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The region had been Christian for less than a century when the Arab armies invaded Egypt in 640 AD. On

year later those armies reached Aswan, where the Islamic tide was stemmed, and the first cataract remained

the southern frontier of Islamic Egypt and the northern frontier of Christian Nubia for several centuries.

During the medieval times Christian Nubia flourished . It was united under the king of Makuria and enjoyed

a ''Classical Christian'' period between 850 and 1100 AD. Arabs had been penetrating the area at various times for centuries,however, as

peaceful settlers, as traders, and as raiders. Some came as tribal remnants of defeated Caliphates, such as

the Abbassids. During the Fatimid Caliphte [969-1161 A.D.] there were many Arab trading expeditions along

the Nile, dealing particularly in slaves[Hassan 1969]. Many Arab tribal leaders married into leading Nubian

families and after that the Nubian kingship system was gradually converted from one tracing relatives

matrilineally to one tracing them patrilineally[from Ibn Khaldun cities in Hassan 1967,pg. 127]. Islamic

religious doctrine and legal pratices also became more and more widespread through the intermarrying

process.

The Muslim conversion of Nubia thus seems to have been gradual ,covering

several centuries ,though in the late phases military were defensive. Salah-al-Din [the famous Salah-al-Din]

defeated a Nubian army that invaded Egypt in 1171,for example, and at various times unruly Arab tribes from Upper Egypt pillaged the area.

Christianity held on in many parts of Nubia untill the fourteenth

century,however, when Islamic raiders coming from the south,in what is know the Sudan,looted churches

and finally completed the long process of conversion [Adams 1967,pg15] Christian Nubian pilgrims were

noted in the holy places of Palestine as late as the Fifteenth century[Hassan 1967 pg. 125],but by the end of

the fourteenth century the vast majority of the Nubians had become staunch Muslims, as they are today.

From 1517, when the Turkish Sultan Selim sent Hassan Koosy to take over governorship of the area, all

through the Ottoman period,and up to the present century,much of Egyptian Nubia was ruled or dominated

by desendants of this family of Turkish petty gentry. Members of the Koosy family married into local

lineages amd resulting aristocracy became known as the kushaf. The desendants of this ruling family still

regard themselves as superior class among the Nubians.

During the Turkish period conditions of relative anarchy alternated with those of local tyranny,and

military forces frequently swept devastatingly in the area.

pages 6,7,8

Nubian Ceremonial Life

Joseph Kennedy

Nubian Ceremonial Life Studies in Islamic Syncretism and Cultural Change
by John G. Kennedy

ISBN: 0520027485