THE MAHDIST STATE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUDAN: Sharìa and the Islamic State in 19th-Century Sudan: The Mahdi's Legal Methodology and Doctrine

Sharìa and the Islamic State in 19 th -Century Sudan: The Mahdi's Legal Methodology and Doctrine. By Aharon Layish. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xxx + 348. $149.00, hardback (ISBN 9789004311381).

In March 1881, a Sudanese holy man named Muhammad Ahmad began to confide to his intimate associates that he was the Expected Mahdi, a prominent figure in Islamic eschatology. In the months and years to follow, he and his supporters overthrew the Ottoman colonial regime in the Sudan and united much of the country under a Mahdist State that endured until the colonial conquest by the British of 1898. The Mahdi himself died in June 1885, but his Companions, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad, thereafter recorded anecdotes concerning his words and deeds, which were broadly comparable in their legal effects to the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad.

Before his call to become the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad had been master and guide to a leading Sudanese Sufi brotherhood. Within the Mahdist State that he subsequently established, the Mahdi abolished all Sufi brotherhoods and every established madhhab (school of Islamic law). (He placed a...