Between the Mahdiyya and the Janjaweed: Sudan’s Tragedy in Confusing Revolution with Statehood

By Amjad Farid Al-Tayeb

The Sudanese nation is enduring the fiercest ordeal in its modern history—a devastating war that has shattered the state, displaced its people, and turned fertile land into rubble and ash. Since the outbreak of fighting in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), hundreds of thousands have lost their lives to violence, hunger, and disease. More than 12 million have been displaced inside Sudan, while over 4 million have fled abroad, making it the world’s largest displacement crisis. As starvation and blockade are wielded as weapons of war, famine looms over entire regions, while fighting grinds on across the country.

This war is not merely a military contest between Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). It is the result of a failed coup that ignited a conflict, toppling what remained of Sudan’s fragile state and exploiting the fracture of its social fabric. It is also the product of intellectual distortion: a refusal to learn from history, instead weaponizing it to fuel further destruction.

Recently, debates on social media and in public discourse have drawn comparisons between the crimes of the RSF and the violence that marked the Mahdist state, especially during the rule of Khalifa Abdallahi al-Taaishi after the death of Imam al-Mahdi in 1885—just months after the liberation of Khartoum from Turco-Egyptian rule.

The Mahdist Revolution: Lives of Rebels and Rulers

Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi (1844–1885) was born in Labab Island in northern Sudan and launched his call for reform at a time when Turco-Egyptian colonial rule burdened the people with taxes and eroded their social order. In late 1880, he met Abdallahi ibn Muhammad (al-Taaishi), who played a decisive role in persuading him to declare the Mahdiyya. Al-Taaishi pledged allegiance, becoming his Khalifa, and al-Mahdi placed him in the ranks of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, sanctifying his actions with religious legitimacy.

The Khalifa was known for his fiery temper, deep suspicions, and authoritarian bent, often convinced of superhuman abilities. Despite the bravery of his soldiers—praised even by Winston Churchill—his rejection of counsel and reliance on tribal favoritism and repression drained his state before the Anglo-Egyptian invasion crushed it at Omdurman in 1898. That battle, in which dervishes charged bare-chested against the British war machine, remains etched in Sudanese memory as a symbol of fearless national resistance.

Yet Abdallahi’s legacy was heavy with authoritarianism, most brutally expressed in the massacre at Metemma in 1897, when he dispatched his nephew, Emir Mahmoud Wad Ahmad, to crush a Ja’aliyyin revolt. Thousands were killed, women raped and enslaved, leaving one of the darkest stains on the Mahdist state.

Weaponizing History, Simplifying the Present

Projecting this history wholesale onto today’s war produces a distorted ethnic narrative. The RSF’s attempted coup on April 15, 2023, was not a product of the Mahdiyya, but the outcome of decades of privatized violence, the normalization of coups as tools of power, and external entanglements invested in dismantling the Sudanese state.

To read the Mahdist Revolution only as a prelude to al-Taaishi’s tyranny is to condemn a great act of national liberation to collective guilt. Conversely, to glorify it uncritically is to overlook the fatal mistakes that led to its downfall. Both framings fall into what scholars call the “ethnic politicization of history”—turning the past into a weapon of exclusion in the present, rather than a resource for understanding.

From Revolution to State: The Missing Lesson

The Mahdist Revolution was a moment of national liberation, a unifying project that transcended tribal divisions. The Khalifa’s state was its distortion: an authoritarian order that reproduced oppression, presided over famines such as the Great Famine of 1889–1890, and unleashed internal repression—until it collapsed before the Anglo-Egyptian conquest.

The fatal mistake lay in confusing revolutionary legitimacy with governing legitimacy. Revolution is born of freedom and justice; the state is tested by its ability to embody these principles. When rulers claim perpetual authority on the basis of revolutionary credentials alone, governance devolves into tyranny. This was the Khalifa’s trap—and it is being repeated in new guises today.

Reconciling with National Memory

Equating the Janjaweed with al-Taaishi ignores critical distinctions:

1. History invoked as an ideological weapon rather than a guide for learning.

2. The conflation of revolutionary legitimacy with state legitimacy.

3. The normalization of ethnic politics and tribal patronage.

4. The entrenchment of exclusion and violence as tools of rule.

Breaking this cycle requires sharp distinctions:

Between revolution as liberation and the state as governance.

Between historical critique and contemporary condemnation.

Between national identity and transient power.

Toward a Balanced Reading

The Khalifa’s failed state does not erase the glory of the Mahdist Revolution. The collapse of Bashir’s regime does not invalidate the legitimacy of the December Revolution. And today’s catastrophe must not be reduced to 19th-century ethnic tropes.

What Sudan needs is reconciliation with its memory: to celebrate revolutions as milestones of liberation, while holding states to standards of justice and sound governance, not myth. Only such a reading can break Sudan’s tragic cycle: the reproduction of tyranny in the name of revolution, followed by the collapse of the state in the name of identity.