The Malik was made of riveted steel plates, and so it was almost indestructible. But it was beat up, with broken portholes and twisted rails, and scruffy, littered decks and cabins full of smashed planks. Some working sailboats and motorboats were moored at the pier nearby, but even so this club — this broken boat — had seen its better days. The Mahdi’s mud forts still stood on the Nile banks at Omdurman, much eroded and smoothed by high water but still showing the musket holes in the battlements.
The Sudanese are so proud of their military prowess that they can quote lines from the Kipling poem ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy,’ written in praise of the Sudanese warriors — ‘the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot’ and ‘We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair.’ When it came to left-handed compliments, Kipling was a born southpaw. Still, the Sudanese are proud of,
An’ ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ’ayrick ’ead of ’air –
You big black boundin’ beggar — for you broke a British square!
In the house of the Mahdi’s successor in Omdurman, there is a room amounting to a shrine to General Osman Abu Baker Nigna. This turbaned saintly looking old man was the soldier who had impressed Kipling, for he had fought nineteen battles against the British and distinguished himself by leading charges that successfully broke the troop formation known as the ‘square.’ No one, neither the Indians nor the Zulus nor Napoleon’s troops, had ever managed that military feat.
Later that day, with a man named Khalifa, who was a history buff, I went to the Khartoum Museum, which was full of pharaonic statuary — and it is obvious that the border of Egypt is arbitrary, and that what we take to be Egyptian gods and temples reached deep into Africa, deeper than Nubia, more southerly than Dongola, almost to Khartoum.
Khalifa said, ‘The kings of Kush were forced out of Egypt by the Assyrian invasions and they ruled at Meroe and the various towns of the Dongola Reach.’
‘How far is Meroe?’
‘You could go there in a day.’
He went on to say that as late as the sixth century the statue of Isis from Philae was carried up the Nile to bless the crops.
There were Christians nosing around the Nile Valley at that time too, Khalifa said, sent from the Eastern Roman Empire to convert the Nubians, who were still (to the horror of the Christians) worshiping Isis and Osiris. Thus it can be said that Christian missionaries have been peregrinating and proselytizing in Africa for upwards of 1400 years — and fighting a rearguard action in places like the Sudan which was Islamized in the sixteenth century.
‘Islam spread in the Sudan through the Sufis,’ Khalifa said.
I had a nodding acquaintance with Sufism, the mystical form of Islam. Khalifa said there were many Sufis in the Sudan. The authority on Sufism in the Sudan, Yusef Fadal Hasan, lived in Khartoum. He told me that there were all sorts of Sufi devotees, according to the mosque — some danced and drummed, others didn’t drum at all, while at certain mosques the Sufis performed unique musical compositions.
And there are dervishes,’ Khalifa said.
Towards the end of a very hot afternoon, the sun lowering into the dust cloud raised by the day, the orb growing larger and redder as it descended, we were hurrying through the low stone-piled graves in the vast necropolis of the Hamad el Nil Mosque in Omdurman, to see the dervishes.
I could hear the chanting as we approached, and coming upon the spectacle I knew that I had never seen anything like it. A crowd of several thousand stood in a great dense circle in the courtyard of a mosque that was at the edge of the cemetery — somehow the dereliction of this mute nearby field of corpses added to the frenzy of what I was witnessing. At the center of the circle were stamping men, some in green robes, some in white, some in green sashes and green skullcaps; about six or seven were dressed in motley — multicolored patched robes and red capes and red dunce caps and carried sticks, some spinning on one leg others dancing or slowly whirling.
The musicians stood in a group of twenty or so, with drums and cymbals, nearer the mosque, and played loudly, in a syncopated way, while everyone chanted — dervishes, green and white robed priests, and the crowd, too.
‘No God but Allah! No God but Allah!’
The robed men in the center began a deliberate promenade in a great circle, led by a huge black man in green — green turban, green robe — and surrounded by the dervishes, some spinning, some hopping or dancing. Nearly everyone had a stick of some sort and some of their gestures seemed to mimic swordplay.
The robed women had been shoved into one corner, where they chanted less demonstratively. The watching crowd of thousands danced in place, and chanted and made a continuous motion of pulling an invisible rope. This slow motion tug-of-war was both graceful and weird and the tuggers’ faces shone with sweat as they mimicked this yanking.
It was the whooping and hollering that I associated with a revivalist prayer meeting, the same goofy smiles, the same hysteria. It was a prayer meeting in every respect. They were chanting ‘God is great’ now, faster and faster, and with this speeded up chanting, the men were walking more quickly in the great circle, raising dust.
Now I noticed the crippled Sufis, men with all sorts of twisted and gimpy legs, spinal curvatures, crutches and canes, and two men scrabbled on all fours. They too approximated dance steps, and fumbled and stumbled in the sacred circle, to the tattoo of the drums and the smashing of the tin cymbals that had the sound of pot lids.
There was at once a slower beat and I thought the dance was ending, but still the thirty or so priests and dervishes made their eccentric way in the circle, now uttering a new chant.
‘Allah al haiyu! Allah al haiyu!’ — God is alive!
The dervishes with matted locked hair and pointed cloth caps and wild patched clothes looked like court jesters or fools — and they even had that self-mocking conceit in their movements. They continued circling, spinning, as a man passed the perimeter of the crowd wafting incense with a thurible, directing the thin smoke into the gleaming faces of the chanting mob.
And now with the red sun lower, and the smell of dust and incense, and the heavy stamping that reminded me of the stamping in some village exorcism, the spinning cripples, the marching priests, the ratatat of the drums and ululations that grew to a shrill yodeling — the pace quickened again — accelerated to a frenzy.
It was, I could see, essentially a sing-song, but when one of the dervishes snaked out a leather coach whip and began cracking it and spinning as the mob clapped and chanted — the sunset on the mosque making a long shadow of the cemetery — the drums had never been louder, nor the cymbals so insistent. I was both worried and energized, for the mob had become frenzied in its ecstatic chanting, ‘God is alive.’ There is a point at which hysteria is indistinguishable from belief.
As an unbeliever, the only one among those thousands, I had reason to be alarmed.
‘But they are not political,’ Khalifa said. ‘They are Sufis. They bother no one. They dance. They are mystical. They are good people.’
Perhaps so, but in any case this was the lovely weird essence that I looked for in travel — both baffling and familiar, in the sunset and the rising dust beaten into the air by all those feet, dervishes and spectators alike. Everyone was part of it. And this was not some spectacle put on for photographers and tourists but rather a weekly rite, done for the pure joy of it.