The Guided One

The Sudan of the 1870s was misgoverned by a Turco-Egyptian regime resented for its taxes, its corruption, and — after Gordon's earlier campaigns against it — its disruption of the slave trade on which many depended. Into this discontent stepped Muhammad Ahmad, a devout and charismatic Sufi holy man, who in 1881 declared himself the Mahdi: the divinely guided redeemer whom Islamic tradition foretold would come to restore justice and true religion before the end of the world.

His message of religious revival and liberation from the hated foreigner spread like fire through the tribes. When the government sent soldiers to arrest him, his followers — the Ansar, armed at first with little more than spears and faith — destroyed them. Each victory swelled his ranks and confirmed his claim, and the Mahdi's movement grew from a religious revival into a national army.

Meanwhile, in 1882 Britain had occupied Egypt to protect the Suez Canal and its investments, and so inherited responsibility for Egypt's crumbling empire in the Sudan. The reckoning came in November 1883, when an Egyptian army of some ten thousand under the British general Hicks marched into the waterless west to crush the Mahdi — and was led astray, surrounded, and annihilated almost to the last man at El Obeid. The disaster destroyed Egyptian power in the Sudan overnight and forced a fateful decision in London: the Sudan would have to be abandoned.