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Re: موت مؤرخ: البروفسيور محمد سعيد القـــــدال (1935-2008م): أحمد إبراهيم أبوشوك (Re: Ahmed Abushouk)
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Professor S.R. OFahey writes
Quote: Date: 08. January. 2007
Muhammad Sa'id al-Qaddal whose death has just been reported was one of a select group of professional historians, Sudanese and non-Sudanese, who have profoundly enriched and deepened our understanding of Sudanese history. Born in 1935 into an Eastern Sudanese family with Khatmiyya affiliations, he was educated at the University of Khartoum and had a varied career as a teacher, lecturer, political activist and, above all, as a scholar in both the Sudan and the Yemen. His writings centred on the Mahdiyya with which he shared a lifelong fascination together with his friend, the late Muhammad Ibrahim Abu Salim (d. 2004). His first major book was al-Siyasa al-iqtisadiyya li'l-dawla al-Mahdiyya, based on his Khartoum Ph.D. thesis, first published in 1986. The work already illustrates a theme that was to dominate his writings, an essentially Marxist analysis and an insistence on the rationality of their actions of the major figures of the Mahdiyya, above all the Mahdi and the Khalifa. These aspects come out in his al-Imam al-Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad ibn 'Abd Allah (various editions; most recently Beirut: Dar al-Jil, 1992). This is by far the best biography we have of the Mahdi, not least because it attempts to situate him in the context of a Sudanese response to Egyptian colonialism but also as part of a reaction to new religious impulses brought to the Sudan largely by students of Ahmad ibn Idris (d. 1837). A particular interest of Dr. al-Qaddal was Sudanese/Ethiiopian relations on which he wrote a series of studies, al-Sudan wa'l-Habash, while, together with Dr. Abu Salim, he edited Isma'il ibn 'Abd al-Qadir al-Kurdufani's al-Tiraz al-manqush bi-bushra qatal Yuhanna malik al-Hubush (Khartoum, 1972). He also wrote a very fine general history of the modern Sudan, Ta'rikh al-Sudan al-hadith, 1820-1955 (Khartoum, n.d.). I am not compentent to comment on Dr. al-Qaddal's political writings, but one I cherish is his Kobar, Dhikriyat mu'taqal fi sujun al-Sudan (Cairo, 1998), a brief work that elegantly combines humour and irony. The Spanish philosopher, Santanyana, once remarked that a people who forget their history are condemned to relive it. Dr. al-Qaddal was one of a select band of scholars who sought to teach his fellow countrymen that they could escape their past only if they understood it. He will be greatly missed, not least by the present writer.
Prof. R.S. O'Fahey Department of History University of Bergen |
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