Darfur is the Fur homeland.

Fur clans, renowned as cavalrymen, frequently ally with or oppose their kin, the Kanuri of Bornu, in modern Nigeria.

After a period of disorder in the sixteenth century, during which the region is briefly subject to Bornu, the leader of the Keira clan, Sulayman Solong (1596-1637), supplants a rival clan and becomes Darfur's first sultan.

Sulayman Solong had decreed Islam to be the sultanate's official religion.

However, large-scale religious conversions do not occur until the reign of Sulayman's grandson, Ahmad Bakr (1682-1722), who imports teachers, builds mosques, and compels his subjects to become Muslims.

Several sultans in the eighteenth century consolidate the dynasty's hold on Darfur, establish a capital at Al Fashir, and contest the Funj for control of Kordofan.

The sultans operate the slave trade as a monopoly.

They levy taxes on traders and export duties on slaves sent to Egypt, and take a share of the slaves brought into Darfur.

Some household slaves advance to prominent positions in the courts of sultans, and the power exercised by these slaves provokes a violent reaction among the traditional class of Fur officeholders in the late eighteenth century.

The rivalry between the slave and traditional elites will cause recurrent unrest throughout the next century.

The Egyptian government of Sudan becomes less harsh as the military occupation becomes more secure.

Egypt has saddled Sudan with a parasitic bureaucracy, however, and expects the country to be self-supporting.

Nevertheless, farmers and herders gradually return to Al Jazirah.

The Turkiyah also win the allegiance of some tribal and religious leaders by granting them a tax exemption.

Egyptian soldiers and Sudanese jahidiyah (slave soldiers; literally, fighters), supplemented by mercenaries recruited in various Ottoman domains, man garrisons in Khartoum, Kassala, Al Ubayyid, and at several smaller outposts.

The Shaiqiyah, Arabic speakers who had resisted Egyptian occupation, are defeated and allowed to serve the Egyptian rulers as tax collectors and irregular cavalry under their own sheikhs.

The Egyptians divide Sudan into provinces, which they then subdivide into smaller administrative units that usually correspond to tribal territories.

The introduction of slave soldiers by Badi II has alienated Sennar's ruling dynasty from the Funj warrior aristocracy, which in 1718 deposes the reigning mek and places one of its own ranks on the throne of Sannar.

The mid-eighteenth century witnesses another brief period of expansion when the Funj turn back an Ethiopian invasion, defeat the Fur, and take control of much of Kurdufan, but civil war and the demands of defending the sultanate have overextended the warrior society's resources and sapped its strength.

Another reason for Sannar's decline may have been the growing influence of its hereditary viziers (chancellors), chiefs of a non-Funj tributary tribe who manages court affairs.

The vizier Muhammad Abu al Kaylak, who leads the Funj army in wars in 1761, carries out a palace coup, relegating the sultan to a figurehead role.

Sannar's hold over its vassals diminishes, and by the early nineteenth century more remote areas cease to recognize even the nominal authority of the mek.

Egypt, as a pashalik of the Ottoman Empire, is divided into several provinces, each of which is placed under a Mamluk bey (governor) responsible to the pasha, who in turn answers to the Porte, the term used for the Ottoman government referring to the Sublime Porte, or high gate, of the grand vizier's building.

No fewer than one hundred pashas will succeed each other in approximately two hundred years years of Ottoman rule

Their authority become tenuous in the eighteenth century as rival Mamluk beys become the real power in the land.

The struggles among the beys continue until 1798 when the French invasion of Egypt alters the situation.

Combined British and Turkish military operations force the withdrawal of French forces in 1801, introducing a period of chaos in Egypt.

The Ottomans seek to restore order in 1805 by appointing Muhammad Ali as Egypt's pasha.

With the help of ten thousand Albanian troops provided by the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali purges Egypt of the Mamluks.

He launches a seven-year campaign in Arabia in 1811, supporting his suzerain, the Ottoman sultan, in the suppression of a revolt by the Wahhabi, an ultraconservative Muslim sect.

To replace the Albanian soldiers, Muhammad Ali plans to build an Egyptian army with enslaved Sudanese recruits.

Although a part of present-day northern Sudan is nominally an Egyptian dependency, the previous pashas had demanded little more from the kashif who rules here than the regular remittance of tribute; this changes under Muhammad Ali.

A party of the Mamluks, after he defeats them in Egypt, escapes and flees south.

These Mamluks establish a state at Dongola in 1811 as a base for their slave trading.

The Egyptian occupation of Sudan is initially disastrous.

Under the new government established in 1821, which is known as the Turkiyah or Turkish regime, soldiers live off the land and exact exorbitant taxes from the population.

They also destroy many ancient Meroitic pyramids searching for hidden gold.

Furthermore, slave trading increases, causing many of the inhabitants of the fertile Al Jazirah, heartland of Funj, to flee to escape the slave traders.

Thirty thousand enslaved Sudanese men go to Egypt for training and induction into the army within a year of the pasha's victory.

So many perish from disease and the unfamiliar climate, however, that the remaining enslaved Sudanese can be used only in garrisons in Sudan.

The Fur clans of Darfur, renowned as cavalrymen, frequently ally with or oppose their kin, the Kanuri of Borno, in modern Nigeria.

After a period of disorder in the sixteenth century, during which the region had been briefly subject to Bornu, the leader of the Keira clan, Sulayman Solong (1596-1637), had supplanted a rival clan and become Darfur's first sultan.

Sulayman Solong had decreed Islam to be the sultanate's official religion.

However, large-scale religious conversions had not occurred until the reign of Ahmad Bakr (1682-1722), who has imported teachers, built mosques, and compelled his subjects to become Muslims.

Slavery has been an institution of Sudanese life throughout history, but Southern Sudan, where slavery particularly flourishes, has long been considered an area beyond Cairo's control.

Because Sudan is close to Middle Eastern slave markets, it is a natural supplier of captives.

Consequently, the slave trade in the South intensifies in the nineteenth century and continues after the British have suppressed slaving in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Annual raids result in the capture of count­less thousands of Southern Sudanese and the destruction of the region's economy and stability.

The horrors associated with the slave trade generate European interest in Sudan.

The Ottoman pasha's government introduces new commercial and criminal codes in Egypt and Sudan in the 1850s, which are administered in secular courts.

The change reduced the prestige of the qadis, Islamic judges whose sharia courts are confined to dealing with matters of personal status.

The Turkiyyah also encourages a religious orthodoxy favored in the Ottoman Empire.

The government builds mosques and staffs religious schools and courts with teachers and judges trained at Cairo's Al-Azhar University.

The government favors the Khatrni­yyah, a traditional religious order, because its leaders cooperate with the regime, but Sudanese Muslims condemn the official orthodoxy as decadent because it has rejected popular beliefs and practices.

The Egyptians encourage economic development in Sudan through state monopolies that export slaves, ivory, and gum arabic.

In some areas, tribal land, which had been held in common, becomes the private property of the sheikhs, who sometimes sell it to buyers outside the tribe, but the slave trade is the most profitable business in Sudan and remains the focus of Egyptian interests in the country until its gradual suppression in the 1860s.