Sudanese culture: dress, drink and music under the law

How Sudanese law came to govern dress and drink

What Sudanese people could wear and drink was written into law during two long stretches of the modern record, and in the second the state regulated music as well. The first belongs to the Mahdist state, which governed from Omdurman from 1885 until the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898. The second ran from September 1983 to 2020, the years in which sharia was the law of the state.

What the Mahdist state required

Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, was the son of a boatbuilder from Dongola and had been educated in the Sammaniyya, a Sufi order. At the start of his rising he encouraged his followers to dress alike in the jibba, and by the 1890s factories in Omdurman and the provincial centres were mass-producing it for the army. The jibba marked rank as well. Lower-ranking emirs wore the more colourful and elaborate ones, the senior commanders chose the plainest to show their piety, and the Khalifa Abdallahi, who led the state after the Mahdi's death, wore plain white. Riverine fighters from the Ja'alin and the Danagla kept for a time to simple white robes, the tobe.

The state made the jibba the communal dress of its men and kept women out of public space altogether. Snuff and alcohol, both part of Sudanese life under Ottoman rule, were strictly prohibited, and the Ottoman fez was forbidden with them. After his victory at Shaykan on 5 November 1883 the Mahdi ordered every Sufi order under his control to disband, so that none could divide his followers, the Ansar.

What sharia and the Public Order Law punished

Men in Sudan had drunk millet wine, sharbot fermented from dates and araqi, and in the twentieth century some took up whisky and beer. In September 1983 Gaafar Nimeiry introduced sharia in the measures known as the September laws, and marked the occasion by having alcohol dumped into the Nile. Buying, selling and drinking alcohol were banned from then on, with 40 lashes as the penalty, and araqi, a spirit made from dates, went on being brewed illegally.

Most Sudanese wear either traditional or Western clothes. A traditional garment widely worn by men is the jalabiya, loose, long-sleeved, collarless and reaching the ankle, with a large turban and a scarf. Women most often wear the thobe, which Sudanese Arabic pronounces tobe: one long piece of white or coloured cloth wrapped around the inner garments and usually drawn over the head and hair.

A penal code of 1991, known as the Public Order Law, barred women from wearing trousers in public on the reading that they were an "obscene outfit". The penalty could reach 40 lashes, and a woman found guilty in 2009 was fined the equivalent of US$200 instead.

What was repealed after the uprising

The interim constitution signed in August 2019, after Omar al-Bashir had been ousted, made no mention of sharia. The government that followed repealed the Public Order Law, and by 12 July 2020 it had abolished the apostasy law and public flogging, lifted the ban on alcohol for non-Muslims and made female genital mutilation a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. Sudan became a secular state in 2020.

Who counts as Arab in Sudan

Britannica describes ethnicity in Sudan as closely tied to language and religion. Most Muslims in the country speak Arabic and call themselves Arabs, they are for the most part ethnically mixed, and many are physically indistinguishable from Sudanese who do not consider themselves Arabs. The Sudanese Arab population is estimated at 70% of the total. Its tribes reckon descent from a presumed common ancestor and fall into wider groupings, among them the Jalayin, settled farmers of the middle Nile, and the traditionally nomadic Juhaynah, which takes in the Kababish and the Baqqarah.

Historians have asked what the label records. Elena Vezzadini argues that Arab migrants were absorbed into local structures and became "Sudanized", and that "In a way, a group became Arab when it started to claim that it was." The archaeologist and linguist Claude Rilly argues that most Sudanese who claim Arab descent through a male ancestor carry DNA inherited largely from generations of African or African-Arab wives, so the claim rests on oral tradition more than on biology. Recent evidence suggests that most citizens identify strongly with Sudan and with their religion, and that the wider Arab and African identities are the ones that polarise.

The Muslim peoples who are not Arab include the Nubians of the far north, most of whom speak Arabic as a second language, the Beja of the Red Sea Hills and the Fur of the Marrah Mountains in the far west. When security agents arrested 32 Darfuri students at the University of Sennar during the protests of 2018 and 2019, demonstrators in Khartoum answered with a slogan declaring that they were all Darfur.

Which languages Sudanese people speak

Arabic was Sudan's only official language until the interim constitution of 2005 made Arabic and English the official working languages. Arabic is the language of government and commerce across the country, and what most Sudanese speak is a distinct Sudanese form of it, the one most Sudanese singers use.

The other languages fall mostly into three families. Bedawi, which the Beja kept after they adopted Islam, is Cushitic, in the Afro-Asiatic family that also holds Arabic. The Nubian languages, Fur and Zaghawa are Nilo-Saharan, and the Kordofanian languages of the south belong to Niger-Congo. Most Sudanese are multilingual, with Arabic and to a lesser extent English as second languages. The constitutional charter of 2019 gives every ethnic and cultural group the right to "use their languages" and to raise children within its own culture and customs.

