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MANUSCRIPT D i
Introduction
This work, consisting of eighty-five pages of MS., was copied out for me under the direction of Sheikh el Dardiri Muhammad el
Khalifa of Khorsi, the present Khalifa of the Tigania tarika in Kordofan and one of the best known and most respected of the
DoALiB, who are a branch of the Rikabia "Ashraf" of Dongola. It was transcribed from the copy made by el Dardiri in 1884 from the copy taken by his father in 1836 from the oldest copy made in
1738 (see para, ccxvi). The book falls into three quite distinct portions. The first sixty
pages or so are the work of that Sayyid Ghulamulla ibn 'Aid who was ancestor of the Rikabia and is related to have been a Sherif who migrated to the Sudan from el Yemen and settled in Dongola (see D 5 {d)). His date was probably the fifteenth century.
The Sherif el Tahir who wrote or copied the original of BA was
his great-nephew, but their works were quite independent of one another.
Ghulamulla does not concern himself with the Sudan at all : his
compilation is cast in the traditional mould, and in arrangement
and subject-matter nearly resembles Abu el Fida's Historia Ante- islamica. It is certainly an abridgement of the history of some mediaeval Arabic encyclopaedist {e.g. Ibn el Athir), and it deals with the history of the world from the creation to the time of the Abbasids.
Several generations later, Ghulamulla's descendant Muhammad walad Dolib the Elder, who, as appears from D 3 (No. 187), flourished
about 1680 A.D., added a further twenty pages (" Part II "). A portion of the contents of this second part are quotations (or misquotations) from Ibn el Athir — unacknowledged, by the way — the rest is a series of disconnected notes, some on the tribes of Arabia, and some on those of the Sudan. The author was evidently acquainted with the original of BA or extracts from it, as a comparison of paras. Lxxxiv et seq. with BA shows with sufficient clearness.
His great-grandson the younger Muhammad walad Dolib, in the eighteenth century, added another briefer, and probably more original
series of notes (" Part III"). It is fairly certain from internal evidence