EGYPTIAN RULE IN THE SUDAN

A Government of Exiles

Al-Zubayr's conquest of Darfur, and its subsequent annexation by Egypt, might at first glance appear to have continued, or even completed, a long process by which the sultanate came into the orbit of the Nile valley as part of Egypt's expanding African empire. There are, however, many ways to interpret the events of 1874. Sudanese refer to the period of Egyptian rule, from the conquest of 1821 until the fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi in 1885, as the Turkiyya. While this reflects a view of foreigners as “Turks,” it also denotes the facts that Egypt was a province of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt's governing class, although ethnically diverse, was culturally Ottoman Turkish. Muhammad Ali himself was of Albanian origin, and the language of his family remained, until the time of King Farouk in the mid-twentieth century, Turkish. The records of the regime in the Sudan were kept in Turkish, and although the use of Arabic gradually increased throughout the period, there was little sense that the regime was “Egyptian.” Historians disagree over terminology; we refer herein to the Egyptian (rather than to the Ottoman or Turco-Egyptian) regime in the Sudan as a matter of convenience.

To the outside world, extension to Darfur of Egypt's empire may have seemed another chapter in a half-century march into bilad al-Sudan that had begun with Muhammad Ali's invasion of Sinnar and Kordofan in 1821.