Breaking the Pen

Abstract

Introduction Contemporary research on the ethnic identity of the Ja'aliyyin of the Northern Sudan directly challenges the indigenous genealogical tradition that took its present-day form in the tenth century AH/sixteenth century AC. The indigenous tradition characterizes the Ja'aliyyin unequivocally as Arabs, who descended from al- 'Abbas, the paternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, (SAAS)' In contrast, MacMichael's A History of the Arubs in the Sudan, the baseline for all subsequent investigation, argues that: In so far as the Ja'aliyyin congeries can be regarded as a single whole its homogeneity consists in the common Berberine or Nubian strain that exists in a very varying proportion in all its component parts. There is also a strong infusion of Arab blood more particularly in the Ja'aliyyin proper, but the error into which the native genealogists have wilfully slipped consists in ignoring the Nubian element and finding the common race factor of the Ja'aliyyin in the tribe of Quraysh. The facts being as they are, it is impossible to specify any particular tribe of Arabia as being that to which the Arab element in the composition of the Ja'aliyyin group can be attributed in any exclusive sense. Trimingham, too, describes an admixture of the indigenous folk (Nubians) and the Arabs, who settled in the Ja'aliyyin area from the fourth to the ninth century AH/ninth to the fourteenth century AC, as “either Semitized Hamites or Semitized Negroes (his italics) but more clearly as Semitized-Negroid- Hamites.” Nonetheless, Trimingham’s characterization of the process that evolved the hybrid identity of the Ja'aliyyin as the Arabization of indigenous groups and the indigenization of the immigrant Arabs has been widely adopted. Hasan’s term “Arabized Nubians" it all very simply and has been widely accepted? Unfortunately, this contemporary discourse about the ethnic identity of the Ja'aliyyin has been, to a greater or a lesser degree, a misguided project. It began largely as a critique of the indigenous genealogical tradition and has not advanced very far beyond that initial point. Its strength is its scholarly disbelief in that tradition. Academic legitimacy lies in its political authoritativeness arising from its access to and use of knowledge as a “sacred resource.” In appropriating history and truth as its own, scholarship left “lore” ...