By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Present 2002 Sudanese Mahdist Situation

The story of the Sudanese Mahdists fighting against the British made it into popular culture through movies such as 1966's Khartoum, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, and more recently, if less impressive cinematically, The Four Feathers (2002). Another reason why we use this as an initial case study for our survey about the background of al-Quida is that since this particular Mahdists movement happened fairly recently in historical terms and affected two great empires, the British and the Ottoman, a great deal more is known about Sudanese Mahdism and its founder than any its predecessors.

Muhammad Ahmad b. Abd Allah was born in northwestern Sudan in 1844 CE/1260 AH. Besides the above three pictured books published the past 12 months  see also ;Muhammad Said al-Qaddal, al-Imam al-Mahdi: Muhammad Ahmad ibn 'Abd Allah, 1844-1885,(Beirut: Dar al-Jil,1992), upon which this chapter draws heavily; P.M. Holt and M.W. Daly, The History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979); PM. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898 (London: Oxford Univer­sity Press, 1970) and "Al-Mahdiyya," EI2; Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 1820-1881 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); Gabriel Warburg, Historical Discord in the Nile Valley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992) and Egypt and the Sudan: Studies in History and Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1985); Richard Dekmejian and Margaret Wysz.omirski, "Charismatic Leadership in Islam: The Mahdi of the Sudan," Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 2 (March 1972), pp. 193-214; John Voll, "The Sudanese Mahdi: Frontier Fundamentalist," International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979), pp. 145-66. The Sudanese Mahdi s writings have been collected and edited in seven volumes by Muhammad Ibrahim Abu Salim, Al-Athar al-Kamilah lil-Imam al-Mahdi (Khartoum: Dar Jamï at al-Khartum lil-Nashr,1990).

Sudan-today the largest state, territorially, in Africa-was then a remote province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, administered as a subprovince of Egypt. Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman general, had become the ruler, or khedive, of Egypt by the early 1820s. Primarily the members of the former Ottoman administration in Egypt, the Mamluks, who had fled south up the Nile after Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798.

Ottoman Turkish contained a number of loan words from Persian, such as the one whence khedive came: khidiw, "lord" or "monarch." Under Muhammad Ali it replaced the Ottoman misir beylerbeyi, "governor-general of Egypt." See Hill, p. 116, note 2.

His ultimately futile effort to replace the Ottoman dynasty with his own included conquering south, into Sudan, as a means of eliminating potential political troublemakers, as well as exploiting the natural resources of Sudan and central Africa. The goal was to enrich Egypt and fund the military buildup requisite for his imperial dreams in northeastern Africa and perhaps even across the Red Sea into Arabia. (See Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali, Cambridge Univerity Press, 1984, especially pp. 196-264.)

Muhammad Ali's son Isma'iI began the Egyptian conquest of Sudan, and by the time the future Mahdi was born in the 1840s much of what is now Sudan had been recognized as de facto Egyptian territory by the Ottoman sultans in something of a fait accompli, since there was little they could have done otherwise. On this process in the 1840s but especially later in the century, see F.A.K. Yasamee, "The Ottoman Empire, the Sudan and the Red Sea Coast, 1883-1889, " in Selim Deringil and Sinan Kuneralp, eds., Studies on Ottoman Diplomatic History, vol. 5 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990), pp. 87-102.

Egyptian territorial ambitions in Sudan quieted for a few decades after Muhammad Ali's death in 1848 but were roused again with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Another Isma'il, this one Muhammad Ali's grandson, sent an army with British officers farther into Sudan and incorporated even more of it into Egypt's ambit.

Modern ideas of pan-African brotherhood notwithstanding, as far as the inhabitants of the Sudan were concerned, they had been conquered by foreigners: not by the British; rather, by Ottoman Turks, and Egyptians. Albeit fellow Muslims, the Egyptians and Turks were seen primarily as exploiters, profiting from onerous taxation, samgh (gum Arabic), cotton, and slaves. Although legal under nineteenth-century Sudanese Islamic law, the slave trade had been criminalized in 1857 by the Ottomans in most of their empire following intense British pressure. This was a dilatory aspect of the famous Ottoman tanzimat reforms, begun in 1839, which were aimed at modernizing the empire. See M.E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792-1923 (London and New York: Longman, 1987), pp. 108-14; F. Robert Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805-1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).

In 1880 interdiction of the African slave trade was elevated to an even higher status with the Anglo-Ottoman Convention for Suppression of the African Slave Trade. On slavery and the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire see Ehud Toledano,The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression: 1840-1890 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Y Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800-1909 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Reda Mowafi, Slavery, Slave Trade and Abolition Attempts in Egypt and the Sudan,1820-1882 (Malmo: Scandinavian University Press, 1981).

In Sudan, however, unlike in Istanbul or Cairo, attempting to wipe out the slave trade was considered not only a contravention of Islamic law but a heavy-handed, imperial infringement on a lucrative means of living for many. Sudanese traders bought or captured slaves, theoretically non-Muslim, from farther south in Africa-a practice that in some fashion continues even today. Opposition to this slaving ban would prove a key plank in Muhammad Ahmad's Mahdist platform.

When Egypt tottered on the edge of defaulting on its debt owed to European banks for the funding of the Suez Canal, the British and French took over the Caisse de la Dette Publique in order to supervise payments. Part of this political maneuver included the installation of a British gen­eral, the famous Charles George Gordon, as governor of Sudan in 1879. See Richard Hill, A Biographical Dictionary of the Sudan (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1951); John H. Waller, Gordon of Khartoum: The Saga of a Victorian Hero (New York: Athenaeum, 1988); Holt, The Mahdist State.

