The Mahdi uprising in the Sudan 1881–5, and the existence of the Mahdist state until 1897, were a watershed in African and colonial history. This event caused the severest setback to the process of the European conquest of the continent, it challenged many of the assumptions on which this process was built (for example that Africa was unable to form strong and stable polities), and accelerated imperialist European rivalries in colonial space. All European eye-witness accounts from Omdurman were authored by Germans and Austrians. They were Rudolf Slatin's Feuer und Schwert im Sudan. Meine Kämpfe mit den Derwischen, meine Gefangenschaft und Flucht, 1879–1895 (1895); Joseph Ohrwalder's Aufstand und Reich des Mahdi und meine zehnjährige Gefangenschaft dortselbst (1892); and, Karl Neufeld's In Ketten des Kalifen. 12 Jahre Gefangenschaft in Omdurman (1899). Ohrwalder's and Slatin's books influenced European public opinion in a decisive way, in particular contributing to the prompting of the British Empire into military action against the insurgents. It is on these accounts that Oeser bases his volume on the Mahdist state which is published by one of Germany's major, and best reputed, scholarly publishing houses.

The very title of Oeser's book, labelling the Mahdist state ‘the first Islamic theocracy’, links the publication to current fears regarding the nature and spread of Islamist fundamentalism. Any investigation of the roots of global antagonisms and cultural conflicts must surely be welcomed. Unfortunately, this is not something that the volume under review seems interested in. Instead, it recounts the events exclusively from the European witnesses’ perspectives, citing or paraphrasing their reports, and renarrating their adventures and struggle for survival. This results in a vivid and thoroughly readable narrative of the three Europeans’ fortunes and observations. Slatin, who in contrast to the missionary Ohrwalder and the merchant Neufeld, had ostensibly converted to Islam and was, due to his role as former governor of the Sudanese province of Dar Fur, kept close to the Khalifa's court, provides the politically most astute insights; the other two, though, give colourful descriptions of living conditions and social structures. Yet, while a detailed picture emerges, the volume under review fails to read the primary sources as texts produced to achieve a certain impact; it fails to identify the textual strategies governing their thematic focus: public morality, cruelty, legal provisions, style of leadership, etc., that served existing prejudices, populated existing discursive spaces and resulted in forcefully casting the Mahdist state, its religious foundations, and its political practices as the quintessential European ‘other’.

In recounting his sources’ comments on issues like slavery, Oeser does not acknowledge that contemporary debates were conducted in a thoroughly controversial fashion – as regards the roots and consequences of the slave trade, but particularly as regards appropriate measures against this scourge. Ernst Marno, for example, an Austrian explorer and Nile navigator in Charles Gordon's employment, warned in the 1870s against drastic measures and their potential to incite resistance amongst large parts of the Sudanese population. Oeser reports his witnesses’ observations as facts: ‘The transport of slaves is conducted with the same heartless cruelty, and with the same hideousness, that is employed when they are snatched.’ (p. 135) There is no mention that the criteria for cruelty and nastiness are thoroughly European, that the apparent disregard for human life also applied to the Mahdist fighters themselves, that the depiction of atrocities served the purpose of touching European audiences in the most sensitive areas, that the sources’ impressions are not counterbalanced by acknowledgements that, once sold to their owners, the living conditions (and life expectancy) of slaves could often exceed those enjoyed in liberty (an argument frequently used in calls for a more nuanced debate and more gradual measures). The issue of slavery, as that of despotism, played an important part in the reconfiguration of African concerns into a triangular relationship by claiming a natural alliance between non-Arabic Sudanese populations and their potential European colonial masters against their Islamist oppressors. Slatin's and Ohrwalder's books provided justifications for European colonialist designs.

In the German and Austrian eye-witness reports from inside the Mahdist state, all of these wider factors are omitted since, quite naturally, the authors’ concern was their own survival. Since Oeser so exclusively relies on their views, he cannot assess them critically and identify their status as being owed to very specific conditions at a very distinct historical juncture in Europe's engagement with the overseas. He fails to discuss the reasons for the production of ‘othering’ images and consequently lacks any awareness of the potency and persistence of constructs and ascriptions born from vested interests.