THE ORIGIN OF THE FUNG

extracted from: Crawford O.G.S. "The Fung Kingdom of Sennar"

Translated by Osama Elnur

The problem of the origin of the Funj

W.J. Crawford

Translated by Osama Abdul Rahman Al-Nur and the late Muhammad Othman Ali

The origin of the fung

The issue of Funj origin represents the most controversial issue in the history of Sudan. Doctor Bruce says: “In the year 1504, a black nation, previously unknown, inhabiting the western bank of the White Sea at approximately 13º latitude, arrived in large numbers of light boats to the Arab regions and defeated Wad Ajib in a battle that took place near Harbagi, and forced him to surrender, according to which the Arabs had to pay them a tribute of half their crop for them initially, and half of their crop for each year that followed... The Arabs were allowed according to this condition. Keeping their previous possessions intact, Wad Ajib was allowed to maintain his status and dignity, so that he would always be ready to use his power for the benefit of the victors in the event that any of the distant Arabs refused to pay tribute. Thus, Wad Ajib became the victor’s representative, known in his country as the Shilluk.  Bruce does not explain to us the source from which he derived this information, but I believe that it can be predicted with some degree of confidence that Bruce took it from Ahmed, the master of the people, according to what Chapter Nine of Bruce’s own book indicates. The Upper Blue Nile Shilluk, as Bruce says, are indigenous inhabitants of the region, and they are the Funj who came from the same region, just like the Shingala, who expelled the Arabs led by Wajeeb (i.e., they are from the White Nile). Vazoglu and Juba (by Juba means a region in Abyssinia - Arkamani) are the Funj regions. The king of Sennar on the other hand is from Shingala (the specific name is Shilluk). These Shilluk live on three large islands [identified by Arkell as Aba Island, Misran Island, and Belli Island] in the White Nile. Their large numbers come mainly from those islands that are one day's journey from Al-Eis (Al-Kawa on the White Nile), and others from the Upper Nile. Their cities are located on the western bank of the Nile, and they are many cities. Between the upper Blue Nile and the White Nile there is another type of Nuba, and these are the original Nuba and the Land of Gold. These other blacks came from Juba, Nuba, and Fazoglu. Juba and Nuba are located towards the Kura border in the hot lowland area in the southeast of the region.

Now we must note that Bruce states that the general Shilluk or the king's forces are mostly pagans until now (i.e. under the Islamic Funj state - Arkamani) and they have their own priests. They worship a tree and other things, and Bruce calls them the common people, to distinguish them from the king, whom he also calls Shalkawi. Who are these common people? If we return to the novel, we find that they are nothing but the forces present in the Nuba villages surrounding Sennar, who worship a tree as well as a stone, and it seems that “their priests have great influence over them.” “They were either bought or taken by force from Fazoglu and the areas south of them in Mount Diri and Tagla,” which are the last regions on the western bank of the White Nile. But we know from the Funj documents that these forces were placed around Sennar by Badi II. 1644-1680, who captured them during his campaign against the Shilluk in the White Nile. Bruce’s testimony about the Nuba villages is similar to what was stated in the Funj documents, and each story confirms the other. However, I believe that Bruce mixed up two different popular narratives, the first related to the origin of the Nuba forces, and the second to the Funj rulers. Bruce himself addressed the difference between the two stories, and his testimony provides evidence that the Funj rulers came to Sennar not directly The White Nile, but from the Upper Blue Nile region. Bruce mentions that Ahmed, the master of the people, who was from the family of the Funj rulers, was born in a village in Fazoglu and was supervised by the magicians (Kujur) in Fazoglu, who, like Ahmed himself, were speakers of Arabic, an acquired second language, and it is said that they had come from Mount Diri and Tagala in ancient times. Therefore, Bruce himself contradicts his account of the Shalakawi invasion by light boats If the Funj’s homeland was in the Upper Blue Nile region, the invasion would not have been possible. I do not seek to cast doubt on the reality of the invasion of Chalkawi with light boats, but I do acknowledge that Amara Dengus, the first of the Funj kings, did not come with a light boat. We will return to the Shilluk later. Currently, we are discussing the local Sudanese point of view about the origin of the Funj.

