*CHAPTER I*
A mixed Eastern and Western city lying in the midst of a wide waste of
grim desert, with a fierce sun blazing down on it by day and a rain of
stars over it by night; a strip of verdure with slender palms and red
and yellow blossoms, stretching for some three miles along the banks of
the Nile, where the great river is cleft in twain as by the sweep of a
giant's hand, and one branch goes up through the brown and yellow
wilderness to the Abyssinian hills and the other to the lakes of the
Equator--such is Khartoum.
The city had changed since Ishmael Ameer spent his youth there.
Lifeless and vacant then, it had risen out of the dust of its own decay.
On the river's front a line of Western buildings, a college, a barrack,
and a palace over which the white crescent and the Union Jack crackled
in the breeze together; at the back of these a great open market, with
rows of booths and shanties, a native quarter with lines of mud-brick
houses, and a handsome mosque; and behind all these an encampment of the
tribes in tents, fronting an horizon of sand, empty and silent as the
sea.
When Ishmael returned to the city of his boyhood British officials of
the Anglo-Egyptian Government, wearing the Crescent on their pith
helmets, were walking in the wide streets with Soudanese blacksmiths,
Arab carpenters, and women of many races, some veiled in white, others
in black, and yet others nearly naked of body as well as face. Two
battalions of British soldiers, a British Sirdar, a British
Inspector-General, and British Governors of provinces were there as
signs and symbols of the change that had been wrought since Khartoum was
shrivelled up in a blast of fire.
Ishmael's fame had gone before him, from Alexandria and from Cairo, and
both the British and the native population of Khartoum looked for his
coming with a keen curiosity. The British saw a man taller and more
powerful than the common, with the fiery, flashing black eyes that they
associated with their fears of the fanatic; but the natives, to their
disappointment, recognised a face they knew, and they said among
themselves, "Is not this Ishmael Ameer, the nephew of old Mahmud and the
son of the boat-builder?" And that was a discovery which for a while
dispelled some of the marvel as well as the mystery which had hitherto
surrounded the new prophet's identity.
Ishmael made his home in his uncle's house on the fringe of the native
quarter, a large Arab dwelling with one face to the desert and another
to the white river and the forts of Omdurman. Besides the old uncle
himself, now more than fourscore years, a God-fearing man devoted to his
nephew, the household consisted of Ishmael's little daughter, Ayesha, a
sweet child of ten, who sang quaint little Soudanese songs all day long,
and had the animal grace of the gazelle; an Arab woman, Ayesha's nurse,
Zenoba, a voluptuous person, with cheeks marked by three tribal slits,
wearing massive gold ear-rings and hair twisted into innumerable thin
ringlets; and Abdullah, a Soudanese servant, formerly a slave.
Before Ishmael had been long in Khartoum most of the British officials
had made up their minds about his personal character. He was one of
those complex beings whom they recognised as essentially Eastern--that
mixture of hypocrisy and spirituality, of sincerity and quackery, which
they believed to be most dangerous of all in its effects upon a
fanatical populace. The natives, on the other hand, began to see that
though a spontaneous and passionate man, outspoken and vehement in his
dealings with the strong and the rich, he was very tender to the old and
to the erring, that he was beloved of children, and trusted by the
outcast and the poor.
Before many days had passed the Moslems of Khartoum asked him to lecture
to them, and in the evenings he would sit on an angerib which Abdullah
brought out of the house, with a palm net spread over it, and speak to
the people who squatted on the ground about him. Clad in his white
caftan and Mecca skull cap, with its white muslin turban bound round it,
the British Inspectors would see him there, on the edge of the desert,
surrounded by a multitude of Soudanese, brown and black, and of Arabs,
olive and walnut, and holding his learners by the breathless intensity
with which he uttered himself.
Yet he did not flatter them. On the contrary, no man had ever so
condemned the evils which they had come to regard as part and parcel of
their faith. All the Arab soul and blood of the man seemed to be afire,
and his wonderful voice, throbbing over their heads far away to the
silent desert beyond, carried such denunciations of the corruptions of
Islam as the people had never heard before.
