Azhar-trained ulama gained elite status in Darfur through learning and magic

Evidence

The merchants regularly went back and forth across great distances of desert, and learned to find or create homes at either end of their journeys. In a way, this was true of the ulamä´ too. These were learned men who crossed the Islamic world in wide swathes from Mecca to West Africa, and who traveled to Därfür to work as judges or in other capacities for the sultan. Many of them came from North Africa,Arabia, or Egypt.They had credentials from al-Azhär University and spoke an impressive classical Arabic that raised their importance in the eyes of the Fur sultans, who were themselves looking to Islamize both court and country. The ulamä´ brought with them to Därfür a wider sense of the world. As Mary Helms writes, “It was this wider experience, conjoined with their mystical divinatory talents and literate-magical abilities, that made them valued associates, particularly of ruling elites.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to scholarship on Islamization of West/Central African courts and the role of learned clerical elites in state formation.