Gordon had fought in the Taiping Rebellion in China in the 1860s and had previously worked in Sudan for the Ottoman Egyptian regime in a num­ber of capacities, including as a staff officer supervising former American army officers (both Confederate and Union) serving in the Egyptian army. Pierre Crabites, Americans in the Egyptian Army (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938). Gordon lasted in the job as governor of Sudan until 1880.

In 1881-82 the British gave up stage-managing events behind the scenes and simply moved onto the stage by taking over Egypt. The alleged proximate cause was the attempted coup against the government by Urabi Pasha, a disaffected Arab Egyptian army officer chafing under the Turkish yoke. The British, in order to secure their Suez Canal route to India as well as maintain the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire-their main ally against the Russians-occupied Egypt. See Yapp, pp. 221-28; Robert T. Harrison, Gladstone's Imperialism in Egypt: Techniques of Domination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), especially chapter 3, "Egypt before the Invasion," pp. 31-66.

Preoccupation with managing this occupation would distract both the British and the Ottomans from the Mahdist movement to the south in Sudan when it erupted in 1881. Sudan's incorporation, between 1820 and 1881, into the Ottoman sphere of influence had profound religious, political, and economic repercussions and set the stage for Muhammad Ahmad's Mahdist revolt. The Ottomans tightened their hold not just economically, as mentioned, but religiously by appointment of politically sympathetic ulama and gadis. The best source on this is Abd Allah Ali Ibrahim, Al-Sira' bayna al-Mahdi wa-al-'Ulama' (Khartoum: Dar Nubar, 1994.

Only religious scholars who had the Ottoman seal of approval could deliver formal religio-legal opinions, or fatwas. The Turks even sent some of these muftis, or "renderers of fatwas," to study at al-Azhar in Cairo. Certain Sufi orders were officially sanctioned, too, while others were disregarded. Muhammad Ahmad's order, the Sammaniyah, was one of the latter and competed intensely with another one, the Khatmiyah (also known as the Mirghaniyah), which allied with the Ottoman regime . For a study of all the mystical orders in Sudan, see Ali Salih Karrar, The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992); and for a look at them in the total context of African Islam, see B.G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

In sum, the Ottomans also practiced a divide-and-rule administration in which tribe was set against tribe, Sufi order against Sufi order, and trader against trader. Some tribes were forcibly relocated in order to weaken them. Others were socially marginalized, and many of their members became dependent on the charitable Sufis for food. The Ottoman Egyptian regime thus had six decades to sow resentment among the peoples of Sudan, and as Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad would not hesitate to exploit this-and he did so quite successfully.

Muhammad Ahmad, the future Mahdi, was raised in a family of Nile boat-builders on the outskirts of Khartoum, modern Sudan's capital. This meant they were probably a notch above poverty level for the time. His parents died before his eighth birthday, about the time he entered a khalwah  or Qur'anic school. Khalwah in most Islamic contexts refers to Sufi "retreat" but in nineteenth­century Sudan it also meant a religious school. See Holt, The Mahdist State, pp. 18ff. 96. Al-Qaddal, p. 45.

Muhammad Ahmad's brothers wanted him at home helping build boats, however, so they forced him to leave the khalwah, whereupon he fled back. When his brothers kidnapped him again, he went on a hunger strike until they relented and let him resume his theological studies. "Such stubborness, allied with his intelligence and aptitude, would have led him to become an alim had not his path been redirected-into that of the Mahdi. When he was about 17 Muhammad Ahmad went to Katranj, south of Khartoum, to study with Sufi scholars there. He left sometime in 1863-64, seemingly with the intention of making the long trek north to Cairo in order to matriculate at al-Azhar. However, in one of those twists of fate that prove decisive in history, he was convinced to stop in Birbir, north of Khartoum, and study with Shaykh Muhammad al-Khayyir Abd Allah Khujali (d. 1888). The servant would later become the master, as Mahdi, and appoint his old teacher the governor of that region of Sudan.

He would never travel any farther down the Nile. While studying at Khujali s school, Muhammad Ahmad at first refused any of the food provided there because it was provided as part of a stipend from the Turco-Egyptian gov­ernment; but he was eventually persuaded otherwise by his shaykh and by hunger. It was at this time that Muhammad Ahmad read and was profoundly influenced by al-Ghazali s book Revival of the Religious Sciences. In fact al-Ghazali also affected another  Sunni Mahdi, Ibn Tumart. (Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, And Osama Bin Laden, 2005, p. 48)

Around this time Muhammad Ahmad was married for the first time, to his cousin, Fatimah bint Hajj. (Bint means "daughter of.") There is an account that when she tried to hide his religious books and persuade him to get a real job, he divorced her. Then for a number of years and at the behest of Muhammad Sharif, another Sufi shaykh under whom he was studying, Muhammad Ahmad became a peripatetic pupil, traveling throughout Sudan and learning from various Sufi masters. One prosaic byproduct of this lifestyle would have been gain­ing familiarity with the condition of the Sudanese people throughout the land under the Ottoman Egyptian regime. He sometimes gathered and sold firewood in order to support himself, but he refused to do business with anyone who sold wine, thereby gaining a reputation for piety. He also seems to have totally broken with his brothers and sister at this point, sub­stituting the Sammaniyah mystical order as his surrogate family. Finally he settled near Khartoum, built a small mosque and khalwah, and took up teaching. He married again, to one Fatimah bint Ahmad Sharfi, and then moved with her to her home, Aba Island in the White Nile. The White Nile and the Blue Nile are the two rivers that flow north out of East-Central Africa to meet at Khartoum and form the Nile proper before it flows on to Egypt. Aba Island in the White Nile is thus southwest of Khartoum.

There Muhammad Ahmad's public ministry as Mahdi can be said to have begun. At a wedding celebration for one of the daughters of Muhammad Sharif, Muhammad Ahmad openly criticized the music and dancing. This resulted in a break between the two Muhammads, in which the future Mahdi's intolerance of frivolity may have been only one symptom of the disease of generational rift in Sudanese society, between the old guard that endured foreign rule and the younger one that eventually could not or would not.( R. Sean O'Fahey, "Sufism in Suspense," in Dejong and Radtke, eds., Islamic Mysticism Contested, pp. 267-82.)

Muhammad Ahmad joined the retinue of another Sufi teacher, al-Qurashi Wad' al-Zayn, in 1878 and took as his second wife this shaykh's daughter. Back on his Aba Island retreat he became increasingly disenchanted with mere world-renouncing Sufism and began to attract his own band of disciples who thought likewise. In this period of transition to intense religious activism he is said to have collapsed while reading a Qur'anic verse that says that "on the Day of Judgement, the people will be scattered like Moths.”

In 1879, at about the same time his latest mentor, al-Qurashi, died, Muhammad Ahmad met Abd Allah b. Muhammad (or later, to the Brits, "Abdullahi") who would become eventually his Mahdist caliph. This fellow seems to have been scouring Sudan for someone to whom to swear fealty as the Mahdi. In 1873 he had written a letter to al-Zubayr Pasha Rahman Mansur (d. 1913), a slave trader and strong man who had gained a position in the Turco-Egyptian administration, hailing him as the Mahdi. AI-Zubayr, no doubt realizing the danger of such a claim, rebuffed Abd Allah b. Muhammad. The incident with al-Zubayr had shown that'Abdullahi was seeking a Sudanese Mahdi.

Little did Abd Allah know that he would before too long get his wish in the person of Muhammad Ahmad. All these years of travel and trial look as if they convinced Muhammad Ahmad that he met all the requirements for the role of Mahdi. If not now, when? If not him, who else? In 1879-80 he embarked on phase 1, as it were, of his transition by secretly informing his disciples that he was the Mahdi. Doing this surreptitiously tranformed Muhammad Ahmad from a mere Sufi propagandist on the periphery of the extant system to a harsh indeed, revolutionary-critic from the outside. He was reinforced in this fateful decision by disembodied voices that addressed him as "O Mahdi of God." Eventually these voices gave way to the hadrahs so characteris­tic of mystical rebels in which the Prophet of Islam and deceased Sufi shaykhs appear, validating the claim to Mahdihood. Of course, much like Christian leaders or even rank-and-file who claim the authority of the Holy Spirit as sanction for their teachings and actions, a Muslim leader who adduces such subjective validation is difficult to refute: who, after all, is to say the prophet Muhammad is not appearing to such a one as Muhammad Ahmad?

Phase 2 was a trip in 1880 to southwestern Sudan, the Kurdufan region-the same area of that country so riven with strife today. Clad in a traditional white Sufi jubbah, a long outer garment open in front and having wide sleeves, he carried only a clay jug, a staff, and prayer beads. Fol­lowers flocked to him as he walked. Eventually he issued a formal da'wah, or "summons," to support him as the Mahdi. The resonance of a call to dà wah in Islamic history cannot be overstated. It is "the invitation to adopt the cause of some individual ... claiming the right to the imamate over the Muslims; that is to say civil and spiritual authority, vindicating a politico-religious principle which, in the final analysis, aims at founding or restoring an ideal theocratic state and which often is one of the means of founding a new empire. At this point the dà wah seems to have been extended only to the people of Kurdufan. Finally, however, in October 1880 (Rajab 1298) Muhammad Ahmad openly proclaimed himself the Mahdi and broadened the Mahdist dà wah to include all of Sudan and, eventually, the entire Islamic world. He returned to his home base of Aba Island, and almost immediately delegations from all over Sudan began making the pilgrimage there. He had drawn up mawathiq, "contracts," avowing that he was the Mahdi for these representatives to sign. Although some were skeptical that the Mahdi should be only 36 years of age, most inked their acceptance and returned home to await marching orders.

Some of the Mahdi s writings fell into government hands about this time, but the Ottoman Egyptian leadership saw him as merely a "deluded Sufi" and ignored the warnings of Shaykh Muhammad Sharif-Muhammad Ahmad's former teacher-that this man and his movement should be taken seriously. The sixteenth-century Vatican dismissal of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, as merely a "drunken German" comes to mind here. The governor of Sudan, Ra'uf, did write a letter of inquiry to Muhammad Ahmad, who replied that he was indeed the Mahdi. The governor then asked for the assistance of the ulama, who decided to send an official religious delegation to Aba Island in order to interrogate this pretentious shaykh and bring him back to Khartoum for re-education. The religious establishment foolishly believed Muhammad Ahmad would yield. The governor's assistant, Muhammad b. Abi Saud, headed up this delegation, which consisted of relatives and erstwhile students of Muhammad Ahmad, accompanied by 25 soldiers. Plan A was to religiously intimidate Muhammad Ahmad into abandoning his Mahdist fan­tasy; should that fail, Plan B was to seize him by force and take him back to Khartoum, short-circuiting his movement.

In August 1881 the anti-Mahdi mission reached Muhammad Ahmad's headquarters. Rebuffed when he requested that Muhammad Ahmad return with them to Khartoum, Ibn Abi al-Sa'ud quoted the Quran: "O Believers! Obey God and His Messenger and those entrusted with authority among you." Muhammad Ahmad riposted with an audacious restatement of his claim: "I am the one entrusted with authority among you and you owe obedience to me, as does the entire community of Muhammad; so heed what I bring you from God." The governor's representative then warned him that this would mean war with the government, whereupon the Mahdi pointed to his followers and scoffed, "I will kill you with such as these." Then he asked his band, "Are you ready to die for the path of God?" And they shouted as one, "Yes!" After a last-ditch failed attempt to bribe away some of the Mahdi s followers, the gov­ernment taskforce returned  to Khartoum and recommended armed intervention.

A battalion-sized unit of about 800 men was then dispatched, again under al-Saud's command, in August 1881. The Mahdists in Muhammad Ahmad's retinue at that time numbered at most 300, most armed with swords, lances, and staffs-none with firearms. Yet somehow they repulsed the Turco-Egyptian troops, losing only 12 men and gaining a cache of rifles in the process. Thus the first armed clash between the troops of the Ottoman sultan and those of the Mahdi ended in the latter's victory. But Muhammad Ahmad was not yet prepared to follow up this w with a full-blown Mahdist uprising. Instead, he decided on the tirr honored mode of continuing the struggle while consolidating Mahd power: hijrah. Like Ibn Tumart, who similarly faced a powerful and he tile establishment regime, Muhammad Ahmad took his followers out the government's purview, much as Ibn Turnart had done with his su porters and in similar imitation of the prophet Muhammad and the eai Muslims. In the nineteenth century African Islam, in particular, saw number of such hijrahs led by powerful, charismatic religio-political fi ures, albeit none who claimed to be the Mahdi.

The most important these include the aforementioned (1) Usman don Fodio, founder of t: Sokoto caliphate; (2) Abd al-Qadir of Algeria; (3) Muhammad Abd All Hasan of Somalia; and (4) al-Hajj Umar al-Futi (d. 1864), in what is nc Mali and Burkina Fasso (western Africa), who claimed to be a mujadd as well as "minister" of the Mahdi. This is "minister" in the European governmental official sense, not in the normal American understanding of "Protestant religious figure." The Arabic term is wazir.

Why did the hijrah work so we and resonate so strongly, with African Muslims? Perhaps one reas, relates to the peripherality of Islam on that continent. For unlike the cc Islamic lands (Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran), in Africa it was pos ble for a renegade religious leader and his retinue to flee to an area n ruled by a Muslim state, where purification of the community could to place free from the taint of the apostate official brand of Islam-an ar where the government's troops were loathe to go. Also, nothing bon people together more tightly and quickly than sharing hardship, and perhaps the hijrah enabled follower's of a new Islamic dispensation, w] hailed from disparate tribal and societal backgrounds, to forge for thei selves a new group solidarity.

When Muhammad Ahmad, now surnamed "al-Mahdi," decided repeat the hijrah paradigm, he was probably doing so not only to bi time and muster his forces but, perhaps just as important, to fix in his fi lowers' minds the legitimacy of the jihad he was about to launch again the most powerful Islamic state of the time, the Ottoman Empire. Ha times lay ahead, but-led by the Mahdi-they would ultimately prew Muhammad Ahmad also reminded his supporters of the prophetic comunity by calling his followers Ansar, the term for the first Muslims w follow Muhammad, and his sub commanders "caliphs," in imitation of t successors to the prophet as rulers of the early Islamic state. "The Mahd use of [such] prophetic parallels was not a blind antiquarianism. He a his followers were deliberately reenacting in their own persons the s ferings and triumphs of the early days of Islam and the consciousness playing a part in this great drama was an inspiration to them.

Thus, on August 15, 1881, the Mahdists embarked on their hijrah, th "Medina" being Qadir in southwestern Sudan. Their ranks swelled alo the way as many Sudanese joined. The government launched several attar on the fleeing Mahdists, only to be defeated each time. On October 24,18 the fourth of the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah, 1298, they arrived. Now they would gather their strength, send the Mahdist summons to other parts of Sudan by means of khalayah, revolutionary Mahdist cells whose job was to convert local notables, like tribal and Sufi leaders. All the Mahdist faithful would then await the year 1300 so they could conquer the apostate regime in Khartoum.

In summer 1881 the Mahdi began his offensive. His forces attacked al-Ubayd, the capital of Kurdufan Province, and finally took it in January 1883. The Mahdists plundered the city while their leader prayed in the main city mosque. Muhammad Ahmad now controlled Kurdufan, which meant that the more southwesterly provinces of Darfur and Bahr al-Ghazal were lost to Khartoum's control as well. Furthermore, Mahdist forces captured even larger caches of modern weapons, including artillery as well as rifles, and began to deploy them. Meanwhile, the Madhist lieutenant Uthman Diqna was recruiting followers in the mountains of the Red Sea coast, thus opening another front against the Ottoman Egyptian regime in Sudan.

Diqna's broadening of the rebellion into the Ottoman Red Sea littoral prompted Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II to take the Mahdists seriously, if not religiously, then geopolitically. The Ottoman sultan was quite concerned about rebel contagion in his Arab domains for two reasons. First, the Hijaz, the western coastal strip of Arabia bordering the Red Sea directly across from Sudan and Egypt, contains the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina and so is of paramount importance to any Muslim ruler in terms of both religious legitimacy and income derived from pilgrims making the hajj. See Joshua Teitelbaum, The Rise and Fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia (New York: New York University Press, 2001), especially chapter 2, "The Social and Political Legacy of Ottoman Rule in the Hijaz, 1840-1916."

With forays into the Red Sea coastal region of Sudan, the Mahdi threatened the Hijaz. Furthermore, the Ottomans had already had to put down the Wahhabi revolts in Arabia earlier in the nineteenth century."' Nonetheless, the Sultan eventually decided against sending troops from Istanbul to deal with the Mahdi because he secretly suspected that the British were manipulating the Mahdists for their own ends and he refused to play into London's dirty imperial hands.Thus, the Egyptians and the British, fresh from their occupation, were left to deal with Muhammad Ahmad and his Mahdist multitudes.

In 1883 the British sent several thousand Egyptian and British troops under General Willam Hicks up the Nile. They were routed by a Mahdist force of some 20,000. With this stunning victory over the world's fore­most imperial power Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi gained legitimacy throughout the Islamic world. Delegations came to him from Tunis, Morocco, and India, and even from the semi-autonomous ruler of the Hijaz, all of which could only have infuriated the Ottomans even more.

The British made one last effort to salvage Sudan by sending General Charles Gordon, the former governor, to Khartoum in January 1884. Gordon enlisted the establishment ulama to renew their propaganda fusillades against the Mahdi, but to no avail. Interestingly, one twist in this regard was Gordon's order that in the mosques the imams read from al-Bukhari's anthology of traditions-the most authoritative collection and one that contains no mention of the Mahdi.

However, the time for a successful ideological and rhetorical refutation of Muhammad Ahmad as the Mahdi was long past. The issue had become a military one. The Mahdists besieged Khartoum in August 1884 with, it was said, 200,000 men. The Mahdi offered clemency to those in the city if they would surrender, and he is said to have personally written to Gordon at least eight times imploring him to do so."' The general, perhaps mindful of the role he would need to establish for Charlton Heston to follow, stead­fastly refused. On January 26, 1885, the final assault began and the Mahdist army soon entered the city in triumph, killing and beheading Gordon in the process-against the Mahdi s express orders. Muhammad Ahmad himself waited until Friday to enter the city so that he could go directly to the main mosque for prayers. The long road from boat-building youth to Sufi novice and master to Mahdi and ruler of Sudan was now complete.

Within five months, however, the Mahdi would be bedridden, most likely with malaria exacerbated by the pace of his writings (seven volumes, collected) and, of course, conquests. The modern world's only successful Mahdi to date died on June 22, 1885.

The Sudanese Mahdi possessed a personality charismatic enough to weld together quite different strains of his society-disenfranchised mystics, slave traders, forcibly relocated tribes, and even some nomadic herders-and sufficient military and political acumen to exploit the lack of legitimate control from Istanbul, through Cairo, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Muhammad Ahmad's Mahdist polity would survive him by some 13 years, when it would fall victim to colonial European rivalries in northeastern Africa.

What administrative form did the Mahdist state take? (Aharon Layish, "The Mahdi s Legal Methodology as a Mechanism for Adapting the Shari a in the Sudan to Political and Social Purposes," in Garcia-Arenal, ed., Mahdisme et millenarisme en Islam, pp. 221-37.)

Before his death the Sudanese Mahdi had appointed caliphs, a conscious reimaging of the early Islamic community's polity, like so much of his Mahdist career. Muhammad Ahmad's right-hand man, Abd Allah, was first among equals and commanded the army: he received the title "righteous caliph," equating him with Abu Bakr, the first caliph. Two other caliphal posts were given to, respectively, Ali b. Muhammad Hilu and Muhammad Sharif b. Hamid. The fourth slot was offered by the Mahdi to Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi, the son of the famous founder of the Libyan Sanusiyah Sufi order, but he declined.

Under the caliphs were umara, "commanders"; umalan, "viceregents"; nuwwab, "deputies"; and umana, "proxies." Commanders were military officials, whereas viceregents headed areas without military garrisons. Deputies were charged with administering Islamic law in tandem with qadis, "judges." The proxies were organized into a majlis, or "assembly," and given responsibility for temporal affairs. He also appointed a supreme qadi or judge, who was to base his legal decisions on the Qur'an and Hadith and the Mahdi s writings.

Muhammad Ahmad also repudiated the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate, declaring both roles of the empire's leader illegitimate. For most of Ottoman history the rulers had used the title "sultan" for their supreme political and military leader. With the conquest of Egypt and the Hijaz in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultans had laid claim to the greater title of "caliph," but had not actually applied and trumpeted this role until the nineteenth century when Sultan Abdülhamid II needed a means of uniting Sunni Islam against outside threats, in particular European imperialism. Muhammad Ahmad's rejection of the Ottoman caliph-sultan was tantamount to political treason and religious apostasy rolled into one.

The Sudanese Mahdi also dissolved all Sufi orders-an ironic move, given the crucial support he received from a number of them. The primary reason seems to have been to ensure that loyalty to one's Sufi shaykh would not undermine loyalty to the Mahdi. He also tried to abolish the four Sunni schools of law (madhahib) on the grounds that they had not existed in the early Islamic community.

