Sennar, 1600–1660

Ajib al-Manjilak, sheikh of the Abdallab, ruled the Arab tribes north of the meeting of the two Niles from Qarri as the Funj king's viceroy. He had forced an earlier king to marry his daughter, and the kings of these years reigned as much by his leave as by their own strength. When Abd al-Qadir seized the throne, Ajib marched south into the Funj heartland, and for a time his word ran from Dongola to the Ethiopian border.

Unsa, king at Sennar since about 1591, was by tradition the son of that earlier king by Ajib's daughter. His reign left the real question open: whether the king at Sennar or the viceroy at Qarri ruled the kingdom. In 1603 or 1604 Abd al-Qadir deposed him and took the throne.

Abd al-Qadir II held the throne for barely three years. Ajib's armies drove him from the Funj heartland toward the south-east and the Ethiopian border. In December 1606 he lost his throne, and with his remaining horsemen and foot soldiers he turned to the one power across the frontier that might shelter him.

Susenyos was fighting his way to the Ethiopian crown and won it at Gol in March 1607. Before Christmas that year the fallen Abd al-Qadir came to him at Bad, south of Lake Tana, and became his vassal. Susenyos gave him silk robes and a gold bracelet, the mark of vassalage, and settled on him the frontier market town of Chelga.

At Chelga Abd al-Qadir lived as the emperor's man, with Ali, a son of Ajib, who had fled with him. Susenyos gave the two exiles cattle seized from tribute-defaulters, and in 1609 they helped him crush a rebel. By Bruce's account the emperor had once sent Abd al-Qadir a kettledrum, the gift a king makes to his vassal, and received a trained falcon in return.

Idris wad al-Arbab, the holy man of al-Aylafun, was consulted by both sides. Ajib asked him about war with the Funj, who had, he said, 'changed the customs upon us'; Idris told him not to fight, for they would kill him and rule his descendants. To Badi, his own disciple, he foretold that they would kill Ajib and that Badi would return to Sennar as king.

Adlan, the next king, turned the war around. In 1611 or 1612 his army met Ajib near Karkoj on the Blue Nile, and Ajib was killed, so old by then that tradition says his eyelids had to be tied up with string. Adlan then led the army north after Ajib's sons, as far as Mushu near the third cataract.

Badi, a son of the exiled Abd al-Qadir, was Adlan's Sid al-Qawm, master of the royal household, and marched north with him. At Mushu the troops deposed Adlan and made Badi king in his place, as Idris had foretold. He turned back south toward Sennar, and asked the scholar Sughayrun, whom he trusted, to follow him.

Ajib's death at Karkoj broke the Abdallab challenge to the Funj crown. His sons fled north to Dongola, beyond the reach of Sennar, and held out there while Adlan's army followed them down the Nile. The family's place in the kingdom now depended on terms the new king would set.

Badi sent Idris to Ajib's sons with a safe-conduct, and Idris brought them home. The new king, calling Idris his shaykh, offered him half the land of his realm. Idris refused, saying it was land taken from the Nuba by force, and asked instead for the right to intercede with the king in everything. Badi granted it.

Abd al-Raziq Abu Qurun reached Dar al-Abwab in Badi's reign, sent by his master Yaqub ibn Ban al-Naqa to settle at al-Mashra al-Ahmar. There he married, fathered twelve sons and spread the Qadiri path. He was a companion of Idris, of Sughayrun and of Hasan wad Hassuna, and his word carried weight with the Jaali chiefs.

The treaty Idris arranged, remembered among the Abdallab as the Covenant of Protection, let Ajib's family keep everything north of the confluence, now as vassals of Sennar. Muhammad al-Aqil, Ajib's eldest son, became sheikh at Qarri; Abdallab tradition puts a one-year rule of his brother Othman before him.

Sughayrun, Muhammad ibn Sarhan, came from Tarnaj in the Shayqiyya country, where his maternal uncle Ismail ibn Jabir had licensed him to teach. His father's kin, jealous that he held his uncles' chair, set the Shayqiyya king Zimrawi on him. Following Badi south, he asked the king only for a homestead, a watering place on the river and a burial ground, at al-Qoz in Dar al-Abwab, and built his mosque there.

Abd al-Rahman wad Hamadtu had studied with Sughayrun under Ismail ibn Jabir and visited the Egyptian scholar al-Banufari with him, who judged Sughayrun fit to teach and Abd al-Rahman fit to give legal rulings. He came south in the same years; Sughayrun named the nearby clearing of al-Fajija for his brethren. Remembered as mufti of his age, he trained the jurists Hamad ibn al-Aghbash and Ibrahim al-Faradi.

Back in Sennar, Badi turned on Ethiopia, which still kept his father at Chelga as the emperor's vassal. When Susenyos sent him gold bracelets and a gold-mounted saddle, Badi answered with two lame old horses, and his men began raiding the emperor's frontier posts. He died about 1616, and his son Rabat inherited the quarrel.

Aleb, governor of Mazaga, an Ethiopian province on the Atbara, fled to Sennar with his horses and the province's kettledrum. Susenyos protested and asked at least for the drum back; Badi sent no reply. Bruce, who calls him Alico, makes much of the desertion; the emperor's chronicle lists it as one grievance among several.

Susenyos now held a list of grievances: the insulting horses, the deserter Aleb and his drum, raids on his frontier posts, and villagers who had fled his punishment into the Funj village of Sarki and been mistreated there. Each could have been settled; none was. The reckoning fell not on Badi but on his son.

Abba Yeshaq, a bishop sent from Alexandria to shepherd the Christians of Ethiopia, was stopped in Sennar on his way and held there a long time, perhaps a year or more. In 1618 word reached Susenyos that he had died in the land of Sennar. The emperor took his death as a cause of war.

Rabat succeeded his father Badi about 1616. When Susenyos's brother Za Giyorgis raided his frontier districts in the summer of 1618, Rabat sent his captains to defend Sarki, the Funj village on the caravan road into Ethiopia. They attacked the village of Changa and killed Mohammed Seid, one of the emperor's Muslim vassals.

Susenyos marched to Bad but stayed in the rear, sending Yonael, governor of Begemder, against Sarki. In the one meeting of the two armies, the emperor's chronicle says, Rabat's men broke and 326 were killed. Between November 1618 and March 1619 he planned a raid on the whole border, from the Blue Nile to Kassala, in three columns.

Malkea Krestos and Yonael led the largest division toward Dabarki on the Dinder, seventy miles from Sennar. They never reached it, but looted frontier villages and stormed the hill-fort of Abromla, leading its king to Susenyos with a rope round his neck. On a second raid in May 1619 Malkea Krestos beat the Bagara herders of the Atbara plain and came home loaded with cattle.

Walda Hawaryat, the emperor's son-in-law, marched nineteen days from Danqaz to the Atbara country with Galla and Turkish captains. Its ruler, Haket, fled, and the column carried off camels and three pairs of kettledrums. On the May raid he pressed ahead alone, found Haket gone again, and was rebuked for abandoning his companion. The Atbara country emptied; its people fled to Sennar.

Takla Giyorgis, lord of Tigray, was sent with the men of his province against Taka, around modern Kassala. The chronicle says only that he made war there and went home to Tigray. The people of Taka and Atbara had been warned of the raids and moved away, so he probably took little.

Susenyos then turned on Fatima, queen of Arom, whose market town on the caravan road from Suakin served the people of Atbara and Taka. The Bahr Negash Gabra Maryam marched on her with the men of Shire. She hid; he waited eleven days and threatened to winter there eating her cattle, and she surrendered. He brought her to Danqaz in September 1619.

Old and too frail to stand, Fatima was told to sit. Asked why she paid no tribute, she said nobody had asked for it in a long time, and that the Funj, 'who are stronger than you,' had overcome her. She denied warning Atbara and Taka of the raids. Susenyos fixed a yearly tribute and sent her home. Rabat had done nothing to protect her.

With the eastern border quiet after 1619, Rabat reigned for nearly thirty years. Late in the 1620s a young Ethiopian fugitive reached his court claiming to be a son of the emperor Yaqob, whose line Susenyos had displaced: a refugee from Ethiopia at Sennar, as a fallen king of Sennar had once been at Chelga.

Saga Krestos was well received in Sennar. He learned Arabic there and was given the name Khalil, but a plan to marry him to the king's daughter required him to become a Muslim, and he fled. He went on to Egypt, reached Cairo early in 1632, and died in France in 1638, widely judged an impostor.

Muhammad al-Aqil held Qarri under the covenant; Abdallab tradition gives him some twenty-five years, to about 1636. The Tabaqat says his son Khidr took the sheikhship after him and was deposed within six months. Crawford finds several short reigns crowded into these years whose order cannot be fixed.

Abdallah al-Brins, another son of Muhammad al-Aqil, followed. Abdallab tradition gives him some seventeen years, from about 1636 to about 1653, and remembers his rule as a golden age. The sheikhship stayed among Ajib's grandsons, held now as vassals of Sennar.

