The Mahdist State at Omdurman

In 1881 in the Sudan, then ruled by an oppressive Turco-Egyptian administration backed by Britain, a religious teacher named Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdullah proclaimed himself the awaited Mahdi and launched a jihad that swept the country, culminating in the capture of Khartoum in 1885 and the death of the Egyptian governor-general Gordon. Muhammad Ahmad died within months of that victory and was succeeded by his deputy, the Khalifa Abdullahi al-Ta'ishi, who built and ruled the independent Mahdist state for some thirteen years. Its capital was raised at Omdurman, across the Nile from ruined Khartoum at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile, a vast new mud-brick city laid out around the great domed tomb of the Mahdi, which became its spiritual and physical centre. The state had its own administration, treasury, army and coinage, and its followers were marked by the jibba, the patched tunic that recalled the movement's early poverty. It is important to record that the Mahdist claim itself was contested: while the coming of a Mahdi is part of Sunni eschatology, the claim of Muhammad Ahmad to be that figure was rejected by much of the Sunni religious establishment, including the scholars of al-Azhar and the Ottoman state, and the movement is best understood historically as an anti-colonial revivalist state whose central religious claim remains disputed. The state was finally destroyed by an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, where the Mahdi's tomb was shelled. This scene depicts Omdurman around 1890 at the height of the Mahdist state, the earthen city around the domed tomb at the river confluence.