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.
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