Precolonial Islam in the Eastern Sudan
Jay Spaulding
The Early Islamic Centuries
With the fall of Egypt to the Muslims in 641 preparations began at once for the conquest of Nubia, and raiders annually probed the southern frontier. By 652 all was in readiness; a large Islamic force equipped with heavy cavalry and artillery in the form of mangonels invaded the northern Nubian kingdom of Makuria and a memorable battle was fought before the walls of her capital at Old Dongola. The Nubians won decisively. “The Muslims,” as one tenth-century Islamic historian put it, “had never suffered a loss like the one they had in Nubia.”1 For most of six centuries thereafter the Nubian authorities were able to impose their own terms upon relations with the Islamic world, an arrangement commonly known among generations to follow as the baqt. The baqt exemplified the institutions of administered diplomatic trade through which eastern Sudanic kings normally preferred to conduct their foreign relations; royal emissaries conveyed valuable presents abroad at intervals, and foreign recipients who desired to keep the good will of the donor were expected to reciprocate them. (With the passage of centuries, various Islamic intellectuals, eager to forget the initial Nubian victory, devised increasingly elaborate and fanciful accounts that undertook to construe baqt shipments as payment of tribute.)
The Islamic conquerors, thwarted by Makuria on the Nile, turned their acquisitive attentions eastward toward the Beja. Early border raids were undertaken to impose tribute upon nearby chiefs and to open their country to Islamic merchants. The initial concern of the traders was perhaps primarily safe transit through the desert that separated Upper Egypt from the Red Sea, but they soon found the Beja to be a convenient source of slaves, and a long age of bitter conflict followed as the slaying frontier was gradually extended southward across the Beja homeland. At the height of hostilities a perceptive eleventh-century Persian traveler observed: “The Beja who live in this desert are not bad people, nor are they robbers. It is the Muslims and others who kidnap their children and take them to the towns of Islam, where they sell them.”2
Muslims who penetrated the Beja homeland soon rediscovered the ancient and long-abandoned mines of gold and precious stones that lined the course of the Wadi al-Allaqi. The last half of the ninth century witnessed a mining boom that attracted several thousand immigrant Arabs to southern Egypt, and also stimulated a new demand for slaves to serve as miners. The Beja resisted the influx of miners vigorously, and in response the Islamic authorities of the day subsidized in turn a pair of Arab adventurers to mobilize a force of mercenaries against them. The ensuing campaigns revealed that although the Beja were not likely to prevail against a well-ordered conventional army, they were not likely to accept defeat either, and would prove extremely difficult to govern. Since these punitive campaigns also introduced the firm hand of government to the frontier settlements, they alienated many of the very miners the campaigns had been organized to protect; in years to come, as the mining boom gradually faded upon sober reappraisal of the mineral deposits, many immigrant Arabs would be absorbed into the northern Beja lineages with whom they increasingly made common cause. During the tenth century, a few of these bilingual communities of mixed descent were recognized by outsiders as the first Beja Muslims.
Meanwhile on the Nile the ninth-century mineral boom in the Wadi al-Allaqi threatened the adjoining northern district of Makuria with a new Islamic invasion in the person of traders and miners; worse, it promised to reward any Nubian subject willing to break with tradition by embracing the economic usages of the Mediterranean world. (The fact that some did so may be inferred from the appearance during the ninth century of a Makurian official charged with locating and taxing Nubian traders resident abroad.) In 836, when foreign Muslims asserted their right to buy land within northern Makuria, the Nubian monarch himself journeyed to Baghdad to seek relief from the caliph. Though kindly received, he was not successful; upon his return he was obliged to divide his realm into a northern zone within which intrusive Mediterranean economic principles would prevail, and a conservative southern zone forbidden to private traders on pain of death. In centuries to follow the northerners became Muslims, and in 1174 the zone was reorganized as an officially Islamic province of Makuria under a dignitary entitled Kanz al-Dawla, the head of an elite group of political refugees from Upper Egypt.
