LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

arabic poetry, nationalism and social changeoverlap in the late nineteenth century, notably in Mahdist panegyric andpropaganda poetry, which official poets composed for recitation in the 1880sand 1890s (Hasan 1974, Sharkey 1994).Local applications for Arabic writing and for prose literature were relativelylimited by 1900. Funj rulers had begun to use writing on a limited basis in theiradministration in the mid-seventeenth century, with surviving Funj documentsconsisting largely of charters and of travel passes for visitors or emissaries(Spaulding and Abu Salim 1989). The mid-eighteenth century witnessed thebirth of Arabic history writing, as a few scholars began to chronicle the deeds ofSufi sheiks and rulers, as well as the occurrences of natural and environmentalphenomena, such as floods, famines and eclipses (Ibn Dayf Allah 1982, Holt1999). Record-keeping became more systematised under the Turco-Egyptiansand later the Mahdists (reflecting an elaboration of bureaucracy), while privateindividuals, such as merchants and landowners, began to keep records too (Hill1959, Abu Salim 1969, Holt 1970, Abu Shouk, Ibrahim and Bjørkelo 1996).Printing, meanwhile, made a limited debut some time after 1820, when theTurco-Egyptians brought a lithographic press to Khartoum to publish officialdocuments. Years later, in 1885, the Mahdists seized this press and printedproclamations and prayer books, but faced a practical restraint on their outputin the form of a shortage of paper (Salih 1971).Three points stand out about the status of Arabic culture at the dawn of thetwentieth century. First, literacy was a rare skill, so that written sources (manuscriptor printed) were reaching small audiences that consisted primarily ofIslamic scholars. In such a context, only oral communication could be masscommunication; by extension, only oral poetry could be popular poetry. Second,the use of prose writing was steadily expanding, and would continue to developin the twentieth century – arguably, and in the long run, at poetry’s expense.Third, Sudanese Arabic culture was not stagnant and convention-bound in1900, as a critic, praising Europe’s literary interventions, once claimed ofEgyptian Arabic poetry on the eve of the Napoleonic conquest of 1798 (Badawi1975: 1). On the contrary, the Sudan’s Arabic literary ‘traditions’, if one caneven use a term which implies such fixity, were and had been steadily evolving.British colonialism thus brought new influences to bear on a cultural systemthat had been in motion for centuries.The Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898 ushered in an era of changes that haddramatic and far-reaching consequences for virtually every aspect of political,economic, and social life in the region. From 1898 to 1956, the Sudan functionedas a de facto British colony, notwithstanding the 1899 partnership agreementthat framed the regime as a de jure Condominium under joint British andEgyptian control.In the Sudan as in the rest of Africa, European imperial powers imposed new— 165 —www.taq.ir