Breaking the Pen (of Sir Harold ibn MacMichael ibn Hicks) The Ja'aliyyin Identity Revisited

Abstract

Introduction
Contemporary research on the ethnic identity of the Ja'aliyyin of the
Northern Sudan directly challenges the indigenous genealogical tradition that
took its present-day form in the tenth century AH/sixteenth century AC. The
indigenous tradition characterizes the Ja'aliyyin unequivocally as Arabs, who
descended from al- 'Abbas, the paternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad,
(SAAS)' In contrast, MacMichael's A History of the Arubs in the Sudan,
the baseline for all subsequent investigation, argues that:
In so far as the Ja'aliyyin congeries can be regarded as a single whole
its homogeneity consists in the common Berberine or Nubian strain that exists
in a very varying proportion in all its component parts.
There is also a strong infusion of Arab blood more particularly in the
Ja'aliyyin proper, but the error into which the native genealogists have wilfully
slipped consists in ignoring the Nubian element and finding the common
race factor of the Ja'aliyyin in the tribe of Quraysh. The facts being as they
are, it is impossible to specify any particular tribe of Arabia as being that
to which the Arab element in the composition of the Ja'aliyyin group can
be attributed in any exclusive sense.
Trimingham, too, describes an admixture of the indigenous folk (Nubians)
and the Arabs, who settled in the Ja'aliyyin area from the fourth to the ninth
century AH/ninth to the fourteenth century AC, as “either Semitized Hamites
or Semitized Negroes (his italics) but more clearly as Semitized-Negroid-
Hamites.” Nonetheless, Trimingham’s characterization of the process that
evolved the hybrid identity of the Ja'aliyyin as the Arabization of indigenous
groups and the indigenization of the immigrant Arabs has been widely
adopted. Hasan’s term “Arabized Nubians" it all very simply and has
been widely accepted? Unfortunately, this contemporary discourse about
the ethnic identity of the Ja'aliyyin has been, to a greater or a lesser degree,
a misguided project. It began largely as a critique of the indigenous genealogical
tradition and has not advanced very far beyond that initial point. Its strength
is its scholarly disbelief in that tradition. Academic legitimacy lies in its political
authoritativeness arising from its access to and use of knowledge as a “sacred
resource.” In appropriating history and truth as its own, scholarship left “lore” ...