Muhammad Ahmed, known as al-Mahdi ('Divinely Guided One') 1844-85
Arab ascetic and rebel

Born in Dongola, Sudan, the son of a shipbuilder, he was the creator of an Islamic state and a religious movement (Mahdism). He was educated within a religious order rather than at university, and was for a time in the Egyptian Civil Service and a slave trader before beginning his relentless and successful campaign against Egyptian rule in eastern Sudan. He was motivated by a conviction that, due to their apparent desertion of the Islamic faith, the ruling class were unfit to govern Muslims. Believing himself to have been selected by God to destroy any government responsible for the defilement of Islam, he declared himself ' al-Mahdi' in 1881 and gathered together a group of virtually unarmed disciples as his ansar ('helpers'). By 1883 he had proclaimed El Obeid (now al-Ubayyid) his capital and had united the nation's diverse and discontented citizens into an army strong enough to defeat any army Egypt could muster, including the 8,000-strong force commanded by General William Hicks (Hicks Pasha). On 26 January 1885, al-Mahdi took Khartoum in the action in which (against al-Mahdi's orders) General Charles Gordon was killed. Following these successes he consolidated his religious empire, establishing a new capital at Omdurman, but was taken ill and died a few months later, probably of typhus. The Mahdists were defeated by British forces led by Horatio Herbert Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman (1898).