Word: dervishness
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Three thousand desert dervishes in flowing abbayas streamed into town on camels, horses and rickety provincial trains. Ten thousand Sudanese jammed the big dusty square before the stuccoed, white-domed tomb, brightening the drab town with pink, blue, yellow and green galabias (skirted garments). For the first time since the Mahdi's victory over Gordon, big black, green and red banners, bearing the silver crescent, and dervish spear, danced overhead. Inside the tomb enclosure, women rocked and swayed over big rawhide drums, wailing mournful tunes in high-pitched tones...
...Sudanese boatman, turned religious seer, involved the British Empire in a sticky little war. Mohamed Ahmed, who had declared himself the Mahdi, the long-awaited messiah of Islamic tradition, had whipped his dervish followers into a frenzied jihad (holy war) against the Sudan's Egyptian rulers. Since Egypt was under British occupation, Britain sent solemn, Bible-reading General Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon* to restore order. Instead, the fanatical dervishes bottled up the undermanned British garrison in Khartoum, hacked Gordon to death with their swords...
Thirteen years later, another British army, under General Horatio Herbert Kitchener (thenceforth known as K of K, Kitchener of Khartoum), set out to avenge Gordon. As the dervishes tried to cut their way out in a ferocious surge known as the Battle of Omdurman, a young cavalry officer named Winston Churchill got in the way, nearly lost his life. Dervish power was smashed...
Last week the dervish spirit was astir again in Khartoum. So was the Mahdi's son. Sir Sayed Abdul Rahman Mohamed Ahmed El Mahdi Pasha lacked his father's messianic complex. But he rode the wave of nationalism that was surging from North Africa to Indonesia. Sir Sayed threatened a second jihad if Egypt won its demand for outright annexation of the Sudan (now an Anglo-Egyptian condomimium...
From the time he entered the Kozlany village school through his Gymnasium and university years in Prague and Paris, Benes was a dervish for study. At 16, the once pious Catholic boy had turned into an unkempt dogmatist. By the time he was 19, he had run the gamut of the philosophies of extremism, from Sorelian violence to Marxian materialism. Then he encountered Thomas Masaryk...