Worst moment in History

[Three Moons]

It's something I've never understood how did old nubian which became the court language of the nubian kingdoms in the 700s and was the court lanaguge for 700+ years somehow decline and become replaced by arabic . In the span of less than 200 years. That's almost a thosuand years of literature and administrative tradtion wiped out. In such a short span of time.

If Adal had expanded beyond Suakin and the Nubian regions on Ethiopia’s border (and the Portuguese Empire hadn’t intervened during the Futuh), it would instead of just raiding it, have fully conquered the Funj Sultanate and the linguistic make-up of Sudan would be very different today. Muslim Horn African expansion into medieval Sudan would have still Islamized them but they would have retained their ancient languages like the modern Cushites and Semites of the Horn without any pressure to adopt Arabic beyond religious purposes.

 

[Juke]

Ask @Nilotic

What was the purpose of that quote? It answered nothing

 

[Yami]

This would have been our fate had they come as much to us. On that note, why didn't Arabs migrate as much to the Somali peninsula considering how close we are? They've gone as far as the end of North Africa even invading Iberia

Ummayads and Abbasids both tried subjecting Somali territory between the late 7th - 9th centuries and got clapped by Waaq enthusiasts. First attempt was in Banaadir and second was Somaliland

 

[Internet Nomad]

Ummayads and Abbasids both tried subjecting Somali territory between the late 7th - 9th centuries and got clapped by Waaq enthusiasts. First attempt was in Banaadir and second was Somaliland

I thought it was because the prophet Muhammad(pbuh) in a Hadith said don’t invade the land of habash so they avoided the whole region.

 

[Yami]

I thought it was because the prophet Muhammad(pbuh) in a Hadith said don’t invade the land of habash so they avoided the whole region.

They never listened to that hadith. Arabs sacked and incorporated the Dahlak Archipelago off the coast of Eritrea after Axum invaded Jeddah a costal city in Hejaz during the early 8th century.

 

[Khaem]

What was the purpose of that quote? It answered nothing

Read it again but slowly

 

[Rayaale]

This would have been our fate had they come as much to us. On that note, why didn't Arabs migrate as much to the Somali peninsula considering how close we are? They've gone as far as the end of North Africa even invading Iberia

They know we would not allow them to penetrate granted Yemen is not that far from the Northern coast we kept them at bay.

 

[Juke]

Read it again but slowly

Rather than admit you made the fact of the Bedouins being the most armed and forcibly absorbing the Nubians you're still standing on that nonsense.

 

[Rayaale]

Even Muslims in darfur are persecuted simple for being black nilo Saharan.

Sudan and Somalia sent ships of cattle among other things to feed the gaajo and thirty bedouins who suffered droughts every decade. Now they repay our kindness with interference and instigating conflict.

Arabs are the worst people wax asxaan maleh

 

[mah14]

They never listened to that hadith. Arabs sacked and incorporated the Dahlak Archipelago off the coast of Eritrea after Axum invaded Jeddah a costal city in Hejaz during the early 8th century.

It is believed that the Umayyads who were obsessed with rule and expansion, will be stopped by this conversation

 

[Khaem]

Rather than admit you made the fact of the Bedouins being the most armed and forcibly absorbing the Nubians you're still standing on that nonsense.

I'll bring more sources that say it more simple

 

[Yami]

The Arabisation of Nubia is the single greatest Tragedy in history. 4 Millenia of civilisation gone. Replaced with "Afro Arabs" #PrayforSudan

Can only hope a future Somali state funds a takeover of some Nubian or Beja tribe that imposes its culture and tounge. Preferably Beja as its related to Somali.

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Full Arabization of Sudan peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after Egyptian occupation. 2 of the main Arab clans in Sudan the Ja'alin and Shaigiya had members still speaking Nubian when travelers were wondering through sudan 200 years ago.

 

[Khaem]

Full Arabization of Sudan peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after Egyptian occupation. 2 of the main Arab clans in Sudan the Ja'alin and Shaigiya had members still speaking Nubian when travelers were wondering through sudan 200 years ago.

