In Darfur: An Account of the Sultanate and Its People, Volume Two

by Muhammad al-Tunisi, Humphrey Davies (Translator)

A merchant’s account of his travels through an independent African state Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Tunisi (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants trading with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Al-Tunisi was raised in Cairo and a graduate of al-Azhar. In 1803, at the age of fourteen, al-Tunisi set off for the Sultanate of Darfur, where his father had decamped ten years earlier. He followed the Forty Days Road, was reunited with his father, and eventually took over the management of the considerable estates granted to his father by the sultan of Darfur. In Darfur is al-Tunisi’s remarkable account of his ten-year sojourn in this independent state. In Volume Two al-Tunisi describes the geography of the region, the customs of Darfur’s petty kings, court life and the clothing of its rulers, marriage customs, eunuchs, illnesses, food, hunting, animals, currencies, plants, magic, divination, and dances. In Darfur combines literature, history, ethnography, linguistics, and travel adventure, and most unusually for its time, includes fifty-two illustrations, all drawn by the author. In Darfur is a rare example of an Arab description of Africa on the eve of Western colonization and vividly evokes a world in which travel was untrammeled by bureaucracy, borders were fluid, and startling coincidences appear almost mundane.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

411 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 8, 2018

About the author

Muhammad al-Tunisi (1790-1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants who traded with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Raised in Cairo, al-Tunisi spent ten years traveling through the Darfur Sultanate. On his return to Egypt, he played an important part in Muhammad Ali's modernization project, supervising the translation of veterinary and medical texts, producing original scientific works in Arabic, and editing the first printed editions of classical Arabic texts.