| Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahgub | |
| Order1: | 5th Prime Minister of Sudan |
| Term Start1: | 10 June 1965 |
| Term End1: | 25 July 1966 |
| Successor1: | Sadiq al-Mahdi |
| Predecessor1: | Sirr Al-Khatim Al-Khalifa |
| President1: | Ismail al-Azhari |
| Term Start2: | 18 May 1967 |
| Term End2: | 25 May 1969 |
| Successor2: | Babiker Awadalla |
| Predecessor2: | Sadiq al-Mahdi |
| President2: | Ismail al-Azhari |
| Order3: | Foreign Minister of Sudan |
| Term Start3: | 1956 |
| Term End3: | 1958 |
| Predecessor3: | Mubarak Zarouk |
| Successor3: | Sayed Ahmad Keir |
| Term Start4: | 1964 |
| Term End4: | 1965 |
| Predecessor4: | Sayed Ahmad Keir |
| Successor4: | Muhammad Ibrahim Khalil |
| Term Start5: | 1967 |
| Term End5: | 1968 |
| Predecessor5: | Ibrahim al-Mufti |
| Successor5: | Ali Abdel Rahman al-Amin |
| Birth Date: | 17 May 1908 |
| Birth Place: | Ed Dueim, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan |
| Death Place: | Khartoum, Sudan |
| Party: | National Umma Party |
| Native Name Lang: | ar |
Muhammad Ahmad Mahgoub (ar|محمد أحمد المحجوب|translit=Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Maḥjūb; 17 May 1908[1] – 23 June 1976[2]) was a Sudanese politician who served as the Foreign Minister and the 5th Prime Minister of Sudan. He was also a prolific literary writer, who published several volumes of poetry and literary criticism in Arabic.[3]
He was born in the city of Ed Dueim in 1908. He moved to Khartoum at the age of seven. Mahgoub graduated from engineering school in 1929 and in 1938, he obtained a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Gordon Memorial College. He was elected to parliament in 1946. After independence, Mahgoub was foreign minister between 1956 and 1958, and then again between 1964 and 1965. In 1965, he was elected Prime Minister, but was subsequently forced to resign. In 1967, he was elected Prime Minister for the second time and served in that position until the 1969 coup d'état.
The 1965 Mahgoub's government had two goals: progress toward solving the southern problem and the removal of communists from positions of power. The army launched a major offensive to crush the rebellion and in the process augmented its reputation for brutality among the southerners. Many southerners reported government atrocities against civilians, especially at Juba and Wau. Sudanese army troops also burned churches and huts, closed schools, destroyed crops and looted cattle.[4]
Mahgoub's war policy in South Sudan was characterized by extreme brutality and the indiscriminate use of terror, reaching levels of violence never before experienced in the south. His campaigns, which included massacres against southern civilians and looting that destroyed entire towns, have been described by some scholars as genocidal and have been compared to the methods of Alphonse de Malzac, a 19th-century European White Nile slave-raider.[5]