As the Beja made the transition from victims to participants in private Islamic commerce, the trading networks of the Red Sea began to impinge upon the large southern Nubian kingdom of Alodia. The capital city of Soba had a quarter for Islamic merchants as early as the tenth century, and by the twelfth the kingdom began to break up; conspicuously, the erstwhile northern riverine province called al-Abwab sponsored a rising international trading entrepôt near the Atbara confluence and conducted a foreign policy that supported the Islamic opponents of Christian Makuria.
Hostilities between the northern Nubian kingdom and the Muslims erupted in 1269, when the Mamluk sultan Baybars rebuffed a Makurian baqt initiative; the Nubians, probably in retaliation, sacked the Egyptian Red Sea port of Aydhab in 1272. The Mamluks dispatched exploratory probes up the Nile, and when these indicated that effective resistance was unlikely, in 1276 a major Mamluk force invaded and conquered Makuria. Under the terms of settlement the Nubians were allowed to keep their religion as protected persons under Islamic law and were to be governed via a puppet king to be chosen by the conquerors from among the old royal family. During the century to follow the Nubians tried repeatedly to shake off foreign rule, leading to a renewed series of invasions from Egypt (notably in 1288, 1289–1290, 1315–1317,1323,1366, and 1379) with the periodic imposition of Egyptian garrisons to support the puppet kings. During the expedition of 1315–1317 the first Muslim puppet king was imposed, and on 29 May 1317 the great royal palace in Old Dongola was converted into a mosque. In 1324 the Kanz al-Dawla seized the throne from the old dynasty and the country disintegrated into warring factions. The Makurian heartland now became a rich slaving ground for Islamic merchants. “[The Nubians] are Christians and have a hard life,” as one fourteenth-century observer from Egypt put it; “they are imported and sold.”3
As the grasp of the northern and southern Nubian kings faltered, the most conspicuous beneficiaries were the pastoral communities who inhabited the wide lands beyond the irrigated banks of the Nile. The pastoralists of these troubled years sought freedom from the waning Christian state, security from Muslim slave raiders, and a new sense of communal identity through the adoption of Islam; in time the cultivators, who in every century before the twentieth aspired to the pastoral lifestyle, were likely to follow. Just as one great pastoral resurgence a millennium before, perhaps sparked by the introduction of the camel, had brought an end to the ancient state tradition of Kush and Meroe, so the great pastoral resurgence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries carved a hiatus through the orderly flow of Sudanese dynastic history at the cusp of transition between the medieval and early modern worlds.
The Islamic African Kingdoms
Renewed centripetal social forces restored royal rule to the Nile in about 1500 and thereafter introduced the state form of government to the western highlands, apparently for the first time, over the century and a half to follow. Legends about the Funj kingdom of Sinnar in the Nile valley and of the realms of Dar Fur and Wadai in the western highlands always characterize the rise of the kings as a triumph for Islam. Close reading, however, reveals that the new kings’ defeated opponents also bore conventionally Islamic names; thus the Funj leader ʿAmara “Whom One Approaches with Bowed Head” struck down Abd Allah “The Gatherer” of the northern riverine communities; Dalil Bahr the Keira son of Ahmad “The Hamstrung” defeated his Tunjur half-brother to create an independent Dar Fur, while ʿAbd al-Karim, the founder of Wadai, supplanted his father-in-law Daud after marrying the daughter ʿAysha. In each instance, it would seem that a preliminary conversion had already taken place long before, during the extended struggles among big-men and chiefs that culminated in the imposition of monarchy; by the point when the first kings achieved definitive consolidation of royal authority a pre-Islamic past had already become literally unthinkable. What was different about the new state form of government that emerged during the early modern age was not allegiance to Islam per se, but the finality of society’s ideological commitment to the faith and the new uses it would now be expected to serve.
