Mahdist State

Overview

The Mahdist State (Arabic: al-Dawla al-Mahdiyah; the Mahdiyya) was an Islamist revolutionary state that ruled Sudan from 1885 to 1899, with its capital at Omdurman. It grew out of the religious and political movement launched in 1881 by Muhammad Ahmad against the Turco-Egyptian administration (the Turkiyya) that had ruled Sudan since 1821. At its height it controlled virtually all of modern Sudan and South Sudan, roughly 2.4 million km²—one of the largest indigenous African states of the Scramble era.

History

Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boatbuilder's son turned Sammaniyya Sufi sheikh, proclaimed himself the Mahdi ("the Expected One") in June 1881, declaring jihad against the "Turkish" rulers, whose taxes, Egyptian officials, and British-influenced suppression of the slave trade had alienated Sudanese society. His followers, the Ansar, annihilated Egyptian expeditionary forces (El Obeid, Sheikan 1883), overran Darfur—capturing governor Slatin Pasha—and besieged Khartoum, which fell on 26 January 1885; General Charles Gordon was killed, days before the British relief expedition arrived. The Mahdi died of typhus six months later (22 June 1885).

Power passed to his chief deputy, Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, who by 1891 consolidated an autocratic theocracy: sharia courts, the beit al-mal treasury disbursing zakat taxes, prohibition of "Ottoman vices" and Western medicine, forced conversion of Copts, and an army organized in Black, Red, and Green "Flags" with a 10,000-man Mulazimiyya guard and a captured-steamboat Nile navy. The regime invaded Ethiopia (sacking Gondar, 1887; Emperor Yohannes IV fell at Gallabat, 1889) and Egypt (defeated at Toski, 1889), and fought Italians (Agordat 1893) and Belgians on its frontiers. But purges, tribal favoritism toward the Baggara, the 1888–89 drought and famine, and endless war devastated the country: Sudan's population collapsed from perhaps 7–8 million to about 2–3 million.

Decline and legacy

Britain, fearing French and Belgian moves on the Nile headwaters, authorized Kitchener's reconquest in 1896. Using a desert railway, the Anglo-Egyptian army took Dongola, Abu Hamed, and Atbara, and on 2 September 1898 destroyed the 52,000-man Ansar army at Omdurman—about 11,000 Mahdists killed for 48 British-Egyptian dead. The Khalifa fled and died fighting at Umm Diwaykarat on 24 November 1899; the Anglo-Egyptian condominium replaced the state, though Darfuri holdouts (Sanin Husain at Kabkabiya) resisted until 1909. The Mahdiyya is remembered as Sudan's first indigenous nationalist government; the modern Ansar movement and the Mahdi's descendants (notably Sadiq al-Mahdi, twice prime minister) carried its legacy into 20th-century Sudanese politics.