Sughayrun taught at al-Qoz for some fifteen years. Dying, he weighed his nephews and sons and chose al-Zayn, the youngest and most learned, and asked that he not be buried until Abd al-Raziq Abu Qurun came. Abd al-Raziq came and bade al-Zayn lead the funeral prayer. Al-Zayn held the school for about fifty years, with up to a thousand students, and died in 1675/76.

Madani, son of Sughayrun's brother Umar, had learned law from his uncle so thoroughly that he was nicknamed al-Hajar, 'the Rock'; he married Sughayrun's daughter Rabia. After Sughayrun's death al-Zayn gave him the opening session of the day's teaching in the mosque, to hold until Sughayrun's son Ibrahim came of age.

Ibrahim, Sughayrun's son, learned Khalil's legal handbook from Madani from beginning to end, and was called al-Hajar after his teacher. He then took over the opening session himself, and later taught al-Zayn's son Muhammad al-Azraq alongside his father. The school was now reproducing its own teachers within the family.

Daf Allah, born in 1594/95 into the Araki family of holy men, had read law under Ibrahim al-Faradi. Idris sent him on to Sughayrun. When he finished the course, Sughayrun shaved his head, wound him a turban, gave him four students and sent him home: 'Go to your people, live near the river, not in the desert, and teach.'

Muhammad wad Dawud, whom Daf Allah's uncle Abdallah al-Araki had named his successor on his deathbed, came from Hillat Ajib with the banners and robes of the Araki shaykhs. 'Your fathers left these with me for you,' he told Daf Allah, and directed him to settle at Abu Haraz, where he built a mosque and teaching rooms.

Daf Allah said he had never studied theology. Wad Dawud sent for his own disciple Ali wad Barri, who had read law under Sughayrun and theology under Husayn Abu Shaar, and Ali came to Abu Haraz to teach him. Ali later wrote two commentaries on al-Sanusi's creed that were read across the region.

Idris told al-Hajj Said, a merchant, that the Prophet bade him build Daf Allah a mosque. Said swore he would not unless the Prophet told him himself; by the Tabaqat's account he then saw him in a dream. A seasoned trader, he brought timber in the Funj king's boats, built the mosque and its roof, and endowed it with twelve slaves and farmland.

Hasan wad Hassuna, grandson of an Andalusian settler, had spent some twelve years in Arabia, Egypt and Syria. Back home his herds grew; he dug a great reservoir, where Ali wad Barri once worked a year, and kept, by tradition, five hundred mounted slaves with silver-mounted swords, who traded horses to Taqali, Darfur and Sennar. His household enclosure was said to be as large as the king's.

Rabat died about 1644 and his son Badi took the throne, remembered as Abu Diqn, the Bearded, for courage and generosity. About 1650, by one reckoning, he led an army up the White Nile against the Shilluk and put them to flight. Under him Sennar became a fixed royal capital, and his government's written documents begin; the oldest known dates from 1654.

Daf Allah never once went to Sennar. When King Badi, Rabat's son, wished to speak with him, the king rode to Abu Haraz himself to visit him and receive his blessing. Daf Allah founded mosques across the Gezira and endowed them with land and slaves, taught for some seventy years, and died in 1683, aged ninety-one.

Badi, Rabat's son, honoured Hasan wad Hassuna and at one meeting granted every request he made. Hasan's slaves had become whole villages, and so many visitors brought offerings that a pen was built for the firstborn of the flocks given him. He died in 1664/65, killed when a gun he fired at a crocodile in his reservoir burst back on him.

Arbab, son of Ali ibn Awn, read law under al-Zayn at al-Qoz and theology under Ali wad Barri, whom he served. After his teacher's death he took up teaching theology himself, wrote a treatise on the articles of faith, al-Jawahir, and became so identified with the subject that he was called Arbab al-Aqa'id, 'Arbab of the creeds'. He died at Sennar in 1690/91.

By the Abdallab list, Hajo, son of Ajib's son Othman, followed Abdallah al-Brins about 1653 and held Qarri some five years. The office passed back and forth among the descendants of three of Ajib's sons, Othman, Muhammad al-Aqil and Uraybi, and the list's dates for these years are traditional.

Ajib II, son of Ajib's son Uraybi, followed Hajo about 1658, by the same list. He bore his grandfather's name, but not his power: he held Qarri as the vassal of the king at Sennar, as every sheikh had since the covenant Idris arranged.

Mismar, another son of Uraybi, was sheikh in 1659, when on a journey to Dongola he wrought havoc among its notables. When a chief brought him a cow seized from a man under Ali wad Barri's protection, Mismar refused Ali's plea for it, and Ali foretold his fall. The king of Sennar's men took Mismar to Sennar and deposed him, and Ali son of Othman was made sheikh in his place.