Mahdist state in Sudan

In June 1881, Muhammad Ahmad, a Sufi religious teacher on an island in the White Nile, declared that he was the Mahdi, the redeemer whom many Muslims expect to restore justice before the end of time. He called for holy war against the Egyptian rulers of Sudan, whom he denounced as corrupt and un-Islamic. His followers, the Ansar, destroyed an Egyptian army under the British officer William Hicks in 1883, and in January 1885 they stormed Khartoum after a long siege, killing the governor-general Charles Gordon two days before a British relief force arrived.¹²

Egypt, a nominal province of the Ottoman Empire, had conquered Sudan from 1820 and ruled it through heavy taxes and officials many Sudanese resented. European officials hired by Cairo, Gordon among them, also tried to suppress the slave trade on which many northern Sudanese merchants depended. After Egypt went bankrupt, partly over debts from building the Suez Canal, Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 and was drawn into its Sudan problem. The Mahdi died in June 1885, and his successor, the Khalifa Abdallahi, ruled a centralized Islamic state until an Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener destroyed it at Omdurman in 1898, where machine guns and artillery inflicted thousands of deaths.¹²