LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

heather j. sharkeywhen, in 1820, the armies of Muhammad Ali of Egypt invaded the Sudan.Under the aegis of the Turco-Egyptian colonial regime, the Northern Sudanedged more closely into the cultural orbit of Egypt and, by extension, theOttoman imperial world. This colonial episode ended in the 1880s, when themillenarian Mahdist movement launched a jihad in the name of Islamic reformand justice. Overthrowing the Turco-Egyptian regime, Mahdists established anIslamic state based at Omdurman. Mahdist rule ended, in turn, in 1898 whenBritish and Egyptian troops invaded the Sudan, bringing the country under thesway of the British Empire at a time when European powers were pursuing their‘Scramble for Africa’.When the nineteenth century ended, Arabic was one of several languagesspoken in the overwhelmingly Muslim regions of the Northern Sudan. In the farnorth, east and west, for example, Nubians, Beja and Fur peoples continued tospeak distinct non-Semitic languages. Arabic was nevertheless dominant as amother tongue in the riverain North and Kordofan, and as a lingua franca inlong-distance trade. Endowed with a system of writing (uniquely, amongSudanese languages), Arabic was a useful tool for statecraft. Finally, as themedium of the Qur’an, Arabic was also the language of Islamic learning andscholarship, and commanded prestige through its religious connections.Taken together, these features ensured that native Arabic-speakers, at thestart of the twentieth century, were the best placed among Sudanese to benefitfrom new educational and professional opportunities that would translate, inthe long run, into political and economic power. Arabic in the Sudan wouldmaintain and even reinforce its hegemony in the twentieth century, as a languageof government, academic study and communication in a wider region stretchingfrom the Maghrib to the Arabian peninsula and Iraq. The only language thatcould possibly compete with Arabic was English – the language of the Britishcolonisers – which also had a trans-regional scope and powerful written tradition.By 1900, the rich culture of Sudanese Arabic poetry was taking three mainforms. First, and particularly in rural areas, there was an oral culture of folk andBedouin poetry, capable of expressing praise and censure, bravery, love andgrief, or recounting histories of battles. Second, and especially in settled farmingareas along the Nile, there was a vibrant culture of Sufi devotional poetry, oftencombining colloquial and literary forms; this Sufi poetry was primarily an oralmedium, though fragments were recorded beginning in the late eighteenthcentury (reflecting the relatively late development of a local Arabic writtentradition). Third, and among learned men who came under Turco-Egyptianinfluence in the nineteenth century, new forms of fusha poetry were taking shapeas Sudanese poets were becoming more aware of Arabic literary (that is,written) works from the Islamic heartland’s pre-Islamic, Umayyad and Abbasidperiods (Badawi 1964, ÆAbidin 1967). These three forms began in some cases to— 164 —www.taq.ir