There has thus been much missionary work done for Islam in this part of Africa by men who have never taken up the sword to further their end,—the conversion of the heathen. Such have been the members of some of the great Muhammadan religious orders, which form such a prominent feature of the religious life of Northern Africa. Their efforts have achieved great results during the nineteenth century, and though doubtless much of their work has never been recorded, still we have accounts of some of the movements initiated by them. Of these one of the earliest owed its inception to Sī Aḥmad b. Idrīs, [1070] who enjoyed a wide reputation as a religious teacher in Mecca from 1797 to 1833, and was the spiritual chief of the Khaḍriyyah; before his death in 1835 he sent one of his disciples, by name Muḥammad ʻUthmān al-Amīr Ghanī, on a proselytising expedition into Africa. Crossing the Red Sea to Kossayr, he made his way inland to the Nile; here, among a Muslim population, his efforts were mainly confined to enrolling members of the order to which he belonged, but in his journey up the river he did not meet with much success until he reached Aṣwān; from this point up to Dongola, his journey became quite a triumphant progress; the Nubians hastened to join his order, and the royal pomp with which he was surrounded produced an impressive effect on this people, and at the same time the fame of his miracles attracted to him large numbers of followers. At Dongola Muḥammad ʻUthmān left the valley of the Nile to go to Kordofan, where he made a long stay, and it was here that his missionary work among unbelievers began. Many tribes in this country and about Sennaar were still pagan, and among these the preaching of Muḥammad ʻUthmān achieved a very remarkable success, and he sought to make his influence permanent by contracting several marriages, the issue of which, after his death in 1853, carried on the work of the order he founded—called after his name the Amīrghaniyyah. [1071] A few years before this missionary tour of Muḥammad ʻUthmān, the troops of Muḥammad ʻAlī, the founder of the present dynasty of Egypt, had begun to extend their conquests into the Eastern Sudan, and the emissaries of the various religious orders in Egypt were encouraged by the Egyptian government, in the hope that their labours would assist in the pacification of the country, to carry on a propaganda in this newly-acquired territory, where they laboured with so much success, that the recent insurrection in the Sudan under the Mahdī has been attributed to the religious fervour their preaching excited. [1072]