Islamic law, as defined by Muhammad Ahmad's own esoteric exegesis and ascetic proclivities, was strictly enforced. This law was to be found in the Qur'an and Traditions, filtered through his own Mahdist ilham, or "direct revelation"; this, of course, meant a total rejection of previous Islamic religious verdicts. Muhammad Ahmad's Mahdist jurisprudence thus resembles modern Islamic fundamentalism in its rejection of what Islamic scholars have had to say over the centuries and its ostensible dependence on only Qur'an and Hadith. However, the Mahdi s direct divine or prophetic revelation made him, if anything, even less prone to doubts than a modern fundamentalist Muslim leader.

The apostasy of falling away from belief in Muhammad Ahmad as the Mahdi was punishable by death, at least while the Mahdi still lived. This was tantamount to making belief in the extant Mahdi a sixth pillar of Islam, to go along with the historical five: profession of faith in one god, Allah, and in Muhammad his messenger; prayer five times daily; the pilgrimage to Mecca; fasting from sunup to sundown during the month of Ramadan; and charity for the poor.

Even day-to-day moral behavior was constrained in a draconian fashion."' Drinking wine or smoking earned the perpetrator 80 lashes and prison time. Libel and swearing in public were also whippable offenses, as were insults like calling someone "son of a dog." The latter could also result in 80 lashes and incarceration. Games like backgammon were outlawed as frivolous. Women were banned from the marketplace and main roads and when they did appear in public had to wear the hijab-the head and par­tial face covering-and avoid nonrelative males. Mahdist women were also to avoid "imitating masculine manners," except when fighting unbelievers. Divorce was mandated for anyone married to a Turk or a spouse who doubted Muhammad Ahmad's Mahdiyah.

On a number of points, though, Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi changed Islamic law, which was his right to do as the Mahdi. He asserted, for example, that as Mahdi he could take more than the traditional four wives. In a perhaps less self-serving interpretation, Muhammad Ahmad changed Islamic inheritance law such that a widow whose husband had been "martyred" fighting against the Turks was entitled to his entire estate, not just a portion (the dead man's brothers getting the lion's share) as the Qur'an mandates."' Thus, whereas the Mahdi was quite austere in most of his renderings of Islamic law, his treatment of women's inheritance is perhaps a kinder, gentler exception.

On the fiscal and economic front a central public treasury, the bayt al-mal, was established based on a common storehouse for booty that had been set up before the Mahdists took Khartoum. Much land belonging to the former Ottoman Egyptian regime was put under the aegis of the bayt al-mal. The Mahdi and then the Caliph Abdullah utilized this as a means of controlling commerical activity as much as possible, in something of a Mahdist command economy. Enormous amounts of gold, silver, livestock, and slaves, as well as munitions and arms, were handed over to the treas­ury and then redistributed as the Mahdi saw fit. As for taxes, the Mahdist government imposed them under the euphemism of zakat, or Islamic charitable contributions. The Sudanese Mahdiyah dedicated most of its revenues to the military, salaries, and pensions.

On the foreign policy front, before his death Muhammad Ahmad engaged in perhaps the first instance of Pan-Islamic activity. He tried to ally with both the Sokoto Caliphate of West Africa (now Nigeria) and with the Sanusiyah Sufi order in North-Central Africa (now Libya). Both attempts were rebuffed. In 1888-89 Abd Allah sent an army to invade Egypt, but it was thrown back by British and Egyptian troops. The Mahdi was gone, but the Mahdist state was still expansionist. By the 1890s, however, European imperial designs in Africa could no longer tolerate the Mahdist state. In the last quarter of the nineteenth cen­tury the "Scramble for Africa" resulted in almost every square mile of the continent's territory coming under European rule-that is, what had not already in the preceding centuries. Eventually only Liberia, Ethiopia, and Sudan's Mahdiyah were left independent: the first because it had been founded by . freed American slaves, the second because of European respect for its ancient allegiance to Christianity. In 1896 Britain, constru­ing French and Italian encroachments into east and central Africa as potential threats to Her Majesty's Suez Canal and India access, sent a large army (18,000 Egyptians, 7,000 Brits) under General Horatio Herbert Kitchener (d. 1916) into Sudan.

Sudanese Mahdism was perceived as a very real threat to the Ottoman Empire even if, in retrospect, it really was not a serious danger to the imperial center. Muhammad Ahmad's movement did succeed in detaching the province of Sudan from imperial control, however, threatening Egypt (arguably the empire's most important province, undoubtedly its most important Arab one), and alarming Istanbul because as Sultan Abdülhamid II fully realized, it had for its stated aim the destruction of the Ottoman government:

The sole and single cause of the Sudanese revolution is the seditious political notion of establishing an independent Arab government in opposition to the Empire, the Caliphate and the Sultanate, and of transferring the Islamic Caliphate there. Both the rebels and those who encourage them-secretly or openly, by word or deed-have taken this notion as their goal, and they have many servants and supporters in Egypt, in Istanbul and in other parts of the Ottoman Empire.''

Accordingly, the Ottoman Empire responded to the Sudanese Mahdist uprising on two fronts: military and ideological, the latter mainly, but not entirely, religious. The former was greatly hobbled, however, by real as well as perceived concerns regarding international diplomacy and politics, especially vis-à-vis the British. Egypt was de jure if not de facto part of the Ottoman Empire and Sudan was administered, then, twice removed: orders from Istanbul had to pass through the government of Muhammad Ali and then his successor sons before being applied on the ground in Khartoum and environs by the hukumdar there.

