The Mahdi

Sudanese Islamic revolutionary

• Born: August 12, 1844
• Birthplace: Dirar Island off Dongola, Sudan
• Died: June 22, 1885
• Place of death: Omdurman, Sudan

The Mahdi led an Islamic reform movement that swept away the Sudan’s Turkish-Egyptian colonial administration and created a new Islamic fervor in northern Sudan. His movement also provided an ideology for later jiḥad movements throughout the Muslim world.

Early Life

The Mahdi was born Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn as-Sayyid in the western part of what is now Sudan. He was a member of an Arabized Nubian family. His parents relocated to Karari, some twelve miles north of Khartoum, where his brothers together with their father, Abdallah, entered into a boat-building business. However, Muḥammad himself pursued religious studies, as his great-grandfather, a respected Islamic scholar, had done. He studied in Khartoum and in Karari. He became a pupil of prominent religious teachers in the Gezira and Berber regions of central Sudan, such as Sheikh al-Amin al-Suwaylih and Sheikh Muḥammad al-Dikayr ՙAbdallah Khujali.

Muḥammad admired the ascetic life and mystic experiences of the Sufis and joined the Sufi order (Tarīqah) of the Sammānīya in 1861. After studying Sufism for seven years, he was certified as a Sammānīya sheikh and married a daughter of his grand uncle, Aḥmad Sharfi. In 1870, he and his brothers established a base on Aba Island on the Nile above (south) Khartoum—a place attractive to his boat-building brothers because of its reserves of wood. There Muḥammad built a mosque and started teaching the Qur՚ān. He soon endeared himself to the tribes of the island.

Over the next ten years, particularly after 1879, Muḥammad traveled widely: to Dongola, Sennar, and Kordofan, among other places in Sudan. During his travels, he observed widespread dissatisfaction of the Sudanese peoples against Turkish rule (Turkiyā). Widespread discontent and unrest had generated an apocalyptical expectation among many people, especially in northern Sudan, that the degenerate world would be dissolved and an authentic Islamic state would arise under the rule of a new messenger of God known as the Mahdi.

Muḥammad Aḥmad was an eloquent and elegant preacher who had a charismatic personality and an impressive physical charm. He was brawny and tall, with a bald forehead and an aquiline nose. He was praised for his “infallibility” and was considered by many to be the “perfect man.” His distinctive attributes, together with his claims of being descended from the Prophet Muḥammad, through al-Ḥasan, the son of the Prophet’s daughter Fāṭima and her husband ՙAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, added to the growing perception that he himself was the awaited Mahdi.

One of the notable people who recognized Muḥammad as the Mahdi was ՙAbdullahi ibn Muḥammad, a nomadic Baqqara Arab from southern Darfur, who fell in a swoon after seeing him at al-Massalamiya on the Blue Nile during March, 1881. This incident resulted in a conversion experience that convinced Muḥammad that he had indeed been elected by God (Allah) as a messenger. ՙAbdullahi then became Muḥammad’s close associate, or khalifa.

Life’s Work

After joining with ՙAbdullahi, Muḥammad went to Kordofan to present himself as the Mahdi and urged that region’s people to eschew the present world for the world to come. His message echoed the familiar teachings of the Sufis in the Sudan, and the people of Kordofan quickly flocked under his banner, taking an oath of allegiance (bay I՚a). His followers came to be known as the ansars—which translates literally as “madmen.”

Muḥammad then made a triumphant return to Aba Island, where on June 29, 1881, he publicly proclaimed his new identity as the Mahdi and urged important leaders of the region to abolish the agrarian tax and join him in a holy war, or jiḥad. The Egyptian governor-general of Kordofan, Muḥammad R՚uf Pasha, dispatched a military expedition to Aba Island with the intention of arresting the troublemaker in August, 1881. However, on August 12, the government’s army was routed by Muḥammad’s followers, who established a base at Jabal Qadir (renamed Jabal Massa) in the Nuba Mountains on August 31.

The governor (mudir) of Fashoda, Rashid Bey Ayman, decided to launch a surprise attack on Muḥammad’s headquarters at Jabal Qadir in early December but did not first obtain official permission from the governor-general of Kordofan. Acting on information about Rashid’s plan obtained from a Kinana woman, Muḥammad ambushed the attackers on December 9, and Rashid Bey was killed in action. On May 30, 1882, Muḥammad’s followers overwhelmed a seven-thousand-man Egyptian force led by Yusuf Pasha Hasan al-Shallali near al-Ubayyiḍ and seized its weapons and ammunition. Muḥammad followed up this victory by laying siege to El-Obeid, which was defended by Muḥammad Said Pasha. The town fell to the Mahdi’s followers on January 19, 1883.

