Beja and Arabs

 Hofheinz, Albrecht. “Beja”. K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas and D. J. Stewart (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam Three Online. Brill, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_24008 Web.

“Contacts with Arab migrants and traders go back to antiquity but gained importance under Islam. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt, several truce agreements were made between Muslim governors in Egypt and the Beja (first in about 111/730, then in 216/831); these attest to a gradually increasing Arab Muslim penetration of the Beja lands for commerce and for exploitation of the rediscovered gold and emerald mines around al-Fawākhīr (east of Qifṭ) and Wādī al-ʿAllāqī (mid-third/ninth to sixth-eighth/twelfth-fourteenth centuries), as well as at least nominal claims of suzerainty over (and tribute from) the Beja. Arab chroniclers and travellers recorded a growing amount of information on the Beja; most notable is the account by Ibn Sulaym al-Aswānī who travelled in the Sudan in about 365/975 and to whom we owe not only a transcription of the treaty of 216/831, which, for a while, subjected the northern Beja to the Islamic caliphate, but also the earliest historical reference to female infibulation (a practice he said was on the decline amongst the Beja). Ibn Sulaym also noted the matrilineal inheritance system that they practised at the time and that subsequent authors assert was later replaced by the patrilineality of immigrant Arab tribes intermarrying with the Beja. Immigration by Arabs interested in the mines as well as the Arab presence in ports and trading centres strengthened both economic and cultural exchange. Epigraphic evidence points to the Beja elite assimilating Arab-Islamic norms already by the third/ninth century (Oman et al.), although Ibn Sulaym regarded this as a mere “veneer of Islam.” By the eighth/fourteenth century, considerable intermarriage with the Arab Rabīʿa had led the Beja ruling class, the Had’ar-āb, to fully embrace the new religion and claim Arab origin (as “Ḥaḍāriba”).”