The Rise of the Mahdist State in the Sudan
In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad bin ‘Abdallah, a Sudanese Sufi shaykh of the Sammaniya order and the son of a boat builder who claimed descent from Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, proclaimed that he was the Mahdi. In Sunni Islam, al-Mahdi al-Muntazar – a messianic figure who will come at the end of the world to reform Islam and spread it over the Earth. While other men have claimed the title, just as Christian societies have produced their share of “second comings” of Christ, Muhammad Ahmad – after 1881, Muhammad al-Mahdi, was singularly successful. He managed to defeat the English-backed Egyptian colonial authorities who had ruled the since 1820 and establish an Islamic state that would outlive the Mahdi himself and survive for nearly 20 years until its ultimate defeat at the hands of the British army at Omdurman in 1898.
From a modern, Western perspective, it seems nearly impossible that such a figure could gain such power. When an American claims to be Christ, he is generally derided as a madman. Charismatic American religious leaders were common in the nineteenth century – Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, and Ellen White are prominent examples. The religions established by these leaders all gained notable followings, but none can compare to the universal appeal of Muhammad Ahmad to the Sudanese people. An infamous modern figure that has been compared to Muhammad Ahmad is Osama bin Laden. Like al-Mahdi, the al-Qaeda leader claims to be a reformer, fighting against corrupt Muslims and Western infidels. Muhammad Ahmad, however, was no terrorist, despite his extreme religious views. Al-Mahdi and his followers were not the aggressors – they were a conquered people trying to free themselves from an obviously repressive colonial authority.
What was it that allowed such an extreme religious figure to gain such a huge following? Muhammad Al-Mahdi arose at an extraordinary time in the history of the Muslim world. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling – , , and had even made an agreement that none of them would gain territory from the Ottomans unless they could devise a way that each of them could gain territory. Many people in the farthest reaches of the Empire saw the version of Islam it espoused as being corrupt. Muhammad Ahmad was not the first to try to reform it – in eighteenth century Arabia, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab had established a new, fundamentalist form of Islam that is still the official religion of the Saudi kingdom. In , Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi organized several Sufi orders that eventually wielded great political power at the end of Africa’s colonial era. The decline of the Ottomans had allowed Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of , to separate from the Empire and establish an autonomous state, although it was still nominally under Ottoman control. soon found itself in dire straits – severely in debt to European powers and forced to allow them to encroach on the . In 1882, the year after Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi, the British sent a military force to occupy itself. The European presence in the produced a wide response among the Sudanese tribes. The Islamic tribes were outraged at the presence of these infidels in their country; non-Islamic tribes spawned a number of prophets, some of whom eventually would lead revolts against the British.
The Egyptian rule in the was rife with abuses. The Sudanese were forced to pay crippling taxes, often collected under the threat of physical violence by loosely organized Egyptian army units made up not of Egyptians, but of a collaborating Sudanese tribe. For some goods – particularly livestock – the taxes actually cost more than the item’s purchase price. The Egyptian government took an official stance against the slave trade, a major source of income for the Sudanese. This was a major about-face for the Egyptians, who had used their army to capture slaves as recently as the 1850s. Officers in the Egyptian army, even while charged with stopping the slave trade, participated in the trade themselves, and the Egyptian government was a major consumer of slaves, using them to man the occupying army in the . Several revolts had arisen in the years leading up to the Mahdist rebellion, some of which had been defeated only after the Egyptian army’s officers had been given direct instructions by Charles Gordon, a British officer who was serving as the governor-general of the Sudan. The rebellions had various causes; several were led by slave traders, others by Sudanese tribes who refused to pay the oppressive taxes.
Besides the obvious popular discontent with the Egyptian rulers, millennial expectations ran rampant through the . With them, the belief that the coming of the Mahdi, a figure that Muslims believe will arise shortly before the end of the world, was imminent were commonplace. The end of the nineteenth century coincided with the thirteenth century after the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina – the year 1300 on the Muslim calendar was only two years after Muhammad Ahmad claimed to be the Mahdi. Many Muslims believed that this century would mark the end of the world. These views were not unique to the ; in Western Africa, Uthman Dan Fodio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, had preached that the Mahdi would arrive shortly; in fact, many of his followers had believed that Uthman himself was the Mahdi. Uthman’s belief that the Mahdi would arise somewhere to the East of Sokoto led many of his subjects to immigrate to the , which could only have served to further exacerbate the Mahdist expectations there. Uthman’s great-grandson, Hayatu ibn Sa’id, in fact, became a follower of Muhammad Ahmad, and was sent back to Sokoto to preach al-Mahdi’s message there.
