10 Qirsh - Abdullah

Issued under Abdullah ibn Muhammad — the Khalifa who succeeded the Mahdi after his death in 1885 — this coinage reflects the Mahdist state's uneasy relationship with monetary convention. The regime was ideologically hostile to many Ottoman and Egyptian precedents, yet economic necessity demanded recognizable coinage. Billon, a debased silver alloy, was the predictable result of a treasury perpetually strained by warfare against Egyptian and later British forces. Kitchener's campaign would erase the Mahdist state entirely by 1898, making the full 1887–1894 run of this type one of the shorter-lived series in northeast African numismatic history.