Mahdī, al-

orig. Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn al-Sayyid ʽAbd Allāh

born Aug. 12, 1844

died June 22, 1885, Omdurman, Sudan

Sudanese religious and political leader.

The son of a shipbuilder in Nubia, he was brought up near Khartoum. After orthodox religious study, he turned to a mystical interpretation of Islam in the Sufi tradition, joined a religious brotherhood, and in 1870 moved to a hermitage with his disciples. In 1881 he proclaimed a divine mission to purify Islam and the governments that defiled it, targeting the Turkish ruler of Egypt and its dependency, Sudan. In 1885, after he defeated Charles George Gordon to capture Khartoum, he established a theocratic state, but he died the same year, probably of typhus. See also mahdi; Mahdist movement; Sufism.

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▪ Sudanese religious leader

Introduction

(Arabic: Right-Guided One),original name  Muḥammad Aḥmad Ibn As-sayyid ʿabd Allāh  

born Aug. 12, 1844

died June 22, 1885, Omdurman, Sudan

      creator of a vast Islāmic (Islāmic world) state extending from the Red Sea to Central Africa and founder of a movement that remained influential in The Sudan a century later. As a youth he moved from orthodox religious study to a mystical interpretation of Islām. In 1881 he proclaimed his divine mission to purify Islām and the governments that defiled it. His extensive campaign culminated in the capture of Khartoum (Jan. 26, 1885). He then established a theocratic state in the Sudan, with its capital at Omdurman.

Early life

      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 Islāmic law, he remained in the Sudan. Increasingly, he tended to a more mystic interpretation of Islām, in the Ṣūfī tradition, through study of the Qurʾān—the sacred Muslim scripture—and the practice of self-denial under the discipline of a religious brotherhood.

      He joined the Sammānīyah 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 Abā 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.

Rise to power

      The 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, for 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 aroused by the clumsy efforts of the government, which was hectored by the European powers, particularly Britain, to abolish the trade without delay; devout worshippers scandalized by the presence of non-Muslim Europeans as provincial governors and by their 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 these 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 unconquerable military machine. Gradually, during 1880 and the first weeks of 1881, he became convinced that the entire ruling class had deserted the Islāmic 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 Islām and to destroy all governments that defiled it. On June 29 he publicly assumed the title of al- mahdī, who, according to a tradition cherished by the oppressed throughout Islāmic history, would appear to restore Islām.

      The events that followed this announcement were among the most dramatic in the history of the Nile Valley. Within less than four years al-Mahdī, who set out from Abā 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-Ubayyiḍ (Ubayyiḍ, al-), provincial capital of Kordofan, and Bāra, a chief town of that province, fell after being besieged by al-Mahdī. 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 Qurʾān. 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 an intelligent and subtle propaganda. Counterpropaganda by the governor-general, ʿAbd al-Qādir Pasha Ḥilmī, a man of great resource, and by the ulama, the learned men, of Khartoum who mocked al-Mahdī's divine claims, failed miserably.

Capture of Khartoum. (Khartoum, Siege of)

      Al-Mahdī's crowning victory was the capture of Khartoum, on Jan. 26, 1885, after a resolute defense by its commander, Major General Charles George Gordon (Gordon, Charles George), who, against al-Mahdī's express order, was killed in the final assault. After many of the citizens of Khartoum had been massacred, al-Mahdī 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 Aḥmad ʿUrābī Pasha, it was an astonishing feat.

Religious empire.

      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 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-Mahdī 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 Islām. In the manner of the Prophet Muḥammad he appointed four caliphs, or deputies, to be the living successors of the four earliest caliphs in Islāmic history. Three of those appointed by al-Mahdī were Sudanese, including the caliph Abd Allāhʿ ibn Muḥammad, al-Mahdī's most trusted counselor and chief of staff; the fourth, Muḥammad al-Mahdī ibn as-Sanūsī, head of the Sanūsīyah order in the western desert, ignored al-Mahdī's invitation. Al-Mahdī 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-Mahdī'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 ʿAbd Allāh. 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-Mahdī's son ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān and the Mahdist community.

Assessment

      Al-Mahdī made a powerful impression on his Sudanese contemporaries, and the doubters were few. Recorded recollections are capricious, 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 access of indignation could make terrible; the sympathetic, sensitive face; 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-favourable picture.

      To the British at the time of the Mahdist wars, al-Mahdī 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-Mahdī was reflected in a bulky literature by European authors that distorted al-Mahdī's image for an entire generation. Ironically, it was General Horatio Herbert Kitchener's conquest of the 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.

Richard Leslie Hill

Additional Reading

F.R. Wingate, Mahdiism and the Egyptian Sudan (1891, reprinted 1968); A.B. Theobald, The Mahdīya (1951); P.M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 2nd ed. (1970); B. Farwell, Prisoners of the Mahdi (1967). Al-Mahdī's collected works in Arabic have been reprinted in a series of volumes under the auspices of the Sudan Government Central Archives, Khartoum.

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