04 Khartoum 0490: Dinner with the Grandson of the Mahdi*

* Note:  The State Department archives did not contain the full text of this cable so part between paras 4 & 5 is missing.  But here follows the entry for my journal for May 13:

"Last night I spent three hours dining with the grandson of The Mahdi. (If you don't know who that is, rent the DVD of the movie Khartoum starring Charleton Heston & Laurence Oivilier.)

We dined on the veranda of the Imam El Mahdi's palace overlooking the Nile River. It was grand. There was just enough breeze for desert cooling (evaporating sweat). The Imam told me the story of his father, the only one of The Mahdi's ten sons to survive the war with the British. Abdel-Rahman was 13 when he was wounded in a battle that killed two of his brothers. By the time he died in 1959, he had helped his country reach independence from the British and had met Winston Churchill, who had fought with the British in the 1890s. Just the two of us talking under the stars about The Mahdi's effort to reform Islam and the sect's continued efforts to do the same without violence. The Imam is head of the Ansar, the descendants of the warriors – who the British called the Dervishes – of The Mahdi. A high point. The West has much to learn about Islam and they of us. Most want to have this exchange. The common enemy is the terrorists.

Most Sudanese are too polite to mention their outrage over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American forces. (The Imam didn’t.) But it is a real black mark against us."

Journal Entry for October 30, 2003

Went to a reception at the Turkish ambassador's residence last evening. There was the usual crowd of diplomats scanning the crowd for targets and then swooping in for a quick info pump. The British ambassador and myself did our info exchange up front and then went off in our own directions. Since everyone thinks the U.S. knows everything, everyone wants to pump me. That's okay, that's what we do. Someone said they recognized me from the picture that appeared in the paper on Monday (part of a long interview I did). The publisher of the newspaper and I chatted. He said he got lots of favorable comment on my interview, especially the part where I said if the Sudanese talked more about the important issues, we foreigners could shut up.

I try to talk to actual Sudanese at these things. They are usually there. Spoke to a businessman. He wanted to know why the U.S. still has sanctions on Sudan. He said that business and investment do more to change things than sanctions. I said that I agreed and hoped we could remove them sometime next year. I also met the Indian ambassador's wife. She looked like an Indian movie star.

On the way home, the crescent moon hung low in the sky over the Blue Nile. The month of Ramadan starts with the first sign of the new moon and ends when the last of the old moon disappears. Struck me how the Arabs of the deep desert could look up every night and tell exactly what part of the month they were in even if they didn't have clocks or calendars. Many of the Muslim holy days go way back into the Arab past. I'm beginning to get a feel for the flow of life when you live as much in the cool night as the brutally hot sun. There is something there vaguely familiar, maybe from the Arabian Nights.