Letter 10: This is the King of the Peasants - The origin of the terms “Nubian” and "Mahas"
Exploring the etymology of Nubian, Mahas, and Arbaab.
Peace be upon those who follow the right path. Which is to say: okay, besties, I have an embarrassing story to tell, but I swear most of it is true!
Here we go: a few years ago, I took on a Nubian name. I’ve matured a lot since the mindset that made me take on the Nubian name, but the impulse back then was ultimately innocent: I was enamored by the waves of Sudani diaspora I saw proudly proclaiming their history, culture, and identity. Remember, I was never unaware of my Nubian connection: I fucking mentioned it in a “who am I?” speech in one of my middle school classes, but I was always met with confusion, dismissal, apathy. And it’s not like I had resources to dive deeper into Nubian history, so I boxed that aspect of my identity aside, since my Mahasi parents were already doing that so well. After all, Mahas have been gradually losing their ability to speak Nobiin over the past few centuries; in el-Gezira, this process is complete. The Blue Nile Mahas have no living memory of speaking Nobiin: same goes for my village. My grandpa always told me that out in Sawarda, where our ancestors started their journey, they continue to speak Nobiin, although the Sawarda Mahas born in el-Gezira have forgotten it for generations.
My grandma’s brother, he’s a Sudanese history encyclopedia. At that point, my knowledge of Nubia was purely through Western academia, which I scoured for information on my family’s history. When I met with Aboui, out in some sparse little settlement caught between the Dinder and the Blue Nile, I asked him why we didn’t speak Nobiin anymore. He told me: “The Recitation got people used to speaking Arabic.”
My family had happily tucked their Nubia connection away into the realm of the past: doesn’t really affect their lives, nor does it need to. But for me, my curiosity was never quenched, and through the internet, I got to see my first Sudani-American Nubians. Unlike me, for whom Nubia was just a quirky factoid and a reason to cringe while listening to 90s hip-hop, these people had grown up around a vibrant and distinct Nubian culture. But they were also clearly concerned for the future of this culture: they saw the Nubian languages and unique cultural identity disappearing, as continuous damming and ethnonationalism wipe out Nubian languages, lands, and disperse Nubian peoples.
I sympathized with their concern. I was that future they feared. For 200 years, by my estimate, the people of my village have not spoken Nobiin. The older people in the village claim there is some unique Nobiin vocabulary or names preserved among their elders: names like Kudooda, Fanog (not Nobiin, I think), or terms like kuttuka (also unattested, I think), etc. There were clear visual markers of the Nubian connection: like our cousins up in Nubia proper, Geziran Mahasis traditionally have three vertical lines going down each cheek for shilookh. In his book on shilookh, Yusuf Fadl Hassan mentions one name for these three marks: mataariq wad al-arbaab, or mataariq ash-sheikh idris, I think – a connection with the Sufi saint Idris wad al-Arbaab, nonetheless. But now that tradition, for arguably great reasons, has also faded away. The people of my village felt no connection to Nubia at all: in fact, they had the urge to stress their dissimilarity to the rattan. Even heard a couple claim that we’re not Mahasi at all, but Ja’ali. I asked Aboui if perhaps I was really Ja’ali after all, whose response was:
“La la! We’ve never mixed with those people.” (scoffs)
(incredible art from this incredible article by Leena ElDeeb on Nubian language issues)
Western academia makes Nubianness look very neatly defined as a concept and identity, and maybe it is…in Egypt. I mean, there, if I’m not mistaken, the overwhelming majority of the Nubian community has living memory of Nubian languages. Many influential Nubian cultural icons arose on the Egyptian-side of Nubia, and they continue to be major drivers of Nubian language research and revitalization initiatives. It also seems, based on my limited observation, Nubians on the Egyptian-side tend to strongly align themselves as Black African, which is also a big theme in non-Nubian Egyptian portrayals and perceptions of Nubians. As a result, there’s a much clearer Arab/Nubian line in Egypt: after all, Nubians on the Egyptian-side are emphatically not Arabs, nor are they considered such.
In Sudan it gets really complicated. I’m gonna make the case that “Arab” in the Sudanese context is either occupational or “semi-ethnic”: which is to say, colloquially, the term 3arab tends to be used to refer to:
riverine Sudani Arabs,
Sudani Nile Nubians,
pastoralist Sudani Arabs,
non-Arab Sudani pastoralists,
Sudani Beja,
Sudani Hijazis (Rashaida)
1-2 are not occupationally Arab, typically, compared to 3-6, who are sometimes further specified as 3arab ru77al (“Nomadic Arabs”), 3arab khala (“wasteland Arabs”), or more impolitely, 3arab zuut (roughly “Arab Bumpkins”). Then basically everybody who doesn’t fall into these groups is non-Arab…for all that means.
