Sultanate of Darfur

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Location of the Darfur region around 1750
Map of Darfur around 1914

The Sultanate of Darfur , also known as the Fur Sultanate , was an empire that existed from the 17th to the 20th century in the Darfur region , which is now in western Sudan .

history

Heyday

Suleiman Solong (1596–1637) was the first sultan of Darfur. He made Islam the state religion. Far-reaching changes did not take place until the reign of Ahmed Bakr (1682–1722), who built mosques and imported teachers. In 1787, Sultan Mohammed Tayrab fought the Sultanate of Sannar , but only got as far as Omdurman because the Nile blocked his way there. However, since he did not want to give up his project, Tayrab and his army remained in Omdurman for months. Incited by dissatisfied chiefs, he was poisoned by his wife and the army eventually returned to Darfur.

After Tayrab's death, Abd al Rahman Ahmad Bakri became Sultan of Darfur. Under him the sultanate reached its climax. After his death, his son Mohammed Fadl succeeded him on the throne in 1801, who was in conflict with his brother Mohammed Abu Madyan. During the reign of Mohammed Fadl, the Egyptians occupied the Sultanate of Sannar and Kurdufan , which bordered Darfur in the east. Darfur itself was not occupied, but the country was completely sealed off from the outside world. A difficult coexistence began for the Sultanate of Darfur with its new neighbors, who controlled the traditional slave routes south to the Bahr al-Ghazal region . After the death of Mohammed Fadl, his son Mohammed Hussein al Mahdi ascended the throne and ruled until 1873. The rule of his son Ibrahim Mohammed Hussein was ended by the Egyptian invasion of the country. In 1873 the slave trader al-Zubayr Rahma and an Egyptian army under Ismael Pasha Aiyub attacked the sultanate and conquered it for Egypt by 1874. At Manawaki the Sultan was killed by al-Zubayr. Sultan's uncle Bosh Ibn Mohammed El Fadl continued the fight and was also killed in 1875. Darfur was now officially under the rule of the Turkish-Egyptian Sudan . On the other hand there was a revolt from January 1877 by Harun ibn Sayf ad-Din. This entrenched itself in the Marra Mountains. There he was defeated in 1879 by the Egyptian governor, the Austrian adventurer, Slatin Pascha .

Mahdi uprising

In 1881 the Mahdi uprising broke out in Sudan . On December 23, 1883, Rudolf Slatin had to surrender to the Mahdi's army . On January 15, 1884, al-Fashir fell to the Mahdists after a one-week siege . Mohammed Khalid was installed as the new governor in Darfur. Sultan Muḥammad Būlād of Dar Sila used the disintegration to incorporate the districts of Dār Fongoro (in the southeast), and then Dār Galfige and Dār Sinyār .

After the death of the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad , a phase followed in which three successors ( caliphs ) appointed by him fought for power in Sudan. The Mahdi's son-in-law, Mohammed al-Sharif, was able to win over Mohammed Khalid, the governor in Darfur. In the course of the power struggles, the families of the Darfur sultans were reinstated as allies against the caliph Abdallahi ibn Muhammad . After Mohammed Khalid was captured, their leader, Yusuf Ibrahim, sought independence. Caliph Abdullahi dispatched Osman Adam, the governor of Kurdufan. He defeated Yusuf Ibrahim in two battles. Yusuf Ibrahim then withdrew to the Marra Mountains and was killed there. His brother Abu Kairat then called himself Sultan of Darfur. He allied himself with the holy Ahmed Abu Jummaisa , who also fought against Abdullahi. The caliph then sent Osman Adam again. On February 22, 1889, the battle of al-Faschir took place, in which the caliph's army was victorious.

Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

Ali Dinar, last Sultan of Darfur, after his death in battle

Sultan Ali Dinar , was reinstated by the British after their victory in the Mahdi uprising. Although he was an opponent of Dār Silas, he accepted a daughter of the Sultan as a wife and left Dār Fongoro and Dār Sinyār to his new father-in-law.

During World War I , he defied the British by refusing to pay his usual tribute to the government of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and sided with the Ottoman Empire in 1915 . Sirdar Reginald Wingate then put together a force of around 2000 men. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Philip James Vandeleur Kelly, the troops marched into Darfur in March 1916 ( Anglo-Egyptian Darfur Expedition ) and defeated the Fur Army decisively at Beringia and occupied the capital Al-Fashir in May. Ali Dinar had previously fled to the mountains. Negotiations for a surrender were eventually broken off by the British. When his whereabouts became known, a small force tracked down the Sultan and killed him in November 1916. Darfur was then completely subordinated to the British administration of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and remained part of Sudan even after independence.

Capital

In the 18th century, al-Fashir was the center of the sultanate.

The Sultan's palace has been preserved to this day and now houses a museum that can be visited.

literature

  • RS O'Fahey: The Darfur Sultanate: A History. Columbia University Press, New York 2008

Individual evidence

  1. a b Darfur Sultanate on globalsecurity.com
  2. ^ Alfred Brehm: Reisen im Sudan, p. 399 f.
  3. a b Kapteijns, Lidwien; Dār Silā, the Sultanate in Precolonial Times, 1870-1916 (Le sultanat du Dār Silā à l'époque précoloniale, 1870-1916); Cahiers d'Études Africaines, Vol. 23, Cahier 92 (1983), pp. 447-470