Abstract
The impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral began during a nearly 200-year-long mega-drought that started in 1640. This mega-drought, which is associated with a global climatological shift that is commonly referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age,’ was unlike other environmental hazards. Though generation after generation tried to cope by making only small adjustments to their practice, traditional pastoralist leaders lost the ability to provide for their dependents in their time of needs. As a result, the bonds of dependence that had structured pastoralist society attenuated. At the start of the nineteenth century, pastoralists converted en masse to a new form of Sufi Islam that purported to offer an innovative set of environmental management tools. Conversion resulted in the creation of new webs of dependence that bound pastoralists to new religious elites instead of to traditional pastoralist leaders.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For the history of nilometers, in general, and this nilometer, in particular, see William Popper, The Cairo Nilometer: Studies in Ibn Taghrî Birdî’s Chronicles of Egypt: I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951), 1–48.
- 2.
Mohammed Umer, et al., ‘Late Quaternary Climate Changes in the Horn of Africa,’ in Past Climate Variability through Europe and Africa, Richard W. Battarbee, Francoise Gasse, and Catherine E. Stickley, eds. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2004), 171–172; Sohair S. Zaghloul, Mohamed El-Moattassem, and Ahmed A. Rady, ‘The Hydrological Interactions between Atbara River and the Main Nile at the Confluence Area,’ International Congress on River Basin Management. Proceedings of the International Congress of Water Basin Management. DSI and WWC, Antalya, Turkey (2007), 787–799.
- 3.
Popper, The Cairo Nilometer, 174–178.
- 4.
D. Verschuren, K. R. Laird, and B. Cumming, ‘Rainfall and Drought in Equatorial East Africa during the Past 1100 Years,’ Nature, 403 (2000): 410–414; J. C. Stager, et al., ‘Solar Variability and the Levels of Lake Victoria, East Africa, during the Last Millennium,’ Journal of Paleolimnology, 33 (2005): 243–251; Erik T. Brown and Thomas C. Johnson, ‘Coherence between Tropical East African and South American Records of the Little Ice Age,’ Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 6:12 (December 2005); S. R. Alin, and A. S. Cohen, ‘Lake-Level History of Lake Tanganyika, East Africa, for the Past 2500 Years Based on Ostracode-Inferred Water Depth Reconstruction,’ Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 199 (2003): 31–49.
- 5.
Dagnachew Legesse, et al., ‘Environmental Changes in a Tropical Lake (Lake Abiyata, Ethiopia) during Recent Centuries,’ Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology , Paleoecology, 187 (2002): 233–258.
- 6.
J. M. Russell and T. C. Johnson, ‘Little Ice Age Drought in Equatorial Africa: Intertropical Convergence Zone Migrations and El-Niño-Southern Oscillation Variability,’ Geology, 35:1 (January 2007): 21–24.
- 7.
J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in the Sudan (New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1949), 14, 126–138; J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 3rd edition (London: Frank Cass, 1976. First edition in 1952), 157, 160.
- 8.
Trimingham, Islam in the Sudan, 14; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 235–245.
- 9.
Jonathan Miran, ‘A Historical Overview of Islam in Eritrea,’ Die Welt des Islams, 45:2 (2005): 185.
- 10.
Hjort af Ornäs and Dahl, Responsible Man, 30.
- 11.
T. R. H. Owen, ‘The Hadendowa,’ Sudan Notes and Records, 20:2 (1937): 188–191.
- 12.
Owen, ‘The Hadendowa,’ 188–189.
- 13.
O. B. E. Newbold, ‘The Beja Tribes of the Red Sea Hinterland,’ in The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from Within, J. A. de C. Hamilton, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 154.
- 14.
Owen, ‘The Hadendowa,’ 189–191.
- 15.
Hjort af Ornäs and Dahl, Responsible Man, 30.
- 16.
Newbold, ‘The Beja Tribes of the Red Sea,’ 154.
- 17.
For example, nearly three-quarters of the Gash Delta was under forest by 1860. Ghada Talhami, Suakin and Massawa under Egyptian Rule (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979), 39.
- 18.
Pankhurst, The History of Famine and Epidemics in Ethiopia, 51.
- 19.
R. A. Caulk, ‘Soldiers and Peasants in Ethiopia c.1850–1935,’ The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 11:3 (1978): 461–466.
- 20.
For a classic history of this period, see Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia: The Era of the Princes: The Challenge of Islam and the Re-unification of the Christian Empire (1769–1855) (London: Longmans, 1968).
- 21.
Pankhurst, The History of Famine and Epidemics in Ethiopia, 51.
- 22.
P. M. Holt, The Sudan of the Three Niles: The Funj Chronicles 910–1288/1504–1871 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 20, 32, 63.
- 23.
R. S. O’Fahey and Jay Spaulding, The Kingdoms of Sudan (London: Methuen and Co, 1974), 82–104.
- 24.
Husayn ‘Abdullah al-‘Amri, The Yemen in the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Political and Intellectual History (UK: Ithaca Press, 1985), 39–59.
- 25.
Madawi al Rasheed, Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidis of Saudi Arabia (London and New York: I B Tauris, 1991), 32–33.
- 26.
Muslim religious requirements maintained human populations in the Hijaz in numbers that could not be supported by the natural environment. Mecca is not situated in a productive countryside. Less than two percent of modern-day Saudi Arabia is considered potentially arable and the rest is unproductive desert. Outside of a number of oasis and mountain valleys, there is insufficient surface water to support cultivation. Johany, et al., The Saudi Arabian Economy, 110.
- 27.
Even at the end of the nineteenth century, exports from Jidda were valued at just three percent of total imports. William Ochsenwald, ‘The Commercial History of the Hijaz Vilayet, 1840–1908,’ in Religion, Economy and State in Ottoman-Arab History (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1998), 70.
- 28.
For a brief summary of Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings, see Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41–92.
- 29.
William Ochsenwald, ‘The Commercial History of the Hijaz Vilayet, 1840–1908,’ 65.
- 30.
Edward R. Cook, et al., ‘Asian Monsoon Failure and Megadrought during the Last Millennium,’ Science, 328 (23 April 2010): 486–489.
- 31.
Pedro Machado, ‘Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa and the western Indian Ocean, 1300–1800,’ in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 170.
- 32.
Richard Pankhurst, ‘Indian Trade with Ethiopia, the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,’ Cahiers d’etudes africaines, 14:55 (1974): 469–472. The Indian merchant population of the Red Sea reached its nadir in the first third of the nineteenth century, after which it began to rebound. In Aden alone, the Indian population grew from just a few merchants at the start of the century to 350 in 1842. The rate of migration from India to Red Sea ports suddenly accelerated in the 1880s and by 1930 there were approximately 5000 Indian merchants residing in the SRSR . See Kundan Kumar, ‘Aspects of Indian Merchant Diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula during the British Period,’ in Indian Trade Diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Prakash C. Jain and Kundan Kumar, eds. (New Delhi: New Academic Publishers: 2012), 65; Claude Markovits, ‘Indian Merchant Networks outside India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Preliminary Survey,’ in Indian Trade Diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Prakash C. Jain and Kundan Kumar, eds. (New Delhi: New Academic Publishers, 2012), 27.
- 33.
The specific features of this theological conceptualization of the nature of divine intervention emerged during a widespread, late-eighteenth-century reformation of Sufi practices during which disparate movements based in Cairo, Istanbul, and parts of the Ottoman periphery started questioning the religious validity of some teachings. Often this questioning centered on evaluating these practices in terms of their coherence to conceptualizations of the exemplary life of the Prophet Muhammad. This re-evaluation led to a reconfiguring of Sufi beliefs. This process ultimately re-energized Sufi communities and helped pave the way for the conversion of pastoralist communities on the ARSL. For a more complete understanding of sufi practices in the ARSL, see Ali Salih Karrar, The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1992); Abd al-Qadir Maḥmud, al-Fikr al-Ṣufi fī al-Sudan: Maṣadiruhu wa-Tayyaratuhu wa-Alwanuhu (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr al-Arabi, 1968); Awad Karsany, Al Majdhubiyya and Al Mikashfiyya: Two Sufi Tariqas in the Sudan (Khartoum: University of Khartoum, 1985); Manṣur Khalid, al-Thulathiyah al-Majidiyah: Suwar Min al-Adab al-Ṣufi al-Sudani (Tortola, British Virgin Islands: Turath al-Maḥdudah lil-Nashr, 1997); Abd al-Hamid Muhammad Ahmad, al-Sharif Zayn al-Abidin al-Hindi: al-Ṣufi al-Muadhdhab, al-Siyasi al-Mutamarrid wa-al-Shair al-Thaiir (Khartoum: Dar Azzah lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzi, 2012); and Albrecht Hofheinz, ‘Internalizing Islam: Shaykh Muhammad Majdhub Scriptural Islam and Local Context in the Early Nineteenth-Century Sudan’ (PhD dissertation: University of Bergen, 1996).
- 34.
Andrew Paul, ‘Notes on the Beni Amer,’ Sudan Notes and Records, 31:2 (December 1950): 224; Anthony d’Avray, ‘Introduction,’ in The Nakfa Documents, Anthony d’Avray with Richard Pankhurst, eds. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000), 19; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 160.
