Mohammed Ali, the Ottoman (Turkish) viceroy of Egypt, sent an invading force to Sudan in July AD 1820 and seized power the following year. During Muhammad Ali’s rule and that of his successor, the Khedive Ismail, the people living in western and southern Sudan were decimated in a merciless campaign for slaves and ivory.

By the later 19th century there was escalating unrest. In 1881 a religious leader Muhammed Ahmad pronounced himself the Mahdi (divinely guided one). By 1885 he had united the Muslim people of northern Sudan, defeated the Ottoman-Egyptian government in Khartoum and created a Mahdist state. Although the Mahdi died shortly afterwards, the Mahdist state lasted 13 years.

The Mahdi was a puritanical reformer. His original supporters, the darawish, were religious men who wore tattered and patched garments called muraqqa'a (which for centuries had been the dress of Sufi initiates). The patchwork tradition of the muraqqa’a was continued more elaborately in the decorative appliquéd coloured patches of a later version of it known as the jubba. The military nature of the Mahdi’s jihad war dictated the design of the jubba on a practical level as it was a short garment that allowed soldiers flexibility of movement.