and to any Mussulmans, half doubtful of their assailants' claim, unresisting death must seem just as acceptable—as it did to Baker Pasha's Egyptians—as death after resistance. Why resist God's Messenger, when if you resist you die sinning, and if you do not you die submissive The men who make these charges, who, as we know, will give life gladly, if only they may break a square, and so die in service to Islam, are personally tall wiry men, able to march thirty miles a day upon a little millet—army contractors will smile, but Spanish infantry, as they know, do the same thing—familiar with the use of both sword and spear, much stronger individually than Europeans, and not so much brave as delighting in death if only they may will. They are not "drilled," in the European sense, but they are taught from childhood to obey to the death, to be careless of death for Islam, and to make this tremendous charge. We do not hesitate to say that they can be faced only by Europeans ; that the Europeans, if ever beaten by them, will become com- paratively inefficient ; and that to pit any Asiatic troops whatever against them, sepoys included, will simply lead to disaster such as on a small scale has attended every attempt to put down a Moplah rising by Indian troops. Many of our readers may doubt, but every Anglo-Indian knows quite well, that if ten or twelve Moplahs—Mussulman fanatics of the true breed—break out in Malabar and announce their intention of attaining Heaven, there is nothing for it but to wait till a company of the Black Watch or other picked British soldiers arrive, and that the Highlanders must exceed the insurgents in number. No courage, nothing but discipline and science, will enable men of any race to face equal numbers of men who leap on the bayonet-points in order that their knives may be close enough to kill.
This, however, is not all. The Mahdi has not only revived the organisation with which Kaled slaughtered out Roman armies and Saladin drove back the Crusaders, but he has re- vived in its fullest, most direct, and most radical form the second tremendous weapon of Islam, which has done more to diffuse the faith than even the Arab sword,—the doctrine that all Mussulmans are equal, and that, at all events while- Islam is in the field, this equality must be real. Mr. O'Kelly, naturally enough, being an Irishman and a modern, and a newspaper correspondent, writes about the " Socialism " taught in El Obeid ; but the Mahdi is only reproducing the teaching and ways of Omar in their most effective form. He insists on equality among his followers, and as property is the first source of inequality, forbids its possession ; and as in the East the one visible mark of inequality is the residence,he prohibits houses under pain of death, and compels all men of all classes to camp-out in straw hats built in their own gardens or on the plain. That order is obeyed, and, remarks Mr. O'Kelly, alienates the well-to-do,—which is quite possible ; but then it seems to the ill-to-do to be proof-positive that the Mahdi comes from God, to open up a Paradise of Ma- homedan brotherhood; where none shall have wealth and all shall have maintenance without bodily toil ; and the ill-to-do are to the well-to-do at least fifty to one, all accustomed to the huts, and all, or nearly all, indistinguishable from their superiors save by the distinctions which are now prohibited. Mussulmans never quite forget this doctrine, never plead birth, or rank, or fortune against each other ; but only the men of the Desert have resisted the charm of gain, and to them, from Aleppo to Zanzibar, this order will be a sovereign charm. It opens all careers to all, secures all against hunger, and removes from all that curse of contumely which the Arab will not bear. If the Mahdi can but win, ho will never lack soldiers willing to be wasted in heaps ; for will they /tot have equality in this life and release from ploughing, and in the next the houris and happiness? And, but that Europe exists, he would, after sacrificing fifty thousInd men, infallibly get to Cairo, if not to Constantinople. The true Ottomans who alone would fight him, even if they did, are too much reduced by conscriptions, misgovernment, and dislike of the burden of children, to resist a people in arms ; and the "Arabs "—in- eluding in that name the Moors, and the half-caste tribal, who,
as Mr. O'Kelly says, are equally brave—count at least four million arm-bearing males. That is, they can expend an arnay of 50,000 men eighty times.
There is no fear of such a rush, for Europe is armed with weapons before which valour, and energy, and devotion are withered up ; nor are we to-day contending for any special policy to be pursued in the Soudan. We shall only waste lives if we fight before the settled region is entered by the Arabs, unless we go to El Obeid, and there is no adequate motive for that exhausting march. Nor do we care very much to urge the construction of defensive works either at Assouan or Siout. We are not certain whether Lord Elgin was not right, and whether a democracy does not do its work better in single efforts, when its giant strength has fair play, than through " far-sighted " " plans " to which it never consistently adheres. But we want once more to point out to the people that the Ethiopian danger is a reality ; that the Soudanese will inevitably, however slowly, invade Egypt ; and that they can be driven back only by European firmness and intelligence. No native Egyptian Government whatever, be it as bad as at present, or regenerated" to the nth, will stop Mahommed Ahmed for a month when his advance has once begun. Its soldiers will fraternise, or fly, or fall. Europe has to do that work, as it had ten centuries ago, or see an Arabian Khalifate revive ; and to that and its consequences, one of which would be civil war in India such as even India never saw, our countrymen may make up their minds. They may do the work themselves, or leave it to other European Powers, as they please ; but done it will have to be, and done by civilised men. We rather regret it in some ways, for an Arab conquest might pre- pare Africa for civilisation ; but we English are, by the will of God, responsible for a fifth of the human race,—and their inevitable fate, if the Mussulmans of South India accept the Mahdi, and Islam and Hindooism once more try conclusions against each other with the sword, is more than we dare face. The struggle might last two centuries, as the last one did, and millions of men might perish uselessly.
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