Mobile Islamic scholars gained elite status and local attachments through their foreign learning

Evidence

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.” This was the case for Muhammad al-Tunisï’s grandfather Suleiman, who left Tunis for the hajj in the late eighteenth century, never to return. In Mecca, Suleiman met other traders from Sennär who invited him to join them when they returned home, an offer he accepted.There, the Sennäri mek, or king, honored him for his learning with a fine home and a beautiful Ethiopian slave, with whom Suleiman fell in love and began another family. As his grandson remembered it many years later, “He forgot his family in Tunis and all of his young children.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 147