A secular regime is toppled by Western intervention, but an Islamic backlash turns the liberators into occupiers. Caught between interventionists at home and fundamentalists abroad, a prime minister flounders as his ministers betray him, alliances fall apart, and a runaway general makes policy in the field. As the media accuse Western soldiers of barbarity and a region slides into chaos, the armies of God clash on an ancient river and an accidental empire arises.
This is not the Middle East of the early twenty-first century. It is Africa in the late nineteenth century, when the river Nile became the setting for an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs, and Africans. A human and religious drama, the conflict defined the modern relationship between the West and the Islamic world. The story is not only essential for understanding the modern clash of civilizations but is also a gripping, epic, tragic adventure.
Three Empires on the Nile tells of the rise of the first modern Islamic state and its fateful encounter with the British Empire of Queen Victoria. Ever since the self-proclaimed Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi gathered an army in the Sudan and besieged and captured Khartoum under its British overlord Charles Gordon, the dream of a new caliphate has haunted modern Islamists. Today, Shiite insurgents call themselves the Mahdi Army, and Sudan remains one of the great fault lines of battle between Muslims and Christians, blacks and Arabs. The nineteenth-century origins of it all were even more dramatic and strange than today's headlines.
In the hands of Dominic Green, the story of the Nile's three empires is an epic in the tradition of Kipling, the bard of empire, and Winston Churchill, who fought in the final destruction of the Mahdi's army. It is a sweeping and very modern tale of God and globalization, slavers and strategists, missionaries and messianists. A pro-Western regime collapses from its own corruption, a jihad threatens the global economy, a liberation movement degenerates into a tyrannical cult, military intervention goes wrong, and a temporary occupation lasts for decades. In the rise and fall of empires, we see a parable for our own times and a reminder that, while American military involvement in the Islamic world is the beginning of a new era for America, it is only the latest chapter in an older story for the people of the region.
Description:
A secular regime is toppled by Western intervention, but an Islamic backlash turns the liberators into occupiers. Caught between interventionists at home and fundamentalists abroad, a prime minister flounders as his ministers betray him, alliances fall apart, and a runaway general makes policy in the field. As the media accuse Western soldiers of barbarity and a region slides into chaos, the armies of God clash on an ancient river and an accidental empire arises.
This is not the Middle East of the early twenty-first century. It is Africa in the late nineteenth century, when the river Nile became the setting for an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs, and Africans. A human and religious drama, the conflict defined the modern relationship between the West and the Islamic world. The story is not only essential for understanding the modern clash of civilizations but is also a gripping, epic, tragic adventure.
Three Empires on the Nile tells of the rise of the first modern Islamic state and its fateful encounter with the British Empire of Queen Victoria. Ever since the self-proclaimed Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi gathered an army in the Sudan and besieged and captured Khartoum under its British overlord Charles Gordon, the dream of a new caliphate has haunted modern Islamists. Today, Shiite insurgents call themselves the Mahdi Army, and Sudan remains one of the great fault lines of battle between Muslims and Christians, blacks and Arabs. The nineteenth-century origins of it all were even more dramatic and strange than today's headlines.
In the hands of Dominic Green, the story of the Nile's three empires is an epic in the tradition of Kipling, the bard of empire, and Winston Churchill, who fought in the final destruction of the Mahdi's army. It is a sweeping and very modern tale of God and globalization, slavers and strategists, missionaries and messianists. A pro-Western regime collapses from its own corruption, a jihad threatens the global economy, a liberation movement degenerates into a tyrannical cult, military intervention goes wrong, and a temporary occupation lasts for decades. In the rise and fall of empires, we see a parable for our own times and a reminder that, while American military involvement in the Islamic world is the beginning of a new era for America, it is only the latest chapter in an older story for the people of the region.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Green (The Double Life of Doctor Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I) has written a formidable work of popular narrative history describing the tumultuous events that took place in northeastern Africa in the final third of the 19th century. Breathing life into, among many others, the starchy British general Charles Gordon and his fanatical antagonist, the Mahdi, who launched a movement that was a forerunner of today's radical Islamist sects, Green examines an era that witnessed the rise of no fewer than three empires (the Egyptian tyranny of Khedive Ishmail, the apocalyptic "fantasy" of the Mahdi, and the British Empire, which "arrived in a flurry of humanitarian concern, but endured through brutal force"). Cautionary modern parallels of this, the first clash of Arab nationalism, Western intervention and Islamic fervor, are of course never far from breaking the surface, but Green carefully prevents them from becoming overtly apparent. He succeeds in not only untangling the complex politics of the Great Powers as they reacted to the crisis along the Nile but also explaining the equally opaque motivations of the shadowy Mahdi and his followers as they pursued their jihad. 16 pages of color photos. (Jan. 9)
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From Booklist
Between the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, the British Empire expanded up the Nile River, impelled by varied motives: money, vengeance, humanitarianism, and imperial diplomacy. Green's panoramic narrative re-creates these three decades with remarkable dynamism, applying a flair for pithy characterization to the political and religious players involved. Among the dozens of portraits worked into the chronicle, none are sharper than Green's images of two men who personify the period: General Charles George Gordon and Mohammed Ahmed (better known as the Mahdi), both of whom were mystics. Where Gordon's mysticism was Christian and personalistic, the Mahdi's was Islamic and totalistic. As the "Expected Guide" awaited in Islamic tradition, confirmed as such to his adherents by his killing of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885, the Mahdi established a militantly fundamentalist state destroyed in turn by the Anglo-Egyptian forces of General Herbert Kitchener. Occasionally bemused but never supercilious, Green achieves a vividly popular account of Britain's ascendance in Egypt and Sudan. Gilbert Taylor
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