Umayyad origin hypothesis

There is one traditional narration that traces the origin of the Funj to the Umayyad and Hijaz structures. It is said that a person by the name of Suleiman [he is said to be the son of Abdullah bin Abdul-Hakam, who lived in the eighth century AD] first settled in a place called Arousa and moved from there to Jara in the land of Jala. When he found that the people there were hostile to Islam, he traveled to Tava, which is subject to Mecca Keren, located 40 miles south of Kurmuk. He taught the Qur’an there, and the Mecca took him as his advisor in the place of Sheikh Al-Abdlab, who moved before the arrival of Suleiman. In a short time, Suleiman married Bint Al-Mak and had children with her, including Amara Dunqas. The sons became rulers in different regions of Sudan. Another story says that these sons passed south on the edge of the Ethiopian highlands and crossed into the White Nile. bride

In a third novel, Tiva, Qaam, and Metopara are mentioned as names of places in Abyssinia that the children passed through on their journey from Eritrea to Sudan. The second name refers to Goz Fami and Debba Fami north-east of Renk, while Metobara could be the village of Matbar mentioned in Kayo's work between Mount Kuljo and the Inqasna Hills on the way to the Nile at Roseiris. There is another place, Mount Matbara, as mentioned in the map of Khojlin, now Mount Makbara, twenty miles south of Al-Qalabat, in the sharp border corner. Another possible approach with Madr Bahr “sea region” which is the name of an Eritrean province was Barangash District. However, the Makkuk Abuldugu and Magaga have a running tradition in their tradition that they are Dinka and that they came from the west from Tiva and Qam, which they say are mountains in the west. These narratives seem to point strongly to the White Nile as the original home of the people called the Funj of the Mountains, but since the Funj themselves did not come to those mountains until recently, possibly after the Turkish invasion, the narratives that are not based on solid foundations may have no bearing on the problem of the origin of the Funj.

The story told by Makili Nail calls Suleiman Ibn Khalid and takes him to Dongola, where he married the daughter of the king, whose name was Teughawal. As a result of this marriage, Amara became king of Anj. Then the story becomes mixed, as it is said that the Funj were defeated by the Funj army and took shelter first in Sennar and then in Mount Turtasi (near Qili). The story ends as follows: “When the Funj arrived in Sudan, they were white like the English, but by marrying local women they became black. The Funj kings in Qili married women from the barbarians, the Inqasna, and others.”

As for the narration of Al-Baja (Al-Basharin Al-Ibrahimab), it tells that the sons of Marwan bin Al-Hakam arrived in Abyssinia from the Arabian Peninsula and advanced to defeat Abdlab Rifa’a, and that was during the reign of Anaku and Kadabub. Later, the savages rose up, killed Marwan's sons, and divided the land with Al-Abdlab. Al-Batahin and Al-Shukria were under their authority. Rifa'a is located on the bank facing Arbaji, and thus this is the second testimony about the battle mentioned by Bruce.

There appears to be a narration in Warkat (near Qurbin) linking the Funj to the White Nile. The people of Warkat speak a non-Arabic language and call themselves savages, distinguishing themselves from the Funj, whose original homeland was Stamsetzi, located between the mountains of Nemati and Tivavan. Most of the chiefs in Karawit, north of Qalli, were Funj, who formed the original inhabitants of the mountain. The inhabitants were proud of their Fungawi origin and considered the savages to be subordinate people, even though the two groups spoke the same language. Although the Funj Karawit mingled with the savages, they still showed distinctive features that made them somewhat similar to the most beautiful Shilluk. There are also Fung in the mountains of Qali and Silak, the majority of whom are Fana Fana and are aware of their connection to the former Mek Ronga. It is possible that all these Funj fled south from their lands at the beginning of the Turkish invasion (which, as is known, made slavery one of its main goals - Arkamani).

Currently, these narratives show significant confusion and incoherence, but the most important point is: Are these narratives true oral challenges, or are they merely narratives extracted from a written narrative, or are they a mixture of the two? I think it's a mixture of both. The introduction of characters from the eighth century into events from the sixteenth century could be the result of the Samarkandian jurist or any other Arabization influence. But it is from Solomon and later accounts show a degree of credibility. The content is the usual type of topics that tell about a poor adventurer who marries the king’s daughter to establish a ruling family. The details mentioned are what are of great importance to the narrators - Ibrahimab below the Atbara River remembers, or chooses, so to speak, from written history the defeat of their Abdallab neighbors, and the inhabitants of the southeastern mountains choose events from their own ancient history - the Arab compilers of genealogies could bear responsibility for introducing Al-Hakam and Marwan, but they were concerned with nothing but establishing or fabricating an Arab ancestry, and it seems unlikely that they would have fabricated other events.

Let's try to look at the local manuscripts and what they say about the subject, something that was made possible by the great work done by MacMichael. The best of these manuscripts, which date back to the middle of the seventeenth century, indicate that the Amiris were the family of Suleiman bin Abdul Malik bin Marwan the Umayyad. They are said to have ruled the blacks in Sudan and the lands of the savages until they eventually became similar to them in every aspect and became known as the Funj. Suleiman fled from the Arabian Peninsula to Abyssinia and from there to Sudan, where he married the king’s daughter and two sons were born to her, Dawud and Anas, whose names were changed after his death to become Udon and Onsa. From their loins came Sudanese kings, the first of whom was Amara in Sennar.