"Beware of slavery," he said. "What says the Koran? 'Righteousness is
to him who freeth the slave.' Beware of sorcery, of spells, of magic,
of divinations--they are of the devil."
Teaching like this might drive away the dominant races but it drew the
subject ones, and among others that attached themselves to Ishmael was a
half-witted Nubian (an Ethiopian of the Bible), known as Black Zogal,
who from that time forward followed him about by day and lay like a dog
at the door of his house by night, crying the confession of faith at the
end of every hour.
After condemning slavery and sorcery Ishmael came to closer quarters--he
denounced polygamy and divorce.
"Beware of polygamy," he said. "It pulls down the pillars of the house.
No man would permit another man to join with him in love for his wife.
Why, therefore, ask a woman to allow another woman to join with her in
love for her husband?
"Beware of divorce, for it brings sorrow and shame. What says the
Prophet (to him be prayer and peace)? 'Of all lawful things hated of
God, divorce is the most hateful.'
"Brothers," he cried, "I see a house that is full of light. There is a
new wife there. She is very happy. But in the upper rooms I hear
children weeping. They are weeping for their mother who has been put
away. She has done no wrong, she has committed no crime, but while the
guests feast and the new wife counts her jewels, the mother's heart is
bleeding for the children she may see no more.
"O men," he cried again in his throbbing voice, "night is for sleep, and
your children slumber, but in their dreams their mother comes to them.
She embraces them and they dry their tears. But they awake in the
morning and she is gone. Where is your father's heart, O ye men of
righteousness? Has all justice died out of you? Shame on you! May
Heaven punish you as you deserve! Divorce shakes the throne of Islam!
Wipe it out, that your faces may be whitened before the world!"
After condemning polygamy and divorce, Ishmael came to closer quarters
still--he denounced the seclusion and the degradation of women.
"Remove the veil from your women," he said. "At the beginning it was
the badge of shame. What says the Koran? 'O Prophet, speak to thy
wives and thy daughters that they let their wrappers fall so that they
may not be affronted.'
"Dismiss the madness of a bygone age that woman is inferior to man. We
are all children of one mother. What says the Prophet? 'Paradise lies
under the feet of mothers.' The proverb of our people says, 'The
threshold weeps for forty days when a girl is born,' but I tell you the
stars sing for joy and the dry wells of the desert spring afresh. Man's
dominion over woman is the product of darkness--put it away. O my
brothers, woman's suffering in the world is so great that if she does
not cry aloud the mountains themselves will groan."
If Ishmael's teaching offended certain of the men, it attracted great
multitudes of the women, many of whom laid aside their veils to come to
him, and among others that came were a number of black girls from
Omdurman who were known to have been the paramours of British and
Egyptian soldiers at Khartoum. His bearing towards these girls had that
shy tenderness which is peculiar to the pure-minded man in his dealings
with erring women, and when some of his followers grumbled at his
intercourse with such notorious sinners he told them a story of the Lord
Isa (Jesus).
It was the story of His visit to the rich man's house, and of the sinful
woman who did not cease to wash His feet with her tears and to dry them
with the hair of her head.
"Shall I be less charitable than the Lord of the Christians?" he asked,
and the choking pathos of his story silenced everybody.
In his preaching he turned for ever to the prophets--the prophet
Abraham, the prophet Moses, the prophet Mohammed, and above all, the
prophet Isa. He called Jesus the divine teacher of Judaea, one of the
great brother souls.
"Only a poor Jewish man," he said, with a memory of his own that none
might share, "only a poor carpenter, but perhaps the greatest and
noblest spirit save one that ever lived in the world."
Thus, evening after evening, when the blazing sun had gone down, Ishmael
sat on the angerib in front of his uncle's house and taught the
ever-increasing crowds that squatted before him on the brown and yellow
sand. The heat and flame of his teaching burnt itself into the wild Arab
souls of the great body of his hearers, but there were some among his
own people who asked--
"Is not this the Ishmael Ameer who denounced the Christians as the
corrupters of our faith?"