Pre-colonial Sudan offered Arab scholars wealth but no centers of learning

Evidence

The Sudan was a treasure chest for learned young Arabs like his grandfather, his father, and eventually himself. It offered a last resort when all other financial possibilities had been exhausted, again as made clear by the examples of his father and his grandfather. It extended to them privileged social standing and luxuries they could not easily have afforded in either Tunis or Cairo. But there was a harsher side to the Sudan as well. Därfür was not a center of learning; it could not itself offer a marketable education, and the circumstances that brought enterprising young scholars there removed them from opportunities like completing their studies at al- Azhär. The Sudan may have presented great opportunity, but it also stole fathers. It was a distant place from which forgetful parents had to be dragged, or where it would be discovered they had died. Finally, the Sudan was a place where half siblings lived, where there was family, which further complicated its geography for al-Tunisï. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 152

Categorization

• XREF: Direct grist for the Egypt-vs-Sudan comparative project: al-Azhar Egypt provided education, Darfur Sudan provided wealth and status—an inversion central to how the two regions functioned for colonial-era migrants.