The Mahdi and Africa: Muhammad Ahmad and Sudan's Mahdist Revolution in Context

The story of the Mahdi of Sudan is generally related from the British point of view, though it was more an African event. The Mahdi’s uprising was the latest in a series of Islamic rebellions and wars which began in the eighteenth century. It also had a profound effect on the rest of North and East Africa, destroying the Egyptian Empire, provoking Ethiopia into a new unification, which allowed it to successfully resist the Mahdists, the Egyptians, and the Italians; it brought British forces...