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persuade the Mahdi to temper his rhetoric and cease his agitation of the Sudanese.The delegation simply vanished in the Sudanese wastes.At last becoming alarmed at the rising threat posed by Muhammed Ahmed and his growing band of disciples, Cairo chose to resort to force to impose silence on the Mahdi.
That August, Abu Saoud, then the governor of Sudan safely ensconced in Khartoum, received instructions from Cairo to put an end to the annoying holy man on Abba Island who was creating so much trouble for the Egyptian overseers and tax-collectors.Badly underestimating the forces arraying against him, as well as the devotion of the Mahdi’s followers to their leader, he sent a column of two hundred soldiers up the Nile to Abba, with orders to arrest or eliminate the Mahdi.
Armed only with clubs and rocks, swords and spears—and a fanatical belief in their leader and his teachings—the Mahdi’s disciples ambushed Saoud’s soldiers and literally butchered them.Immediately after their victory, the Mahdi and his faithful, now between ten and twelve thousand strong with their motley armament augmented by the captured muskets of the annihilated Egyptian column, left Abba Island and headed for Mt.Jebel Gedir, in the depths of Kordofan, intent upon retaking the Sudan in the name of Islam.
It was a ragtag force, impressive due to its sheer size rather than from any organizational strength or tactical abilities.Still, the Mahdi would prove to have considerable natural skills in logistics and in moving masses of his followers over long distances.When, in December 1881, a second column of some fourteen hundred Egyptian soldiers met with the same fate as the first, he rapidly began gaining an aura of invincibility.Each victory, however small or large, brought in hundreds of new followers, while adding new weapons to the army’s arsenal and swelling its coffers with money, jewelry, and personal valuables looted from the bodies of the slain.
What had seemed for so long to be a smoldering rebellion against Egyptian authority now flared up into open revolt throughout the Sudan.For reasons that were beyond the Mahdi’s control but from which he would benefit, the uprising was no longer just a “situation” but an all-out crisis for Cairo.When the Mahdi finally faced Cairo’s next attempt to bring him to bay, it would be no small column of soldiers he would encounter—it would be an army.

CHAPTER 3
REVOLT IN THE DESERT
When the Mahdi declared himself and his followers in open revolt against the Egyptians in mid-1881, rebellion in the Sudan had already begun, but his proclamation of jihad , or holy war, against the “Turks” made him the rallying point for tremendous additional unrest that had been threatening to boil over for more than a decade.In the process he gave the energy aroused from discontent a purpose and a direction.Perhaps even more significantly, by proclaiming jihad , the Mahdi provided Sudanese defiance with a moral legitimacy, a spiritual underpinning that would not only sustain it but even increase its fury.
His proclamation was powerful, sweeping, and strident: “Verily these Turks thought that theirs was the kingdom and the command of Allah’s apostles and of His prophets and of him who commanded them to imitate them.They judged by other than Allah’s revelation and altered the Shari’a of Our Lord Muhammed, the Apostle of Allah, and insulted the Faith of Allah and placed poll-tax ( al-jizya ) on your necks together with the rest of the Muslims….Verily the Turks used to drag away your men and imprison them in fetters and take captive your women and your children and slay unrighteously the soul under God’s protection.” He then went on to issue his call to arms: “I am the Mahdi, the Successor of the Prophet of Allah.Cease to pay taxes to the infidel Turks and let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.”
At the same time, he added yet another aspect to his proclamations, one that