Arabism only completely gripped Sudan in the 1800s which made it all the more tragic and preventable

Rather than admit you made the fact of the Bedouins being the most armed and forcibly absorbing the Nubians you're still standing on that nonsense.

 

[Khaem]

Rather than admit you made the fact of the Bedouins being the most armed and forcibly absorbing the Nubians you're still standing on that nonsense.

The ethnic and linguistic diversity of Sudan and South Sudan is an established fact, although the contours of “legitimate” ethnolinguistic categorizations have been disputed in the region since the early 20th century by administrators, missionaries, local leaders, intellectuals, politicians, social activists, anthropologists and linguists. Censuses and statistics have played a pivotal role in the construction of taxonomies of “Arab groups” subdivided along tribal lines, e.g. Jaʿālī, Juhayna, Shaygiyya, and so-called “non-Arab groups” defined by language, e.g. Nubian, Beja, Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Lotuko, Zande (Miller 2018). Beyond their historical plasticity and social relativeness, such categories and broader ones like “Arab” or “African” are politically sensitive. Indeed, they have contributed to ethnicize the wars plaguing Sudan since the middle of the 20th century (Johnson 2016).

• 1 See also “Ṣirāʿ ʿalā hawiyyat al-Sūdān,” Arabī Post, 23 May 2019, <https://arabicpost.shorthandsto (...)

2Recent developments have again brought to the fore conflicting social identities and unequal access to political, economic and symbolic resources. These issues largely underpin Sudan’s scission into two states in 2011, the civil war that broke out in South Sudan in 2013 and the ongoing conflicts and tensions in Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Red Sea states. They are also crucial in the revolutionary process that has unfolded in Sudan since December 2018, toppling the “salvation” (ingādh) regime in April 2019 (see Deshayes in this issue). Dynamics of power and ethnocultural belonging are not new in the region; they have shaped the construction of Sudan as a modern territory at least since the 19th century, be it through exogenous regimes (Ottoman-Egyptian rule 1820-1885; Anglo-Egyptian Condominium 1899-1955) or endogenous polities (the Mahdist state 1885-1898; postcolonial Sudan 1956-2011). Yet the 2010s have stirred a sense of historical acceleration (Koselleck 2011) in the Sudans, which is not unrelated to the various Arab uprisings of 2011 (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen) and 2019 (Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq). The overthrow of President Omar Al-Bechir’s thirty-year long authoritarian rule, the setting up of a mixed civilian-military council and the appointment of a transitional government under the economist Abdalla Hamdok have opened up opportunities for redefining political ideologies in Sudan. For certain Sudanese actors, this process entails rethinking the meaning of categories such as “Arab,” “Islamic,” “African” and “Sudanese,” as well as reaffirming or contesting connections between them (Jāmiʿ 2019).1
3This article offers historical depth to this debate by examining how such (auto)identifications were formulated and used in another “accelerating time,” namely the decolonization era. The transformation of Sudan from an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium into a postcolonial state was all but a linear, predetermined or complete process. Rather, the period stretching from the 1946 British decision to lead Sudan towards self-government through the 1956 proclamation of independence and until the 1964 popular uprising that ended Ibrahim Abboud’s military regime was full of political hopes, doubts and disillusions (Seri-Hersch 2018: 45-63). An equally important aim of this article is to contribute to the study of concrete articulations between Arabization (taʿrīb in Arabic) and Islamization (aslama) in historically situated Sudanese contexts. Indeed, the two phenomena have been very often closely—but rather uncritically—associated in a wide array of academic texts referring either to the long-term historical process that has made Sudan into a largely Arabic-speaking and Muslim society in the modern era (MacMichael 1967 [1922]; Hasan 1967; Abd al-Rahim 1970; Grandin 1997) or to a specific set of Sudanese state policies meant to Arabize and Islamize Southern populations after 1956 (Nyombe 1997; Poggo 2002; Sharkey 2012). The taken-for-granted conflation between language, ethnicity and religion not only relies on long-lived “Orientalist” readings of Sudanese history (Spaulding & Kapteijns 1991); it has also influenced political and media discourses on Sudan, while strengthening the ideological tools of Al-Bechir’s “Islamist” regime from 1989 until 2019 (Abdelhay et al. 2011: 479-480; Salomon 2016).

