Dar Fur and Wadai
Far to the west of the Nile valley lie the regions of Dar Fur (now in the west of the Republic of the Sudan) and Wadai (now in eastern Chad). Both began to come in contact with Islam around the year 1600.
Nomadic Arabs probably reached northern Dar Fur in the late sixteenth century and in the following century holymen from the Nile valley ventured westwards, after the first ruler of the Keira dynasty, Sulayman (fl. 1650) accepted Islam. At about the same time the Muslim sultanate of Wadai was founded by a holy man of Nile valley origin, Abd al-Karim, who married into the Tunjur ruling family and then led a revolt against it, establishing a dynasty which endured until the French conquest of 1911. The Keira dynasty of Dar Fur was similarly long-lived, surviving, despite a period of evanescence during the Turkiyya and the Mahdiyya, until the incorporation of the area into the Anglo- Egyptian Sudan in 1916 and the killing of its last sultan Ali Dinar. Islamic influences came to these areas not only from the Nile valley but from West Africa also, since they lay along the pilgrimage route from the Lake Chad region to the Nile valley and Red Sea.Not only did West Africans sometimes abandon their pilgrimages and settle at various points along the route (including points much farther east), but the route was also a conduit for migrant holy men and scholars. Like the sultans of Sinnar, the rulers of Dar Fur settled immigrant holy men on estates (hakura), granting them immunities (jah) both physical and fiscal; farther west still, the mais of Borno granted holy men similar privileges (known as hurma and enshrined in a mahram document) and there are traces of such a system in sixteenth-century Songhay. The object of rulers in settling holy men near their court was to be able to tap their blessedness or ‘holiness’ (baraka), to acquire protection from them through the amulets they could write and so that the prayers or Qur’an readings they could offer on the ruler’s behalf would bring upon them God’s favour in this world and the next. Encouragement of Muslim holymen should not, however, be taken as a sign of the commitment of these Sudanic rulers to an Islamic political or social order. The courts of Sinnar, Dar Fur, Wadai, Borno and Songhay, while adopting certain Islamic trappings (e.g. an Arabic chancellery, the title wazir (chief minister) in some cases, patronage of imams (prayer leaders) or qadis (judges), retained in large measure their older African character, reflected in a high degree of royal autocracy, a complex hierarchy of offices with indigenous titles, traditional taxation systems and, in Borno and Dar Fur at any rate, an influential role for the royal women.