Only fourteen years after the death of British General Charles George "Chinese" Gordon in 1885 near Khartoum, and the loss of his 7,000 loyal Egyptian and Sudanese troops at the hands of the followers of the religious fanatic “Mahdi”, Muhammad Ahmad, Winston Churchill wrote….……

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensuality deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899]). 

The Egyptian government had stood in a quandry before the Mahdi, a forerunner of Al-Qaeda, who claimed dominion over the entire Islamic world. Even the Ottoman Sultan regarded this fanaticism as a threat to his position as Caliph, but did not dare to challenge his claim. Gordon’s death was later avenged by a British Army (with the blessings of President Theodore Roosevelt) and in so doing, brought slavery to an end and rescued Egyptian nationalism from the threat of extinction by fundamentalist Islam. In the dramatic Hollywood film on the siege of Khartoum, the narrator plays tribute to Gordon …. We cannot tell how long his memory will live. But there is this….A world with no room for the Gordons is destined to revert to the sands.

After his victory, Muhammad Ahmad slaughtered thousands of civilians in Khartoum and took many thousands more as slaves. He became the ruler of most parts of modern day Sudan, and established a religious state, the Mahdiyah. It was governed by a harsh enforcement of Islamic law (Sharia). In Britain, Gordon was regarded as a hero and martyr and in 1898, an expedition against the Mahdists led by Horatio Kitchener avenged his death and re-conquered the Sudan.

What we know today is that there are no Gordons or Churchills in the West and that, like the helpless Sultan, there is no figure among Muslim national leaders capable of openly confronting what Churchill rightly called “this fearful fatalistic apathy“. In Gordon’s time, the Khedive of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha had sought the help of British and American military men to help create a strong Egyptian army and even if corrupt, he strove to place the welfare of the Egyptian people and their existence as a nation in the forefront of his policies. His successors committed Egyptian troops to oppose the Mahdi under Gordon's command.

Today there is no similar national ruler in the now independent Muslim states, not Mubarak in Egypt nor the third rate Shi’ite or Sunni “allies” we have in Iraq, nor Musharraf or his successors in Pakistan. Even less so among our European allies. Even when they themselves are targeted by the Islamic Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda or other fundamentalist groups, these leaders dare not try to openly move against these extremists and label their version of Islam as heretical.

This is why “Medved’s Five Points“ strike a responsive chord with many in the West, not just pacifists or ultra naïve Democrats. Even some conservative self-styled hardliners find Medved’s “logic” persuasive. This is of course, the same traditional “logic” of the old Middle East “hands” at the State Department, and the British and French Foreign Offices who recoil at the hint of a confrontation with extremist Islamists. This is why President Bush (and probably John McCain if elected) can only go so far before they are reined in by the “old hands“ at the State Department. All we have to do is listen to the most recent statements of Condi Rice and her constant apologetics for Mahmud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

Even the ghoulish atrocity committed by a fanatic against Israeli rabbinical students in Jerusalem that elicited demonstrations of joy and street celebrations in Gaza has not been denounced by any established Muslim religious authority. The dead hand of the Mahdi continues to hold us in a strangle hold and we have reverted to the sands.