Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

272 t CHAPTER TEN
was no need, then, for either a concealment or a return: the Sunni
Mahdi was simply postponed to the indefinite eschaton, not as
Jesus—though some continue to maintain that Jesus and the
Mahdi are one and the same—but next to Jesus, and subsequent
Muslim scenarios of the End Time preferred to assign separate
roles to the Mahdi and to Jesus.
Like the Jews’ Messiah, the Mahdi has not lost all his political
potency in his postponement to the End Time. At various times
and in various places persons have come forth to announce that
they were the awaited Mahdi. In modern times, the “restoration of
Islam” has most often been pursued in the context of forming an
Islamic state or throwing off foreign domination over a Muslim
population. The most famous modern representative of the type
remains Muhammad Ahmad, who revealed his identity as the
Mahdi in the Sudan in 1881 and convinced enough Muslims of the
truth of his claims to lead an insurrection against the British that
destroyed one British army under General Charles Gordon at
Khartoum in 1885 and required another under General Arthur
Kitchener to put it down in 1889.