The Eritrean novel

As a result of these discussions, it seems as if we have gotten rid of Bruce’s hypothesis about the Chalkawi origin, and we can talk about a Western origin (the White Nile) as valid evidence of the original place of its authors, but it is not valid for the origin of the Funj. Other accounts, oral and written, point to the northeast. In the year 1522, Amara Dengus was undoubtedly based in Lamul, which is eight days away from Sennar, and it is possible that he recruited his forces from the inhabitants of those areas. However, the local story suggests that he eventually came from further north. Currently, there are specific accounts in Eritrea of ​​a tribe called the Funj. Rossini recorded a local story that says that when Azjadi came to Al-Habab in about 1500, the tribes living in the area were the Palo and the Funj. The Funj departed upon his arrival, and only one family remains of them at the present time. It is worth noting that this talk is about the Funj as a tribe, and another tribe, the Balu, was added to them, and thus they appear as ordinary people, not rulers of the kingdom, and they lived in Tartra. The next village to the south of Azjdi village is Indlal (Inzlal).

In the biography of Mercurius, it was mentioned that the Queen of Sheba (called the Queen of the South), upon her return from a visit she made to Solomon, followed a route different from the one on the way, because her slaves, the Funj, the Takorere, and the Balu, were in a state of revolt. This implies that those tribes occupied part of the usual route to Palestine when that paragraph was written, and this would place those tribes on or near the normal pilgrimage route through Eritrea (from Suakin via Maria to Keren). The reference undoubtedly contains a historical paradox: the priest in question (Mercurius) died in 1419, while Rossini attributed the manuscript to the eighteenth century. Linking the Funj with two other Eritrean tribes seems out of place in the eighteenth century when the Funj were then well known in Abyssinia as the ruling family of Sennar, but this may have been valid and correct in the fifteenth century.

Rossini records an account of the existence of a Funj camp at Ribalav near Raya in the Agra plain, where its remains can be seen near the dome of Sheikh Iyasu. The place was called Atatafi, where the Funj fought the Almadas who had occupied the area before the Azjadi came.

The name Funj is repeated in the same region. In the genealogy of the Mansa tribe to the south of Al-Habab, the third name was Awali Al-Fanjawi, the third descended from Mansai. This name goes back to the twenty-first generation preceding Lahbamakhel (the beginning of the twentieth century) and would therefore occur around the end of the thirteenth century, long before the founding of the Funj dynasty. In a pond thirty miles below Agordat there is a creek by the name of Adefungai. Four miles away is Dongoaz, which is considered a summer camp for the leaders of Beni Amer, and therefore it is called Daga or Zaga camp. It is located in an arable area near two lakes. The name of the Donqas building may be derived from Donguaz. The second name must be ethnic or topographic, and there are such types of matches in the region.

The narrative does not say in so many words that Azgedi expelled the Funj from the Insiba Valley where he found them, but that is implied in the statement that indicates the departure of the Funj with the arrival of Azgedi. This incident can be considered a reason behind the movement of Amara Dunqs to the south, but Crawford says that it is not necessary for his hypothesis to care about the departure, as there may be other reasons that led to it. Amara Dongs lived in an era that witnessed instability and political fluctuations. Abyssinia, the more powerful neighbour, began to take an interest in the south-east, the land of its future occupiers, the rulers of Adal (Zila). The western border remained open to anyone who could muster hundreds of knights. The region was a crossing pass through savage tribes to reach rich but deserted lands. It is possible that Amara Dongs, with a group of knights, began to carve out his future in the south and established a center for him in Lamul. Among his military commanders was one by the name of Abu Kamil, who may have been an ancestor of the Kamilab to the south of Tokar. Abu Kamil was a Meccan sherif, and the Kamilab Atbara, a branch of the same tribe, were nobles. Once again, the dates agree, as Kamil, the traditional ancestor of the Kamilab, belongs to the same generation as Amara Donqis, and Othman, the grandson of Abdullah, married Fatima, the granddaughter of Abu Kamil (Kumayl).