But the problem with such a simple explanation, as anybody who’s lived in Sudan will tell you, is that there are contexts where it is explicitly inappropriate to refer to some groups as 3arab. I mean, I know lots of non-Nile Nubian Sudanis who insist Halfawis and Mahas are actually Arab and you can tell by their light skin, but I also know from experience Halfawis are usually pissed the fuck off if you call them Arab. At the same time, I also know a Halfawi koz who calls himself 3arabi in contrast to the ooshi, or abeed in Arabic, a racial slur for non-Arab Sudanese, in particular Darfuri non-Arabs, Nuba, and modern Funj groups. If I wanted to put it in American terms, it would almost be like saying: Arab, in the Sudani context, is roughly a race. For the sake of explanation, mentally substitute the term “white” for “Arab” here, since these are both the ethnic/racial identities of prestige in their respective societies:
(a portrait of a Shaigiya woman from the early 20th-century…very Nubian fashion, no?)
Riverine Sudani Arabs are as white as it fucking gets, pure WASP nightmares, Nile Nubians might be more like your Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans. Which is to say, they’re white, except when it’s convenient for the people whiter than them to degrade them on the basis of their less-white traits, like speaking a non-Arabic language, or an assumed weaker connection to the majority religion (Islam in Sudan, Protestant Christianity in the US).
Your 3arab ru77al are probably best thought of like white Southerners, they’re white, seriously white: in fact, they’re so white, the most privileged people at the cultural, political, and economic level mock their whiteness. I remember once talking to an older Sudani who said they were surprised George Bush was painting cause he was such an 3arabi: I mean, you know, he’s from Texas, a total bumpkin, gonna do something like paint? That’s the traditionalist thought process here, so while 3arab ru77al get some prestige, they’re also economically marginalized and associated with traditional values, which bourgeoisie people often decry as backwardness.
Hijazi Sudanis are white immigrants: more recent arrivals and marginalized and segregated as a result (possibly, this is all speculation). They have a lot of cultural pride and prestige because of their history, being the “pure Arabs” which Sudani Arab nationalists like to drool over, but they’re also economically marginalized in reality, because in the end, it’s not just about being Arab or non-Arab.
The Sudani Beja are hard to find an incendiary analogy for. Historically, they’ve fought alongside the riverine and pastoralist Arab Mahdists: I mean, think Osman Digna. They’re also often colloquially referred to as Arab, some researchers claim they refer to themselves as Arab; notably, they refer to other Sudani Arabs as jaali (after the biggest Sudani Arab group) or bilwiyyet, which Yusuf Fadl Hassan has argued is related to a historical Yemeni tribe known as the ibn Baliyy. Occupationally, they’re 3arab ru77al, which is to say, pastoralist, but linguistically they’re, you know, not Arab. That said, if you go into ‘Awn ash-Sharif Gaasim’s Encyclopedia of Sudani Tribes and Genealogies, you see that Beja groups do have ansaab: genealogies tracing them to an illustrious Peninsular Arab ancestor.
How it is the term 3arab came to be so fucking flexible in Sudan is a subject for another day, but I want people to keep this in mind: this way of understanding Arabness is not exclusive to Sudan. You also see it in Chad, where Arab-identifying groups are a minority, but Chadian Arabic is one of the most widespread spoken languages. You see the same in South Sudan, where South Sudanese Arabics are widely used as medium languages between indigenous South Sudanese languages, but only those with Arab genealogies self-identify as Arab. It’s also worth noting that, in Sudan, Chad, and South Sudan, Arabness correlates with Muslim-ness: there are no Sudani Christian Arab communities the way there are Palestinian Christian Arab communities or Iraqi Christian Arab communities.
I bring all this up because it puts this Arabized Mahasi in a weird spot. In what sense am I actually Arab, or Nubian, or Mahasi for that matter? This might not be an important question to you, but I disagree. When I follow these three threads, I can discover the history that contextualizes the personal stories of my family: a way to understand my current reality and, yes, a source of pride. I strongly believe heritage is fun. Being Mahasi is a blessing, and I would never wish to be born in a world where Sudanese people forgot what their tribes were, and you can all get the fuck over it, Sudani liberals. This is why, in a phase of my life where I was diving deeper and deeper and deeper into my Sudanese heritage, and learning about Sudanese history, and discovering the past of the Mahas…I was inspired by those African activists I saw who sacrificed their colonial names for indigenous names.
