For Want of a Camel : The Story of Britains Failed Sudan Campaign, 1883-1885

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Islamic scholar, turned revolutionary, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd'allah al Mahdi, the disparate and mutually hostile Arab tribes of the Sudan had come together in a religious and "Sudanese" movement that rocked the very foundation of Eqypt's most important colony, with thee effects flooding over the Egyptian capital, Cairo, and rippling as far north as London, the center of the British Empire, itself. At the time, the Sudan consisted of a million square miles of desolate and almost completely waterless desert, swamp, rock, thorn and scrub plant life, where, under its relentless and scorching sun, lived an assortment of savage, mostly Muslin but incompatible Arab and Nilotic tribes - fierce, tough and uncompromisingly independent. Since 1821, Sudan had been under the harsh rule of the Turko-Egyptians rule, the Turqiyyah, when the Albanian viceroy Ottoman of Egypt, Muhammad 'Ali Pasha, sent his armies to conquer the southern regions. From the time of Colonel Ahmad Urb's defeat in the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian war, the British military occupation of the country had ensured that Egypt had remained firmly in the realm of British influence, although "only temporarily". On the surface, while the faade of Ottoman sovereignty and khedival rule was maintained, in reality, Egypt was a tightly controlled responsibility of the British government, a "protectorate" in the real sense of the word. Behind the curtain, the puppet master, Sir Evelyn Baring, manipulated the affairs of state, "advising" the khedive as to internal and external policy and fiscal decisions. Although, Egypt had held the Sudan as a dependency since its conquest in 1820, the administration of Sudan was considered a "domestic" matter by the British government, and it was left to