4Over the last twenty years, several sociolinguists, anthropologists and historians have engaged in empirically-based studies that unpack the enmeshment of linguistic practices, religious affiliations, state policies, economic processes and ethnic claims in colonial and postcolonial Sudan. These works significantly contribute to our understanding of Sudanese societies and politics because they denaturalize the relations between Arabic, Arabness and Islamness, demonstrating how social practices vary according to specific contexts and issues. For instance, it has been shown that Juba Arabic has been historically and is still used by non-Muslim Southern Sudanese people in South Sudan and Khartoum. This pidgincreole served not only as a lingua franca in certain multilingual areas and towns from the late 19th century onwards; it became the mother tongue of part of Juba’s population from the 1940s and the marker of a Southern, non-Arab supratribal identity from the 1970s (Mahmud 1983; Leonardi 2013; Miller 2014; Manfredi & Tosco 2018). Other studies have highlighted the actual role of European and North American Christian missionaries in promoting Arabic varieties in Southern Sudan, although these same missions officially fought against the spread of Arabic—seen as an Islamization factor—by cultivating English and “indigenous” Southern Sudanese languages such as Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk (Miller 2009; Sharkey 2011). After independence in 1956, Arabization policies carried out by the successive Khartoum governments were unsuccessful in fostering a broadly shared Arab identity in Sudanese society; on the contrary, they triggered the development of “African” (implying culturally pluralistic) identities among populations in Southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains and Darfur, even if Arabic as a spoken language progressed in these areas (Sharkey 2008). Ethnographic work has also shown that identification with Islam and the adoption of “Arab” practices among Lafofa people in the Nuba Mountains in the 1980s were part of economic strategies rather than strictly religious processes of conversion (Manger 2002).

5The following study contributes to this scholarship in two ways: first, by reappraising the chronology of Arabization and Islamization policies in Southern Sudan, locating their inception in late colonial times rather than in the post-independence era. Second, it examines to what extent, how and why the Arabic language and the Islamic religion were enmeshed in cultural discourses, political strategies and school practices at the critical time of British imperial retreat and Northern Sudanese empowerment (1946-1964). In this regard, the attainment of independence in 1956 was not a clear-cut rupture, but rather one stage in the larger process of political and cultural “Northernization” at work from the 1940s. The analysis draws on Sudanese and British intellectual/scholarly writings, political speeches, administrative proceedings, educational plans and reports, schoolbooks for elementary teachers and Southern Sudanese press articles, coupled with a wealth of academic studies. It will bring to light a set of actors, dynamics and social experience that resulted in a strong conflation of language, ethnicity and religion in the making of “postcolonial” Sudan.

 

[Khaem]

The Late Colonial Drive Towards an Arab and Islamic Sudan​

• 2 Some Christian missionaries did use Arabic but in the Roman script, as was the case of the Catholi (...)

6During most of the colonial era (1899-1955), the British-dominated government of Sudan ruled separately the Northern and Southern parts of the country. This well-studied “Southern Policy” (Abd al-Rahim 1966; Sanderson & Sanderson 1981; Collins 1983; Mayo 1994) was rooted in British attempts to prevent the spread of the North’s predominantly Arabic and Islamic culture into the South, “protect” the Southerners from Northern slave traders and concentrate the government’s limited financial resources in the North, which was perceived as more “civilized” than the South. The separation policy was formalized through three ordinances in 1922 and 1925 that considerably restricted the movement of goods and people between Northern and Southern Sudan. It also affected how the British authorities in Khartoum and Juba dealt with language and religion. Whereas Arabic was selected as the main administrative language in Northern Sudan, English was preferred for the South. This dichotomy was in part reproduced in the distinct educational systems that were established in the colonial era (Seri-Hersch 2017): Arabic and English were used as teaching languages in the Northern government school system, while local languages (Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Lotuko, Zande) and English dominated the Southern missionary school system. The 1928 Rejaf Conference was a landmark in the history of linguistic policies in Southern Sudan, insofar as it selected “indigenous” languages (labelled as such from that time) as media of instruction rather than Arabic or English (Abdelhay et al. 2016).2 Christian missionaries, who included British Anglicans, American Presbyterians and Italian Catholics, were allowed to develop their activities only in the South, being barred from proselytizing among the predominantly Muslim Northern Sudanese (Sanderson & Sanderson 1981).