Now, the Mahas were not colonized by Arabs: the Arabization of Sudan, though, is a topic for another letter. That said, I still felt like reclaiming the Mahas in me, and so, I rushed to the realms of Nubian Sudani social media to locate a potential Nubian name for myself. I found some good stuff: in a future letter, I’ll organize it so you can pick a Nubian name if you want one, too. But anyways, yes, all Kwame Ture was my cringey young adult way of thinking of it, and so I picked the name that spoke to me: Arbaab. I was told it meant “my father” and “sheikh,” and I thought it was perfect for somebody whose community is literally just a group of Mahasi Sufis who decided to settle near their sheikh. Now…it doesn’t. Actually, I’m worried it might not even be Nubian, the G.W. Murray dictionary lists it as being derived from urbaab, “king and father,” but this sound change is irregular. Aboui told me the name means malik, king: perhaps it’s just related to the Arabic or Persian term, arbaab, lord, after all.
If Nubian identity is about your affiliation with the Nubian languages, then I still don’t have a Nubian name. As popular as this way of understanding Nubianness is, though, I’d like to submit an alternate idea. To do that, we need to go back to the most overrated period of Sudanese history: the Kingdom of Kush.
Everybody calls the Kushites Nubians, or gets even more scarily wrong and claims the Kushites were one ethnic group and the Nubians were another. All of this is bullshit. The truth is: in the days of the Kingdom of Kush, nobody had a concept of “Nubian” the way we do today. Back then, we can talk about “Nubian” in two senses:
Geographical, as in, from what we call Nubia, the land between the 1st and 6th cataracts of the Nile.
Linguistic, as in, speaking what linguists today classify as Nubian languages, which includes, but is not limited to: Mattokki (Kenzi Nubian), Nobiin, Andaandi (Dongolawi Nubian), Tid-n-Aal (Midob Nubian), and Ajangwe (Kordofan Nubian).
Of course, back then, the people living in Nubia (the Kushites) and speaking Nubian languages, as far as we can tell, weren’t using those terms themselves to mean those things. We probably got this practice of referring to this strip of land as Nubia from Greek and Roman mapmakers, which was later picked up by Arabs. They didn’t come up with the term themselves: the term nuba is indeed homegrown.
(read more about this statuette here)
Back in the Kingdom of Kush, they spoke a variety of languages, many of which have gone extinct, the most prominent of which was Meroitic, which, alongside Ancient Egyptian, was used in official Kushite writing. In these texts, we see the first mention of the term nuba to refer to a group of people: a statuette with kwu kwur nuba lu inscribed upon it. Inscribed on the statue of a bound man, Claude Rilly has translated this sentence to: “this is the King of the Nuba.”
Nuba was not an ethnic term in the time of Kush. It’s usually believed that this so-called King of the Nuba was in fact a Nubian language speaker, but I dunno how you plan to prove that. What we know for sure, though, is that nuba had class connotations: many academics argue it is indeed a derogatory term meaning “slave.” Even in the 20th-century, Dr. Kabbara defined the term nob – related to Meroitic nuba – as meaning “peasant.” G.W. Murray’s English-Nubian comparative dictionary also defines nob as slave girl, or peasant. Could it be that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Kush were enslaving Nubian language speakers, and the name nob/nuba stuck to them overtime while connotations changed?
Perhaps, but let’s also not write the Nubian language speakers out of the story or pretend they’re totally separate from the Kushites. While Meroitic is not in the Nubian language family, most experts agree it is a sister language to the ancestor of the modern Nubian languages: think Hebrew v.s. Arabic. We also know from ancient Egyptian writing that Kushite society was likely ethnically and linguistically diverse. Sure, they referred to their kingdom even back then as kwush in Meroitic (from which we get the Ancient Egyptian kash and Hebrew cush), but it’s not like this was an ethnic group. And one ethnic group we know existed in that time, sometimes on good terms with the Kushite state, were the Maghu, perhaps the Megabaroi (perhaps Mer. “maghu man?”) of Greek and Roman geographers, speculated to be the first Nubian language speakers, who lived in North Darfur but began moving to wetter areas of Sudan as the Yellow Nile began to dry up. This includes some of them moving to Nubia, intermixing with the local populace, adopting the lifestyle of Nile-centric agriculture, until post-Kush the kingdoms of Migi and Makuria arose, using Maghu languages as their official languages.
Now, the first King of Migi, King Silko, has a famous inscription where he commemorates his victory over the Old Bidawiyet speakers, the Blemmyes. It’s believed that he was the first Christian king of Migi, known in Greek as Nobadia and in Arabic as al-maris or an-Nuba. In his inscription, he dons a Meroitic crown, and declares himself: “The King of the Noubades (Nobadians) and all Ethiopians.”
Now, don’t let the term “Ethiopian” confuse you – Silko’s inscription is in Greek, and in Greek, especially at that time, Ethiopian was a generic term for Black peoples. But as you can see, even by that time when a Nobadian/Nubian ascended to the throne, it seems there was still linguistic and ethnic diversity in the region, just as there is today.
