A PORTRAIT OF THE MAHDI.

Western Star, Issue 944, 2 May 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

A PORTRAIT OF THE MAHDI.

Imagine a man about forty years of age, of medium height, as lean, as the saying is, as shotten herring, with a mahogany complexion, coal-black beard and eyes, and three vertical slashes on his pallid cheeks; add to this a long cotton shirt as a garment, a narrow turban as a headdress, a pair of wooden sandals, and in the hands—dry as those of a mummy —a string of ninety beads, corresponding to an equal number of divine attributes, and you have the Mahdi. Those who have seen him say that Mohammed-Ahmed plays to perfection the part of a visionary dervish, waving his head when walking, and murmuring constant paayers, his eyes fixed on heaven. His father was a carpenter on Naft Island, in the Nubian province of Dongola, and about 1852 came, with his four children, to Ohindi, a small city on the banks of the Nile south of Berber. When still very young he was placed as an apprentice under one of his uncles, a shipbuilder,,of Ohakakah, opposite Sennarr. It seems that the future prophet w not without his failings, for one day his uncle thought well of flogging him in regular French style. The proceeding was not appreciated, and the child ran away until he arrived in Khartoum, where he entered a sort of school or convent for begging dervishes, who were in charge of the monument erected over the venerated remains of Sheik Hoghali, patron of the city. There his life was a remarkable one for his piety; but as to education, he never learned how to write or even now to read fluently. Later he went to a similar institution in Berber, then to one in Aradup, on the south of Kena. In the latter city he became, in 1870, the favourite disciple of an eminent fakir, Sheik Nur-el-Daim, and finally was ordained by him and went to Abbas Island, white Nile. His fame as a saintly man was every year on the increase. He lived in a kind of pit or subterranean repository for grain, called silo, which he had dug up with his own hands; and there he passed his life, fasting and praying, burning incense day and night, and’ repeating the name of Allah for hours at a time until he would fall to the ground panting and exhausted. If anybody spoke to him he gave back no answer except sentences from the sacred book of Islam. Earthly things seemed only to inspire him with disgust and pity. He had made a vow to absorb himself in the contemplation of divine perfections and to weep all his life for the sins of mankind. But his tears did not destroy his power of; vision, and he kept his best eye open to business; and the faithful coming by thousands and depositing rich gifts at the mouth of his silo, he never failed to see the gifts nor to stow them away carefully for stormy days. /In 1878 he had become so wealthy 'that he felt the necessity to declare that Allah had ordered him to leave his silo, and td take unto him a large collection of wives, whom as a truly practical man, he chose among the most influential families ofthe country, especially that of the Bagaras, the most opulent slave traders of the White Nile.

Every one has still fresh in his memory the appalling extermination of Hicks Pasha’s 11,000 men, surrounded on the fifth of November, 1883, the first day of the Fourteenth century of the Hegira! —at Lasghil while marching on El Obeid. This horrible butchery, happening on the Jthreshhold of the century, announced as the one of the Last Prophet, gave a bloody consecration to Mohammed-Ahmed, who after the three days' battle, went ail over the battle-field, piercing with his spear the ghastly' corpses of his enemies and exclaiming; “It is I, the Prophet who destroyed the heretics 1° Compared to him, Mohammed was no more, in his mind, than a small prophet He alone was the only great and powerful Messiah, announced by Mohammed himself, . The Sultan of Constantinople was no more the supreme Caliph, the chief of Islamism j| it was he, Mohammed-Ahmed, and he ordered his own name to be invoked in public worship in the place of Mohammed’s, right after the name of Allah 1

1 have said enough to show what kind of a man is the Nubian Mahdi. —■ Alfred M, Ootte, LL.D.. in The Oatholio World.