How Sudan was written before Arabic

From the second century BC a Meroitic script was in use in two forms, a hieroglyphic one carved for royal and religious texts and a cursive one written with a stylus for records. The earliest inscription dates from between 180 and 170 BC, and some 1,278 cursive texts were known by 2000. The British Museum's account is that the sound values of the signs are known, so names can mostly be read, while the longer texts largely defy interpretation for want of bilingual inscriptions. Christian Nubia later wrote Old Nubian in an alphabet based on Coptic, and Sudan: history covers the kingdoms that used both.

One title from Kush came back into use in 2019. On 8 April a photograph of Alaa Salah leading a chant from the roof of a car spread widely, and she came to be called the kandake, the title carried by Amanirenas, who fought Roman Egypt in the first century BC.

How the Sufi orders shaped Sudanese Islam

At the division of 2011 more than 97% of the people who remained in Sudan were Muslim, and most Muslims belong either to Sufi or to Salafi groups.

How the orders came to Sudan

Islam reached the Nile villages through individual teachers. Ghulam Allah ibn A'id came from Yemen and settled at Dongola in the fourteenth century, and Hamad Abu Danana followed in the fifteenth, teaching a contemplative way to God. The Funj, recorded as founding the kingdom of Sennar in 1504, made the country safer for such men, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries schools of religious learning were founded along the White Nile. The Funj themselves kept divine kingship and the drinking of alcohol into the eighteenth century.

The teachers were faqihs, jurists whose following came from their teaching and piety, and the most successful gathered their disciples into orders. A revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced the Khatmiyya, also called the Mirghaniyya. In the 1880s the Mahdi won support or neutrality from every order except the Khatmiyya, which was pro-Egyptian, and that division outlived his state: the Umma Party and the Unionist Party grew out of the Ansar and the Khatmiyya, and both later broke into smaller parties. Darfur has traditionally had none of the Sufi brotherhoods found in the rest of the country.

How zikr and the older rites are kept

Each order has its own forms of zikr, remembrance, in which recitation, drums, dance and incense can lead to trance, and the faithful regard it as a form of prayer. Zikr is most often held on late Friday afternoons, as at the tomb of Sheikh Hamed el-Nil in Omdurman. In 2023 UNESCO inscribed the procession and celebrations of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday in Sudan.

Older practice continues beside Islam. Among the Fur, sanctuaries are splashed with a paste of flour and water to ensure fertility, sacrifices are made at shrines and ancestral tombs when the rains are due, and the office of rainmaker is hereditary. Coptic and Greek Orthodox Christians are long established in Khartoum and the northern cities.

What Sudanese music is built on

Most Sudanese music is pentatonic, which sets it apart from traditional Arabic music and its maqam, and it leans on polyrhythm and on interlocking cross-beats, often in a ratio of three against two, as in the tum tum rhythm of the north and west. The lyre that Nubian music calls tanbura or kissar was the usual accompaniment to song until the Arabic oud largely replaced it in the twentieth century. A music called aldlayib is played on the tambur, a wooden lyre with five strings, to hand clapping and singing.

Women have forms of their own. In western Sudan the hakamat are women of high standing whose songs of praise or ridicule can incite or shame the men of their tribe in a feud, and peacebuilding initiatives in Darfur have asked them to use that influence to resolve conflict. Women also sing aghani al-banat, girls' songs, to the dalooka drum, and perform the zār, a ceremony of music and dance believed to drive spirits out of the possessed.

Egyptian and then British military bands trained Sudanese soldiers on brass instruments, and the historian Ahmad Sikainga counts the Sudanese members of those bands as "the first professional musicians".

Why the urban song is named after a briefcase

The popular song that took shape in Omdurman in the 1920s is called hageeba, "briefcase". The name came in the 1940s from a Radio Omdurman programme, hageebat al-fann, in which the presenter Ahmed Mohamed Saleh played old records he kept in his briefcase. Its singers took melodies from madeeh, the chanted praise of the Prophet, and set new, secular lyrics to them. Muhamad Wad El Faki began the style. He had learned recitation and voice control at a khalwa, the Sudanese religious school, and the writer El Sirr A. Gadour credits his standing outside the main ethnic communities of Omdurman with making him a "general" singer.

Hageeba was sung by a lead voice and a chorus over the tar frame drum. In the 1930s Muhamad Ahmed Sarour, Khalil Farah and others made the first commercial 78 rpm records of Sudanese music in Cairo, for sale from Omdurman, and in 1943 Aisha al Falatiya became the first woman to sing on Sudanese radio. Mohammed Wardi, a Nubian singer, began his career in the late 1950s, and his "Green October" became famous with the revolution of October 1964.

What happened to musicians under military rule

After sharia was imposed in 1983, poets and artists including Mahjoub Sharif were imprisoned, and zār ceremonies were interrupted and their drums confiscated. The coup of 1989 brought a government that closed the music halls and outdoor concerts. Mohammed Wardi and the oud player Mohammed al-Amin went into exile in Cairo, and the singer Setona emigrated there in 1989. Radio Omdurman erased every tape of the southern singer Yousif Fataki. Abu Araki al-Bakheit, banned from performing his political songs, went on performing in defiance of the authorities.