- 35.
Paul, History of the Beja Tribes of the Sudan, 54; Andrew Paul, ‘The Hadareb,’ Sudan Notes and Records, 40 (1959): 75–78; Talhami, Suakin and Massawa under Egyptian Rule, 109; A. Zaborski, ‘Notes on the Mediaeval History of the Beja Tribes,’ Folia Orientalia, 7 (1965): 291; Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, The Fung Kingdom of Sennar (Gloucester: John Bellows Ltd., 1951), 123.
- 36.
Hjort af Ornäs and Dahl, Responsible Man, 27–29.
- 37.
Those Afar clans that did convert retained most of their traditional religious practices. Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Borderlands: Essays in Regional History from Ancient Times to the End of the 18th Century (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997), 61.
- 38.
For an overview of this theological debate and its political implications, see Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 154–161.
- 39.
For a brief account of Ibn Idris’s life and preaching in Mecca, see R. S. O’Fahey, Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 58–80.
- 40.
Despite the role that Ibn Idris played in al-Mirghani’s education and in the development of his understanding of the value of missionary work among the unbelieving, al-Mirghani’s teachings minimized the importance of Ibn Idris and played up the special role of the al-Mirghani family. The prayers written by Ibn Idris were not, for the most part, incorporated into the Khatmiyya liturgy. Among followers of the Khatmiyya Sufi brotherhood, Ibn Idris is remembered only as al-Mirghani’s teacher.
- 41.
O’Fahey, Enigmatic Saint, 142–153.
- 42.
Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 235.
- 43.
For a brief history of the al-Majdhub family, see Hofheinz, Internalizing Islam, 21–26.
- 44.
O’Fahey, Enigmatic Saint, 177.
- 45.
Though al-Majdhub died without an heir in 1832, the Majadhib continued to develop the Majdhubiyya. In 1853, al-Majdhub’s nephew, Muhammad al-Tahir al-Majdhub was sent by the family from the Nile to Sawakin to assume the leadership of the local zawiya and to ensure the unity of the Nilotic and Eastern Sudanese branches of the Majdhubiyya. Hofheinz, Internalizing Islam, 39.
- 46.
For a general outline of the structure of Sufi brotherhoods on the ARSL, see Trimingham, Islam in the Sudan, 201–205.
- 47.
S. F. Nadel, ‘Notes on Beni Amer Society,’ Sudan Notes and Records, 26:1 (1945): 65–66.
- 48.
Miran, ‘A Historical Overview of Islam in Eritrea,’ 186.
- 49.
Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 218–219, 227–229.
- 50.
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 156.
- 51.
There was little intrinsic value in holding the Funj Sultanate’s territory. When compared to its neighbors, the Funj Sultanate was not a particularly wealthy state. In the west, the Dar Fur Sultanate was the starting point of the lucrative Darb al-Arbain, or 40 days caravan road, which brought slaves and gold from Africa to Egypt. In the south, Ethiopia was known as a fertile land of riches. The conquest of the Funj Sultanate was driven by political motives. In 1811, recalcitrant Mamluks had fled into Northern Sudan, where they hoped to regroup and launch a campaign to recapture the Egyptian state. The real economic prize of the first campaign of conquest was Dar Fur. Though Muhammad Ali did not publicly discuss his reasons for conquering Sudan, the progress of the campaign indicates that the initial motivation for the conquest was political and not economic. The search for treasure only began once the fall of Sinnar was all but assured. In April 1821, Muhammad Ali sent a force to conquer Dar Fur. As it was making its way through Kurdufan, the expedition was defeated. Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 1821–1881 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 8–13. For a summary of the progress of the expeditions to conquer the Funj Sultanate and Dar Fur, see P. M. Holt and M. W. Daly, A History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day, 4th edition (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 47–58.
- 52.
Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 54–55.
- 53.
Anders Bjørkelo, Prelude to the Mahdiyya: Peasants and Traders in the Shendi Region, 1821–1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 74.
- 54.
Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 74.
- 55.
Abir, Ethiopia, 152–156.
- 56.
Richard Pankhurst, The Great Ethiopian Famine of 1888–1892: A New Assessment (Addis Ababa: Haile Selassie I University, 1964), 4.
- 57.
Abir, Ethiopia, 156–157.
- 58.
As evidenced by the recording of an extremely low flood by the Cairo Nilometer.
- 59.
Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 115–116.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Serels, S. (2018). Survival by Conversion, 1640–1840. In: The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94165-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94165-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94164-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94165-3
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)