Download Free Early Mahdism Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Early Mahdism and write the review.

This book is a valuable contribution to the study of messianism and millenarianism in the history of Muslim Spain and pre-Modern Morocco presented in a broader framework of research on Muslim eschatological beliefs and Islamic ideas on legitimate power.
Scholars estimate that a fifth of the world's population is Muslim, and this figure is growing rapidly. This text, written by an American scholar, highlights one of the lesser-known aspects of Islam called Mahdism, which centers belief on a "rightly guided one," a prophet who will at some point return to earth to rally Muslims and make the world right.
Limamou Laye, an Islamic leader from present-day Senegal, has proclaimed himself the reincarnation of Muhammad, with his son later proclaiming himself to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Limamou Laye established a tariqa, or Sufi organization, based upon his claims and the miracles attributed to him. This study analyzes Limamou Laye's goals for his community, his theology; as well as the various elements ­­- both local and global - that created him and helped him to emerge as a religious leader of significance. This book also explores how the growth of Islamic communities in Senegambia stems from an evolving conflict between the traditional governments and the emerging Islamic communities. Douglas H. Thomas demonstrates that Sufism was the obvious vehicle for the growth of Islam among West Africans, striking a chord with indigenous cultures through an engagement with the spirit world which pre-Islamic Senegambian religions were primarily concerned with.
A “well-researched” account of the nineteenth-century Sudanese cleric who led a bloody holy war, from a New York Times-bestselling author (Publishers Weekly). Before bin Laden, al-Zarqawi, or Ayatollah Khomeini, there was the Mahdi—the “Expected One”—who raised the Arabs in pan-tribal revolt against infidels and apostates in Sudan. Born on the Nile in 1844, Muhammed Ahmed grew into a devout, charismatic young man, whose visage was said to have always featured the placid hint of a smile. He developed a ferocious resentment, however, against the corrupt Ottoman Turks, their Egyptian lackeys, and finally, the Europeans who he felt held the Arab people in subjugation. In 1880, he raised the banner of holy war, and thousands of warriors flocked to his side. The Egyptians dispatched a punitive expedition to the Sudan, but the Mahdist forces destroyed it. In 1883, Col. William Hicks gathered a larger army of nearly ten thousand men. Trapped by the tribesmen in a gorge at El Obeid, it was massacred to a man. Three months later, another British-led force met disaster at El Teb. This was followed by the infamous conflict at Khartoum, during which a treacherous native—or patriot, depending upon one’s point of view—let the Madhist forces into the city, resulting in the horrifying death of Gen. Charles “Chinese” Gordon at the hands of jihadists. In today’s world, the Mahdi’s words have been repeated almost verbatim by the jihadists who have attacked New York, Washington, Madrid, and London, and continue to wage war from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean. Along with Saladin, the Mahdi stands as an Islamic icon who launched his own successful crusade against the West. This deeply researched work reminds us that the “clash of civilizations” that supposedly came upon us in September 2001 in fact began much earlier, and “lays important tracks into the study of terror, fundamentalism and the early clash between Islam and Christianity” (Publishers Weekly).
In the early 1880s, Britain intervened in independent Egypt and seized control of the Suez Canal. British forces were soon deployed to Egypt's southern colony, the Sudan, where they confronted a determined and capable foe amid some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. In 1881 an Islamic fundamentalist revolt had broken out in the Sudan, led by a religious teacher named Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, who proclaimed himself al-Mahdi, 'The Guided One'. In 1884, Mahdist forces besieged the Sudanese capital of Khartoum; Colonel Charles Gordon was sent to the city with orders to evacuate British personnel, but refused to leave. Although the British despatched a relief column to rescue Gordon, the Mahdists stormed Khartoum in January 1885 and he was killed. British troops abandoned much of the Sudan, but renewed their efforts to reconquer it in the late 1890s, in a bloody campaign that would decide the region's fate for generations. Written by leading expert Ian Knight, this fully illustrated study examines the evolving forces, weapons and tactics employed by both sides in the Sudan, notably at the battles of Abu Klea (16–18 January 1885), Tofrek (22 March 1885) and Atbara (8 April 1898).
This book is the first analysis of the Sudanese Mahdiyya from a socio-political perspective that treats how relationships of authority were enunciated through symbol and ceremony. The book focuses on how the Mahdi and his second-in-command and ultimate successor, the Khalifa Abdallahi, used symbols, ceremony and ritual to articulate their power, authority and legitimacy first within the context of resistance to the imperial Turco-Egyptian forces that had been occupying the Nilotic Sudan since 1821, and then within the context of establishing an Islamic state. This study examines five key elements from a historical perspective: the importance of Islamic mysticism as manifested in Sufi brotherhoods in the articulation of power in the Sudan; ceremony as handmaids of power and legitimacy; charismatic leadership; the routinization of charisma and the formation of a religious state purportedly based upon the first Islamic community in the seventh century C.E.
Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions tells the story of the Nurbakhshiya, an Islamic messianic movement that originated in fifteenth-century central Asia and Iran and survives to the present in Pakistan and India. In the first full-length study of the sect, Shahzad Bashir illumines the significance of messianism as an Islamic religious paradigm and illustrates its centrality to any discussion of Islamic sectarianism. By tracing Nurbakhshi activity in the Middle East and central and southern Asia through more than five centuries, Bashir brings to view the continuities and disruptions within Islamic civilization across regions and over time. Bashir effectively captures the way Nurbakhshis have understood and debated the meaning of their tradition in various geographical and temporal contexts. Bashir provides a detailed biography of the movement's founder, Muhammad Nurbakhsh (d. 1464). Born to a Twelver Shi'i family, Nurbakhsh declared himself the mahdi, or the Muslim messiah, as an adept of the Kubravi Sufi order under the influence of the teachings of the great Sufi master Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240). Nurbakhsh's religious worldview, which Bashir treats in depth in this volume, offers a
This book examines contemporary jihad as a cult of violence and power. All jihadi groups, whether Shiite or Sunni, Arab or not, are characterized by a similar bloodlust. Murawiec characterizes this belief structure as identical to that of Europe's medieval millenarians and apocalyptics, arguing that both jihadis and their European cousins shared in a Gnostic ideology: a God-given mission endowed the Elect with supernatural powers and placed them above the common law of mankind. Although the ideology of jihad is essentially Islamic, Murawiec traces the political technologies used by modern jihad to the Bolsheviks. Their doctrines of terror as a system of rule were appropriated by radical Islam through multiple lines of communication. This book brings history, anthropology, and theology to bear to understand the mind of jihad that has declared war on the West and the world.
This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.