• 3 The LA was composed of 75 members: 10 nominated by the Governor-General, 52 Northerners (10 direct (...)

7The British policy of separate administration was abandoned in 1946, at a time of growing Anglo-Egyptian rivalries over the control of Sudan. By “reuniting” the Northern and Southern Sudan—two regions that had been formally integrated into the “Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” in 1899 but had hitherto never existed as one administrative unit—the British sought to coopt Northern Sudanese elites and weaken the Sudanese partisans of the “unity of the Nile valley” project, namely an Egyptian-Sudanese political union under Egyptian leadership. The British strategy to win over Northern Sudanese opinion against Britain’s Egyptian ideological rival was twofold. First, British authorities in Khartoum and London officially defined Sudanese self-determination as their goal, stressing the ultimate aim of Sudanese independence. Second, they proceeded with the administrative and educational unification of Northern and Southern Sudan, answering an old Northern claim that had been voiced increasingly loudly since the early 1940s. The new institutions set up in 1948 reflected these policy changes: the Executive Council (ec) and the Legislative Assembly (la) were meant to represent the whole country,3 although their prerogatives were seriously limited by the British Governor-General, who appointed the ec and kept the right to veto the laws designed by the la. In the same year, a Ministry of Education was created with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿAlī Ṭāhā, a Northern Sudanese educator and Umma party-affiliated politician, as its first head. It was under his tenure as Minister of Education (1948-1953) that the “unification” of school curricula and educational systems in Sudan was launched (Seri-Hersch 2018: 56-61, 93-94).

• 4 The Republic of the Sudan, 1957, This is Our Way to Build a Strong Nation: Education (Khartoum: In (...)
• 5 For more details on educational gaps between the Northern and Southern Sudan, which had been broad (...)

 

[Khaem]

8In practice, unification did not entail the blending of existing Northern and Southern educational structures and methods. Rather, it meant the Northernization of Southern teaching via the introduction of the Arabic language and the adoption of Northern curricula and textbooks in Southern schools.4 This is not surprising given the nature of the Sudanization process—namely the gradual replacement of British with Sudanese officials—, which was accelerated from 1946 onwards: the overwhelming majority of posts were taken up by Northern Sudanese men, as exemplified in 1954, when only 6 out of 800 Sudanized posts went to Southern Sudanese (Collins 2008: 65), although the Southerners represented one third of Sudan’s total population of ca. 10 million people at the time.5 Hence, the Arabic-speaking, Muslim elites that came to dominate state institutions sought to shape Sudan as an Arab and Islamic nation-state almost a decade before the attainment of political independence in 1956.

Arabizing and Islamizing the South​

9Several concrete measures were implemented to carry out the Arabization of Southern Sudanese people in the late colonial era. In August 1949, the ec passed a resolution defining Arabic as the vehicular language of Sudan (Sanderson & Sanderson 1981: 298). A few months later, ʿAlī Ṭāhā announced before the la that Arabic as a main subject matter would be introduced in all schools in the South (Beshir 1968: 68). By 1954, Arabic was used as a teaching language in the 22 government elementary schools operating in the South (which were still fewer than the 62 mission schools) and as a subject matter in all types of elementary, intermediate and secondary schools (Sanderson & Sanderson 1981: 304, 310). The entrance exam to Rumbek secondary school included an Arabic exam as from 1953 (Sanderson & Sanderson 1981: 310; Sandell 1982: 70).

• 6 As recalled by al-Khalīfa himself in a 1981 interview with the scholar Liza Sandell (1982: 66).
• 7 See also Ministry of Education, Sudan, 1950, Proposals for the Expansion and Improvement of the Ed (...)

