Mahdi (pass. part. of Arab ḥadā = 'he guided': 'the well-directed one'), the Mohammedan restorer of all things. Though not mentioned in the Koran, he is said to have been promised by Mohammed to complete his work in filling the world as full of righteousness as it is of iniquity. The idea is that of the Jewish and Christian Messiah and of the Zoroastrian Saoshyant. Some need for reform soon made the idea practical. The first three califs were by Ali's party regarded as usurpers; and after Ali's reign and murder that party grew in number and in determination to recognise as Imām or calif none but Ali's heirs. Mohammed, a son of Ali though not of Fátima, but of 'the Hanafite,' bore unwillingly the name of Mahdi, and dying in peace he was expected to return. The Shia or party of Ali consisted mainly of Persians. This race opposed the Ommiades because these were unprincipled men and half heathen, because they were their foreign tyrants, and because as usurpers they had broken through the divine right of heredity. The
Abbasides who, descended from the prophet's uncle, expelled and destroyed the Ommiades by aid of the Shia were as much the enemies of these as their predecessors had been. The seventh Shiite Imâm was poisoned by Haroun Alraschid the eighth by his temporarily Shiite successor Almanûn; the ninth, tenth, eleventh followed the same path of martyrdom. The twelfth, Mohammed by name, disappeared after captivity at the age of twelve years in 879. The Shiite inference is that he, the 'hidden Imâm,' will yet come as Mahdi to destroy the false prophet and, with the help of Jesus, to destroy or convert to Islâm all mankind, and to put all wrongs right. Then will follow the resurrection and the final judgment. The native princes of Sofi's line who mastered the Persian throne in 1505 called themselves the lieutenants of the coming Mahdi. From the Ismaîlis (q.v.) in North Africa arose another Mahdi, from whom sprang the Fatimide califs. The seventh of these was Hakim, one of God's incarnations that had previously been Ali. He died, 'became hidden,' in 1020, and is expected by his sect the Druses. Among the Berbers of Mount Atlas in the 12th century arose another Mahdi, by name Mohammed ibn Tumert, whose disciple and successor Abdulmûmin overran Morocco and supplanted the Almohade dynasty there and afterwards in Spain. Hence the Almohade ('Unitarian') dynasty. The year 1666 produced in Turkey its Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, and in consequence its Kurdish Mahdi for the suppression of this Dejjâl, or false prophet. Both fell quietly into the sultan's hands. In 1799 another Mahdi arose in Egypt, against the French, and fell in battle. In Dongola, towards 1843, was born Mohammed Ahmed. He was for a time in the Egyptian civil service, but disagreeing with the governor, he became a trader and a leading slave-dealer. About the prophetic age of forty he claimed to be the Mahdi. Gradually at the Mahdi's call—the Muslim equivalent for a revolutionary spirit—the Eastern Soudan stirred itself against Egyptian misrule. In 1883 he seized El-'Obeid, the chief city of Kordofan, and made it his capital; and on the 5th November of that year the Egyptian army commanded by Hicks Pasha was annihilated. In 1885 Khartoum was taken by treachery, and General Gordon, whom Britain had sent to pacify the Soudan, was killed. The Mahdi died at Omdurman on 22d June 1885. The Khalifa Abdulla succeeded him, but never wielded his power, and his influence was destroyed by the British expedition to Dongola in 1896 and the disastrous defeats inflicted on him by the Sirdar Kitchener (afterwards Lord Kitchener) at the Atbara in April 1898, and especially at Omdurman on 2d September 1898. The Mahdi's tomb in Omdurman was destroyed, the Egyptian flag was hoisted at Khartoum, and, after Fashoda, the whole Nile Valley came under British influence.
For the rebellion, the defeat of Hicks Pasha, and the fall of Khartoum, see EGYPT (Vol. IV, p. 243), GORDON, SOUDAN. See also Darmesteter, The Mahdi Past and Present (Eng. trans. 1885); Wingate, Mahdism and the Egyptian Soudan (1891); Ohrwalder, Ten Years' Captivity in the Mahdi's Camp (1892); Slatin Pasha, Fire and Sword in the Soudan (trans. by Wingate, 1896); Bennett Burleigh, Sirdar and Khalifa (1898); G. W. Stevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum (1898).