M. Nubia and Islam: 1400-the present

1. The Islamization of Nubia

The Christian kingdoms of Makuria and Alwa gradually destabilized and fragmented into fiefdoms of independent warlords. Bands of bedouin Arabs, forced out of Egypt by its rulers, simultaneously pushed southward along the Red Sea hills and up the Nile and quickened the process of political decay. The influx of large numbers of Muslim nomads into Nubia undermined what little influence the Christian church still retained, and the divided Christian territories gradually fell into the hands of Muslim chiefs, either by violence or through their intermarriage with the ruling Nubian families.

Traditionally in Nubian society a man left all his property not to his own sons but to his sister's eldest son. This explains why, in ancient times, the Nubian throne so often passed to a king's nephew. As the Arabs increasingly intermarried with the Nubian women, all property in time passed into the hands of the Arabs, who left all their property to their own sons. Because the Arabs became dominant both socially and politically, their children began to identify exclusively with their Arab ancestors while ignoring or suppressing knowledge of their pre-Islamic Nubian ancestors.

The breakdown of centralized authority in the Nubian Nile Valley and surrounding deserts led to banditry and lawlessness, which resulted in a cessation of foreign trade and Nubia's increased isolation from the outside world. In the north, despite their conversion to Islam, Nubians were able to retain their language and some aspects of their former culture. In the south, the Nubians were Arabized to such an extent that they lost their native language to Arabic. Since native identity lacked prestige among the Arabs, the Islamized Nubians now assumed real or fraudulent genealogies that linked them to Arabia and the Prophet Mohammed. Eventually the Nubians came to be divided into numerous small Arab chiefdoms, encompassing one or several villages, and each was ruled by a mek ("king").

2. The Kingdom of Sennar

In the early sixteenth century a supreme Islamic kingship emerged at Sennar, about 180 miles south of modern Khartoum. This state, known as the Kingdom of the Funj, had a ruling dynasty actually of Nilotic or central African origin. The kings, in other words, had very black skin and were not Nubians. By some means, however, the Funj had come to embrace Islam and traced their descent from the Prophet Mohammed. Known as the "Black Sultans," they managed to extend their control over the northern Arab-Nubian tribes settled in Upper Nubia and eventually claimed tribute from all the meks along the Nile as far as the Third Cataract. North of there, the Ottoman Sultan in Turkey claimed the rest of Nubia as part of his own new territory, along with Egypt, which he conquered in 1517. He also seized control of the Red Sea ports of Suakin and Massawa.

Although the early Funj rulers were not well versed Muslims, they did seek to become enlightened, and thus opened their kingdom up to foreign religious teachers. Thus many early Muslim missionaries came to the Sudan from Arabia and spread knowledge of the sufi sects of mystical Islam. Unlike the learned Islamic scholars trained in Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, the sufis who came to the Sudan were bearers of a folk religion that believed in salvation through spiritual ecstasy rather than through scriptures. Each sufi movement had its own prescribed route to salvation and enlightenment, usually through some rigid ritual abstentions and practices. While the people worshipped conventionally, certain male members of the society trained to study religion and joined one or another sufi order. These men then became disciples of a recognized sheikh or holy man. When the latter died, the disciples dispersed to found new schools and to disseminate further the teachings of the master.

The Islamic period in the Sudan has not left many ancient remains. All the early mosques were built of perishable materials, like the houses themselves, and do not survive in any presentable state. Nor were these buildings decorated; there was no sculpture, no stone carving, no representational art. A few inscribed tombstones have been preserved from the early centuries of Islam, but not much else. Like the Christians, the Muslims were buried in simple graves, in which the dead were laid on their sides looking toward Mecca. The only people to merit burial in an impressive tomb were the saints and holy men who spread the faith across the countryside. Their tombs are the most impressive Islamic remains in the Sudan. They are great mud-brick, often whitewashed domes, called gubbas. Although many are in dilapidated condition, they survive because of the veneration in which their owners were and are still held.

Doubtless the most magnificent objects created in the Sudan during this period were the costumes, armor, and weapons of the elite. Of this material, however, only very little still survives. It is a curious fact that with the introduction of Islam, the use of the bow and arrow - the weapon so identified with early Nubians - died out, probably because such weapons had not been used by the armies of the Prophet and for that reason were considered impure.

