Near the center of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan lies a tract of broken, elevated terrain about the size of South Carolina. The region, by common convention, is called the Nuba Mountains, and the people who live there, through a familiar if misleading generalization, the Nuba. The inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains have long attracted the attention of students of African languages and cultures, for in these respects they exhibit very great diversity among themselves as well as distinctiveness in relation to the Arab and Nilotic cultural traditions that dominate the surrounding lowlands on every side. No scholar has yet deliberately undertaken to write a history of the Nuba, but many have found themselves constrained to make tangential statements or assumptions about Nuba history in the course of constructing studies with some other primary focus. The sum of these tangential comments and assumptions may read as the current state of Nuba historiography. The present study addresses a stimulating clash of opinion among those whose interests have led them to comment peripherally on the more remote Nuba past. The issue at stake is the existence, or non-existence, of a state form of government among the Nuba in precolonial times.Students of the Nuba during the colonial and post-colonial periods have seldom failed to assign considerable importance to the role of successive Sudan governments in directing the destiny of the Nuba, however they may differ in assessing the quality of this intervention.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies.Between the fall of Egypt to the Arabs in 641 and the Egyptian conquest of the northern Nubian kingdom of Makuria in 1276, contemporary observers often perceived the conduct of foreign relations across this segment of the frontier between Christendom and Dar al-Islam to be distinctive and unusual. These unusual arrangements were commonly designated "baqt," from the Hellenistic Greek pakton, an alien loanword equally foreign to all participants.1 The baqt is a comparatively well-documented theme in medieval African history and has figured prominently in most previous scholarship about Christian Nubia.2 From a limited number of familiar sources a recent generation of scholars has erected, with but minor variations of emphasis, a single standard edifice of interpretation. Unfortunately this structure of consensus rests upon questionable methodological foundations, so that the superficial image of analytical clarity and closure it conveys may prove upon closer examination, at least in part, to be illusory. The present study offers an historiographical critique of the received understanding of the baqt, and proposes an alternative contextual frame within which the surviving primary evidence mnay be better interpreted; the baqt was primarily a Makurian institution and merits consideration from a Nubian perspective. The Origin and Intention of Islamic Literature about the BaqtThere were two parties to the baqt, the Nubians and the Muslims. With very few exceptions, however, the surviving sources upon which present knowledge about the baqt rests were written from the perspective of the Muslims, and virtually none were produced by Nubians.3 Perhaps precisely because the Arabic sources do

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.

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