Read First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam for Free Online

Islam Muhammed Ahmed would ultimately embrace.Muhammed had shown a great deal of devotion and dedication to his Sheikh and teacher as well as a great deal of faith which distinguished him from his colleagues.When Sheikh Muhammed realized Muhammed Ahmed’s dedication and devotion he appointed him shaykh (teacher) and permitted him to give instruction on Tariqa and Uhuud (guidance to the spiritual path to God) to new followers wherever he happened to be.
Upon becoming a religious teacher, Ahmed married a remarkably charismatic presence to his gifts for scholarship and rhetoric, and he began advocating adherence to a branch of Islamic teaching known as Wahhabiism, a distillation of Islam to its most austere form, which discarded the formality and ceremony that had accumulated about Moslem worship over the centuries.The Wahhabi sect had actually begun as a reform movement in Islam, essentially a purification of the Sunni sect, originating in Arabia in the middle of the 18th century.First expounded by Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a Moslem cleric born sometime around 1703 in the heart of the Arabian peninsula, who gave the movement its name, Wahhabiism taught that all rituals and religious trappings, the veneration of holy persons, and any form of ostentation in worship, as well as the accumulation of wealth and personal luxury—all of which had begun to overtake Islam by the middle of the 9th century—were false and must be abandoned by the truly faithful.As a result, Wahhabi mosques were simply constructed, built without minarets, and Wahhabi adherents were quite plain in their dress and did not smoke tobacco or hashish–a most unusual sacrifice among Arabs.
Al-Wahhab’s austere teachings, delivered with considerable force and conviction, quickly became unpopular in the city of Medina where he made his home.The leading Moslem authorities in the city, who enjoyed their wealth, ostentation, and trappings of worship, soon drove him and his followers out of Medina and into the Nejd Desert in northeast Arabia.It was there that they were found by a tribe of nomadic Arabs, the Saud.Upon hearing Al-Wahhabi preach, the Saudi sheik became convinced that he had been given a holy mission to purge Islam of its corruption, and so declared jihad –-holy war–-and began the conquest of the neighboring tribes in the Arabian peninsula, sometime around 1763.Within a half-century the Wahhabis, having come to dominate the Saud tribe, ruled all Arabia except for the province of Yemen, from their newly-founded capital at Riyadh.
The power of the Wahhabi message to move and inspire ordinary Moslems became even clearer when the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, who at least nominally ruled Arabia, repeatedly sent out expeditions to crush the Sauds and their tribal allies and vassals—who in turn repeatedly crushed the Ottoman forces.It wasn’t until the sultan turned to his Egyptian viceroy, the great Muhammed Ali, that Ottoman supremacy was restored to the Arabian peninsula.By 1818 the Wahhabis were once more driven into the deserts, this time into both the Nejd and the Sahara.Wahhabi power experienced a brief resurgence in the 1820s and 1830s along the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf, but afterward it began to decline until the Wahhabis lost control of Arabia in 1884.
But Wahhabism was far from dead, and in finding a disciple in Muhammed Ahmed, it would undergo yet another transformation, eventually becoming a political and military power that would threaten the religious and social structure of the entire Middle East, and in doing so leave a spiritual legacy that would endure for the next century.In a land as barren and daunting as the Sudan, the austerity of Wahhbiism had an inevitable appeal to Sudanese Moslems, and Ahmed’s teachings quickly began to make a virtue of the Sudan’s poverty while offering what appeared to be a way out of its suffering.
Ahmed began by teaching his Sudanese followers that they would never be free of misery