The military dimension of the Ottoman sultan's anti-Mahdist response, as we have seen, was a disaster. Perhaps if the sultan had been more willing to commit substantial numbers of his own troops instead of relying upon whatever the khedive in Cairo could be ordered to scrounge together, reinforced by relatively small detachments of British soldiers, the Mahdism of Muhammad Ahmad might have been nipped in the bud. The Ottoman military may have been no match for those of the British or the French, but it could probably have defeated the fervent but illequipped hordes following Muhammad Ahmad. But Abdülhamid II's paranoia regarding the British prevented him from doing so.

Diplomatically, the sultan refused to deal with Mahdist Sudan as a separate issue from Egypt. By 1882 he feared that' sending Turkish troops directly to fight the Mahdi's forces would legitimize the British occupation of Egypt and permanently detach Sudan from its northern neighbor, thereby granting the khedives the de jure independence they had been seeking, as well as the de facto kind they already possessed (in relation to Istanbul, if not London)." After the Mahdi died in 1885, the Ottomans and British jointly attempted to open a diplomatic channel to the Mahdist caliph, Abd Allah, but to no avail. The Mahdiyah in Sudan remained as a military and ideological threat to the sultan's theoretical dominions in Egypt and his still real ones across the Red Sea in the Hijaz until the British finally ended the matter in 1898.

While Muhammad Ahmad was still alive, the most active front upon which the Ottomans engaged him was that of ideology, and more specifically that of religious principles. Ottoman newspapers were ordered to describe the Sudanese Mahdi as a saki, or "rebel."" More important, the religious establishment in Egypt and pre-Mahdist Sudan was enlisted in an Islamic propaganda war with Muhammad Ahmad.

As soon as Muhammad Ahmad showed up on the radar screen of the governor in Khartoum, religious officials, including ulama, muftis, and qadis, were summoned to rebut the alleged Mahdi's manshurat, or "proclamations." This was the second of the double-barreled attack on him, the other being military. Before long the center of Sunni orthodoxy, al-Azhar in Cairo, was being prompted to issue deprecating fatwas about the pretender in Sudan. Three prominent Ottoman-appointed religious officials in Sudan itself composed letters opposing Muhammad Ahmad's dà wah, which were then circulated throughout the country. Sayyid Ahmad al-Azhari b. al-Shaykh Isma'il al-Wali al-Kurdufani, the Shaykh al-Islam for western Sudan, wrote "General Advice to the People of Islam about the Attack on the Obedience to the Ummah." Shaykh al-Amin al-Darir, Shaykh al-Islam for the eastern part of the province,20 composed "Guidance for the Seekers of Direction regarding the Mahdi and the False Mahdi." And Mufti Shakir, head of the Appeals Court of Sudan, wrote his own untitled refutation of Muhammad Ahmad. When General Gordon was reinstalled as governor in Khartoum, he had even more ulama issue anti-Madist fatwas and even went so far as to convince the religious establishment to allow the Muslim soldiers under him to break the fast during Ramadan, citing as precedent that the prophet Muhammad's troops had done so while besieging Mecca. Gordon also convinced the imams to read from the hadith collection of al-Buhkari in the mosques, presumbly because it contains no references to the Mahdi.

In September 1884 yet another fatwa was issued, at Gordon's request, under the names of Shaykh al-Amin Muhammad, chief of the ulama of Sudan; the aforementioned Mufti Shakir; Shaykh Husayn al-Majdi, Professor of Religious Sciences at the University of Khartoum; Muhammad Khawjali, Supreme Qadi of Sudan; and Muhammad Musa, Mufti of the Sudanese Majlis. Far from dissuading Muhammad Ahmad and his followers, however, these establishment fusillades simply reinforced their conviction that he was the Mahdi.

In all these fulminations against the Sudanese Mahdi, 13 major points stand out. First, appeal was made to Hadith that the Mahdi would come from Arabia, and more specifically from the Hijaz, most likely from Medina. Muhammad Ahmad, to the contrary, was from Dongola in Sudan. Then, it was observed that the traditions clearly stated the Mahdi would be of the family of the prophet Muhammad and thus an Arab, or ahmar (literally "red"). Muhammad Ahmad, in contrast, was not Arab and was in fact aswad, "black." Third, the traditions made no allowance for the Mahdi to emerge in Sudan. Also, vis-à-vis the other eschatological figures, the Mahdi was supposed to appear at approximately the same time that Jesus and the Dajjal were on earth. Where were they if Muhammad Ahmad was indeed the Mahdi? Furthermore, the Hadiths say that the Mahdi would kill al-Sufyani, not other Muslims as Muhammad Ahmad was doing. Fifth, the Mahdi was supposed to come in the midst of a chaotic time upon the death of a caliph. But the Ottoman caliph, Sultan Abdülhamid II, was very much alive, and chaos did not reign in the Ottoman domains-at least, not until Muhammad Ahmad had sparked it. Far from filling the earth with equity and justice, as would the true Mahdi, this charlatan in Sudan was filling at least part of it with pillage and looting. Traditions also described the coming of the Mahdi as resembling finding a treasure, but could anyone seriously describe Muhammad Ahmad in such glowing terms? Eighth, allegiance was supposed to be sworn to the Mahdi in Mecca, between the rukn and the maqam. However, Muhammad Ahmad had coerced or extorted loyalty and done so far from Arabia. Also, whereas the followers of the true Mahdi would be pious Arab Muslims from Syria and Iraq, Muhammad Ahmad's supporters consisted of al-ajam, "foreigners," who did not even speak good Arabic and awbash, "rabble." Tenth, there was no evidence Muhammad Ahmad was even remotely related to the family of the Prophet. Far from abiding by the Qur'an and Sunnah, he departed from them. The false mahdi, in an argument from politics and not religion, was undermining the peace and stability afforded by the Ottoman sultancaliph. The God-given responsibility to defend the faith and keep the peace was imputed to the distant ruler in Istanbul (especially, it should be pointed out, by those on his payroll). Thirteenth and finally, his selfvalidating visions and ostensibly direct illumination from God made him unreliable, since he thereby rejected the consensus of all the Islamic scholars who had gone before." Thus, Muhammad Ahmad was indeed not the true Mahdi but a mutamahdi, or "false mahdi."