Until the revolution of 2018 and 2019 a public concert needed permission from both the Ministry of Culture and the police, and every public event had to end by 11 pm. Weddings went on with music and dance under every restriction. At the sit-in outside the army headquarters on 25 April 2019, "Dum", meaning blood, by the Sudanese-American rapper Ayman Mao was called the anthem of the revolution. Since the war began on 15 April 2023 many Sudanese artists have fled to Egypt, Kenya and Uganda.

What Sudanese people eat and drink

Most Sudanese peoples have lived by cultivation, growing sorghum, millet, sesame, maize and groundnuts, with groundnuts and cotton sometimes sold for cash. Lamb and beef are the commonest meats, and meals are communal and often shared with guests.

Bread is eaten with mullah, a family of savoury stews. Kisra is a fermented bread like Ethiopian injera but thinner and smaller, and gorrassa is close to a crêpe. Mullah ahmar, a red sauce of minced meat, goes with asida, wheat flour boiled and moulded into a ball. Many mullahs are thickened with waika, crushed dried okra, and seasoned with ni'aimiya, a Sudanese spice mix. In rural Darfur and Kordofan a fermented food called kawal stands in for meat.

Salata aswad is grilled aubergine with chillies. Peanut butter or mashed peanuts do the work in it that tahini does in baba ghanoush, and elmaraara and umfitit, dishes of sheep's offal eaten raw with onions, are made with peanut butter too. Egypt shares ful medames and molokhia with Sudan, though the Sudanese tamiya is made from chickpeas and the Egyptian one from fava beans.

Water is traditionally offered free to anyone from large clay pots in the streets. Strong coffee, sometimes poured from a jabana pot, and black tea, often with milk, are sold in the streets by "tea ladies", and on hot days cold hibiscus tea, karkadeh, is made at home. UNESCO added the knowledge and practices of the date palm to Sudan's entries on its intangible heritage list in 2022.

What Sudanese writers and painters made

Arabic is the language of written literature in traditional Sudanese society, and its best-known works are religious, above all a large body of writing on the lives and virtue of holy men, known mostly through recitation on the anniversaries of the pious. Al-Tayyib Salih's books Season of Migration to the North, published in 1966, and The Wedding of Zein, from 1967, have been translated into various languages. Modern poetry, in the work of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhub and many others, draws on the country's mixed African and Arab heritage.

In the crafts and in painting each locality developed its own forms, and more unified national styles came from artists in the cities. Ibrahim el-Salahi, proficient as printmaker, calligrapher and photographer, is internationally recognised. UNESCO inscribed Arabic calligraphy for Sudan in 2021 and the engraving of gold, silver and copper in 2023.

How film and photography came to Sudan

Photography in Sudan goes back to the 1880s. Film began with British colonial cinematography in the early twentieth century, and after independence in 1956 a documentary tradition was established. Financial pressure and constraints imposed by the Islamist government brought filmmaking into decline from the 1990s, and the revival since the 2010s has been limited mainly to Khartoum. The protests of 2018 and 2019 produced poems, songs, paintings and caricatures, in Sudan and in the diaspora.

What the war did to the National Museum

By April 2025 UNESCO had helped the authorities digitise more than 1,700 cultural objects and 100 ancient manuscripts under threat. When the authorities secured the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum that spring, they found evidence of large-scale looting and significant damage, and UNESCO brought officials from Sudan and nine neighbouring countries to Cairo to work against the trafficking of what had been taken. By then more than 90% of Sudanese journalists and media outlets had stopped working.

How weddings and holy days are kept

Sudan ratified UNESCO's convention on intangible heritage on 19 June 2008, and by 2025 six elements had been inscribed for it. Two carry Sudan's name in their titles: the procession and celebrations of the Prophet's birthday, inscribed in 2023, and al-Jertiq, inscribed in 2025, whose listing names "practices, rituals and expressions for preservation, protection, abundance and fertility". Henna followed in 2024, and the oud and al-saafiyat, the craft of plant fibres, were nominated in 2026.

Weddings are where much of the music lives. Hageeba was performed at weddings and other social occasions and soon became popular, the songwriter Ibrahim al-Abadi fused traditional wedding poetry with music, and the singer Setona's album Queen of Hena carried songs for henna ceremonies.

Britannica's survey of three traditional cultures, the Fur, the Humr Baqqara and the Otoro Nuba, found ritual marking each stage of life in all three: birth, circumcision, puberty, marriage and death. Among the Otoro, five age grades each lasted three years, their members were promoted together with festivities, and girls formed age grades of their own. A man who had killed an enemy was entitled to a small pattern of scars on his back.

Where Sudanese football came from

Football reached Sudan from Britain by way of Egypt in the early twentieth century, and the Sudan Football Association was founded in 1936. Clubs from the same period, Al-Hilal of Omdurman and Al-Merrikh among them, spread the game, and the Khartoum League was the first national league played in the country.

Women's football grew from informal clubs in the early 2000s into an official national league in September 2019, and in 2021 the women's national team played in the Arab Women's Cup for the first time, in Cairo.