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Breaking the Pen: (of Sir Harold ibn MacMichael ibn Hicks) The Jafaliyyin Identity Revisited Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim Introduction Contemporary research on the ethnic identity of the Jabliyyiln 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 Jabliyyin unequivocally as Arabs, who descended from al- 'Abbas, the paternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, ($AAS)2 In contrast, MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan,3 the baseline for all subsequent investigations,4 argues that: In so far as the Jahliyyin congeries can be regarded as a single whole its homogeneity consists in the common Berberine or Nfibian strain that exists in a very varying proportion in all its component parts.
Literality, finally, has assumed the familiar question of the usability of the genealogical tradition in the construction of the history of Arabization of the Sudan.
24 James has rightly pointed out that such criticisms originated among the writers of the Colonial period in the Sudan, who asked "ethnographic" questions of the genealogical tradition which it could not answer.
32 Failing to cope with MacMichael's parable metaphor, authoritative discourse has slipped into being a genealogical tradition in its own right.
48 The first challenge to MacMichael's widely accepted hybrid identity of 42A number of Northern Sudanese "Arab" scholars have appropriated the thesis of the Arabized Nubians (Africans) to substantiate their argument for defining post-independence Sudan as an Afro-Arab state.