ABSTRACT
THE islamization of the Nilotic Sudan has been (and indeed still is) a continuing process. Since the Arab conquest of Egypt in the early seventh century, Nubia and the Upper Nile regions have been in contact with Islam, and the frontier of islamization has, during the last thirteen hundred years, moved southwards up the Nile in fairly well-defined stages. One such stage was inaugurated during the fourteenth century, when the northern Nubian kingdom of al-Muqurra with its capital at Old Dongola, gradually ceased to be Christian, and broke up into arabized principalities. A dark age ensued. When a clear historical tradition is resumed, in the opening years of the sixteenth century, the southern Nubian kingdom of 'Alwa (which had its capital at Suba, near modern Khartoum) had also foundered. Arab tribes had pushed southwards into the Gezira, between the Blue and White Nile, but the Arabs themselves were subject to alien overlords. These were the Funj: a dark-skinned people, whose immediate provenance (their remoter origins are highly controversial) was the upper Blue Nile. 1 They were quickly islamized, and so under their domination (which lasted nominally until the Turco-Egyptian conquest in 1821) the southern frontier of Islam was stabilized roughly along the line of 13° N. It was in this period of approximately three centuries, that the effective islamization of the northern Sudan was carried out, and this was the time in which the older holy families established themselves.
