Egyptian nationalists saw Sudanese expansionism as threatening as British rule

Evidence

Despite his urging Egyptians to learn from the Mahdists’ example, he made frequent insinuations about Egypt’s natural right to the territories of the Sudan and expressed many suspicions about Muhammad Ahmad’s claims to being the Mahdï, fearing that such an approach to leadership disguised a more venal kind of fanaticism. The zeal that Muhammad Ahmad, as al- Afghänï always referred to him, inspired in his followers was fine for confronting the British but painfully inappropriate when directed against fellow Muslims. Muhammad Ahmad inspired the religion-heated nationalism of Muslims from New Delhi to North Africa, for which al-Afghänï praised him over and over; but al-Afghänï believed that Ahmad’s continued call for the conquest of Egypt would destroy the filaments of pan-Islamic fraternity.This expansionism would be as serious a threat as British imperialism: I do not know what the result would be if the Sudan fell wholly into Muhammad Ahmad’s possession and he set up government over those vast lands, with no way left to him but to continue on his path and propagate his message among all the Arab tribes, with all of his capabili- ties. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 460

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s comparative Egypt-vs-Sudan question: Islamist pan-Islamic rhetoric coexisted with Egyptian claims over Sudanese territory.