Chapter 18 - Governing Men and their Souls: The Making of a Mahdist Society in Eastern Sudan (1883-1891) (original) (raw)

When Muḥammad Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh, a leading member of the Sammāniyya ṭarīqa1, openly proclaimed on 29 June 1881 that he was the Expected Mahdī (al-Mahdī al-muntaẓar), he initiated a collective religious and political movement that was to profoundly transform Sudanese society. Over the four years that followed, he successfully wrested control over most of Nilotic Sudan from Egyptian colonial domination (1820-1885) and founded a centralised state structure, which was headed by the Khalīfa ʿAbdullāhi after Muḥammad Aḥmad's death on 22 June 1885. Until its demise in September 1898 in the wake of the Anglo-Egyptian conquest (1896-1899), the Mahdist regime exerted tremendous influence on the social fabric of the diverse local communities, which it attempted to radically alter to conform to the Islamic ideals it promoted, notably through its mobilisation of the population for jihad.2 However, the historiography of the Mahdiyya (1881-1898) has remained focused on the political and military dimensions of the period, at the expense of an analysis of its socioeconomic dynamics. The main reason for this gap is the lasting influence of British colonial literature, which was initially developed by Francis R. Wingate, the senior British intelligence officer in Egypt between 1889 and 1899. Indeed, Wingate's first publication, Mahdiism and the Egyptian Sudan (Wingate 1891), and his famous editorial work on the personal accounts published by Joseph Ohrwalder (1892) and Rudolf C. von Slatin (1896), have played a crucial role in shaping contemporary understandings of the Mahdist movement. His efforts were famously described by Peter M. Holt as "war propaganda" or "the public relations literature of the Egyptian Military Intelligence" (Holt 1958: 112), and aimed, through the construction of the "legend of the Mahdiyya" (Daniel 1966: 424-428), to convince British public opinion and political leaders of the necessity and legitimacy of a military intervention in