Chapter One: The Daudiyya Tribes

As for Ghaylan, the fifth son of Daud, he fathered the Ghaylanid sons, who settled several centuries ago in Adrar, Mauritania, and are not of our concern now. These descendants of Udi, after separating from their cousins the Maghafira and the sons of Dlim, turned towards Tagant, and stopped there for some time, next to the Marabouts of Sanhaja; and when it seemed to them that the region was too barren to allow them to live together, they were forced to separate from each other. The sons of Ghaylan remained with a large portion of the Ja'afara in Tagant, or moved towards Adrar, while the rest of the sons of Daud, the groups under the leadership of their general Daud al-Saghir bin Alloush, headed towards Hodh. It is worth mentioning a narrative that attributes this separation to an order issued by the famous Black Sultan (4), whose name we find in all Moroccan legends; for the sons of Daud were among the first Arab conquerors of the Hodh and the Upper Coast regions, and they politically dominated these areas for about a year (the 17th and 18th centuries), then they were forced to migrate under pressure from other Arab migrations to the East, and they suffered losses along their route along the Niger River from Ras al-Ma to Sikolo, leaving behind the political sovereignty of the sons of Muhammad [Ahmad]. In addition to the oral narrative, we have evidence of the advance of these horse tribes towards the Niger River through two brief periods in the history of the governors, in which it is mentioned that during the period 1688-1689, the sons of a leader from the governors moved to the river (Niger). Elsewhere, also in 1729, the sons of Bu Faa'ida invaded the Tuareg, which led to the annihilation of a large number of them on the river, and the destruction of many of them in Akdouya. As for the northern tribes, accustomed to their desert homeland, they remained great pastoralists, and their livestock consisted of herds of camels, and therefore they were in a state of constant wandering. They remained pure Hassanians, brave warriors, and addicted raiders, and they also became the political masters of this part of the Sudanese coast, and imposed their control over their southern brethren, whom social transformation and these northern tribes, the sons of Alloush al-Ibil, Ahl Baruda, and Tamraz, considered. And if the southern tribes lived in a more arid and humid region that caused the death of camels, the raising of other livestock succeeded, and also because these tribes often allied with the neighboring negroes, they gradually lost their desert morals, and their sons transformed. (4) The narratives refer to the Black Sultan as Moulay Ismail, Sultan of Morocco (d. 1727), or Sultan Abu al-Hasan al-Marini.