[ 8i ]

MANUSCRIPT ABC

Introduction

The author of ABC is Sadi'k el Hadra, a Mahassi of the village of Salamat el Basha near Khartoum North. He is an old feki who

has made the study of genealogies his life's work, and is, in fact, in process of completing the compilation of an enormous volume com-

prizing several hundreds of pedigrees which he has collected. I am

afraid that neither his critical faculty nor his educational qualifications can honestly be said to fit him for the adequate presentation of the subject he has so courageously undertaken to elucidate, but he has

certainly collected a formidable mass of raw material.

On my showing an interest in his studies he kindly composed for me the monograph here translated: it is in the nature of an abbrevi-

ated edition of his magnum opus. The first part deals with that branch of the Mahass which is

traditionally descended from 'Agam ibn Zaid ibn Muhammad Mahsin, i.e. with the author's own tribe. The second part is concerned with the Ga'ali group of tribes, the third with those of Guhayna, and the fourth with a medley of others. One or two brief biographies are also included.

Sadik's method, he informs me, has been to compare various manuscripts (twenty-four in all, he says) and to supplement or check them by personal oral enquiries from other fekis. When satisfied as to the truth he has enshrined it in his work. His method, in fact, has been that of the author of AB. It is, however, obvious that he has been unduly credulous, and apt to accept at its face value much information that is worthless: in this respect he falls behind the author of AB. He also shows a distinct tendency to force variant accounts into an unnatural agreement by baldly stating as a fact what is no more than the product of his own imagination.

What then is the value of the work? It is small, but not altogether negligible. In the first place we have in it an example, the only one included in this collection, of a present-day nisha, and one that

illustrates well the methods followed by native genealogists in dealing with their authorities.

Sadik el Hadra has studied the Tabakdt (D 3) and various

versions of BA and other such MSS., and we see the result: the pre-