NEWSPAPER READERS IN LATE nineteenth-century Britain would have been well-acquainted with the idea of the Mahdi, the divinely guided redeemer of Islamic eschatology. A search for the term in The Times’s digital archive for the period 1880-1900 turns up 830 results. This interest in Islamic messianism was a response to the rise of Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese mystic who declared himself Mahdi in March 1881 and won a series of victories over Anglo-Egyptian forces, culminating in the conquest of Khartoum and the infamous killing of Gordon in June 1885.
Muhammad Ahmad is one of several Mahdis treated in the latest work of Yohanan Friedmann, a leading historian of Islam at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Though the Mahdi doctrine is especially associated with the minority Twelver Shii form of Islam,…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2023