The 139th Anniversary of Mahdi’s Conquest of Khartoum: History and the Snoring of History (1-2)

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

January 26, 2023 was the 39th anniversary after the 100th anniversary of Mohamed Ahmad al-Mahdi’s conquest of Khartoum in 1885 and the establishment of the Mahdist State from the ruins of the Turkish-Egyptian ruling state (1821-1885).
This anniversary did not pass this time as a date as we used to. We note it and celebrate it as a national achievement and a precedent in building the independent Sudanese state. The late al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, the grandson of the Mahdi and the inheritor of his Imamate over his supporters and the leader of the Umma Party, comes out to renew the resolve of the nation on a day of historic victory for it.
The late Imam praised the conquest of Khartoum in his last celebrations before his passing on November 26, 2020, viewing the December 2019 revolution as a beautiful act of the Mahdism that aroused the Sudanese’s desire for freedom, and there is no way in what he said to understand the Sudanese revolutionary tendency without it.
This anniversary of the conquest of Khartoum has passed today while the city is in the clutches of the reality of a war to occupy it.
The history of conquest of Khartoum by Mahdi was mixed with the reality of the conflict around it to this day between the armed forces SAF and the Rapid Support RSF .
The “Rapid Support” RSF side adopted the conquest as a precedent for the destruction of the “State of 56” in Sudan, that he desired to inherit “as a village whose livelihood has been improved,” which is the verse that the Mahdi himself recited in his first Friday sermon after his victory over the Turkish government.
As for the armed forces SAF they recalled on the anniversary, when they saw the devastation of the city by the Rapid Support RSF what was reported about the destruction that occurred in Khartoum during the Mahdi’s conquest of it.
The anniversary of the conquest resulted in the publication of Arabized material on websites about the New Zealand “Otago Daily” (January 19, 1899), which was extremely hostile to Al -khalifa Abdullah, who was in charge of Sudan at that time. I mentioned his atrocities, such as killing 15,000 residents of Khartoum at the time of the conquest, and his brutality that did not show mercy to diplomats or clerics.
He amputated the hand of the Greek consul, cut his body into pieces with machetes, and threw his body parts on the side of the road.
He also hung an Australian nun by her wrists from a high beam, whipped her with a thick stick on the soles of her feet, and pulled out her nails from her feet.
The title of this article in the media stated, “What a similar night to yesterday,” meaning that the conquest of Khartoum by Mahdi is identical to its invasion by the “Janjaweed,” one sandal for another.
We say casually that it is the writer’s opinion that the Al khalifa harbored a tendency to criminality and bloodshed, which he hid from the Mahdi to some extent during his lifetime, and then unleashed horror and injustice when the situation cleared for him with the death of the Mahdi.
One does not know how Al Khalifa succeeded in killing 15,000 people in the conquest of Khartoum, while the Mahdi, from whom the coming Khalifa hid his brutality, stood by.
The correct question is: What is the “limit” by which Al-Mahdi was deceived about the intentions of his successor when his successor stood by him and did not commit obscenity?
Certainly, this “extreme” is not the case when killing this prestigious number of the city’s 50,000 residents.
The last phrase above will be the gateway to criticizing the British and European writings about Mahdism, whose cognitive authority we accepted regardless of its facts and which we sought for help in our political disputes.
These are writings that came out of the factory of mobilizing British public opinion with enthusiasm for the idea of ​​“restoring Sudan,” which is the phrase in its historical form and what is meant by restoring the Egyptian Khedive, which had found direct opposition from William Gladstone, the Prime Minister himself.
This mobilization directed its full fire at Al Khalifa Abdullah and his state, in order to impress upon the British the nobility of the mission of saving the Sudanese from an eastern tyrant, as they say.
The chief of that authority in the Mahdist state took over the intelligence administration of the Egyptian army, which was in charge of Reginald Wingat Pasha, who became governor-general of Sudan after its restoration.
His most prominent contributions to this mobilization were his editing of the writings of Rudolf Sultan, the governor of Darfur in the Turkish state in Sudan, and the Reverend Joseph Ahrwalder, who escaped from their confinement in Omdurman and wrote as eyewitnesses in German about the tyranny of Al Khalifa Abdullah and its evils.
Their writings increased pressure on Wangat’s editing of the two books in English, as will be mentioned.
This was a mobilization of the empire in Britain in general. The British academic John Mackenzie addressed it in his book “Propaganda and Empire: Exploiting British Public Opinion, (1880-1960)” published in (1984).
In his words, the British government was not a major party in this inciting propaganda to build the British Empire, but it was responsiblefor it.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, commercial propaganda agencies leaked their call to society in education circles, the military, churches, and the general public, whom they solicited with theatrical performances, entertainment, and exhibitions. MacKenzie called the mobilization of the common people to support empire building “popular imperialism.”
It is surprising that our elite submitted to the knowledge they received about the imperialist propaganda literature about Mahdism and merely reproduced it, as we have seen, while those who criticized this literature were the ones who established the professional historiography of Mahdism.
He is the English academic B. M. Holt, who was hired by the British administration during the 1950s to catalog the documents of the Mahdist State, which they had diligently collected during the restoration of Sudan and preserved throughout those years.

To be continued