It was the turn of the Islamists, after their opponents, to belittle Mahdia: an elite that angrily chewing history

By Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

A hidden war is taking place between the Sudanese elite behind the war that is wreaking havoc on the country, and it is taking place at its most intense between the Islamists, the “Supporters of the Salvation Regime,” and their opposition, known as the “FFC” Forces of Freedom and Change, which were behind the revolution against their regime. The two groups are accusing each other for the responsibility of the out breaking of the civil war that Sudan has fallen into, after which no one knows whether it will be peaceful or if it will be scattered in the four winds.
The material behind this war is history, and even its rumination. The history of the Mahdist state (1885-1898) comes in the center of its storm. It is the state that was established in 1885 after the revolution was launched for its sake by the Sufi jurist Muhammad Ahmad Abdullah al-Fahal (1843-1885). He said that he was the Mahdi, and the renewal of Islam was decided upon at the known time for the same. It is the beginning of the 14th century AH (1882 AD), and the elimination of the Turkish-Egyptian regime that ruled Sudan after its invasion in 1821. He said about it that it departed from religion, became tyrannical in power, and ruled without the law of God and His Messenger. He said in a leaflet to the Sudanese that the Turks “drag your men in chains and imprison them with shackles” for the sake of the tax that neither God nor His Messenger ordered. He was succeeded by the state after his hasty death, Abdullah bin Muhammad al-Taqi, known as “Al-Taayshi” (1846-1899), from the Baggara people in western Sudan, whose name is currently associated with the “Rapid Support” forces. The end of the state came in 1898 in the context of European campaigns against Africa in the second half of the 19th century, with an English campaign claiming to “recover” Sudan from the Egyptian Khedive, against which it rebelled in revolution.
The Mahdist state remained a “bone of contention” between the parties in the hidden war between the “FFC” and the Islamists. The opponents of the Salvation Government, who took the name “Forces of Freedom and Change” after the fall of the regime, agreed that the Islamist regime was cut from the fabric of the Mahdist state with the presumption of theocracy, the religious state, in both of them. Then many of these same people looked at the history of the Mahdism during this war, looking this time not at its theocracy. Rather, to match the Mahdi’s conquest of the oppressive Khartoum in 1885, and the attack of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo “Hemedti” on the same city whose state, the “1956 state” as they call it, was unfair to the country’s fringes in order to monopolize the elite of the Nile and Central Sudan in it. The elements of conformity are completed by the fact that Dagalo came to invade Khartoum with a force mostly from the “Baqqara people” who had the upper hand in the Mahdist state. The conquest of Khartoum was, in an important aspect, a promise made by marginal forces and armed movements during their resistance to the Islamist (Salvation) state, embodied in the military slogan, “All power is in Khartoum.”
The Islamists ended up imprinting the Mahdism on its conquest of Khartoum as a precedent for the Rapid Support attack on the city, its destruction, and the occupation of large parts of it. This is surprising for Islamists, for whom the Mahdism was once a source of inspiration in supporting the religion and enforcing it in their lives. What is surprising for them in their opposition to the “Rapid Support” aggressions in the invasion of Khartoum is that they reproduced what was popularized by early European writings, such as “The Sword and Fire” by Adolf Sultan Pasha, the ruler of Darfur under Turkish rule, and a Mahdist prisoner until he escaped captivity, about the Mahdism. These are books written by English historians who have a bad professional opinion about them. Recently, the English historian Fergus Nicholl wrote about them, saying that they are works that distort the facts to a high degree…their pages are filled with deliberate contempt for everything that the Mahdi stood for.” He said about them that it can be said that their true author is Major F. R. Wingate, head of Egyptian Army Intelligence, and later Governor-General of Sudan, was issued under his direct supervision. He wanted to prepare the British public to be satisfied with his government whenever it decided to “reclaim” Sudan, as it was said, and to see in that restoration a white civilizational nobility that would save the Sudanese from rule of the oriental despot.
One also wonders how Islamists believe what was rumored about the conquest of Khartoum, about someone like the Mahdi who complied with the teachings of Islam in the conquests of countries and spread them among the fighters before, during and after the conquest. Dr. Muhammad Al-Mustafa Musa Hamed, author of the book “Echoes of Mahdism in the World,” collected a selection of these teachings from Al-Mahdi’s publications and published them recently to ward off the slander of those who read the “Rapid Support” invasion of Khartoum in light of the conquest of Khartoum: those who supported the “Rapid Support” and rejoiced in it, and those who opposed it, such as the Islamists, they considered him a disaster.
We continue based on the authority of an eyewitness to the conquest of Khartoum at the hands of supporters of the Mahdi, peace be upon him, namely Babiker Badri.