Nuba, savages, and angs

When Amara arrived in the south, he often encountered Anak (Nubawans) fleeing from the Arab spears after the destruction of Soba (we must remember that Sheikh Al-Abdlab is said to have come to Sudan when Amara's father went to Tava). This painful event is still remembered in the minds of the descendants of the fugitives, who became the greatest part of “the life of Soba, the country of our grandfather and beloved.” Even today, the devastation of Soba is being cited in Sudan as an expression of comprehensive destruction. It is possible that Amara formed a group of knights among them, taking advantage of their natural desire to take revenge on those who destroyed the capital of their kingdom and advanced north on the Blue Nile to regain their lost region with them. After his victory in Arbeji, he decided to establish the capital of his own kingdom in Sennar, because Soba had been completely destroyed, in addition to the fact that Sennar was protected from Arab attacks. Abadia, possibly Abdullah Jamaa, was in charge of the king's treasuries when Rubeni visited Sennar. Amara Donqis himself constantly moved from place to place, a common practice in ancient times when there was no rule of law, if he wanted to maintain his authority over the chiefs subject to him. However, evidence of Roubini points to Lamul as the headquarters of the Dongs building. If Lamul is in Al-Qalabat, then its choice must be successful, as it controls the two most important trade routes that enter Abyssinia from the west and meet there. To the southwest of Al-Qalabat is an extended belt of mountainous lands. It was a typical border area, difficult to access or control, a natural refuge for outcasts. Even today, the place is still unknown, and the Abyssinian section (Kwara) is not shown on maps. The southern section to the northeast of Fazogli is the land called the Land of the Savages, its strong center in Abu Ramla (which King Dekin failed to occupy). This is the Janjar region, and Amara often recruited his forces from here, consisting of refugees and barbaric citizens. The Sennar kings relied on such a warehouse of manpower to impose their sovereignty until the second warehouse was discovered in Kordofan. As long as the Funj governor was stationed mainly at Lamul, with deputies in Sennar and other areas, he could still control the forces, but once the capital moved to Sennar, probably during the reign of Deqin, those forces, left to themselves, gained a measure of independence. This could be the truth behind the phrase the Funj in the South, the origin of the Janjar horse, and the Lulu forces. Evidence that supports this hypothesis is the Shukriyya statement about the cavalry guards of the King of Sennar, the sons of Dungor and Reed, and Dungor is a place in the Janjar region in the Upper Dender. It seems that Shukria's saying relates to events that occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Soba is a country of greatness and love

The Fazügli region still contains the remains of a number of independent granted fiefdoms, once Sennar's suzerainty was recognized. Mak Fazughli himself still maintains his position under the government of Sudan (referring to the British-Egyptian colonial government) and was crowned a while ago with the “cap”. The current ruler of the Funj is called Mangel, but it is said that this is a new title. Mount Qili, located seventy miles south of Roseires, has an interesting history linked to specific Fungawi relationships. It is a name closer to a Nubian word meaning “red.” Could the name have been given by Nubians who migrated south? The early history of Qili is unclear and is known only from oral traditions that mention someone by the name of Jabar, king of Fazughli, whose name is included in the list of kings of that region. Mayas was the first king of Qili, the uncle of Amara Dongus, and his throne was in Desa near Roseiris to the north of it, a site previously called Abumias. In Desa, there is an ancient site about which people say that its name was Soba and Mias. Chatoy says the site is covered with more pottery than any other site he has seen and that there is  what looks like the floor of a red brick house. The name Mayas appears in the genealogy trees, but without any relation to Qili’s account. ""With a hat"

According to Qili accounts, their main centers were shifted from Desa to Jebel Raqriq, eighty miles to the south, by Dura ibn Mayas, and from there to nearby Qili (where they are now) by Mayas ibn Dura.

Among such small feudal leaders, Amara Dongs recruited his army, with which he was able to defeat the Abdlab Arabs and establish the Funj Kingdom in Sennar. This is the country of the savages and the Funj ministers. It is said that the Amirites, who are the ancestors of the Funj kings, had ruled the blacks in Sudan and the savage lands and finally became identical with them and were known as the Funj. It would be wonderful if one could succeed in giving an accurate definition of the term savages, but that is not possible because our references give different definitions and it is only known that they came to Sennar from the south.

These savages in the Vazogli area were mostly Negroes, but included some migratory elements from the northwest. Archeology will one day reveal their material culture. Currently, archeology provides limited support for the theory that the Funj came to Sennar from this region. In the site of Abu Qili, facing Sennar, in 1914, he uncovered a cemetery whose tombs contained pottery the likes of which had never been discovered (until that time - Arkamani). The cemetery was considered to belong to a late date, most likely the Funj era. The pottery is very different from any other pottery and must have been introduced from somewhere else and does not represent a development from the earlier Christian pottery specific to the region. Currently, the available evidence indicates that the Fungawi pottery in Abu Qili is derived from a culture belonging to the upper Blue Nile.

The hypothesis of Chalkawi origin

However, advocates of the Shallakawian hypothesis may argue that there is a small but powerful Shallakawian root in the Funj narrative that this eastern (Upper Nile) theory cannot account for. We then attempt to address this objection and also give some details about the Shilluk themselves who, even if they were mere raiders, found a place for themselves in the history of Sennar.

The theory of the Chalakian origin of the Funj is based on a number of elements, the most important of which is Bruce’s often-cited narrative. Then there is the firm belief among the elderly savages of Jebel Quli that the Funj were Shilluk, in addition to the mention of the Shilluk, Dinka and Kira in genealogies, one of which dates back to the sixteenth century, which are genealogies that make these three ethnic groups share a common origin with the Funj. There is also a coronation ritual with the accompanying cake, a ritual that bears many of the distinctive features of the Shalakawi rituals. Although these elements may seem insufficient, they represent a foundation on which we can rely.

