Land in Dar Fur: Charters and Related Documents from the Dar Fur Sultanate (Fontes Historiae Africanae. Series Arabica, 3)

This book is the first study of the administration of this Sudanese sultanate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be drawn from recently-discovered Arabic land charters. Translations of forty-seven selected charters and related documents are presented to illustrate the complexity of land as an issue in the sultanate. The authors review the principles by which privileged status, rights in people and in landed estates were granted; and examine the nature of the administration in Dar Fur. The volume will be of interest to historians of Africa and the Middle East and to those concerned with land and society in a comparative framework. The Dar Fur sultanate was an African kingdom and a Muslim state; one polity among many in the Sudanic Belt, the vast zone below the Sahara stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. Translated With An Introduction By R.s. O'fahey ... [et Al.]. Includes Indexes. Bibliography: P. 119-123.