The Sudan of the Three Niles: The Funj Chronicle

P. M. Holt\u27s The Sudan of the Three Niles is an annotated translation of the Funj Chronicle, a history of the Funj sultanate (1504–1821) based at Sennar, along the Blue Nile, and of the Turco-Egyptian regime that succeeded it at Khartoum. Along with the Tabaqat of Wad Dayf Allah (a biographical dictionary of Sudanese Muslim holy men compiled in the late 18th century), the Funj Chronicle is the most important Arabic source on the northern riverain Sudan in the Funj era, a period in which Islam was spreading widely and the region was developing its pronounced Arab–Islamic identity

Mover and Shaker: Grace Mary Crowfoot, Intimate Conversations, and Sudanese History

The Rationale for This StudyAt the fourth annual conference of African studies in France (4èmes Rencontres des Études Africaines en France [REAF]), which revolved around the broad theme of “Cosmopolitical Africas” (Afriques cosmopolitiques), several panellists considered “traces of intimacy” in African history regarding individuals and their modes of oral, literary, and artistic expression. Drawing inspiration from many scholars, including Stoler (2002), who wrote about “cross-racial” relationships in Southeast Asian colonial systems,Goffman (1959), whose sociological analysis of face-to-face “interaction rituals” is now a classic, and more, their aim was to consider close, and often idiosyncratic, exchanges –intimate encounters–in making history. I presented this study on Sudan at this conference and in this context, focusing on Grace Mary Crowfoot, a British polymath and superwoman of her era, and assessing the impact of her informal interactions with Sudanese men and women during the early twentieth century. As I tell it here, her story forms part of a collection of short biographical studies I have begun writing about figures whose lives in Sudan and Egypt transcended national and regional boundaries while producing global entanglements

Jihads and Crusades in Sudan From 1881 to the Present

This chapter grapples with several difficult questions that arise from the history of conquest, revolution, and colonial rule in Sudan. To what extent was the Mahdist jihad anti-Christian at its inception; to what extent did the jihad reflect, instead, a battle among Muslims over the nature of Islamic government and society? How did Muslim religious sensibilities influence popular responses to British colonialism after 1898? To what extent did jihadist discourses persist among Sudanese Muslims, both in the Anglo-Egyptian period and in the decades following decolonization? Reciprocally, to what extent were British policies anti-Muslim? How did British fears of Muslim “fanaticism” influence colonial policies on education, administration, and public health, and did these policies amount to a series of “colonial crusades”