10The quick pace of Arabization owed much to the efforts of Sirr al-Khatm al-Khalīfa, the Province Education Officer of Equatoria Province in Juba (1950-1955), who was later appointed Chief Inspector (1956) and Assistant Director of Education in Southern Sudan (1957-1960), before serving as Prime Minister of Sudan (1964-1965) in the aftermath of the October Revolution that overthrew Abboud’s military regime. In spite of some difficulties caused by the historical legacy of slavery, which tainted Northern-Southern relationships with arrogance and distrust,6 Arabization policies made significant progress in the first half of the 1950s. This was also due to the fact that the missionary societies all accepted to cooperate with the Ministry of Education in introducing Arabic into the schools under their supervision (Sandell 1982: 67).7 Indeed, the Ministry turned to a surprising variety of actors in order to implement Arabization in Southern Sudan. In 1952, some American Christian missionaries, who had previous experience in translating the Bible into Sudanese Arabic, were asked to prepare two simple textbooks to help teach Southern pupils colloquial Arabic. Northern Sudanese educators may have then envisaged written colloquial Arabic as a step towards learning standard Arabic, although this view was not undisputed among missionaries and Southern Sudanese students (Sharkey 2011: 42). Following another line of action, the Ministry of Education hired an Egyptian linguist from Cairo University, Khalīl Muḥammad ʿAsākir, to transcribe the main Southern Sudanese languages in the Arabic script. This operation was thought as a first step towards the spread of Arabic in the South. Readers in Dinka, Bari, Zande, Lotuko and Moro written in the Roman script were transliterated into Arabic (Abdelhay et al. 2015: 267). Yet ʿAsākir was confronted with two major obstacles, namely the difficulty to adapt the Arabic alphabet to sounds that did not exist in Arabic—a difficulty that had also arisen when transcribing Southern vernaculars in the Latin script—and the lack of teachers able to teach vernacular languages in that alphabet (al-Sayyid 1990: 55-56; Sharkey 2008: 34).

• 8 Ministry of Education, Sudan, 1958, Annual Report, 1956-57 (Khartoum: n.p.): 67-68.

11Arabization policies largely benefited from the resources of the state-sponsored Publications Bureau in Juba (founded in 1948), whose Arabic Section was set up in 1950 under the supervision of ʿAwaḍ Sātī, a teacher who was at the time the Chief Editor of the Publications Bureau in Khartoum and would later be appointed Director of Education (1954-1956) before becoming the first Sudanese ambassador in the United Kingdom in June 1956. The Arabic Section in Juba published Arabic readers, textbooks in Arabic (some of which were translated works), a weekly magazine called Sambala after a village near Juba, as well as an illustrated Arabic encyclopedia (Cookson et al. 1964: 196; Sanderson & Sanderson 1981: 336; ʿAlī Ṭāhā 2004: 233). Among the 24 textbooks published by the Juba Bureau during the 1956-1957 school year, 19 were in Arabic. Four were in English and one in Moro. Their printed quantity ranged from 50 to 2,550 copies, reaching much higher numbers in the case of two Arabic books printed by the Khartoum Bureau (15,900 and 17,000 copies), which helped the Juba Bureau when most of the team temporarily relocated in the capital (August 1955-September 1956) because of the eruption of the civil war in the South.8

• 9 The 1964 October Revolution, which was mainly led by Northern protagonists, initially offered some (...)

 

[Khaem]

12The Northernization of Southern education was taken a step further with the nationalization of missionary and private schools in 1957, one year after independence. Northern Sudanese civil servants replaced missionaries as heads of elementary schools, introducing state curricula as early as 1958 in the Upper Nile province, later in more distant Equatoria (Seri-Hersch 2017). Amidst the first Sudanese civil war (1955-1972), two educational models coexisted—or rather strove to survive—in Southern Sudan until the mid-1970s. Some schools, notably those in Anyanya-controlled areas, continued using vernacular languages and English as teaching media while teaching Arabic as a subject. Other schools conformed to governmental directives, offering a totally Arabized curriculum and relegating English to a mere subject. The state model prevailed over time: from 1966 onwards, no government school used Southern “indigenous” languages as media of instruction anymore. Hence, Khartoum’s Northern Sudanese elites succeeded in imposing Arabic as a teaching language in numerous schools, especially in Upper Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal provinces (Sandell 1982: 79-80).9

• 10 The hostility of Northern Sudanese elites towards Christian missionaries was not new (King 1975: 3 (...)

