Al-Mahdi, (Arabic for “The Right-Guided One” or "The One Who is Guided by God") original name Muhammad Ahmad ibn al-Sayyid ʿAbd Allah, (b. August 12, 1844, Labab Island, Turkish Sudan, Egypt Eyalet — d. June 22, 1885, Omdurman [near the ruins of Khartoum], Mahdist Sudan), was the creator of a vast Islamic state extending from the Red Sea to Central Africa and the founder of a movement that remained influential in Sudan a century later. As a youth he moved from orthodox religious study to a mystical interpretation of Islam. In 1881, he proclaimed his divine mission to purify Islam and the governments that defiled it. His extensive campaign culminated in the capture of Khartoum (January 26, 1885). He then established a theocratic state in Sudan, with its capital at Omdurman.
Muḥammad Aḥmad was the son of a shipbuilder from the Dongola District of Nubia. Shortly after his birth, the family moved south to Karari, a river village near Khartoum. As a boy, Muḥammad developed a love of religious study. Instead of seeking an orthodox education, such as that offered at al-Azhar University in Cairo, and passing into the official hierarchy as a salaried judge or interpreter of Islamic law, he remained in the Sudan. Increasingly, he tended to a more mystic interpretation of Islam, in the Ṣufi tradition, through study of the Qurʾan—the sacred Muslim scripture—and the practice of self-denial under the discipline of a religious brotherhood.
Muhammad joined the Sammaniyyah order and grew to manhood in a wholly Sudanese religious setting, purposely separating himself from the official ruling class. By now, the young man had begun to attract his own disciples and, in 1870, moved with them to a hermitage on Aba Island in the White Nile, 175 miles south of Khartoum. His highly emotional and intransigent religious observance brought him into conflict with his shaykh (teacher), whom he reproved for worldliness.
The exasperated shaykh expelled him from the circle of his disciples, whereupon Muḥammad Aḥmad, having vainly asked his teacher’s pardon, joined the brotherhood of a rival shaykh within the same order.
Sudan, at this time, was a dependency of Egypt, which was itself a province of the Ottoman Empire, and governed by the same multiracial, Turkish-speaking ruling class that governed Egypt. In appearance, education, and way of life, the rulers contrasted starkly with their Sudanese subjects, and, although the more assimilated higher officials and some of the chiefs of territories along the Nile who profited from their government connections were reconciled to the regime, the less privileged Sudanese were not. The situation was politically dangerous. The discontented came from many different walks of life: taxpayers oppressed by fiscal injustices and enraged by the frequent floggings to which they were subject when tardy in their payments; slave traders angered by the clumsy efforts of the government, which was hectored by the European powers, particularly Britain, to abolish the slave trade without delay; devout worshippers scandalized by the presence of non-Muslim Europeans as provincial governors and by said governors addiction to alcohol; peasants living by the Nile forced to tow government ships; warlike tribesmen, weary of the long years of enforced peace, spoiling for a fight. All of these elements were potential enemies of the established order.
It was Muḥammad Aḥmad who converted this diversified discontent into a unified movement that for a time would transcend tribalism and weld the faithful into an effective military machine. Gradually, during 1880 and the first weeks of 1881, he became convinced that the entire ruling class had deserted the Islamic faith and that the khedive -- the viceroy of Egypt -- was a puppet in the hands of unbelievers and thus unfit to rule over Muslims. In March 1881 he revealed to his closest followers what he considered his divine mission—that God had appointed him to purify Islam and to destroy all governments that defiled it. On June 29, he publicly assumed the title of al-Mahdi, a rightly guided leader who, according to a tradition cherished by the oppressed throughout Islamic history, would appear to restore Islam.
The events that followed this announcement were among the most dramatic in the history of the Nile Valley. Within less than four years, Muhammad Ahmad -- al-Mahdi --, who set out from Aba Island with a few followers armed with sticks and spears, ended by making himself master of almost all the territory formerly occupied by the Egyptian government, capturing an enormous booty of money, bullion, jewels, and military supplies—including Krupp artillery and Remington rifles.
By the end of 1883, al-Mahdī’s ansar (“helpers,” a name first given to those people in the city of Medina who helped the Prophet Muḥammad) had annihilated three Egyptian armies sent against them; the last, a force of 8,000 men with a huge camel train, commanded by General William Hicks, was butchered almost to a man. El Obeid, the present-day Al-Ubayyid, provincial capital of Kordofan, and Bara, a chief town of that province, fell after being besieged by al-Mahdi. He now committed his first acts as the head of an armed theocracy on the march: taxes were collected, not as demanded by the Egyptians but as laid down by the Qur'an. Already his fame had reached responsive ears in Arabia to the north and as far west as Bornu, now a province of northern Nigeria. A master of the art of putting his enemies always in the wrong, he supported his military operations by intelligent and subtle propaganda. Counter-propaganda by the governor-general, ʿAbd al-Qadir Pasha Ḥilmi, a man of great resource, and by the ulama, the learned men, of Khartoum who mocked al-Mahdi’s divine claims, failed miserably.
