Holymen of the Blue Nile: The Making of an Arab-Islamic Community in the Nilotic Sudan, 1500-1850

NeilMcHugh's Holymen of the Blue Nile presents the story of Islamic leadership in the northern riverain Sudan and its role in the formation of an Arab-Islamic consciousness.It focuses temporally on the 1500-to-1850 period, and geographically on the lower Blue Nile basin, the heartland of the Funj sultanate.Holymen of the Blue Nile offers fresh historical interpretations for the processes of social, political, religious, and economic change that unfolded over the course of this 350-year timespan.It will appeal not only to historians of the Funj and Turco-Egyptian Sudan, but also, and more broadly, to those concerned with the issue of Sudanese identity formation over time.Chapter One of McHugh's work belongs on a recommended reading list for students and scholars of Sudanese history.It provides a thoughtful historiographical overview of identity formation and social flux in the northern riverain Sudan from the collapse of the Nubian kingdoms to the nineteenth century.The subsequent chapters become considerably more technical as they explore the role and development of Islamic leadership in the Blue Nile region after 1500.(In many ways one can see in these chapters a dialogue carried out with the works of Jay Spaulding on Funj history, and notably with Spaulding's The Heroic Age in Sinnar of 1985.)Two significant contemporary sources provide much of the author's evidence: namely, Kitb al- abaqt, the famous biographical dictionary of Sudanese holymen compiled by Wad ayf Allh (d.1804); and the Funj Chronicle, a body of untitled historical manuscripts written in the early nineteenth century.European travellers' accounts, as well as nineteenth-and early twentieth-century archival materials and Arabic treatises, add to the evidence.Supplementary data comes from interviews conducted with descendants of the holymen and their followers.Six