MOHAMMED AHMED IBN SEYYID ABDULLAH (1848-1885), Sudanese tyrant, known as "the Mandi," was born in Dongola. His family, known as excellent boat-builders, claimed to be Ashraf (or Sherifs), descendants of the Prophet. His father was a fiki or religious teacher, and Mohammed Ahmed devoted himself to religious studies. He went to live on Abba Island on the White Nile about 150 m. above Khartum ; many dervishes gathered round the young sheik, whose reputation for sanctity speedily grew. He travelled secretly through Kordofan, where (with ample justification) he denounced to the villagers the ex tortion of the tax-gatherer and told of the coming of the mandi who should deliver them from the oppressor. In May 1881 a certain Abu Saud, a notorious scoundrel, was sent to Abba Island to bring the sheik to Khartum. Abu Saud's mission failed, and Mohammed Ahmed no longer hesitated to call himself Al-Mandi al Montasir. "The Expected Guide." In August he defeated another force sent to Abba Island to arrest him, but thereafter deemed it prudent to retire to Jebel Gedir, in the Nuba country south of Kordofan, where he was soon at the head of a powerful force; and 6,000 Egyptian troops under Yusef Pasha, advancing from Fashoda, were nearly annihilated by him in June 1882.
By the end of 1882 the whole of the Sudan south of Khartum was in rebellion, with the exception of the Bahr-el-Ghazal and the Equatorial Provinces. In January 1883 El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan, was captured. In the November following Hicks Pasha's force of io,000 men was destroyed at Kashgil, and in the same year the mandi's lieutenant, Osman Digna, raised the tribes in the eastern Sudan, and besieged Sinkat and Tokar, near Suakin, routing General Valentine Baker's force of 2,500 men at El Teb in February 1884. The operations undertaken by Great Britain in face of this state of affairs are narrated under EGYPT : Military Operations. It need only be added that General Gordon (q.v.) was besieged at Khartum by the mandi and was killed there when the town was captured by the mandists on the 25th-26th of Jan uary 1885. The mandi himself died at Omdurman on June 22, 1885, and was succeeded by his khalifa Abdullah.
See Mandiism and the Egyptian Sudan by F. R. Wingate (1891); Ten Years' Captivity in the Mandi's Camp (1882-92) from the MS. of Father Joseph Ohrwalder by F. R. Wingate (1892) and Fire and Sword in the Sudan (1879-95) by Slatin Pasha.