In a late Old Nubian manuscript from Makuria (perhaps related to the term maghu, as well?), a slaveowner named Kabobi writes a letter of manumission for their slave “Appa,” cryptically saying they “cause them to be a ngoba – Nubian” so that Appa may be with their friends and their family. This is one of the only examples of an Old Nubian manuscript using something like the Meroitic nuba: even here, it appears to have a class dimension more than merely ethnic or linguistic. Perhaps even meaning freeman, or citizen? It calls to mind one Arab geographer who claimed the Nubians of Alwa were divided into free and enslaved Nubians. But even then, the preferred indigenous term the people of Nubia used for themselves at the time was Migi or Makur – Rilly goes so far to speculate these terms as being related to the modern Nubian self-designations Murgidi (“Birgid” in Birgid Nubian) and Mahas. The latter isn’t quite convincing – how do you get from maghu to ma7as? But I guess it would make more sense than what Awn ash-Shareef Gaasim tries to tell us: namely, that ma7as is the nickname of some King Muhsin, a person I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist and no Mahasi I’ve ever talked to has ever heard of.
You see how ambiguous, fluid, and uncertain these terms can be? Now, when you go into 19th-century travel literature, and read that riverine Sudani Arabs were speaking Nobiin and Andaandi while calling themselves Arab, and that solely Arabic-speaking Danagla, Beja, and Mahas were calling themselves Arab, how do you define “Arab” and “Nubian” in the Sudanese context? You could be wishy-washy and say “culture,” but, you know, the cultures of this region have evolved radically over the course of the millennia of history I just covered.
I don’t know the answer. But, asking the question did help me know who I am. In my searches, I found Dayf Allah’s Book of Biographies and the wonderful story of Sheikh Idris wad al-Arbaab, who at one point meets with a high-ranking Funj official. Dayf Allah says Sheikh Idris tells this official “of his people, the Mahas, who live in the Lowlands/the North.”
(the King Farouk mosque, a renovation of the Arbaab al-’Agayid mosque, a mosque built by Sheikh Arbaab al-Khashin, a Mahasi often credited with founding Khartoum)
Perhaps your modern Nubian purist would look at Sheikh Idris as a wholly un-Nubian figure and a Mahasi in name only, even though it was pre-modern Sudan, so there’s a great chance he spoke Nobiin. But I dunno, I relate to this guy who, when he meets one of the highest officials in the land, has the urge to tell him about his unique community of people, the Mahas, and the place they come from. I wonder why he found it so important. I don’t think it’s too radical to guess that it’s because he considered being Mahas a part of him, and was proud of it.
Or maybe not. Well, I’m proud of my Mahas-ness, and am proud to share a name with my fellow kinsman, Sheikh Idris wad al-Arbaab. I hear people talking about being Nubian by lineage or Nubian by love, and when you look at a guy like Sheikh Idris, is it really fair to say he’s not both? That’s Nubian enough for me, no matter what his languages were: reviving the language is a part of Nubian pride, but the language isn’t all there is to Nubian identity. Nubians are people. They change, grow, evolve over time. They change religions, and are affected by their historical circumstances; they take on new identities, create new labels, redefine old ones, but all names aside the legacy of the peoples of Kush, Migi, and Makuria run deep in them. This is not meaningless, at least not to me: for a diaspora kid, learning this helped me love myself, discover my passions, be comfortable with the community I was born into.
So Arbaab is perfect. Ambiguous in origin, in between religions, language families, historical epochs: perhaps the most Mahasi name of all.
I hope you have enjoyed these ruminations and benefited from them. Peace be upon all who follow the right path, and God bless the soul of our king and our father and our teacher, Sheikh Idris wad al-Arbaab, his friend and our friend.
Thank you for this thorough insight. I also come from ‘Mahas Khartoum’ and Tuti, - our people are in Burri, Hilad Hamad, and Gezira- we’re told our ancestor Arbab Alagaayed ((Idris) founded Khartoum, we grew up w that pride and the Hamad Alrayyah song and everything-but no one has been able to tell me where or who we were before that. I’d meet Mahas girls at college who shamed me as not ‘real Mahasiya if you don’t speak rutaana’. Yet my last name is Baba- which they told us meant ‘the big house of generosity’, but hmmm..
I also once spoke w Prof Yusuf Fadl for a story I did on Tuti, I learned alot from him, but still- seems there’s a point beyond which nobody really knows how to connect us to actual Nubia.
Now that I am raising curious American kids for whom identity is a crucial issue, I find myself wanting answers for them.
Thanks for digging in to all of this.
Hana