Crawford hypothesizes that the Chalkkawi connection was not derived directly from the Shilluk region of the White Nile, but indirectly from the Fazoghli region and the mountains to its west, whose population was partly of Chalkkawi origin. When Amara Dingus marched north down the Blue Nile and established his kingdom, he may have taken with him some of these Chalkawid connections, but it is more likely that they were introduced, or took firm roots, when Sennar became the permanent seat of the Funj kings. Crawford links this to the arrival of Dakin "from the East." This agrees well with the previously mentioned testimony of Mek Hasan, that Deqin named the owner of the custom because he was the one who introduced the coronation rites for the first time. Is it not permissible for this statement to be correct as long as Dekin is the first king who was crowned in Sennar after he arrived there to make it the headquarters of his permanent metropolis instead of its remote powerful center in Lamul? Arkell agrees with this interpretation and believes that Deqin was the first of the Funj kings to establish cooperative relations with the local savages, the guardians of the rituals adopted by the Funj.

There is a clear confusion between the Funj and the Savages that can be easily noticed. The Funj kings belong to the ruling class of military leaders, whose members are of different ethnic origins. Some of them, including the second king, Abdul Qadir, have rude Arabic names. The original forces of Amarat Dungus included Arab, Abyssinian, Beja, and Nubian officers. It is just an assumption that what we know about the army is that it is composed of Funj and savages. Since the savages are the locals, logic says that they formed the numerical majority, and that the term Funj was used to denote the officer class. On the island, there is still a common tradition that says that the Funj were an army without women and that they took women for themselves from the local population. From here, it seems to us the basis of the confusion between the Funj and savages. Regarding this confusion, Crawford proposes a hypothesis regarding the dual nature of oral traditions about the origin of the Funj. His hypothesis is that the accounts of the northern origin of the Funj can be traced back to the ruling Funj class, while the accounts of the southern origins go back to the inhabitants of the conquered region of Vazoghli.

There is no doubt that the people of Fazughli originally arrived from the west. They are Negroes and therefore cannot be counted as coming from the North or the East. In the southeast extends the land of the Hamites, the Galla. In addition, the names of the places indicate clear evidence of a relationship with the Shilluk. In his book on the Shilluk, Westermann pointed out that there are many place names in Fazughli bearing the prefix fa or ba, which is a prefix that distinguishes the names of Shilluk villages, and then he comes to the conclusion that the villages of Fazughli are sites of the Shilluk who arrived there as immigrants Westermann, 1912. In addition, there is a kind of duplication in the names of places (for example, Kaka) found in both Fazoghli and the White Nile regions. Westermann,1912

Direct contacts between the Kingdom of Sennar and the Shilluk certainly existed. There must have been continuous overlap in the Fenian border posts at Al-Ais. Shortly after the middle of the seventeenth century, for example, a Muslim oud player named Ismail was killed, and more than forty Muslims were killed with him by the Shilluk, whose raids sometimes reached farther north. Petherick, the first European traveler to reach the country of the Shilluk, gave a description of these raids and said: “During the flood of the (White) Nile, groups of Shilluk bands in their light canoes descended down the Nile and surprised the Ais and the Arab inhabitants on both banks of the river as far north as the Shillai Valley. They were so bold that in many cases, after hiding their canoes in the grass, they explored across the country as far as the areas adjacent to Sennar... They enslaved women. and children, and the spoils of flocks and cattle.” Petherick, 1861. Between Kosti and Sennar, the two Nile rivers are 60 miles apart, and the island was wider to the north and south of this latitude, so that the areas adjacent to Sennar were vulnerable to such invasions. There is no record of these invasions but one would expect a record of this kind to be found. Petherick,1861

Schweinfurth described the Shilluk canoes that he saw as “tururs that are secure with ropes, and they are as light as feathers, so that one can carry three of them on one’s shoulder, even though each of them can accommodate three people. When the Shilluk reaches the end of the journey, he seizes his canoe like an ancient warrior does with his armour, and carries it with him to ensure its safety on the one hand, and to make it dry, as the tarur quickly absorbs water and becomes saturated with moisture. A group met me with a large fleet. Of those boats, it is estimated that there are about three thousand boats, and since a group of merchants were attacked on their way back to Khartoum and their goods were plundered, I felt a degree of concern.” Schweinfurth adds, “They can be seen rushing toward the river at breakneck speed, packing their boats together like ants.” Schweinfurth, 1873. Schweinfurth,1873

In 1911, the Shilluk country formed a narrow strip on the western bank of the Nile from Kaka in the north to Lake Nu in the south. Pethrick described the city of Kaka in 1853 as being made up of straw straw, one mile from the river, the furthest north and the most important of the Shilluk cities, and the only place where foreigners were allowed to settle.

About the ancient history of the Shilluk, we only know what can be extrapolated from oral traditions. One day we will know more, as the banks of the White Nile are full of mounds (daba) that appear clearly on the map extending from the two mountains almost to Malakal and Sobat. They are also found in some cases farther inland from the river on the sides of the valleys. There are other bears in Bahr el-Ghazal at the confluence of the Bongo River with the Goul River and to the east towards Nahrjur. These bears are round in shape and of different sizes, amounting to four thousand/twenty thousand square metres, with a height of 15-40 BC. The pottery that covers some of these bears differs from Dinka pottery, and locals interpret it as being made by a group of Bargu who were tall.

Returning to the problem of the origin of the Funj, we find that the people of Fazoghli came from the White Nile, and Crawford believes that there are three possible ways to accomplish this migration: the first is from the areas adjacent to Melut across the plain east to the edge of the Abyssinian highlands and then gradually penetrates north through Karmuk and Qili, the second is from the borders of Jabal Ahmed Agha via Karmuk and then north, and the third is from the area adjacent to Renk, passing through Qali Mountain and the Tabi Hills.

The naming of Jabal Ahmed Agha is undoubtedly late Turkish, and it is the same mountain that Verni mentioned as Dfavung, and thus it is marked on the map. Both Crawford and Arkell believe that the name Dvavong has nothing to do with the origin of the Phong. Legian called this mountain Tivafan, and he said that the Dinka name for the mountain was “Kor Auer”, meaning Mount Auer, and that the Arabs called it Mount Barba after the name of the ruins remaining next to it. The name Ahmed Agha dates back specifically to the year 1860, when a battle took place between the Dinka and Turkish colonists. The name appears on the map of the Quarter-Million Survey Authority as Ahmed Agha, in addition to an alternative name, Biban, mentioned. In favor of the third possibility, the name Goz Fami, located about twenty miles to the northeast of Renk, can be mentioned. Pham was one of the places that the Funj passed through on their migratory route.

The hypothesis of a Bornawi origin

Arkell proposed the hypothesis that the Funj arrived in Sennar not by their own strength, but rather thanks to the leadership provided by the ruler of an exiled family from Borno (formerly Kanem). The Kanem Empire had controlled the Kingdom of Darfur, and thus the caravan routes to the Nile and Egypt. History in Borno says that the Kanem Empire expanded in 1576 east to the Nile and the land of Doi O Do Do (Datao?), which belonged to the Christian Kingdom of Dongola, which in the opinion of Arkle Ado is on the island of Sai. Islam arrived in Kanem before the year 1240 from North Africa, not directly from Egypt. This hypothesis goes to claim that the Borno Muslim exiles, as a result of power struggles in the Kanem Empire, reached the White Nile and settled in Al-Eis, which was then a village of Chalkawiya, and the invaders gained power first over the Shilluk and then over the weakened Suba kingdom. Thanks to the power of the Shilluk, they defeated the Arabs who were under the leadership of Al-Abdlab in the Battle of Arbaji and then established the Kingdom of Sennar. Palmer believes that the name Funj itself is related to the Funi, which is the legendary Mai name of Kanem, and to the word that in the Kanuri and Tebu languages ​​means face covering (the veil) among the Tuareg, and that the word savages is derived from the Tuareg word imjhli (plural, imjhad), which means the slave class.

This Bornawi narration partly confirms the Shillak origin of the Funj, since they were the ones who overthrew Soba... and defeated the Abdlab... and established Sennar under the invading Bornawi leadership, which defeated the Shilluk. Hence, calling the invaders Funja is, as Crawford says, to call the family of William the Conqueror Saxon.

