A History of Islamic Societies

The East African states are here grouped together for geographical convenience, but the experience of each country was in fact very different. The history of the Sudan resembles that of North Africa and the Middle Eastern Arab countries. For a century and a half, the Sudan has been consolidating a modern state. The northern part of the country has an Arabic-speaking population, a Muslim identity, and strong Islamic movements, but the southern part encompasses a non-Muslim African population that resists assimilation on Arab, Muslim, and central-state terms. In 2011, the south became an independent state. Somalia resembles Mauritania in that tribal, Muslim, and Arab identity have become part of Somali national identity. Ethiopia also has a long history of state consolidation, but this has taken place under Christian rather than Muslim auspices. In Ethiopia, the Muslims have resisted incorporation into a non-Muslim state, but until recently their resistance was expressed in secular rather than religious terms. The histories of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and other East African countries, by contrast, follow a West African pattern in which the dominant consideration in the twentieth century has been the formation of colonial regimes and their replacement by secular national states. In these countries, Islam is the basis of local communal and social organization but not of state power or national identity.

Sudan

By the nineteenth century, many parts of the modern state of Sudan already had a long history of Muslim sultanates, substantial Muslim populations, and developed Muslim religious institutions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the process of territorial unification and consolidation of state power proceeded relentlessly. It began with the Egyptian conquest of the Sudan by Muhammad ʿAli, nominally the Ottoman governor of Egypt, but already an independent ruler, who conquered the Funj sultanate in 1820, and founded Khartoum as a new capital in 1830. Later Egyptian rulers expanded their territory to include the Upper Nile and equatorial provinces in 1871, Bahr al-Ghazal in 1873, and Darfur in 1874.