When Turks Became Infidels

Abstract The Mahdist uprising in late Ottoman Sudan has generally been described in either economic or religious terms—as either an economic backlash against harsh taxation and Sudan's incorporation into the global capitalist system, or as an eruption of religious fanaticism directed against British colonizers. This article argues that both explanations err in uncritically adopting a modern concept of “religion” as distinct from the realm of “economy.” Reading several little-used archival documents from before and during the Mahdist uprising, the article shows how the uprising was a critique of precisely a modernist reordering of the world in terms of economy and religion, a cleavage closely related to the rise of new categories of difference like “Sudanese,” “Arab,” “African,” and so on. Yet the operative categories for the Mahdists were in fact mu'minūn versus kuffār—the former including West Africans and the latter primarily aimed at “the Turks,” the purported caliphs of the Muslim world—confounding the colonial concepts of religion, economy, and race that continue to structure scholarship on Sudan, the Middle East, and the non-West more broadly.