Al-Mahdi’s crowning victory was the capture of Khartoum, on January 26, 1885, after a resolute defense by its commander, Major General Charles George Gordon, who, against al-Mahdi’s express order, was killed in the final assault. After many of the citizens of Khartoum had been massacred, al-Mahdi made a triumphal entry into the stricken city and led the prayers in the principal mosque. Even making allowance for the military weakness of Egypt, which during the crucial years of 1881 and 1882 was torn by the nationalist revolt of Ahmad 'Urabi Pasha, it was an astonishing feat.
The withdrawal of the British expedition, which had failed to relieve Khartoum, left al-Mahdī free to consolidate his religious empire. He abandoned Khartoum, still heavy with the stench of the dead, and set up his administrative center at Omdurman, an expanded village of mud houses and grass-roofed huts on the left bank of the Nile, opposite Khartoum. The site of the new capital had two advantages: it was higher and better-drained, hence healthier, than Khartoum, and, by governing from the exclusively Sudanese town of Omdurman, al-Mahdī avoided the evil associations of the old capital. He directed every aspect of communal and personal life by proclamations, sermons, warnings, and letters. In this endeavor, he was helped by the capture, intact, of the government press and an abundance of stationery. However, al-Mahdi confined himself to the enunciation of principles while most of the routine matters of govenance he left to his chief officers. The political institutions, as well as the nomenclature of his government, were based insofar as practicable on those of primitive Islam. In the manner of the Prophet Muḥammad, al-Mahdi appointed four caliphs, or deputies, to be the living successors of the four earliest caliphs in Islamic history. Three of those appointed by al-Mahdi were Sudanese, including the caliph 'Abd Allah ibn Muḥammad, al-Mahdi’s most trusted counselor and chief of staff; the fourth, Muḥammad al-Mahdi ibn al-Sanusi, head of the Sanusiyyah order in the western desert, ignored al-Mahdi’s invitation. Al-Mahdi referred to himself as “the successor to the apostle of God”—that is, successor to the Prophet Muḥammad, but only in the sense of continuing his work.
Al-Mahdi’s rule was brief. He became ill, possibly of typhus, and died in June 1885, only 40 years old. Pursuant to his wish, al-Mahdi's temporal functions were assumed by the caliph ʿAbd Allah. Over al-Mahdi's grave, the caliph built a domed tomb similar in architecture to those customarily built over the remains of the more venerated holy men. Partially destroyed by gunfire during the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, it was later rebuilt by al-Mahdi’s son ʿAbd al-Raḥman and the Mahdist community.
Al-Mahdi made a powerful impression on his Sudanese contemporaries, and the doubters were few. Recorded recollections are varied, but most witnesses agreed on his medium-to-tall height; his austere frame, which, according to some, fattened toward the end of his life; the soft voice that a sudden flare up of indignation could make terrible; the sympathetic, sensitive face; and the large, piercing eyes. The pious were sure that in his person he conformed to all that was traditionally expected of a mahdi.
Understandably, European captives drew a less-favorable picture.
To the British at the time of the Mahdist wars, al-Mahdi was the enemy whom they associated, though wrongly, with the killing of Gordon. The war correspondents generally reported him as an ogre, cruel when he was not lascivious, and they dubbed him the False Prophet. This caricature of al-Mahdi was reflected in a bulky literature by European authors that distorted al-Mahdi’s image for an entire generation. Ironically, it was General Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s conquest of Sudan in 1896–98 that first brought Mahdists and British officials together and fostered what was to become a growing interest among European and Sudanese scholars in the study of Mahdist documents in the original Arabic. Such studies made possible a clearer view of this modern ascetic who changed the course of African history.
Following Ahmad's death, Abdallahi ruled as Khalifa, but his autocratic rule, as well as directly applied British military force, destroyed the Mahdi state following the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan. Despite that, the Mahdi remains a respected figure in the history of Sudan. In the late 20th century, one of al-Mahdi's direct descendants, Sadiq al-Mahdi, twice served as prime minister of Sudan (1966–67 and 1986–89), and pursued democratizing policies.
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Churchill, Winston (1902). "The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ahmad
https://www.britannica.com/biography/al-Mahdi-Sudanese-religious-leader
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