The Sudan Handbook

74 the sudan handbook

assimilation between these migrants and indigenous African popula-

tions, and the establishment of trade networks that linked Egypt and

the Middle East to West Africa. In time, this was to bring a new religion,

a new language and a new source of social organization to a region

stretching from Senegal to the Red Sea, the region known to the Arabs

as Bilad al-Sudan, ‘the land of black people’.

Following the first Islamic conquests of North Africa, small numbers

of armed traders followed the Nile Valley southward to Nubia: a seventh-

century agreement, the Bakt, records the establishment of relations

between the new Muslim rulers of Egypt and the indigenous Nubian

kings, marked by an annual tribute of slaves. Later, in the fourteenth

century, conflict in Egypt encouraged Arab migration southwards to

Nubia, and, from the sixteenth century onwards, the Arabization of the

central area of Sudan gathered pace.

This cultural penetration has been characterized by some historians as

a predominantly non-violent process, involving the progressive assimi-

lation of indigenous populations by marriage and proselytization. By

this account the paradigmatic bearers of Islam were itinerant holy men

and teachers (who were sometimes also traders). With them came the

slow spread of literacy and a new grammar of kinship, one that gave

recently Islamicized communities the opportunity to create lines of patri-

lineal descent linking them to the family of the Prophet Mohamed or

his followers, thus merging diverse local cultures into an Arab ethnic

identity. The legend of the wise stranger, a founding ancestor of Arab

origin who is given the daughter of a local ruler in marriage and becomes

ruler in his turn, is widespread among communities in the north and

west of Sudan.

From the sixteenth century onwards new centres of power emerged

in the region that was to become Sudan: the Funj kingdom in the Nile

Valley around Sennar – an area that is still a key part of the heartland of

the modern northern Sudanese state – and, in the west, the Fur sultanate

and the Masalit sultanate, both of which endured into the twentieth

century. The rulers and the subjects of the Fur and Masalit sultanates

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors were^ Muslims,^ but^ most^ of^ them^ did^ not^ embrace^ an^ Arab^ identity^ in^ the^

(www.riftvalley.net).