13Islamization measures were undertaken as soon as the Southern Policy was abrogated. After travel restrictions between the two regions were lifted in 1947, many Southerners sought to work in the North; they were often forced to convert to Islam to find a job (ʿAlī Ṭāhā 2004: 243). The decade preceding independence witnessed a significant flow of Northern merchants into the South, where Quranic schools and mosques were quickly opened (Nyombe 1997: 107). Despite a 1952 law limiting religious education to pupils that had been officially registered as Christians or Muslims, it was found that some government schools in the South automatically taught the Islamic religion to “animist” pupils (Sanderson & Sanderson 1981: 327; Aḥmad 1983: 23). At the same time, a virulent anti-missionary campaign was voiced by Northern Sudanese politicians and the Arabic-speaking press in Khartoum. In a speech at the la in March 1950, Muḥammad Aḥmad Maḥjūb (Umma) asserted that Christian missionaries spread a hostile vision of Islam and stirred feelings of hate between Northerners and Southerners, working against Sudanese unification. He enjoined the Minister of Education to stop cooperating with them in the South (ʿAlī Ṭāhā 2004: 242-243). Returning from a trip to Southern Sudan, Northern journalists wrote newspaper pieces containing similar accusations against Christian missionaries. In January 1953, ʿAlī Ṭāhā decided to inspect all schoolbooks and materials “used, seen or read” by pupils in missionary schools in order to check their contents (Sanderson & Sanderson 1981: 328).10
14The Islamization of Sudanese society and state was also pursued by political and legal means. The Sudanese declaration of independence (January 1st, 1956) mentioned Arabic as the sole official language and Islam as the state religion (Sharkey 2008: 34-35). In September 1956, the Umma-People’s Democratic Party coalition government appointed a committee to draft a new Constitution, which was to replace the “secular” temporary Constitution derived from the 1953 Self-Government Statute (Bin Matt 2006: 6). Two months later, the Chief Judge (qāḍī) of Sudan, Ḥasan Muddathir, addressed a memorandum to the Constituent Assembly, in which he recommended the adoption of an Islamic Constitution:

In an Islamic country like the Sudan, the social organization of which has been built upon Arab customs and Islamic ways and of which the majority are Moslems, it is essential that the general principles of the Constitution of such a country should be derived from the principles of Islam (Deng 1995: 518, n. 4).

• 11 The first Sudanese “permanent” Constitution was promulgated one year after the Addis Ababa Agreeme (...)

15At the same time, the Umma party and the Khatmiyya order issued a joint statement on the necessity of making Sudan into an Islamic parliamentary republic, with the sharīʿa as its exclusive source of legislation. Yet the political vision of an Islamic state, which would be further elaborated by Sudanese “Islamists” under the leadership of Hasan al-Turabi from the 1960s up to the 1990s (Berridge 2017), did not go beyond rhetoric at this stage: the constitutional process was brutally interrupted by the military coup of General Ibrahim Abboud in November 1958 (Fluehr-Lobban 1990: 617).11

• 12 For a fuller discussion, see Abd al-Rahim (1969: 221-223) and Hanes (1995: 166-167).

16Bringing important nuances to the existing literature (Nyombe 1997; Poggo 2002; Sharkey 2012), the above development demonstrates that Arabization and Islamization policies began to be implemented as early as one decade before the Abboud era (1958-1964), when Sudan was still under British rule and amid many uncertainties about its political future. Indeed, the unification of the North and the South in 1947 had not meant the end of the ideological struggle between Sudanese independentists and unionists, supported by their respective British and Egyptian allies. The 1952 revolution by the Free Officers in Egypt brought to power a regime that for the first time recognized the Sudanese right to self-determination, opening the way to a new Anglo-Egyptian agreement (1953) on Sudanese self-government and the grant of self-determination after a three-year transitional period. Yet, until 1955, no one knew whether Sudan would become an independent state or a mere province within a broader Egyptian-Sudanese polity; perhaps ironically, the pro-unionist al-Azharī government eventually opted for Sudanese full independence in March 1955.12 In the following sections, we explore how Arabization and Islamization were specifically articulated through discourses and practices at that time of British disengagement and Northern Sudanese takeover.

