source: Brittanica Online Encyclopedia

INTRODUCTION

The jihadist movement known as the Sudanese Mahdist was a colonial war of the late 19th century. It is frequently asserted that the Mahdist was due to the oppression and misgovernment of the Egyptians in the Sudan. This hypothesis has been too easily and uncritically accepted, since its fail to explain why the revolution began precisely when and where it did. Examples of oppression and corruption could be found in the Turco-Egyptian administration, although it may be queried whether these were as universal and offensive as it sometimes suggested. Corruption shocked the 19^th Century European visitors, but it had long been endemic in Ottoman and Egyptian administration [1].

It was fought between the Mahdist Sudanese and the Egyptian and later British forces. It has also been called the Anglo-Sudan War or the Sudanese Mahdist Revolt. The British have called their part in the conflict the Sudan Campaign.

To many modern Sudanese, he is Abu ‘l-Istiqlal, ‘The Father of Independence’, a nationalist leader who united the tribes of the Sudan by an Islamic ideology, drove out the alien rulers, and laid the foundations of the nation-state. This is an interpretation of the consequences of his revolt, rather than appreciation of his motives.

Another modern Sudanese view of Muhammad Ahmad sees in him a mujaddid, a renewer of the Muslim faith, come to purge Islam of faults and accretions. Much in Muhammad Ahmad’s own statements about his mission supports this opinion. A theme which occurs frequently in his pronouncement is that he was sent to establish the faith and the custom of the Prophet – the normative ideals of Islam. Seen from this point of view, Muhammad Ahmad is comparable to the Muslim reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia.

THE FOUNDER

The Mahdist or the Mahdia takes its name from its leader, Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd Allah. He was born in August 12, 1844 was a religious leader, in Sudan, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881, and declared a jihad against Egyptian authority in Sudan. He raised an army and led a successful religious war to topple the Egyptian occupation of Sudan. [2]

Under his religious authority the divided clans of the Baggara and their subject Fur tribesmen were united into an alliance dedicated to establishing an “Islamic” state as the first step in a universal Islamic state.

In the West he is most famous for defeating and later killing British general Charles George Gordon, in the fall of Khartoum. Ahmad himself died soon after.

Without his leadership his movement and state lost much of its momentum. Attempts to expand by invading neighbours were unsuccessful, and famine, disease, persecution and warfare killed off about half Sudan’s population.[3] In 1898 an invading British army destroyed the Mahdi’s army at the battle of Omdurman.

Muhammad Ahmad ibn ‘Abd Allah was the son of a Dunqulahwi boatbuilder who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Deeply religious from his youth, he was educated in one of the Sufi orders, the Sammaniyyah, but he later secluded himself on Aba Island in the White Nile to practice religious asceticism. In 1880 he toured Kordofan, where he learned of the discontent of the people and observed those actions of the government that he could not reconcile with his own religious beliefs.

Upon his return to Aba Island, he clearly viewed himself as a mujaddid, a “renewer” of the Muslim faith, his mission to reform Islam and return it to the pristine form practiced by the Prophet. To Muhammad Ahmad the orthodox ‘ulama’ who supported the administration were no less infidels than Christians, and, when he later lashed out against misgovernment, he was referring as much to the theological heresy as to secular maladministration.

Once he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad was regarded by the Sudanese as an eschatological figure who foreshadowed the end of an age of darkness (his arrival coincided with the end of a century—in this case, the 13th—of the Islamic calendar, a period traditionally associated with religious renewal) and heralded the beginnings of a new era of light and righteousness. Thus, as a divinely guided reformer and symbol, Muhammad Ahmad fulfilled the requirements of mahdi in the eyes of his supporters[4].

THE ANSAR

Surrounding the Mahdi were his followers, the ansar and foremost among them was ‘Abd Allah ibn Muhammad, who came from the Ta’a'ishah tribe of the Baqqarah Arabs and, as khalifah assumed the leadership of the Mahdist state upon the death of Muhammad Ahmad.

The holy men, the faqihs who had long lamented the sorry state of religion in the Sudan brought on by the legalistic and unappealing orthodoxy of the Egyptians, looked to the Mahdi to purge the Sudan of the faithless ones. Also in his following, more numerous and powerful than the holy men, were the merchants formerly connected with the slave trade. All had suffered from Gordon’s campaign against the trade, and all now hoped to reassert their economic position under the banner of religious war. Neither of these groups, however, could have carried out a revolution by themselves. The third and vital participants were the Baqqarah Arabs, the cattle nomads of Kordofan and Darfur who hated taxes and despised government. They formed the shock troops of the Mahdist revolutionary army, whose enthusiasm and numbers made up for its primitive technology.

Moreover, the government itself only managed to enhance the prestige of the Mahdi by its fumbling attempts to arrest him and proscribe his movement. By September 1882 the Mahdists controlled all of Kordofan, and at Shaykan on November 5, 1883, they destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under the command of a British colonel. After Shaykan, the Sudan was lost, and not even the heroic leadership of Gordon, who was hastily sent to Khartoum, could save the Sudan for Egypt. On January 26, 1885, the Mahdists captured Khartoum and massacred Major General Charles George Gordon and the defenders.

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 1881 and 1882 was torn by the nationalist revolt of Ahmad ‘Urabi Pasha, it was an astonishing feat.

RELIGIOUS EMPIRE

The withdrawal of the British expedition, which had failed to relieve Khartoum, left al-Mahdi free to consolidate his religious empire. He abandoned Khartoum, still heavy with the stench of the dead, and set up his administrative centre 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-Mahdi avoided the evil associations of the old capital. He directed every aspect of community and personal life by proclamations, sermons, warnings, and letters. In this endeavour he was helped by the capture, intact, of the government press and an abundance of stationery. But he confined himself to the enunciation of principles; most of the routine 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 Muhammad he 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 Muhammad, al-Mahdi’s most trusted counselor and chief of staff; the fourth, Muhammad al-Mahdi ibn as-Sanusi, head of the Sanusiyah 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 Muhammad, but only in the sense of continuing his work.

Al-Mahdi’s rule was brief. He was taken ill, possibly of typhus, and died in June 1885, only 41 years old. At his wish his temporal functions were assumed by the caliph ‘Abd Allah. Over his 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 ‘Abd ar-Rahman and the Mahdist community.

REFERENCE:

1. PM Holt & MW Daly, A History of Sudan, (England: Pearson Education Limited, 2000)
2. The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898: A Study of Its Origins, Development, and Overthrow. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.
3. Mahmoud, Mahgoub El-Tigani. “The Mahdist Correctional System in the Sudan: Aspects of Ideology and Politics,” Africa Today.
4. Wikipedia contributors, “Muhammad Ahmad,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Muhammad_Ahmad&oldid=196865015 (accessed April 1, 2008).
5. “Islamic world.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-26940>. (accessed 2 April 2008)

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[1] 1.Mahmoud, Mahgoub El-Tigani. “The Mahdist Correctional System in the Sudan: Aspects of Ideology and Politics,” Africa Today.

[2] PM Holt & MW Daly, A History of Sudan, (England: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), page 76.

[3] Sudan : Country Studies – Federal Research Division, Library of Congress: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sdtoc.html (accessed March 24, 2008)

[4] “Islamic world.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-26940>. (accessed 2 April 2008)

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