First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam by Daniel Allen Butler Read Free Book Online

will bring justice to the earth, restore true religion, and usher in a short golden age before the end of the world.Yet it is no small point to note that any doctrine concerning the figure of the Mahdi or his mission cannot be found anywhere in the Koran, and there is little among reliable hadiths (the sacred teachings of the Prophet Muhammed’s successors) about such a personage either.The idea of the Mahdi seems to have evolved during the first two or three centuries of Islamic history.Many scholars have suggested-–in particular regarding the Shi’ite doctrines of the Mahdi—that a clear inspiration for the Mahdi comes from Christianity and its ideas of a judgment day in the hands of a religious renewer.
In 19th-century Sudan the conflict between Shi’ite and Sunni Islam, which assumed vital geopolitical importance elsewhere in the Middle East, was not a major factor to devout Muslims such as Muhammed Ahmed.In fact, it can be seen that Ahmed, who rose as much from the Sufi tradition as Sunni, was able to borrow, if unconsciously, Shi’ite concepts of what it meant to be the “Mahdi.” In Sunni Islam, which included the Sudan, a “mahdi” is simply a particularly enlightened teacher, while the “Mahdi” of Shi’ite Islam has a real eschatological importance, and is in the future an essential figure for Islam as well as the world.At this point an understanding of the schism within Islam is important to understand, not only for a perspective on Muhammed Ahmed’s rise to power but as it increasingly affects the West at its current flashpoint in Iraq.
Thirty years after the death of the Prophet Muhammed, Islam was plunged into a civil war which eventually produced the three major sects of the faith.Uthmann, the third Caliph, or successor to Muhammed, was killed by mutineers in Mecca in 656 AD, and within months open warfare erupted across Arabia as three distinct groups emerged from the ranks of Islam’s faithful, each fighting for power within the faith.It has been suggested that the Caliph’s assassination was simply a pretext for the struggle, which pitted the Muslims of modern-day Iraq and Egypt, who resented the power of the third Caliph and his governors, against rival factions of the mercantile aristocracy in the rest of the Middle East.Whatever the actual motives for the killing, it precipitated a bloody conflict—part civil war, part religious conflict—and left a divide within Islam.The war ended with the establishment of a new dynasty of Caliphs, who called themselves Sunnis, who ruled from Damascus.In reaction to them there emerged two other factions: the Shi’ites and the Kharijites.
The Sunnis held themselves as the true followers of the sunna (“practice” or “way”) of the prophet Muhammed, from whence they derive their name.Sunnis also maintained that individuals and congregations within the Islamic community (the ummah ) could not possess their own spiritual autonomy but must always be guided.To this end the Sunnis were willing to recognize the authority of the Caliphs, who maintained rule by law and persuasion, and by force if necessary.The Sunnis became the largest division of Islam, establishing themselves in positions of dominance throughout most of the Middle East and Asia.
Of the two smaller factions created from this schism, the Shi’ites and the Kharijites, the latter eventually became a small and obscure fragment of the Moslem world.The Shi’ites, however, remained a minority of sufficient size-–roughly a fifth of the faithful—and influence to remain a power within Islam.The fact that the former Persian Empire—today’s Iran—went into the Shi’ite fold lent the schism political and ethnic importance.Much as the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had less to do with religous theology than with the ability of Great Britain to hold sovereignty over Ireland, so did the Persian dominance of Shi’ite Islam present a political challenge to Sunni