For Muhammad Ahmad, the best defense was always a good offense. His responses to these derogatory fatwa were always addressed to the 'ulama al-su', "ulama of evil," whose rejection was based more on their love of wealth and position than on legitimate Islamic scholarship and beliefs. One lethal weapon in the Sudanese Mahdi's armory was the doctrine of naskh or mansukh, "abrogation." This meant that he simply nullified any hadith that did not apply to him and so unfettered his Mahdiyah from the wooden letter of the text traditions regarding the Mahdi. Muhammad Ahmad also riposted that the religious scholars simply did not understand the deeper truths about the Mahdi and accused them of cherry picking traditions out of context in their misguided attempt to discredit him. Ultimately, his claims to be in direct, mystical contact with the prophet Muhammad, and thus indirectly with Allah, were irrefutable, albeit subjective. 22 But as long as Muhammad Ahmad was standing up for the disparate groups of Sudanese against Turkish and Egyptian oppression and for true Islam, as they saw it, and even more important, as long as he was winning on the battlefield, his Mahdism would be accepted. Most telling, for many in Sudan the Ottoman sultan was not the caliph of Islam but a tyrant and the Ottomans, far from being coreligionists, were aggressors and unbelievers. It did not hurt that in September 1882 a huge comet was seen in the skies, further proof to the already convinced that Muhammad Ahmad was exactly who he claimed to be. So the Ottoman anti-Mahdist agenda was largely doomed from the start. Perhaps if the Turks and their Egyptian subjects had been able to bring immediate and overwhelming firepower to bear on the Mahdi and his followers-pace the French in Algeria a few years earlier-the matter might have turned out differently Istanbul was unable to do so, however, from a combination of diplomatic and logistical obstacles, neither of which would hobble the British when they decided to end the Mahdist state in Sudan once and for all at the end of the century. The worst the Mahdi did, though, was detach one province from the orbit of Ottoman control and, consequently, embarrass the sultan.

Muhammad Ahmad's Sudanese Mahdism proved not only a huge influence on Sudan proper but, more important for the world at large, a case study in how Mahdist movements arise and can come to power. As such, it is the Mahdist movement par excellence for understanding that important mode of Islamic resistance. In Sudan Mahdism became the cornerstone of that country's nationalism, especially vis-à-vis Egypt. Eventually Mahdist ideology was sublimated into Sudan's Ummah Party, which for much of modern history constituted the opposition party in that country. On Mahdism's influence after 1898 see Warburg, Historical Discord, pp. 42-61 and 186-91; O'Fahey, "Sufism in Suspense," pp. 277ff; M.W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Heather Sharkey-Balasubramanian, "The Egyptian Colonial Presence in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1932," in Jay Spaulding and Stephanie Beswick, eds. White Nile, Black Blood: War, Leadership and Ethnicity from Khartoum to Kampala (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2000), pp. 279-314; and Muddathir 'Abdel Rahman, Imperialism & Nationalism in the Sudan: A Study in Constitutional and Political Development, 1899-1956 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this admittedly rather detailed survey about the Sudan Mahdi. First, and most obvious, it serves as proof that non-Shï i Mahdism is alive and well and an ever-present threat in the Muslim world.  In common with bin-Laden he declared jihad, has some degree of Sufi adherence, and grievances against European Christian nations.

And how at least one Sudanese Mahdist rationalized clinging to his beliefs after Muhammad Ahmad's death, see Muhammad Ibrahim Abu Salim and Knut S. Vikor, "The Man Who Believed in the Mahdi," Sudanic Africa 2 (1991), and some of the essays in Jon R. Stone, ed., Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy (New York and London: Routledge, 2000) shed some light on Mahdists' behavior, post-Mahdi; see in particular Leon Festinger et al., "Unfulfilled Prophecies and Disappointed Messiahs"; Joseph Zygmunt, "When Prophecies Fail"; J. Gordon Melton, "Spiritualization and Reaffirmation"; and Anthony B. van Fossen, "How Do Movements Survive Failures of Prophecy?" Also, for a more recent treatment there is Stephen D. O'Leary, "When Prophecy Fails and When It Succeeds: Apocalyptic Prediction and the Re-entry into Ordinary Time," in Albert I. Baumgarten, ed., Apocalyptic Time (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 341-62.

Furthermore websites on the internet defending the coming Mahdi are less systematic than full-length Arabic books on the topic; but what they may lack in analysis, they make up for in emotional, populist appeal. This is true of both the Arabic and English ones, though especially the former. Of course the main problem with analyzing the use of cyberspace is that is virtually impossible to know who is taking advantage of the several million webpages which in some way mention Islam. This holds true-on a much smaller scale, certainly-for the sites defending the eventual historical truth of the Mahdi.

Are Mahdist books and websites, then, merely the tip of a massive Mahdist iceberg of belief, or are they, rather, an attempt by a tiny, albeit fanatical, rump faction to wag the entire apathetic dog?

 

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