Religious PRactice & belief 91links back to well-known names from the early days of Islam. The success
of the new Arabized merchant families rested on the possession of slaves,
who laboured in the home and in the fields. This served to entrench
social distinctions in a world which extended legal and social protection
to Muslims but not to non-believers from outside its bounds. Similar
processes and responses to the arrival of Islam in the Funj kingdom
were evident in the sultanate of Darfur, though in this case of a robust
indigenous polity with its own very distinctive political culture, on a less
massive scale, and at a later date.
The Ottoman conquest of the old Funj kingdom in 1821, and the
succeeding period of ‘Turco-Egyptian’ rule which lasted until its overthrow
by the Mahdists in 1885, saw an intensification of exploitative trade into
new peripheries of the south and west, including slaving and forced
military recruitment. This period saw the further spread and consolida-
tion of the Sufi orders. In the west, the growth of the Tijaniyya tariqa was
linked with increased immigration of West Africans. In the Nile valley the
Khatmiyya Order drew in members from many different backgrounds,
paving the way for the quasi-national movement of the Mahdiyya.
Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, was himself originally a Sheikh of the
Sammaniyya Order, but Mahdism aspired to transcend these orders;
it was a campaign for the purification of Islam along reformist lines,
aiming to return to the basic principles of early Islam, to the Quran and
the sunna. Having found support through the existing various Sufi tariqas
of popular Islam across the country, Muhammad Ahmad then sought to
suppress them in the name of the national movement – and to foster, in
Schuver’s words as quoted above, a fusion of Sudanese patriotism with
religious enthusiasm.
Following the Mahdiyya, and for the greater part of the twentieth
century up to and beyond independence in 1956, mainstream political
developments in the northern Sudan took their shape from the sectarian
rivalries that had already been established. In particular, the followers
of the Mahdist movement themselves were reconstituted as a quasi-
religious brotherhood, the Ansar, which underpinned the rise of theThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors modern^ political^ party^ of^ the^ Umma.^ It^ drew^ its^ main^ strength^ from^
(www.riftvalley.net).