Cultural Representations: The Convergence of Northern Sudanese and Orientalist Discourses​

17Various social actors living in Sudan in the 1940s and 1950s shared a similar vision of the Arabic language and the Islamic religion as two close-knit elements. The connection was strong to the point that it entailed a seemingly mechanical or immediate association between the processes of Arabization and Islamization in political speeches and intellectual writings. A few examples will be developed to show that Northern Sudanese and Orientalist (mainly British) discourses often converged in this regard. One year after its creation in 1938, the Graduates Congress, which had been inspired by the Indian National Congress and served as an intellectual and political forum for educated Sudanese (Niblock 1987: 187), addressed a “Note on Education” to the (British) Sudan Government. In its general educational recommendations, the Congress wrote the following:

In numerous aspects of our life we have much in common with the Arab countries of Islamic Orient [sic] which is due to our akin descent. We therefore consider that education in this country should take an Islamic Oriental character and not a pagan African one, or in other words that the Arabic Language and Religious Instructions should receive the greatest possible care in all stages of education (Beshir 1969: 237).

18The almost ontological connection between Arabic and Islam was even more blatantly stated by Muḥammad Aḥmad Maḥjūb, who was an engineer, a lawyer and a nationalist activist before joining the Umma party in 1953. In a book entitled Al-ḥaraka al-fikriyya fī al-Sūdān: ilā ayna yajibu an tattajiha? (“The Intellectual Movement in Sudan: In What Direction Does it Have to Go?”), published in 1941, he wrote:

In every place where Islam spread, Arabic literature and Arabic culture inevitably spread too. So did the Book of God the Bountiful, the Sunna of God’s Messenger and the Noble Tradition, all these in the Arabic language. […] Sudan’s fate was that the Arabic language spread in its quarters first to propagate Islam among its people, second because Arab blood is dominant among its inhabitants. […] The influence of the Islamic religion and the Arab culture in this country is most visible in the works of men of letters from the previous generation (Maḥjūb 1941: 15-16).

Rather than admit you made the fact of the Bedouins being the most armed and forcibly absorbing the Nubians you're still standing on that nonsense.

 

[Khaem]

@Khaemwaset Nubians are cool, but keep in mind us horners are very different and have become our own people with own civilizations. Beja is very very distantly related to somali, it seperated around eight thousand years ago.

We were simply adjacent to much of our nubian cousins

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[Khaem]

I mean the sudanese arabs are mostly of nubian origin in reality

Yes few are actual arabs

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Eh, much of said "arabisation" is only on a linguistic note more than anything else. Especially in areas like the maghreb, where it's continued its traditions. Plus I mean, look at the romans and how they romanized a lot of europe. It's not a unique thing whatosever

That’s not comparable at all, the romans didn’t wipe out their languages. Europe still has their own unique languages and culture. Can you say the same for the Middle East? Aramaic is just one of the many languages that stopped being spoken as it was replaced by Arabic.

That’s not even the worst part, these people genuinely believe they’re Arab. Not just a person who speaks Arabic, but that their blood is Arab. Ask them about their history and they’ll tell you they’ve always been Arab. They’ll deny their own history. It’s why arabisation is awful. To the point where native languages are suppressed.

For example, in North Africa the Amazigh languages were suppressed and their traditions and customs were banned for many years, because it conflicted with the countries new “Arab identity” brought to them by foreigners. Even though majority of North Africans are of Amazigh ancestry, millions of them genuinely believe they’re Arab. They’ve only recently started teaching Amazigh language and script in school, after years of protest and campaigning.

Imagine the Somali language being banned and Arabic being the only language taught in school. That’s how it is for many people in North Africa and the Middle East, their indigenous language and culture oppressed so as to not hurt the fragile ego of their fellow countrymen, who have been brainwashed into believing they’re Arab and brainwashed to hate their own native culture. Arabisation is a disease.