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

frustration, the Sudanese people were more than receptive to Ahmed’s teachings.
Yet despite his railings, and the popularity with which they were received, if he had been an ordinary man, Ahmed might have been forgotten by history, just one more of a countless number of provincial holy men of various doctrinal shades and sectarian colors who have ranted against established powers and traditions for whatever obscure reasons motivated them.But Ahmed was not an ordinary man.By the time he reached manhood, the remarkable charisma that he would come to use in charming so many of his followers began to appear.
Certainly he was an attractive figure physically.Father Joseph Ohrwalder, an Austrian missionary to the Sudan who would one day spend seven years as Ahmed’s prisoner, wrote of him, “His outward appearance was strangely fascinating, he was a man of strong constitution, very dark complexion, and his face always wore a pleasant smile.He had singularly white teeth, and between the two middle ones was a vee-shaped space, which in the Sudan is considered a sign that the owner will be lucky.His mode of conversation, too, had by training become exceptionally pleasant and sweet.” To the end of his life, Father Ohrwalder, himself a man of considerable courage and conviction, who would suffer near-starvation and considerable physical abuse as the Mahdi’s captive, remained fascinated by Muhammed Ahmed as both a man and a religious leader.
It was while he was in his self-imposed semi-exile along the shores of the Nile from 1874 to 1879 that Muhammed Ahmed came to consider the idea that he had personally been chosen by Allah to lead a holy war with the purpose of first liberating the Sudan, then sweeping the entire realm of Islam clean of corrupting Western ways and washing their influences from the faithful.At the same time such cleansing would facilitate the further spread of the “pure” Islamic faith.It was not a mere delusion that overwhelmed him, then swept him away on his holy crusade: during the time he spent living on the island of Abbas he traveled widely up and down the coast and along the Sudanese Nile, teaching his doctrine of austere piety, exhorting the Islamic faithful to follow the “path of God Almighty.”
His travels took him as far as Dongola in the north, along the banks of the Blue Nile region, to Kordofan in the western reaches of Sudan, and Sennar in the east.While it can be honestly said that Ahmed was wandering the Sudan as a sort of itinerant holy man, serving the poorest of the Sudanese as a healer and scribe, the overly-romantic misconception that in return those he aided filled his begging bowl with food does him a disservice, for it downplays the position held in the Sudan by learned Islamic clerics: he was neither a beggar nor poverty-stricken.Everywhere he went he made disciples among people who heard him teach, many of whom made their way to Abba Island, where he would give them further instruction, eventually sending them back out into the countryside to carry his message of piety and simplicity.
Wherever his wanderings took him, Muhammed Ahmed found that the Sudanese people’s discontent with the rule of the Ottomans and Egyptians mirrored his own, and in their desire to break their bondage they began to look for the appearance of “the Mahdi” to save them.So great was their desire for the guidance of this “Expected One” that whenever a teacher appeared possessing great knowledge, dedication, and devotion to Islam they would readily believe him to be the Mahdi, though no one had yet proclaimed themselves to be him.Ahmed himself began to preach of a “mahdi” who would first cast out the infidels and heretics from the Sudan, then purge all Islam of its excesses and venality, returning it to the path of true righteousness.
In the theology of Islam, the “Mahdi” is a savior figure, a pre-messianic messenger, sent to prepare the world for the appearance of the actual messiah, who