The British desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb revealed imperial savagery to Egyptian nationalists.

Evidence

But two years after this speech, through what was, for Kämil, its shameful and shaming seizure of Omdurman in 1898, Great Britain opened the Pandora’s box that was Africa. In doing so, British military officials had revealed a degree of their own savagery and fanaticism when they revenged Gordon’s death by ripping apart the tomb of the Mahdï. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 746