ابوبكر القاضى على درب عرمان لتجريم الدنناقلة

Quote: PERMANENT PILGRIMS: THE ROLE OF PILGRIMAGE IN THE LIVES OF WEST AFRICAN MUSLIMS IN SUDAN C. Bawa Yamba Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. 237 pages. During the Anglo-Egyptian period, thousands of West Africans crossed into the Northern Sudan, hoping to fulfil the Muslim duty of pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. Arriving at a time of acute labour shortage, many settled in Sudanese towns and rural areas and took manual and agricultural jobs. Though these pilgrims regarded the Sudan as a mere stopping place, where they could work and save for the journey ahead, most in fact struck roots. In Permanent Pilgrims: The Role of Pilgrimage in the Lives of West African Muslims in Sudan, C. Bawa Yamba takes the story of these West African immigrants into the 1980s and ‘90s, to explore the dynamics of cultural identity among their third-, fourth, and fifth-generation descendants. In particular, he considers Hausa-speaking communities in the Blue Nile region, an area dependent on cotton-farming since the inception of the Gezira Scheme in the 1920s. Between 1984 and 1992, Yamba (a Ghanaian anthropologist trained and based in Sweden) conducted fieldwork in “pilgrim villages”, the residents of which - though born and bred in the Sudan - defined themselves as transient populations saving to perform the hajj. Constrained by poverty and local debt, however, few ever reached their goal. (In one “pilgrim” village, for example, only five out of 4,000 residents had ever reached Mecca.) Rare success stories nevertheless nurtured the pilgrim dream and identity among others. Yamba’s self-inflicted “pilgrims” did not define themselves as “Sudanese”, but on the contrary chose a path of conscious non-assimilation. They resisted integration into mainstream Arabic-speaking Sudanese society in a variety of ways - for example, by building houses of impermanent or flimsy material, to stress their transience, and by preserving Hausa customs, such as wife seclusion (purdah). They also maintained separate village Qur’an schools (khalwas) for their children, where teachers applied strict discipline. They rejected Sudanese government schools with their “western” educations, and attributed moral laxness to Sudanese Muslims. By insisting on their separateness, pilgrim communities remained economically and socially marginal within the Blue Nile region. Young men who wanted to break out of this mould - by getting a better education or a more lucrative job outside the community, or by taking a Sudanese wife (in a context where widespread polygamy put Hausa wives in short supply) risked ostracization. Once shunned by fellow “pilgrims”, such individuals often tried to hide or erase their West African origins. Thus assimilation to Arabic-speaking Northern Sudanese culture became an all-or-nothing affair. Permanent Pilgrims raises provocative questions about the demographic and cultural impact of West African immigration in the Sudan. How typical, for example, are these “pilgrim communities” in their adamant non-assimilation? And how distinctive are West Africans, as ethnic enclaves, after a century or more of settlement? This fascinating work, with its mixed historical-anthropological approach, points the way for further research on the plurality of Muslim culture in the Sudan. Heather J. Sharkey Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts