The Sudan Handbook

Religious   PRactice & belief 89

Historical Background: Islam, the Dialectics of Authority

vs Charisma

As the Turco-Egyptian rule in the Sudan was beginning to crumble in
the early 1880s, and the Mahdist movement was gaining supporters,
the Dutch traveller J.M. Schuver was on his way through the country,
aiming to explore unknown routes up the Blue Nile and into Abyssinia.
He was following an inland track towards Sennar, away from the main
route by the river itself. Noticing groups of white-draped youths and
children shuffling around bright evening fires, reciting as they went, he
recognized these as Quranic schools, each under the eye of a pious cleric.
He gives us a very sympathetic portrait of these often itinerant holy men
(feki in colloquial Arabic, fugara in the plural form) who typically had a
simple way of life dedicated to spiritual pursuits, providing the necessary
Muslim blessings at family rituals, and medicines or protective amulets
for dealing with illness and misfortunes. At one place Schuver came
upon what he termed a ‘real rural seminary’ hidden in the woodland,
away from the eyes of passing caravans and bands of soldiers. Here was
a gathering of fugara and numerous groups of youths under instruction.
Schuver considered he had visited one of those centres of ‘Sudanese
patriotism fused with religious enthusiasm’. These, he thought, would
‘join hatred against the unbelievers to resentment against the Turkish
tyranny’ and play a part in the insurrection already threatening.
This scene resonates for us today, especially since the resurgence of
militant Islamist politics a century after Schuver’s travels. We may ask,
to what extent have there been earlier periods when ‘patriotism’ has been
‘fused with religious enthusiasm’? How far has governmental authority
in the past been associated with one or other dominant form of religious
orthodoxy? And how far has there always been a tendency in Sudan
towards charismatic sources of resistance to such authority?
Scholars concur in suggesting that Sunni Islam was first introduced
into the middle Nile valley during the medieval period, when the former
Christian-run kingdoms of Nubia were weakening politically. By the early
sixteenth century, political rule had been established over large parts of
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).