Nilotic Sudan

This region, south of Egypt and watered by the Nile to the south of the Aswan cataract and the Nile’s tributaries, is also divided ethnically into northern Hamitic and southern Negroid regions. The northern region was called Nubia. The percentage Hamitic/Kushitic in both regions also tends to fall, the farther from the Nile and its tributaries one travels. Further south was the Nilote and Negro zone. Apologies for the use of Negro if it offends anyone (I do not intend it to be in any way offensive).

Before Islam, Nubia was a Christian kingdom. It was conquered by Arabs from Egypt in the 7^th Century. The southern kingdom held out for a treaty in 651 CE and began a trading relationship with the Muslim Egyptian Arabs. Around 1250 CE, the Mamluks finally conquered the southern region. The capital of Nubia, Dongala, declined as Nubia became an Arabic state.

The conversion of the population was not extensive until the 14^th to 16^th Centuries and Arabic was still not spoken widely. The southern Christian ‘Alawa State was replaced by the Muslim Funj State by the 16^th Century. The Arab vassals settled their whole tribes in this region and their indigenous fellow countrymen and women spoke Arabic earlier than the northern populations. The slave trade continued there.

Islamic lawyers and mystics were the two major sources of conversions to Islam in Sudan. The Sufis were especially influential early on. While in West Africa the Sufi mystic was called a marabout, in East Africa including in Sudan the term used was fakir (incidentally, a lawyer was and is called a faqih in Arabic). The Sufi orders were well established from around the 12^th Century.

These two styles of Islam, the styles of the mainly Maliki faqih and the, often Qadiri (from the 14^th Century) fakir, became blended in East Africa including in the Sudan.

Briefly, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, also lorded over Sudan in the 19th Century for a time. This was supported militarily by the British general, Gordon, until the mahdiyya movement (led by a radical Sufi who rather apocalyptically called himself the Mahdi, the Mahdi being the much prophesied Muslim end-times figure) brought about Sudanese independence.

Today, virtually all in both the North and South of Sudan speak Arabic, look alike and are Muslim. The only cause of the fighting there appears to be tribal and ethnic identity. There are now three major relevant ethno-tribal identities: Arab, Kushitic/Hamitic and African.

East Africa

Here we are considering Eritrea, Ethiopia to an extent, Somalia, Tanzania (including Zanjibar), Djibouti, islands of the Indian Ocean and Kenya.

As Sudanese development has more to do which Egyptian development, I discuss it along with Egypt’s (or at least separately from East Africa).

The Arabic name Zanj refers to the Negroid peoples of Tanzania and Kenya. The more northerly Hamitic peoples, although also black-skinned, were called Barbara (very like both Berber and Barbarian in origin). The Romans also made this distinction which may be a little too stark, however, to be useful to science. Within this area, Ethiopia remains a little unique having remained mainly Christian culturally (having also been the Christian kingdom that gave refuge to some of the earliest Muslims). It is clear that both trade and cultural contacts between coastal regions and islands across the very narrow Red Sea pre-date Islam.

We have five sources for our Arab history of East Africa: al-Mas’udi of Baghdad in the 10^th Century visited pre-Islamic Zanjibar (Zanzibar); al-Bakri the 11^th Century Andalusian and Moroccan; al-Idrisi in the 12^th Century; Ibn Sa’id in the 13^th Century; and Ibn Battuta who also visited Zanjibar (and also the Maldives) in the 14^th Century.

All the sources noted the poverty of all but the ruling classes in the region. The Arab trade in African slaves which occurred and was noted in these sources remains an issue today for some African nationalists.

This post is a little brief so I hope to expand it. If anybody wants to add information via the comments, please do so.

West Africa

Muslim traders from Mauritania and Morocco soon reached the Western Sahara and penetrated further south to places like Ghana, Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast collectively referred to in Arabic as Sudan (black) regions. Note that Sudan as used here also includes modern day Sudan and really the whole belt of settlement to the south of the Sahara that abutted the Arab/Berber Islamic world of the time. Trade between North and West Africa in fact predates the advent of Islam in Africa. Gold, salt, slaves and ivory were among the traded items.

The ivory trade was formally disapproved of in Islam but as an extravagance rather than out of animal welfare considerations. The renowned Saharan Tuareg with the traditional headgear were associated especially with the salt trade.

The part of the basin of the Niger River bordering the southern Sahara (and known in Arabic as the Sahal (beach/coast)) was influenced by Muslims from at least the 10^th Century. Bakri from 11^th Century Spain was an Arab historian of this area as was the 12^th Century Tunisian (and Norman Italian) Arab, Idrisi (a descendent of the founder of the Idrisid dynasty). From them we know that Muslim merchants were allowed by the local king of what is now (roughly) Ghana to build and worship at a mosque there. We also learn from them that a pattern of conversion of first elites, who learned Islam from learned merchants and sometimes Sufi mystics, and then their subordinates developed in the local West African societies.

The Almoravids were especially evangelical in both North and West Africa in the 11^th and 12^th Centuries. Both Berbers and Arabs were involved. There arose (as a result of the pattern of conversion) two types of Islam that the West Africans learned, the sophisticated version taught by the merchants and the simple version taught by the Sufis. The zeal was apparently infectious and attempts were made by West African rulers to convert other West Africans and their rulers to Islam often by force. This was occasionally a mere pretext for conquest, however, notably the late 13^th Century ‘jihads’ of the rulers of Mali.

As with the Maghreb, the hajj was enthusiastically attended and participation conferred great prestige on the hajji when back home in West Africa.

Mutual visits also forged significant links between West Africa and the rest of the Islamic world. Nevertheless, Ibn Battuta noted in the 14^th Century that Islam was still predominantly practiced then by the elites.

We know from the work of a Muslim historian in Niger that the locals preferred to add Islam to local customs rather than replace the old customs completely. He notes the absence of the early influence of the Muslim jurisprudents as a problem for the 'proper' local development of Islam (as he saw it) and sees that as having produced the reformist (and jihadist) movements of the 19^th Century, which sought to introduce the stricter form of Islam lacking in West Africa. Another view is that early West African Islam benefited from lacking the strictures of the legalism which developed elsewhere.