The eastern Sudanic kingdoms were Islamic lands that sought and received recognition as such from their neighbors. They were also feudal societies that postulated a hierarchical social structure preoccupied with differentiations of rank and status, and they accepted as natural and inevitable very wide social distances between the hereditary ruling elite and the polyglot ethnic mosaic of humble commoners. The state ideology of the new kingdoms was structured to serve two aspects of the social dynamic. Islam provided a set of general integrative forms that expressed the corporate unity and excellence of society in its relations with the outside world. The titles of the monarchs themselves as preserved in their charters and letters reveal that a king was expected to enact the role of exemplary Muslim for his community (the kings of Wadai and Dar Fur claimed the caliphal title amir al-muʾminin; the kings of Sinnar did not), and the accounts of travelers indicate that many kings took this obligation very seriously. Legend claimed that the sterling Islamic credentials of the first Funj sultan had deterred an invasion of Sinnar by the great Ottoman conqueror Selim the Grim, while by the nineteenth century, as the Turks came to be viewed as fellow-Muslims in an increasingly hostile world, a Dar Fur sultan was said to have tendered formal submission to the Porte. Many kings exercised the royal prerogative of dispatching a mahmal of rich presents to the Holy Cities of Arabia and extending charitable donations to other worthy Islamic institutions abroad. Kings were expected to facilitate the passage of pilgrims; indeed, it was not unknown for a ruler to abdicate in order to perform this obligation himself. Visitors with claims to intellectual or spiritual gifts in the Islamic sense were welcomed, and could typically expect to receive generous royal patronage both as privileged courtiers when in the presence of the king and through royal grants of landed estates, groups of subject commoners, and other privileges that established these immigrant holy men as local dignitaries in the countryside. In short, contacts with the outside world were made comprehensible and legitimate to surrounding lands through their conduct in a conventionally Islamic idiom.
The sincere Islamic convictions of eastern Sudanic kings, however, did not preclude considerable flexibility in the conduct of foreign policy. During the sixteenth century, Sinnar resisted Ottoman advances up the Nile and allied herself with Ethiopia to contain Turkish ambitions at their newly annexed Red Sea city-state island outposts of Sawakin and Musawwaʿ. On the other hand, Sinnar was obliged to repel two major Ethiopian invasions (in 1618–1619 and 1744), and during the later seventeenth century she invaded and annexed the surviving Christian Alodian successor state of Fazughli that controlled important sources of gold near the upper Blue Nile. The two western kingdoms of Dar Fur and Wadai struggled against each other for over a century as each sought to reestablish by force the actual or ostensible unity that was said to have obtained under a dynasty of Tunjur. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, however, a cautious entente was achieved, upon which Wadai directed her expansive energies westward against Baghirmi while Dar Fur began a long and ultimately successful campaign against Sinnar for control of the region of Kordofan that lay between them. No clear pattern of loyalty to specifically Islamic commitments is apparent in the course of political events.
The second set of ideological forms characteristic of the eastern Sudanic monarchies was hierarchical in structure and particularistic in its ramifications; this idiom, drawing heavily upon the lexicon of African kingship, served to justify the authority structure of the state and to rationalize the very great cultural diversities that obtained among the polyethnic class of subjects. Here too the king played a central role, as the ritual initiator of annual cultivation on the Nile or as rainmaker in the west, and everywhere as supreme arbiter over a regime of sumptuary regulations that defined in concrete terms the elaborate social pyramid of rank and status. In Sinnar, for example, (since comparable legal evidence from the western kingdoms is not at hand), the king’s law created a carefully defined middle-level social status niche for Islamic holy men. The testimony of a holy man in court was worth less than that of a nobleman but more than that of a commoner; the penalty for killing a holy man was less than that for killing a nobleman, and it was greater if he were a privileged immigrant foreigner than if he were native-born, but in either case greater than the penalty for killing a commoner. In all the kingdoms holy men enjoyed various exemptions from taxation, rights of geographical mobility and personal security, and other privileges that distinguished them from the class of subject commoners.