The climate in all of late nineteenth-century Africa, but the in particular, then, was ripe for the rise to power of an anti-colonialist Islamic reformer like Muhammad Ahmad. Even before proclaiming his mission, Muhammad Ahmad had written many letters to Egyptian officials, condemning their lax, and in his view, corrupt version of Islam. His personal distaste for the occupying government had been developing nearly as long as his religious sentiments – he had been a favorite of anti-colonialist tribal leaders longer than he had been the head of his Sufi order. Muhammad Ahmad himself had contributed to the belief that the Mahdi would arise shortly, apparently having even expected a Libyan Sufi leader to declare himself the Mahdi. Muhammad Ahmad’s eventual successor, Abdallahi bin Muhammad, called Muhammad Ahmad the Mahdi well in advance of Muhammad Ahmad’s claim – in Abdallahi’s account, at their first meeting. Abdallahi had long searched for the Mahdi – before he encountered Muhammad Ahmad, he had written a letter to al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, a tribal leader, asking him to assume the role of Mahdi. Whether Muhammad Ahmad believed his own proclamation or not, by claiming to be the Mahdi in 1881, he set himself up as a natural rallying point for more than one group in the . He was an anti-colonial leader, and could draw support from those who hated the Egyptian taxes and opposition to the slave trade. He hated the Ottoman practice of Islam, and he fulfilled the Mahdist belief of many of the people of the , allowing him to become a religious icon. Al-Mahdi was in the perfect position to accomplish his ultimate goals of Islamic reform and expulsion of the Egyptian colonial authority from the .
Al-Mahdi fits the mold of many African Muslim jihad leaders before him. Like Uthman Dan Fodio and Al-Hajj Umar Tal in Western Africa, Muhammad Ahmad made use of the integration of church and state in Islamic belief. For his followers, and eventually all the people of the , he was the ultimate authority, for both religious and secular matters. He outlawed the four schools of Islamic law and ordered the burning of books that attempted to interpret the Qur’an, effectively establishing his own belief as the only valid interpretation and the only valid law. Another important similarity between al-Mahdi and other African leaders – Uthman Dan Fodio, in particular – is that both men tried to emulate the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Al-Mahdi took this to an extreme – he duplicated the hijra, made explicit comparisons between his entourage and the Companions of the Prophet, and even forced his followers to include his name in their declaration of faith. These parallels to the Prophet helped legitimize al-Mahdi’s authority in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims.
Like other Islamic reformers – ‘Abd al-Wahhab for one – al-Mahdi, in the name of a return to correct Islamic practice, created a new form of Islam unlike any that had been practiced before. One major change he made was instrumental to his military success. Al-Mahdi forbade his followers from undertaking the hajj, replacing it as one of the five Pillars of Faith with an obligation to wage jihad against the Egyptians. Through his connection with Hayatu ibn Sa’id, he even attempted to call subjects of the Sokoto Caliphate to jihad on the other side of the continent. The Mahdi’s followers were also required to make a pilgrimage to pledge their allegiance to him; making another parallel to the life of the Prophet, he termed this the hijra. Again, al-Mahdi expected Hayatu to influence Sokoto subjects to travel to the to show their loyalty to him, especially since Uthman Dan Fodio had instructed his followers to go to the Mahdi once he had arrived on Earth.
Through the hijra, al-Mahdi dispossessed his followers from their homes, and spurred by the religious call to war, they formed a ferocious fighting force – the key to the success of the Mahdist rebellion. These men, armed only with spears and clubs, won a string of convincing victories over the Egyptians. Despite being relatively ill-equipped and poorly trained, the Egyptian military was no backwards organization. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III had reorganized the Ottoman military along European lines. Some Egyptian soldiers had machine guns; many others had modern, European-made rifles. In Khartoum, al-Mahdi’s forces utterly annihilated an English force commanded by General Charles Gordon, the man who had successfully ended several previous Sudanese rebellions. Gordon himself was killed in the battle. It was the Mahdi’s soldiers who formed the real strength of the rebellion. Whether motivated by religious fervor or the desire to liberate their homes from the oppressive Egyptian regime, these men won victories that can be described as nothing less than astonishing. Al-Mahdi’s part in the rebellion was his incredible ability to motivate his army.
Unfortunately for the longevity of the Mahdist state, al-Mahdi, like many other revolutionary leaders, lacked the organizational ability to form a viable state. At the beginning of his mission, he gave three men the title of khalifa – the title held by the four “rightly guided” rulers of the Islamic empire after the death of the Prophet Muhammad; the fourth khalifa title was offered to a Libyan Sufi, but was refused. The khalifas were selected from three of the major tribes of the , and their tribal loyalties and positions as leaders in the Mahdist army soon produced an army divided along tribal lines. After Muhammad Ahmad’s death in 1885, Abdallahi bin Muhammad, the man given the position of Abu Bakr, the direct successor to the Prophet, assumed control of the Mahdist state. Abdallahi proved an oppressive leader. He treated tribes with which he had long-standing personal disputes very poorly. Rather than being content with having expelled the Egyptians from the , the khalifa embarked on military campaigns to conquer surrounding areas, even sending an ill-fated force to invade in 1889. The downfall of the Mahdist state was brought about by a British invasion force led by Lord Kitchener. The advance of technology finally proved too much for the Mahdists – in one battle, the British, armed with the new Maxim machine gun, killed thousands of Mahdist soldiers, with a loss of only 48 men.
Muhammad Ahmad bin ‘Abdallah was not a madman, in spite of his claim to be the Mahdi. He was a leader who seized an opportunity to accomplish his goals. He was able to play upon the Sudanese hatred of the Egyptian occupation, combined with the popular expectation for the coming of the Mahdi. He was able to unify the Sudanese tribes against the Egyptians, something that no other Sudanese revolutionary had been able to do. He whipped them into a religious fervor and provided the leadership necessary to entice a poorly equipped force to defeat a much superior adversary. His unfortunate shortcoming was organizational; he established a totalitarian state, and passed control to a man who allowed his own prejudices to drive the way he ran his government.
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