Muhammad Ahmad

Who is Muhammad Ahmad?

Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah was born in 1844 near Dongola in what is now northern Sudan, the son of a boat-builder who traced descent from the Prophet Muhammad. He trained as a religious scholar and Sufi teacher, eventually settling on Aba Island on the White Nile, where he built a following among Sudanese frustrated with Turco-Egyptian taxation and administration. In 1881 he declared himself the Mahdi, the divinely guided redeemer expected in Islamic eschatology, and called for jihad against the ruling government. His movement won a rapid series of victories over Egyptian garrisons, and by 1884 his forces had besieged Khartoum, defended by the British general Charles Gordon. The city fell in January 1885, and Gordon was killed, an event that shocked Victorian Britain and made the Mahdi a figure of global notoriety. Muhammad Ahmad established the Mahdist State, with its capital soon moved to Omdurman, governing under a strict interpretation of Islamic law. He died of typhus only months after his victory, in June 1885, and was succeeded by his deputy, the Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, who ruled the Mahdist state until it was defeated by an Anglo-Egyptian army at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

Sources: P. M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898 · Rudolf Carl von Slatin, Fire and Sword in the Sudan (1896), eyewitness account · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Muhammad Ahmad" entry