The Islam of the eastern Sudanic kingdoms was corporate and communal; all obedient subjects of the exemplary Islamic king were Muslims by definition, irrespective of any empirical deviation between their respective lifestyles and the customary usages of the Islamic heartlands. Such discrepancies were often rather wide; pork and beer, for example, were dietary staples in many provinces, while sumptuary laws demanded the exposure of the torso of commoner women and the bare head of commoner men. The Islam of the subject commoners was defined not necessarily through intellectual knowledge about the faith nor through observance of a life-style characteristic of Muslims elsewhere, but through obedence to the Islamic king. Disobedience to the king, conversely, implied rejection of the corporate Islam of the community, and that justified the imposition of severe penalties appropriate to apostasy or unbelief. In practice this onus was borne most commonly by the Islamically controversial southern communities of each kingdom, termed Nuba in Sinnar, Fertit in Dar Fur, and Kirdi in Wadai. They and they alone among the communities of subjects were compelled to discharge their tax obligations to the kings in nonagricultural form, notably in ivory, gold, civet, or slaves, and whoever failed or refused was liable to punitive raids and selective or mass enslavement. Each eastern Sudanic kingdom thus came to possess a bleeding southern frontier along which class conflict manifested itself in the form of a localized but eternal civil war; insecurity was institutionalized, and Islamic status rendered eternally contingent.
The Rise of Middle-Class Interpretations of Islam
A turning point in the history of each of the three great kingdoms of the eastern Sudan came with the decision to open commercial ties with the Ottoman world. In the Funj kingdom this decision was taken in the third quarter of the seventeenth century as Sultan Badi II (1644–1681) established a fixed capital at Sinnar, built an impressive royal mosque, and began to send periodic caravans to Egypt and Sawakin. In Dar Fur the opening came during the last quarter of the eighteenth century as Sultan ʿAbd al-Rahman moved his fashir east of the mountains to the site that bears the name today and organized caravans to embark down the Forty Days’ Road through the northeastern desert to Egypt. Wadai established significant religious contacts with the Mediterranean milieu when Sultan Muhammad Sharif (1834–1858) became an adherent of the Libyan-based Sanusiyya brotherhood, but because the king was an economic conservative the commercial opening of Wadai had to await the reign of his successor Sultan ʿAli (1858–1874). Increasingly frequent and intimate contact between the African kingdoms and the Mediterranean world could hardly fail to highlight the contrast between the culture of the eastern Sudan and the usages of the heartlands of Islam. While the implications of this critique were similar everywhere, the ultimate consequences became most clearly visible in the case of Sinnar, where a counterculture was given time to gather partisans as the critique ripened.
One index by which the advance of the newly imported critical perspective may be measured lies in the rise of literacy in Arabic, not only among the professionally Islamic classes but also within the government; through written sources such as chronicles, charters, letters, legal documents, hagiography, and poetry the age that followed the opening of the eastern Sudan to the culture of the Mediterranean world would be much more accessible to the historian, albeit through certain admittedly limited perspectives, than what had gone before.
