ABSTRACT
[189] A call to Allah Most High, by the sword and by furnishing proof, was combined by God in the Mahdi. God permitted him to fight his adversaries and promised him victory. The slaying [of the Mahdi’s enemies] was in place of the punishment — such as sinking and drowning — which all his adversaries deserved. At times, the Mahdi himself was present at the jihād while, at others, he dispatched some of his Companions to fight the enemy. The Prophet had done likewise [190] and the Mahdi followed in his footsteps. Since the age of Prophecy, war was conducted by campaigns (ghazwa), expeditions (sarīya) and missions (ba‘th): an army in which the Prophet was present is a ‘campaign’; an operation at which the Prophet was not present but sent one of his Companions, is an ‘expedition’; and a ‘mission’ is that [column] which is separated from an expedition. The Mahdi participated in nine campaigns [named after commanders or battlesites]: Abā, Muḥammad Sa’īd [Wahbī], al- Mukhtār b. al-Zubayr al-Kinānī, [191] Rāshid [Bey Aymān] the governor of Fashoda, Jabal Funqur, Yūsuf Ḥasan al-Shallālī, El Obeid, Hicks and Khartoum. Fighting took place in all the campaigns, except those of Muḥammad Sa’īd and Jabal Funqur. Despite painstaking inquiries, the author could not establish that the Mahdi himself had actually fought in any of the campaigns. 120Although the Mahdi was with the Companions during the fighting, it was his habit to pray and to immerse himself in the state of beholding. No sooner had he done so than God destroyed the enemy. The author remarks that rather than include all the Mahdi’s campaigns in one chapter, which might have facilitated a study of the Mahdi’s sīra, [192] he preferred to arrange them in chronological sequence.
