Introduction
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Introduction In Darfur is the result of a collaboration, undertaken in the rapidly modernizing Egypt of the 1830s and 1840s, between the work’s author, the Tunisian–Egyptian Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Tūnisī (1790–1857), and its instigator, copyist, and in some sense editor, the Frenchman Nicolas Perron (1797–1876). The backgrounds of these two men could hardly have been more different in terms of upbringing, language, and culture. They lived, however, in an era of convergence. Under Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1805–48), the Egyptian state was recruiting Arab and European professionals and deploying these to its newly created institutions. As Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, a contemporary who found employment there between 1827 and 1835, put it, Egypt had reached in those days “a peak of splendor, strength, magnificence, munificence, and glory. Those inducted into its service enjoyed a huge salary in the form of money, cloth- ing, and provisions, more than was customary in any other state. Its viceroy awarded high rank and tokens of imperial favor to Muslim and Christian alike . .” 28 This was the dynamic that brought al-Tūnisī and Perron together, at the Madrasat al-Ṭibb al-Miṣriyyah (the Egyptian Medical School), the first modern institution of its kind in Egypt, founded in 1827 at Abū Zaʿbal, a military facility north of Cairo that already housed a military hospital. There, Perron worked initially as a teacher of chemistry, probably from 1829, and became director in 1839, while al-Tūnisī participated in the translation into Arabic of European medical texts, some by Perron. As colleagues, the two were part of | xxvii a wide-ranging translation project based at the school that has been compared, for the importance of its role in the transfer of modern European scientific knowledge to the Arab world and for its impact on the Arabic language, to that housed at the ninth-century Dār al-Ḥikmah, or House of Wisdom, in Baghdad, celebrated as the instrument by which Greek science was translated into Arabic.29 In addition, their relationship had a side that went beyond the normal limits of professional collaboration, since al-Tūnisī acted as Perron’s shaykh, or teacher, for a period of half a dozen or so years, during which he gave him lessons in Arabic—lessons that acted as the incu- bator for the work presented here. At the time, the Land(s) of the Blacks—as the belt of partially Islamized countries that stretched from the Atlantic south of the Sahara almost to the Red Sea was called by the Arabs—was little known to Arab scholarship and less so to European. Leo Africanus (ca. 1494–1554) had devoted a chapter of his Description of Africa (1550)30 to them, but this was based more on accounts by other trav- elers than on firsthand experience. During the first half of the nine- teenth century, French scholars and travelers began to fill the gap,31 but the subject of al-Tūnisī’s book, Darfur, which today constitutes the westernmost part of the Republic of the Sudan and lies at the center of that belt, remained largely unknown. It had taken shape as a state only in the seventeenth century and, with Wadai (now part of Chad), the other Eastern Sudanic state that al-Tūnisī visited, was less accessible than either the more Islamized states to the west or those closer to the Nile Valley to the east. Before al-Tūnisī’s visit, only the Englishman W. G. Browne, who spent from June 1793 to March 1796 there, had left a description of the country; one whose value is diminished by the fact that Browne was not allowed to move freely.32 Change, however, was afoot. In 1821, the armies of Muḥammad ʿAlī would conquer Kordofan and the Funj sultanate to its east, initiating the process that would lead ultimately to the creation, for the first time, of a country called the Sudan; in 1843, an Egyptian-sponsored army under the command of Muḥammad xxviii | Introduction Abū l-Madyan, half brother of Sultan Muḥammad Faḍl, attempted to take the country but failed. The sultanate continued to maintain its independence until 1874, when it was finally incorporated into Egyptian Sudan. Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Tūnisī (1204–74/1790–1857)33 was born into a family from the city of Tunis that claimed descent from the Prophet Muḥammad and whose male members therefore bore the title sayyid (“master”) or sharif (“of noble pedigree”); al-Tūnisī never fails to use one or other of these titles when referring to his relatives. Descent alone, however, was not the sole criterion by which they judged their lives: scholarship, and recognition for it, were also central. Al-Tūnisī’s great-grandfather on his father’s mother’s side (named Sulaymān, as was his paternal grandfather) bore the sobriquet “al-Azharī,” meaning that he had traveled to Cairo to study at the mosque-university of al-Azhar, and wrote sev- eral books (topics unspecified), while his son, al-Tūnisī’s maternal great-uncle Aḥmad, was “a learned scholar, a trustworthy source, of unimpeachable authority, for the transmission of both hadiths and the law” who taught law in Tunis (§2.1.27). Al-Tūnisī’s father, ʿUmar, studied with his uncle Aḥmad (§2.1.27) and later, in Darfur, gave lessons to the local men of religion and wrote scholarly com- mentaries for the sultan, as his son is at pains to point out (§2.3.23). A common pattern is discernible in the lives of al-Tūnisī’s grand- father and father, lives recounted in some detail in the first two chapters of the work—travel between Tunis, Cairo, the Hejaz, and Sudan; extended and ultimately permanent absences of fathers who left North Africa to settle in “the Land of the Blacks,” leaving young families behind them in Tunis or Cairo; sons seeking those same absent fathers; meetings of remarkable coincidence between sons and fathers in the middle of vast, empty spaces—and al-Tūnisī him- self would in some ways repeat the pattern. The travel was fueled by trade in commodities such as “mantles and tarbushes” (§2.1.1) and also, when “the Land of the Blacks” was involved, in slaves (§§2.1.28, Introduction | xxix 2.1.29, etc.). Settlement in the Land of the Blacks was facilitated by their status as learned sayyids, for the rulers of the Sudanic nations, from the Funj sultanate in the east to Borno in the west, had a long tradition of encouraging the immigration of such persons, who were seen as lending religious legitimacy to their rule in a region that had been undergoing a slow process of Islamicization for hun- dreds of years. The coincidental meetings were occasioned by the interconnectedness, however attenuated, of the caravan system that served the trade. Absent from their lives is any but a muted sense of Europe and the non-Muslim world to the north (“French dollars”— a trading currency, and not necessarily French34—are one of its rare representatives). For such merchants and sayyids, the non-Muslim world consisted primarily of the pagan groups living to the south, who were the source of the slaves. Against this background, in 1803, fourteen-year-old Muḥammad al-Tūnisī set out from Cairo, to which city the family had moved, in search of his father, ʿUmar, who had left some seven years earlier for Sennar, and subsequently moved, as the boy had by this time discovered, to Darfur. Muḥammad’s account of his journey, under- taken under the wing of a fortuitously met friend of his father’s, and of his subsequent stay in Darfur (introduced by an overview of political events preceding his arrival), form the bulk of the work. Al-Tūnisī lived in Darfur for almost eight years, most of them with- out the father he had come so far to find, for the latter, a scant two months after the two were reunited,35 sought and received the gov- ernment’s permission to return to Tunis, leaving Muḥammad to manage his estates. Eventually, the father would return from Tunis to the Lands of the Blacks, not to Darfur but to the neighboring Sul- tanate of Wadai, where he would again be welcomed by the sultan and awarded estates as tax farms. After staying on alone in Darfur, Muḥammad also moved to Wadai36 to join his father, only to find that he had by that time returned yet again to Tunis. On his departure from Wadai in 1813, the author, still in his twen- ties, went first to Tunis, then moved to Egypt (exactly when is xxx | Introduction unclear). There, after a period of unspecified length that he describes as being devoted to study and ending in insolvency (§§1.2–4),37 he entered government service in Muḥammad ʿAlī’s vigorously devel- oping state (§1.5), by which he continued to be employed for the rest of his working life. His first job was as a chaplain (wāʿiẓ) in the Egyptian army that fought in Greece’s Morea on behalf of the Otto- mans from 1823 to 1828 (§1.6). On his return from Greece, al-Tūnisī joined the staff of the Egyp- tian Medical School38 “as a language editor39 of medical books, specializing in pharmaceutical works” (§1.6). He also edited several canonical texts of Arabic literature40 for the recently established government press at Būlāq, near Cairo. Toward the end of his life, he gave lessons on Fridays at the important mosque of al-Sayyidah Zaynab.41 Nicolas Perron (1797–1876)—at first al-Tūnisī’s colleague, later his superior, and for much of the period also his student—trained in Paris initially in languages, but turned later to medicine, becoming a doctor in 1825.