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This text presents an analytical narrative of Darfur, from the beginnings of its recorded history to the present. Three themes dominate: Darfur's complex history and its equally complex ethnic and ecological issues. The various phases of Darfur's history are given appropriate weight, under the sultans (c. 1650-1916), under the British (1916-56) and since independence (1956). An understanding of all three periods is the key to an understanding of the present. Darfur's history was played out against a complex ethnic background, often described as Arab and African. This greatly over-simplifies a pattern of ethnic and often linguistic change in which ethnic labels are constantly fluid and subjec...
This innovative anthropological study, based on biographic narratives recorded during extensive field-research in Darfur, Sudan (1990-95) provides a unique understanding of how, in daily life, working women of different classes negotiate their identities in the context of an Islamist regime.
The British were in Darfur for only forty years (1916-56) and, administratively, their impact was minimal. In retrospect, their most important role was in recording and codifying the customary law and administrative practice under the sultans. The present volume presents annotated selections from the British records that were copied in situ by the author in al-Fashir and Kutum in 1970 and 1974 and of which the originals were subsequently destroyed by accident. Darfur was unique in a Sudanese colonial context in that in 1916 the British conquered a functioning multi-ethnic African Muslim state. Their policy in the forty years of their rule was largely to maintain the system they had inherited...
In Sufism East and West, the contributors investigate the redirection and dynamics of Sufism in the modern era, specifically from the perspective of global cross-cultural exchange. Edited by Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh, the book explores the role of mystical Islam in the complex interchange and fluidity in the resonance spaces of “East” and “West.” The volume challenges the enduring Orientalist binary coding of East-versus-West and argues instead for a more mutual process of cultural plaiting and shared tradition. By highlighting amendments, adaptations and expansions of Sufi semantics during the last centuries, it also questions the persistent perception of Sufism in its post-classical epoch as a corrupt imitation of the legacy of the great Sufis of the past.
The Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest of Sudan - Churchill's 'River War' - has been well chronicled from the British point of view, but we still know little about its front line troops, the Sudanese soldiers of the Egyptian Army. Making use of unpublished primary sources and published material located in the United Kingdom and Sudan, Slaves of Fortune provides an historiographic correction. It argues that nineteenth-century Sudanese slave soldiers were social beings and historical actors, shaping both European and African destinies, just as their own lives were being transformed by imperial forces. -- Jacket.
From Darfur to the Rwandan genocide, journalists, policymakers, and scholars have blamed armed conflicts in Africa on ancient hatreds or competition for resources. Here, Tsega Etefa compares three such cases—the Darfur conflict between Arabs and non-Arabs, the Gumuz and Oromo clashes in Western Oromia, and the Oromo-Pokomo conflict in the Tana Delta—in order to offer a fuller picture of how ethnic violence in Africa begins. Diverse communities in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya alike have long histories of peacefully sharing resources, intermarrying, and resolving disputes. As he argues, ethnic conflicts are fundamentally political conflicts, driven by non-inclusive political systems, the monopolization of state resources, and the manipulation of ethnicity for political gain, coupled with the lack of democratic mechanisms for redressing grievances.
The end of the eighteenth century was a transformational period for the Muslim communities in the Russian Empire and their relationship with the tsarist state. One of the major figures to emerge out of this context was the reformer Abu Nasr Qursawi (1776-1812). A controversial religious scholar, he put forward a sweeping reform of the Islamic scholarly tradition that was influential among these communities into the twentieth century. Nathan Spannaus presents the first detailed analysis of Qursawi's reformism, both in its contours and broad historical setting, addressing issues of modernity, secularity, tradition, and intellectual history.
This volume of newly commissioned essays provides comprehensive coverage of African philosophy, ranging across disciplines and throughout the ages. Offers a distinctive historical treatment of African philosophy. Covers all the main branches of philosophy as addressed in the African tradition. Includes accounts of pre-colonial African philosophy and contemporary political thought.
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic, guises. In November 2017, the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée...