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Sultan Selim I and the Sudan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

P. M. Holt
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Extract

The article considers the origin and validity of statements made by Budge, MacMichael, Crawford and Arkell associating the establishment of Ottoman control over Lower Nubia and the Suakin-Massawa region with Sultan Selim I. These statements are derived from Na‘ūm Shuqayr's Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān, which has two principal relevant passages. In the first, Shuqayr combines, and dates with misleading precision, two traditional anecdotes concerning Nubia, one derived from Burckhardt's Travels in Nubia (1819), the other an aetiological legend of a frontier-fight. The second passage mentions a legendary invasion of Abyssinia by Selim, and relates to a Fūnj (or ‘Abdallābī) claim to Arab ancestry. The personal connexion of Selim I with these exploits is wholly mythical: it is excluded by the detailed account of his acts during 1517 given by the contemporary chronicler, Ibn Iyās. The establishment of Ottoman rule in these two regions was the achievement of Özdemir Pasha in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, about the middle of the sixteenth century. The legend of the frontier-fight may refer to an even later episode, in the last quarter of that century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 19 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

1 Budge, E. A. Wallis, The Egyptian Sudan (London, 1907), 11, 200–1, 207–8.Google ScholarMacMichael, H. A., A history of the Arabs in the Sudan (Cambridge, 1922), I, 189; 11, 6.Google ScholarCrawford, O. G. S., The Fung Kingdom of Sennar (Gloucester, 1951), 123, 170.Google ScholarArkell, A. J., A History of the Sudan to A.D. 1821 (1st ed., London 1955), 204.Google Scholar

2 Holt, P. M., ‘The Beylicate in Ottoman Egypt during the seventeenth century’, BSOAS, XXIV, part 2 (1961), at p. 217, n. 2.Google Scholar

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4 See his biography in Hill, Richard, A Biographical Dictionary of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Oxford, 1951), 293.Google Scholar

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