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16. KALKI
In the history of Islam, many men have arisen who claimed to be the Mahdi. They usually appeared as reformers antagonistic to established authority. The best known of these in the West was Muhammad Ahmad, 1844-85, a Muslim religious leader in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He declared himself in 1881 to be the Mahdi and led a war of liberation from the oppressive Egyptian military occupation. He died soon after capturing Khartoum. In his reform of Islam the Mahdi forbade the pilgrimage to Mecca and substituted the obligation to serve in the holy war against unbelievers. His followers, known as Mahdists, for a time made pilgrimages to his tomb at Omdurman. The final defeat of the Mahdists in 1898 at Omdurman by an Anglo-Egyptian army under Lord Kitchener gave Great Britain control of Sudan.
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ma/Mahdi.html P. M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan (2d ed. 1970).
The Columbia Encyclopedia
Coming of Mahdi
"The world will not come to an end until God sends a man from my family, whose name will be the same as mine, and whose father's name will be the same as my father's. He will fill the earth with justice and equity as it is filled with injustice and tyranny"
Fusul al-muhimma, p. 274 Al-Imam al-Mahdi, The Just Leader of Humanity http://www.al-islam.org/mahdi/nontl/Toc.htm
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