The Sudan Handbook

Religious   PRactice & belief 91

links 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 the

The 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).