Note 37 — Chapter III · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF WESTERN ASIA.

But settlements of Arabs had been established in Nubia for several centuries earlier and the Arabs on the Blue Nile had so increased in number and wealth in the tenth century that they were able to ask permission to build a mosque in Soba,37 the capital of the Christian kingdom.38 In the thirteenth and especially from the beginning of the fourteenth century there began a general process of interpenetration through the migration into Nubia of Arabs, especially of the Juhaynah tribe, who intermarried with the women of the land and gradually succeeded in breaking up the power of the Nubian princes.39 In the latter half of the fourteenth century Ibn Baṭūṭah40 tells us that the Nubians were still Christians, though the king of their chief city, Dongola,41 had embraced Islam in the reign of Nāṣir (probably Nāṣir b. Qulāūn, one of the Mamlūk sultans of Egypt, who died A.D. 1340); the repeated expeditions of the Muslims so late as the fifteenth century had not succeeded in pushing their conquests south of the first cataract, near which was their last fortified place,42 while Christianity seems to have extended as far up the Nile as Sennaar.