Pre-1800–1880s: (Islam on the Nile — The Funj Kingdom and the Faqis as Workers of Miracles and Scholars of Islamic Law, the Darfur Sultanate as a Major Cross…

Pre-1800–1880s: (Islam on the Nile — The Funj Kingdom and the Faqis as Workers of Miracles and Scholars of Islamic Law, the Darfur Sultanate as a Major Crossroads Linking Western Savannah with the Nile Valley, Egyptian Encroachment Bringing New Brotherhoods and a Christian Governor, and Reformist Sufism as the Main Vehicle of Anti-Egyptian Resistance): Islam had been pushing southward up the Nile valley for centuries before 1800. The Funj kingdom rested on local ideas of quasi-divine kingship, but Islam was increasingly important — Muslim holy men known as faqis established lineages critical in political mediation and the spread of Islamic belief, belonging to sufi brotherhoods including the Shadhiliyya, Qadiriyya, and Majdhubiyya. Muslim influence was particularly potent in the eighteenth century as the Funj disintegrated into civil war, and the broader population turned to the faqis for guidance. To the west, the Darfur sultanate had its roots in a late-seventeenth-century dynasty that applied sharia law and elevated Islam to a royal cult — by the late eighteenth century Darfur was a major regional power sitting on an enormous crossroads linking the western savannah with the Nile valley and Egypt. With Egyptian encroachment in the nineteenth century came new threats — the founding of Khartoum in the 1820s was followed by aggressive commercial and military incursions into southern Sudan. The Egyptians brought their own brotherhoods and in the 1870s brought General Gordon, a Christian, as governor to suppress the slave trade. Foreign incursions and the undermining of local holy men led to the expansion of reformist sufi brotherhoods — the Sammaniyya, from whose number would come the leader of the Mahdist revolt, Muhammad Ahmad, and the Majdhubiyya, which would encourage militant resistance.