3. The Egyptian Conquest of Nubia and "the Sudan", 1821-1883

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Funj kingdom was in collapse. Egypt's new ruler, an independent Turkish viceroy of Albanian descent named Muhammad Ali, turned his eyes to the south, seeking to seize control of the slave trade, which had become a major business in the Sudan during the Islamic era. Discovering that the Sudanese tribes had very few firearms, he invaded with a small, heavily armed force and quickly conquered the Sudan and annexed it to Egypt. He founded the city of Khartoum at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles as the seat of Egyptian governmental control in the Sudan. This period of Egyptian ("Turkish") rule in Sudan is known as the Turkiya. It was a period of intense slave raiding and exploitation of the Sudan's natural and animal resources; it was also a period in which European explorers and businessmen poured into the Sudan on an unprecedented scale. The headwaters of the Nile were discovered and explored, as were many of the remoter parts of the Sudan, but the Muslim peoples deeply resented the brutal treatment by the alien government, its oppressive taxes, and the presence of European Christian administrators, whom the Egyptians began using after 1870.

4. The Revolt of the Mahdi and the "Mahdiyya": 1883-1898

In 1881 an obscure Muslim holy man named Mohammed Ahmed declared himself the long-expected Messiah of Islam, the "Mahdi," and united the country under a message of expelling the hated Egyptians and uniting the people under the earliest and purest form of Islam. One hears again in this movement echoes of the "pious Aithiopians" of ancient times. The early victories of the Mahdi's followers against the Egyptian armies sent against him were considered miracles, and quickly all the Muslim Sudanese tribes rallied to his side. The Nubian tribes, which straddled Egypt and Sudan, were divided in their loyalties; some fought with the Mahdi; others rejected him as a false prophet. Since Egypt had just been taken over by British authorities, the Mahdi's revolt became a British problem, yet Britain was unable to prevent the Mahdi from conquering all of the country and its capital Khartoum, despite the dispatch of British troops. The determined defense of Khartoum against the Mahdi's forces by the British General Charles G. Gordon is one of the great tales of Colonialist Africa. The city ultimately fell after a ten month siege; Gordon was killed; the British were outraged but helpless to do anything; and the Sudan, for the next thirteen years, became an independent Islamic state.

Until 1898, the Sudan successfully fought off the forces of colonialism; the period was called the Mahdiyya ("The Period of the Mahdi"). In 1896, however, Britain launched a slow invasion of the Sudan by building a railroad up the Nile and transporting troops, sophisticated weaponry and disassembled gunboats over the cataracts. On Sept. 2, 1898, just north of the Mahdist capital of Omdurman, the 50,000 man army of the Mahdi's successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, carrying medieval weapons and primitive guns, attacked the British line. Over 11,000 men were mowed down by howitzers and machine guns. Resistance collapsed; the Khalifa fled and was later killed, and Britain took control of the Sudan.

5. The "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" (1898-1956) and the Sudanese Republic (1956-present)

After 1898 the Sudan remained officially a part of Egypt, but unofficially it was an independent British protectorate until 1956, when it was granted full independence. Although the Sudanese people aspired to democratic rule, and have periodically experienced it, the country almost from its beginning has been siezed by a succession of military dictatorships backed by rival Islamic political parties. Almost continuously from that time to the present, the country has been plagued by a series of devastating civil wars waged by the Islamic government against the non-Islamic southern Sudanese peoples, who have been fighting for their religious freedom and representation in the government.

6. The Birth of the Science of Nubiology.

In 1958, Gamel Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, decided to build a high dam at Aswan. The Egyptians wanted it to control the flooding of the Nile and to generate electrical power for themselves. Unfortunately the lake created by the dam would completely flood Lower Nubia and destroy all of the ancient Nubian sites in Egypt. The waters would also inundate about 70 mi (110 km) of the Sudan. Because of the building of the dam, a huge international emergency effort was organized to rescue Nubia's archaeological treasures and heritage before they were lost forever. Thus, between 1959 and 1967, over 40 international teams worked together to explore 300 miles of the Nile Valley. They discovered thousands of ancient sites and objects, which are now in museums the world over. Three complete Nubian temples were removed altogether and may now be seen in New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art), in Leiden, Holland (Museum van der Oudheden), and in Barcelona, Spain. Many others were taken down and restored on higher ground. This great effort made Lower Nubia, archaeologically, one of the best known regions of the world and created the discipline of "Nubiology." After the flooding of Lower Nubia and with the passage of time, many of the Nubiologists in the 1970's began to look south to continue their researches, and they began the exploration of the northern Sudan, which continues today (2001). Currently there are about sixteen foreign archaeological expeditions working in Sudan, as well as many Sudanese teams.