His ignorance of the outside world blinded him to the...

His ignorance of the outside world blinded him to the overwhelming superiority in transport and armament possessed by his enemies in Egypt…." Of course the major obstacle to the acceptance of Muhammad Ahmad as the pan-Islamic-or at least pan-Sunni-Mahdi was the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate in Istanbul.

In the propaganda responses to Muhammad Ahmad's initial Mahdist claims, the Ottoman `ulama in Khartoum were ordered to point out that the Mahdi would come, according to the relevant Hadiths, at a time when there was no legitimate ruler in Islam-a situation clearly NOT obtaining when Sultan Abdülhamid II was clearly enthroned in Topkap?.

And in fact it seems that Abdülhamid never really took seriously Muhammad Ahmad's religious claims, being "far less interested in the Mahdi's ideology than in his opportunities.

Mahdism was a hostile force on a map: what worried the Sultan most was the presence of revolt in the eastern Sudan, from where it might easily spread across the Red Sea to Arabia….Consequently the Ottoman's government's first concern was to prevent the insurrection from spreading into neighbouring regions, and above all into Arabia.

" Abdülhamid, in essence, saw Muhammad Ahmad as a new Saudi-type threat to Mecca and Medina rather than an existential threat to Ottoman central rule and religious authority. Nonetheless it remains the case that "the Mahdi and his ansar sought, first and foremost, the renewal of Islam and its purification….For them the `liberation' of the Sudan…had nothing to do with territory or with nationalism, but was purely Islamic.

It was the first stage in the jihad against the world of unbelievers, starting with the Egyptian and Ottoman Muslim rulers…." [emphasis added].

Another group, this time in the 20th century, that saw Mahdism as a way to Islamically "liberate" a portion of the ummah-and not just any portion, but its historically holiest section, Arabia-was the movement of at least several hundred mainly Saudis and Egyptians led by Juhayman al-`Utaybi in the name of the alleged Mahdi, his brother-in-law Muhammad `Abd Allah al-Qahtani, in late 1979.

"On the morning of November 20, 1979, they gunned down guards, cowed thousands of worshippers into submission, placed snipers in the minarets, and began broadcasting over loudspeakers that the Mahdi had come and that the bay`ah (loyalty oath) to the Saudis was henceforth dissolved, to be replaced by one to the Mahdi.