ABSTRACT
The reconquest of the Sudan and the destruction of the Mahdist state of the Khalifa 'Abdullahi were seen as a victory over what Salisbury publicly called the 'false religion' ofIslam in a speech of June 1898.1 The offence given to Muslims, not least to those in Britain's Indian empire, elicited a hasty explanation that the premier had been referring to the Khalifa and his followers as the heretical disciples of the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad, a false prophet in the eyes of orthodox Muslims.2 In fact, Salisbury's hostility to Islam went deeper than that. On the one hand, he regarded Islam, conventionally but with absolute certainty, as a creed destined to yield to Christian truth in the fullness of time. l On the other, he watched with unaffected concern the contemporary resurgence of Islam across the East. As British and Egyptian troops advanced into the Sudan, he spoke of the impact that Turkey's defeat of Christian Greece in the war of 1897 had on Muslims everywhere: 'A slight ... an exaggerated victory, has recalled to them their past of a thousand years ago, when they were victorious in every part of the world ... they cannot but believe that that glorious period of their history is to be repeated. '4 He shared Lord Cromer's anxiety about the reliability of the Egyptian Army in combat against fellow Muslims. The battle of Omdurman dispelled the fears he had avowed when the ruling Liberals decided to abandon the Sudan to the Mahdi in 1884. The 'terrible intelligence' that British generals in the
Khedive's service were being 'hunted out by Mahomedan insurrection' had, he said then, run through the whole Muslim world. s Omdurman made good the Gladstonian retreat before Islam at its most militant and avenged the death of Gordon.