A central preoccupation of the new literature was the professionally Islamic class, by this time no longer necessarily immigrant but rather native sons, and sometimes daughters. Through the corpus of royal charters from Sinnar and Dar Fur, one may observe the process by which the kings endowed holy men with lands, subjects, and an ever-lengthening list of exemptions and immunities that progressively freed them from all residual obligations toward the state and gave them license to reorganize the communities they ruled as they saw fit. The hagiographical literature offers an array of paradigmatic careers through which the holy man may be seen enacting the vocations of healer, teacher, scholar, warrior, merchant, mediator, courtier, judge, mystic, or pater familias; perhaps it is significant that the recorded lives of saints who used their powers to defend the interests of subject commoners are considerably longer, on the average, than are those of holy men who merely served as courtiers and judges. The longest hagiographical work, the Tabaqat of Muhammad al-Nur b. Dayf Allah, gives fair insight into how the holy men themselves conceptualized their universe. Many holy men, particularly during the earlier generations, thought in terms of Sufism’s eloquent elaboration upon the ancient Neoplatonic vision of a cosmos comprising a hierarchy of ascending levels of material and spiritual reality linked through the divine process of creation by a great chain of being. This world view was eminently suited to the society of eastern Sudanic kingdoms, which it mirrored, and it afforded psychedelic visions of unlimited cosmic progress to humble folk who found themselves, by choice or by royal fiat, answerable to a holy man. The Tabaqat also reveals, however, that as generations passed interest in the cosmos faded as a second, legally oriented paradigm of society gradually gained in influence.
The literature of private legal documents traces out in exquisite detail precisely how the holy men who led communities gradually transformed them in conformity to the principles and usages of the Islamic heartlands; in the present limited context a few illustrative examples of this complex and highly nuanced process must suffice. The royal grant of free geographical mobility made it possible for individuals of holy status to participate in commerce, and the royal grant of the right to sponsor a market enabled the opportunities of commerce to come to them. The ensuing spread of the money economy made possible a form of speculation in food grains by which many families of cultivators became permanently indebted, though the holy men, who usually preferred political power to monetary gain, were not necessarily the worst of creditors—at least as long as potential markets external to the community itself were few. Within the community of a holy man the concept of private property in land was introduced, and a rudimentary market in real estate was born as the rich began to buy out the poor; conspicuously, the erstwhile traditional landholding rights of women were often extinguished in this way. Holy men relaxed the sumptuary laws regulating bridewealth to encourage competitive bidding for matrimony, a technique that allowed the rich of each generation to consolidate their wealth through corporate marital mergers or for a rising family to convert its newly accumulated wealth into status for its children. The concession to community members of the right to acquire and own slaves carried the potential to transform agriculture fundamentally, but at initial stages a more conspicuous consequence was the introduction of slave concubinage among holy men and the beginning of slave prostitution.
Under the cumulative impact of these institutional changes the status of women within the holy man’s community gradually changed; as landholding rights eroded and meaningful participation in production became a marker of low or even slave status, free women urgently sought respectability through evermore-stringent degrees of Islamically sanctioned seclusion. Males compelled to commit substantial resources to competitive bidding for a rich and prestigeous mate embraced the new purdah system wholeheartedly, for it safeguarded their investment. Traditional locally manufactured Sudanese female garments were replaced, by those who could afford them, with more conservative (and more expensive) imported Middle Eastern fashions. In Sinnar, at some point late in the eighteenth century, it was discovered that the female of the species cannot swim—a skill hitherto vital in an agricultural world where cultivated islands were numerous but boats were few. Here as elsewhere the middle-class Islamic institutions and usages pioneered by holy men within the microenvironment of their chartered enclave communities would ultimately become the standard for eastern Sudanic society as a whole.
A second index by which the advance of intrusive Mediterranean institutions may be measured lies in the appearance of towns and the rise of an indigenous urban-based middle class. At early stages of foreign commercial contact visiting merchants were conducted via royal fiat to and from a specially designated entrepôt at or near the capital, and exchanges were confined largely to the court itself. From Wadai comes explicit testimony out of the very first generation during which roads were open to Mediterranean traders from the north to the effect that the people of Wadai bitterly resented the prerogatives lavished upon foreign traders by their king and envied the wealth accumulating in their privileged alien enclave.
In the long run it would prove difficult for Sudanese kings to thwart the desire of their subjects, and not least the provincial authorities who controlled physical access to the realm, to participate in the lucrative new trade with the Islamic heartlands. Wadai resisted throughout her brief half-century of further existence to enter the colonial age as an old agrarian state without cities. Several unruly new towns arose in nineteenth-century Dar Fur, one of which, under the leadership of a holy man, conducted an eleven-year insurrection against the last Keira monarch; meanwhile, the kings auctioned off to rival entrepreneurial consortia of traders and mercenaries the right to conduct the raiding expeditions that supplied a burgeoning nineteenth-century export trade in slaves. But the disintegrative effects of commercial capitalism were most clearly evident in Sinnar, where the number of new eighteenth-century towns approached thirty. The old matrilineal dynasty was overthrown in 1718; the distinctive Funj system of kinship discipline that had united the elite and enforced hierarchy among its members now gave way to the simple sale of titles and offices through competitive bidding among the quarrelsome new warlord patrilineages. In 1762 a clique of middle-class warlords tamed the sultan and imposed one of their own as ruling Hamaj wazir, then indulged themselves in half a century of pointless civil war during which each of the new towns was ravaged at least once.
When a society changes, the ideological structures that rationalize it must accommodate to the transformation. The new towns of the late precolonial eastern Sudan housed a variety of lifestyles alien to old agrarian rural society; some typical examples would include the self-made nobleman who purchased his title and bribed his way into office with the profits of speculation on the grain market, the slave who gathered coins for her master through prostitution with itinerant merchants, the mercenary raider who had kidnapped and imported her, the schoolmaster who had taught him to perform calculations of profit and loss, or the respectable free woman who spent her hours of privileged seclusion devising colorful spirit possession cults as an antidote to housewifely boredom. For new townspeople such as these, legally oriented interpretations of Islam imported from abroad encapsulated in handbooks such as the Mukhtasar of Khalil b. Ishaq or the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd offered an authoritative and appealing new paradigm of how life should be lived. Empirical conformity to the rules of Islam found in legal texts now became the criterion by which one’s status as a Muslim was evaluated. Urban leaders made public prayer compulsory (having provided instruction for those unfamiliar with the requisite formalities), and new urban customs of dress and adornment were established to conform to Middle Eastern usages. In the end the new urban-based middle-class society would claim for itself an entirely new cultural and ethnic identity as Arabs, in support of which bourgeois literati composed appropriately ingenious pedigrees as they chronicled the tumultuous and bloody collapse of the old order. Rural folk, particularly in the southern provinces, were now often denied the status of Muslims in order to legitimize their enslavement.
The Islamic Slavelords
The political vacuum along the Nile created by the victory of middle-class Islam was filled by an invasion of Egyptians in the service of Muhammad Ali and his successors, who conquered Sinnar in 1821 and Dar Fur in 1874. The Turco-Egyptian regime allied itself with the emergent middle classes of Sinnar to introduce or extend Mediterranean institutions such as the money economy and a conventionally Islamic magistracy with which to defend such key principles of the new bourgeois society as private property in land and the right of non-noblemen to own slaves and to conduct private commerce. As the nineteenth century advanced, rural society along the Nile was transformed as slave labor began to replace free in the fields, while trade, moneylending, and cash-cropping elevated new local elites. Historically conspicuous products of this transformation were the jallaba, men displaced by poverty and debt from their homes in the irrigated north or drawn by the lure of easy fortune beyond the western or southern Turco-Egyptian frontier. In the wide equatorial lands south of Sinnar and Dar Fur jallaba warlords erected predatory new Islamic slaving regimes to service the demand of the Turco-Egyptian market, while south of Wadai a similar regime arose in response to the arrival of Mediterranean capitalism as mediated by a Libyan Islamic brotherhood, the Sanusiyya.
