African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on December 18, 2007
African Affairs 2008 107(426):21-43; doi:10.1093/afraf/adm068
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Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan: The Politics of Language, Ethnicity, and Race
Heather J. Sharkey teaches in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
In what is now Sudan there occurred over the centuries a process of ta'rib, or Arabization, entailing the gradual spread of both Arab identity and the Arabic language among northern peoples. After the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898, British colonial policies favoured a narrow elite from within these ‘Arab’ communities. Members of this elite went on to develop a conception of a self-consciously Sudanese Arabic national identity, in the process adapting the term ‘Sudanese’ (sudani), which derived from an Arabic word for blackness and previously had servile connotations. At decolonization in the 1950s, these nationalists turned ta'rib, into an official policy that sought to propagate Arabic quickly throughout a territory where scores of languages were spoken. This article considers the historical diffusion of Sudanese Arabic-language culture and Arab identity, contrasts this with the post-colonial policy of Arabization, and analyses the relevance of the latter for civil conflicts in Southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and, more recently, Darfur. Far from spreading Arabness, Arabization policy sharpened non-Arab and, in some cases, self-consciously ‘African’ (implying culturally pluralist) identities. Arabization policy also accompanied, in some quarters, the growth of an ideology of Arab cultural and racial supremacy that is now most evident in Darfur.
This publication was made possible in part by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Carnegie Scholars Program, 2006) and the University Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania, but the statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. The author would also like to thank Benjamin F. Soares, Karin Willemse, Vijay Balasubramanian, and two anonymous referees for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article; the African Studies Centre at the University of Leiden for hosting the seminar (April 2007) where this work was first presented; and Tukufu Zuberi, Eve Troutt Powell and the Africana Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania for organizing a symposium on Darfur (1 March 2007) that helped to bring ideas into focus.