Arkamani's comment

Thus, it becomes clear that the ethnic formation of the Funj Kingdom embodies the product of a massive mixing process that gave birth to an old-new society. There is no dispute that the Arabs arriving to Kush were purely Bedouin tribes searching for green pastures, and the issue of spreading the Islamic faith was not included in the calculations of the motives of those migrations. Bedouin life represents a direct and innate way of life, and therefore the knowledge of a Bedouin is a direct translation of his needs. That is, as Gaston Blachard says, the Bedouin does not exhaust himself in knowing things, but rather refers to them only by their usefulness and the amount of direct benefit from them. Bedouin Islam meant faith and belief and did not mean a vision or a system. “This was what was known about Islam throughout the stages preceding the Funj. It was a Bedouin Islam that was not concerned with what was going on in the world of thought and culture, but rather was ignorant. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to find a reference to a pioneer of thought, a school of science, or even theory or logic throughout those centuries of mixing between local life systems and nomadic lifestyles that became one of the basic components of the Sudanese mind,” Othman. It was the Funj kings, not the Abdlab Arabs, who conquered the country and sent invitations to Muslim jurists to come and initiate the call for the new religion they had embraced by hosting the Arab immigrants and allowing them to assimilate with them. The Sudanese tolerance that we sing of morning and evening is in fact a trait that has distinguished Kush and its peoples since the earliest historical periods and is not a trait coming from beyond the sea. However, what is most important above all else for understanding the current crisis that threatens the entity of our Sudanese nation lies in the fact that the arrival of Islamic preachers was linked to the period of decadence that prevailed in Arab culture starting in 1258 AD. Ibn Khaldun described the state of jurisprudence in that period by saying, “Imitation in the countries stopped with these four - Malik, Abu Hanifa, Al-Shafi’i, and Ibn Hanbal, and the people closed the door and paths of disagreement, so they declared their inability and want, and they returned the people to their imitation of these four, each with the imitators who were assigned to him, and they prohibited the circulation of their imitation because of the manipulation it contained.” Ibn Khaldun. Othman Hassan Othman is right in reading the text, according to which it refers to “the rigidity and withering of thought in the field of jurisprudence, and its lapse into impoverished traditionalism that led to isolationism and sectarian fanaticism, which Ibn Khaldun explained by the lack of an environment in which one opinion and the other opinion interact.” The preachers who came to the Funj Kingdom in the sixteenth century and after had no “mind of jurisprudence,” but rather a “mind of return,” which, in its return to its ideal model, mixed, in Al-Aroui’s words, the authority of the religious text with the authority of the historical text, adding sanctity to the historical text. In this context, Othman Hassan Othman expressed the reality of jurisprudence in the Zarqa Sultanate by saying, “The jurisprudential mind as an activity no longer exists in the era of decadence, except for some mechanisms used in a premature and limited manner within the scope of the “reason of return,” which represented an activity hidden in the guise of jurisprudence. Therefore, it was natural for Wad Dhaif Allah to mention at the beginning of his book, Classes, that what he derives from news about the fundamentalists has the status of certainty that benefits knowledge of the thing and denies it. There is doubt, suspicion, and delusion about him.”

This mind, cloaked in jurisprudence, imposed its horizon on the Funj Kingdom. If his basic statement is to direct all developments that occur in society towards the exemplary past, so that the new is an automatic extension of the old and gains its meaning from it, then this is the current vision of the advocates of the fundamentalist Islamic movement from the Traubists who propose perceptions and principles that transcend, as Al-Tayeb Tizini says, above history and are not subject to either development or criticism, then it is no wonder that the crisis of our Sudanese nation in the twenty-first century has reached a dark tunnel. Today, the Trapists seek to confirm Sayyid Qutb’s idea that Islam is a unity of belief and behavior, achieving an ideal model through a reconstructive reconstruction of the moral and material aspects of life and its social systems, in the primitive environment in which it appeared. Therefore, there is nothing for the mind to discover, but only interpretation and consistency with principles in history. In order to preserve their political and material interests in the first place, they insist on justifying their behavior by resorting to mixing and merging the field of the relationship between the Creator and the creature and the field of social relations, standing as an obstacle to the liberation of the latter field from the authority of religious rulings and thus the emergence of a civil society, the precondition for the unity of our Sudanese nation... This is how Omar al-Bashir declares to high school students after they passed the exams and completed the forced military training imposed on them and are looking forward to enrolling in universities that “our youth He does not aspire to academic degrees, but seeks martyrdom for the sake of God! God looks seventy times to choose the mujahid, and looks seventy times to choose the martyr.” To my life, this embodies the pinnacle of intellectual decadence about which Salama Musa said, “In the Middle Ages, decadence did not mean anything other than limiting the human mind to serving what is beyond nature and seeking happiness and contentment in other than this earth.”

This thought, which is shamelessly expressed by Omar al-Bashir and other new Islamists in Sudan, is nothing but a continuation of the idea of return that was associated with the Funj era and reached its extent as a result of frustration in light of the comprehensive slavery that the Turkish-Egyptian colonialism established over the country and turned it into “Sudan” with a deficient understanding that the Arab mentality in general still represents. We will not delve into the modern history of Sudan, which begins with the campaigns of Muhammad Ali, which inaugurated Sudan as a permissible land for the slave trade as long as it was a land of blacks. This history, although it has led to research and study, still requires us to implement a more solid, scientific methodology that uncovers much that is kept secret, away from the various forms of taboo imposed by a mentality infected with a murderous schizophrenia. Thus, it was necessary for the people of Kush and the Funj, who became defined by the color of their dark skin as slaves whose freedom was prohibited, to declare their rejection of the comprehensive slavery imposed on them, and the fires of the national liberation revolution broke out, which had no other way but to seek refuge with a message that addressed the prevailing mentality that had grown and nurtured since 1504.