On November 5, the Mahdi scored another major victory over government forces at Sheikan that were commanded by the British colonel William Hicks. On December 23, the Turkish-Egyptian administration in the western Sudan collapsed following a victory of the Mahdi’s followers at Darfur, where Rudolf Slatin Bey was in charge. On April 12, 1884, Baḥr al-Ghazāl surrendered to a Mahdi force commanded by Karamallah Muḥammad Kurqusawi. The Mahdi had converted the Baqqārah tribes of the western Sudan and the riverain peoples, and the Bīja tribes of the east went over to the Mahdist commander, ՙUthmān ibn Abī Bakr Diqna.

The Mahdist forces then targeted Khartoum, the center and symbol of Turkish-Egyptian rule in the Sudan. Between 1873 and 1879, Khartoum had been administered by Governor-General Charles George Gordon, a British officer employed by the Turkish-Egyptian authorities. Gordon was trying to implement a modernization program—including an effort to abolish the slave trade—that was seen by the Sudanese people as an attempt to Christianize the region. After Gordon had left in 1879, Ra՚uf Pasha became governor-general.

The politics of the Sudan were further complicated in 1882 by the fact that Great Britain began occupying Egypt in September of that year, and it thereby assumed responsibility for Egypt’s share of the administration of the Sudan. Because of the deteriorating situation of the Sudanese government, the British decided to withdraw their forces from the Sudan and planned the withdrawal in consultation with the Turkish khedive, who oversaw the administration of Egypt. They sent Gordon to the Sudan to organize the withdrawal. Gordon reached Khartoum on February 18, 1884. By April, he managed to evacuate some 2,500 foreigners. However, he had also decided as early as February 26 to suppress the Mahdi’s jiḥad.

Meanwhile, the Mahdi’s forces encircled Khartoum, spreading their jiḥad in the adjacent Berber region. By May, they had cut off Khartoum from the outside world. In September, the vanguard of the Madhi’s followers, commanded by ՙAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nūjumī, reinforced the Mahdist army already operating in Khartoum under the command of Muḥammad ՙUthmān Abu Qarja. Shortly thereafter, the main Mahdist force reached the city. On January 5, 1885, the Fort of Omdurman—across the Nile River from Khartoum—surrendered to the Mahdi, who captured Khartoum on the night of January 25. Gordon was killed while defending his palace against the insurgents.

After establishing a new capital north of Omdurman, Muḥammad Aḥmad transformed his spiritual leadership into a theocratic rule. However, on June 16, 1885, he became ill from a fever. He may have been poisoned—as was rumored—or, perhaps more plausibly, was infected with typhus virus. In any case, he died in Omdurman on June 22. His khalifa, ՙAbdullahi ibn Muḥammad, succeeded him as the ruler of the Sudan.

Significance

Muḥammad Aḥmad’s religious revolt, or Mahdiya, was one in a series of Islamic revivalist and fundamentalist movements during the nineteenth century. Others included those of Wahhābīya in Arabia, the jiḥad of Shehu ՙUthman dan Fodio in Nigeria, and the Sanūsīya in Cyrenaica in North Africa.

Muḥammad Aḥmad’s brief regime as the Mahdi played a significant role in the era of “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century. By overthrowing the Turkish-Egyptian rule, it contributed substantially to the formation of the nation state of the Sudan that would arise during the mid-twentieth century. The political and spiritual role played by the family of Muḥammad continued to influence the history of post-independent Sudan.

Bibliography

Bermann, Richard A. The Mahdi of Allah: The Story of the Dervish Mohammed Ahmed. New York: Macmillan, 1932. A much acclaimed popular, rather than scholarly, biography.

Collins, Robert O. The Southern Sudan, 1883-1898: A Struggle for Control. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962. Well-written and authoritative, though brief, account of the Mahdist jiḥad era in the Sudan.

Holt, Peter M. “The Mahdia in the Sudan, 1881-1898.” History Today (March, 1958): 187-195. A succinct summary of Holt’s monograph on the subject (see below). A must for a preliminary understanding of Mahdism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898: A Study of its Origins, Development, and Overthrow. 2d ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1970. Well-researched and written, a magisterial account of the Sudanese Mahdiya.

Shaked, Haim. The Life of the Sudanese Mahdi: A Historical Study of Kitab Sa’adat al-Mustahdi bi-Sirat al-Imam al-Mahdi… by Ismail b. ՙAbd al-Qadir. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978. Ismail’s sacred biography provides intimate details of the divine calling of Muḥammad Aḥmad and his “miraculous” victories in numerous battles in connection with his jiḥad.

Wingate, Francis R. Mahdism and the Egyptian Sudan. 1891. 2d ed. London: Frank Cass, 1968. A work by an officer of the Turkish-Egyptian government that is based on military and government documents, as well as some limited Mahdist sources. In spite of its occasional anti-Mahdi bias, this is a valuable account of the Mahdi’s campaigns by a distinguished contemporary.