Along the upper Blue Nile the intrusive northern Islamic jallaba of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were called the Watawit; after several generations of bitter internal conflict a northern Sudanese leader named Khojali Hasan eventually won Ethiopian backing and emerged supreme among them. The Watawit regime differed from its western counterparts in that it mobilized slave labor for the mining or washing of local gold deposits as well as producing slaves for export. Over the century and a half of its existence this slavelord regime succeeded in gradually isolating and decimating the small indigenous communities of the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century companies of merchants based in Khartoum succeeded in passing beyond the great equatorial swamps of the White Nile to establish outposts along the rivers of the southern Sudan and on into [modern] Uganda and the Congo. Not all these companies were Islamic; indeed, some of the earliest merchants were European or Egyptian Christians. But all the expeditions and bases of the Khartoumers were staffed largely by northern Sudanese jallaba, and in time the Turkish authorities took steps to drive out the non-Muslims by favoring their Islamic competitors. The motive was not primarily religious scruple but a desire to minimize meddling by foreign powers claiming rights of capitulatory patronage over various classes of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects; the issue was particularly sensitive because, in an age of European abolitionist fervor, slaves were rapidly eclipsing ivory and gum arabic as the major economic preoccupation of the Khartoumers in the south. Thereafter the government in Cairo equivocated between fatally self-contradictory policies of embracing the jallaba slavelords through cooptation or eradicating them through the imposition of direct rule by force. Religion became an overt issue again during the 1870s as the government, bowing to foreign humanitarian sentiments, dispatched European Christians such as Samuel Baker, Romolo Gessi, and Charles Gordon to assert Ottoman control.
Meanwhile the southern frontier had found its organizational genius in the northern Sudanese entrepreneur and slavelord al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur. Upon his arrival in the Bahr al-Ghazal in 1856 he began to build up a network of thirty-one fortified bases from which, when he set forth against Dar Fur in 1874, he could muster 6,400 professional slave troops supported by 9,000 armed jallaba. Zubayr’s military machine rested upon a generalized enslavement of the non-Islamic populace; as the resistance of each defeated community was crushed those allowed to survive were given Islamic slave names and assigned duties as cultivators, bearers, soldiers, or concubines—or were sent northward via the jallaba to be exchanged for the firearms and gunpowder upon which the predatory enterprise depended. Zubayr’s technique of forcible conversion to Islam through violence and enslavement has remained a compelling precedent for many subsequent Sudanese governments.
At the close of the 1870s the Cairo government stripped al-Zubayr of his conquests through chicannery and force, and many of his outraged minions soon rallied to the cause of the Sudanese Mahdi. One, however, began an independent career of conquest, enslavement, and forced Islamization; between 1878 and 1900 Rabih Fadl Allah carved a broad swath westward from southern Dar Fur. From 1878 until 1891 he occupied the southern frontier zone of Wadai, there building up a force comparable to that of al-Zubayr; then he struck on westward toward the shores of Lake Chad. Upon the departure of Rabih from the southern periphery of Wadai a new slavelord named Sanusi arose to exploit the possibilities of the region; fed by slave-tended plantations surrounding his capital at Ndele, Sanusi’s gunmen extended Islam and servitude across southern Chad and in the northern Central African Republic and exported tens of thousands of slaves northward toward the Mediterranean.
Conclusion
Islam has served to explain and justify four rather different situations in the historical experience of the precolonial eastern Sudan. In some early cases it entered competitive lineage societies during the stage when they were undergoing or resisting the pressures of centralization; there the new ideology apparently followed other valuable, exotic, imported prestige goods down the redistributive networks of the politically consolidating chiefs. In other cases, African kingdoms adopted Islam as state cult. With the opening of these kingdoms to the commercial capitalist usages of the Mediterranean world, Islam provided rationales for a middle-class critique of old agrarian society, and it also defined the essence of the predatory slavelord regimes that arose beyond the nineteenth-century colonial frontier. While today the Islamic rationale for the older two forms of eastern Sudanic society is largely a matter of historical interest, the justifications for the last two remain significant living idioms in the political discourse of the region.
Notes
1. Vantini 1975, 95.
2. Spaulding 1995, 589
3. Ibid., 592.
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