“In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Praise be to God, the Noble Guardian, and may blessings and peace be upon our master Muhammad and his family, and then from the servant who lacks God, Muhammad al-Mahdi bin Abdullah, to my loved ones in God who believe in God and His Book...  Then God bestowed upon me the great caliphate, and the Master of Existence (peace be upon him) told me that I am the Awaited Mahdi and succeeded me by sitting on his throne in the presence of the caliphs and rulers, and God supported me with the angels and saints...  Then he told me Master of Existence (may God bless him and grant him peace) that God has made the Mahdi a sign for you, and she is the mark on my right cheek, and He has also made for me another sign: She will emerge under a banner of light, and she will be with me in times of war carried by Azrael, so God will strengthen my companions with her and send terror into the hearts of my enemies, so that no one will meet me with hostility except that God will forsake him... Then the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) said to me: You are created from the light of my heart, so whoever has happiness believes that I am the Awaited Mahdi, but God has placed in me The hearts of those who love prestige are hypocritical, so they do not believe for the sake of their prestige… and peace be upon you.”

Thus, the leader of the revolution against Turkish tyranny declared his divine message, threatening in the name of God all those who doubted his command. He had no other way to gain control over an empire that made religion a cover for practices such as those that Muhammad Ali made permissible in Sudan. The revolutionary Mahdi succeeded in creating a national awakening that destroyed the foundations of the Turkish tyrannical state and eliminated it, but at the same time he established a framework upon which a more tyrannical religious state was established after his death, which was the result of the struggle between the elites for power. The Caliph Abdullah al-Taayshi took control of Sudan from 1885 until 1898, imposing his authority on it through terrorism in the name of the religious state, beginning with the killing of all of the Mahdi’s relatives who claimed to be the most “noble people.” He deserved to inherit the state founded by the revolutionary Mahdi. Due to the failure to solve the political and economic problems, the Caliph resorted to declaring jihad to spread the faith instead of paying attention to providing the worldly needs of a people exhausted by the fighting and their exile. Hence, neither rapid-fire rifles nor modern cannons, which killed thousands in Karari, were the only factor in defeat.

After independence, the specter of the jihadist state appeared again, starting in 1967, with its advocates achieving a seizure of power on June 30, 1989, with a black military coup that once again plunged the country into a state of war in the name of jihad, but this time it was a jihad against the project of the Sudanese nation itself and its future, a jihad to impose a medieval project that has outdated itself.

Hassan Makki, 1990, Sinarian Culture: Meaning and Content, Khartoum, Dar Al-Makza Al-Afriqiyah Al-Islamiyya.

Arousa: Almeda mentions an area called Harissa, now Arisa, 40 miles south of Asmara. Bruce mentions an area called Arousa in what is now called Amara, located on the current map between Tana and Dangola. Arousa is also the name of an area below the Third Cataract, as well as an island on the White Nile near Kosti (Sudan in Blogs, No. 15, p. 223). In Arabic, the word means a newly married girl, but the name is far from being related to this meaning. bride

(1) Soba section. See Sudan in Mudawwanat, issue thirteen, p. 256. Crawford says that the Sheikh of the Bomzuja, Ahmed Adam, told him in February 1950 that people say, “Soba is the country of the grandfather and beloved,” and that the phrase is used for the oath. He also said that all ancient sites are called Soba.

(2) Al-Taqiyya Abu Qarun Al-Sudan in Mudawanat, Issue Twenty-Six, pp. 37-42. Due to the importance of this wonderful description of being crowned with a hat or horns, Arkamani published a translation of it by Dr. Awad Hassan from the University of Khartoum while he was in the Libyan Jamahiriya at the University of the Western Mountain, for a purpose that had nothing to do with Arkamani magazine, the idea of ​​which had not yet been born at that time. I would like to apologize to my friend Awad Hassan for publishing the translation without referring to him, knowing that he will not object to what is of public scientific benefit. D. Awad Hassan

(3) Abumias, as Cayo calls it, and places it in his map directly to the south of Al-Kook (Abukok in the map of the Quarterly Survey Authority No. 55. Caio points to another site that he calls Al-Mahas, a little north of Sinja, and on the western bank there is the current account. Bruce mentions Mias or Al-Kassab, which is probably Al-Mahas according to Cayo, but he confuses it with the place farther south, Abumias, which is Abukok and Desa. Bruce explains in his map Mias On the bank of the Nile and Kaslab, 30 miles to the side, far inland. In any case, he did not arrive there and his information was heard.

D.Westermann 1912, The Shilluk People. Their Language and Folklore. Berlin .

J.Petherick 1861, Egypt, the Soudan and Central Africa, Philadelphia .

G.Schweinfurth 1973, The Heart of Africa: three years travels and adventures in the unexplored regions of Central Africa, from 1886 to 1871, Translated by E.F.Ellen, London .

Francis and the social structure of the Dinka