Muhammad ‘Ali’s expansionist policy had brought Sudan under Egyptian administration, thus making it a territory of the Ottoman Empire. The first attempt to establish a modern school there started in the reign of ‘Abbas Pasha. Lack of interest on the part of Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, who had been sent to Sudan as a kind of exile, in establishing the school resulted in the failure of the attempt. The basic goal had been to establish in that country a school resembling the elementary and preparatory schools that existed in Cairo, with the mission of educating the sons of local notables and other citizens and of the military and civilian administrators (the Sons of Turks) residing in Khartoum, Dongola, and Sennar. The school, during its brief, nine-month life, from Shawwal 1269 to Sha‘ban 1270/July 1853 to April 1854, taught grammar, arithmetic, geometry, and calligraphy. Archives from the period show that Turkish was also taught. The death of ‘Abbas, however, compelled the school to close its doors before the start of its second academic year.45 Nevertheless, the school made no distinction between the children of the local inhabitants and those of the ruling class, and it was this school that laid the foundations of modern education in Sudan.
As modern educational activities were relaunched under Khedive Isma‘il, the teaching of Turkish resumed in Sudan, for the first time in its history in an organized manner, with Khedive Isma‘il sending an order to this effect to Sudan in response to a request by commander-in-chief Musa Hamdi Pasha concerning the need to educate local individuals inducted into the bureaucracy. In this order we find indications to the effect that the education of the local people for this purpose alone was an insufficient goal. On the contrary, one or two elementary schools were to be set up in Khartoum to work for the diffusion of civility and well-being among its inhabitants and to ingrain in them a love for the motherland and a desire for advancement. Khedive
Isma‘il wished to have around five hundred pupils gathered from the local inhabitants along with the Sons of Turks working there and to have them enrolled all together in these elementary schools. He likewise made it plain in his order that the required teachers of Arabic and Turkish should be sent from Cairo.46 At this, Musa Hamdi requested the establishment of five, rather than two, schools in Khartoum, with more in Berber, Dongola, Kordofan, and al-Taka with a capacity of one hundred students each.
These schools were established in 1863 on the instructions of the khedive as an expression of his desire for the diffusion of modern education, a topic on which discussion was initiated for the first time in Sudan. Among the components of the curriculum was the teaching of Turkish as well as of the history of the Ottoman Empire entitled Vdsif tarihi (Vasif’s History). Among the qualifications required for those to be appointed to teach in these five schools was a good mastery of Turkish and of the thuluth and riq‘a scripts. The names of the first teachers to be appointed indicate that they were of Turkish origin—Asitaneli Mehmed §akir (Khartoum), Harputlu Hafiz Mehmed (Dongola), Budali Mehmed (Berber), iskilipli Hafiz Halil (al-Taka), and Harputlu Yusuf (Kordofan).47 In 1871, two more schools were established, at Suakin and Massawa, bringing the total to seven. Our information concerning these schools is confined to that gathered by the late Ahmad ‘Izzat ‘Abd al-Karim from the archives of ‘Abdin Palace during his work on his important study of the history of education in Egypt.
These schools were closed in 1877 following the appointment of the Englishman Gordon Pasha as governor of Sudan, and with this the teaching of Turkish there was prematurely cut short.48
World History
