Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

238 III. Судан и его соседи sometimes going further down; locally made blades have crudely drawn not parallel fullers. These type of blades broadly correspond to amedieval Arabic generic term“ al-sayf al-musha ṭṭ ab ”, i. e. the “channelled sword”. Hunley identified and described in great detail five types of fullers. 1 Ends of two chiselled grooves are occasionally joined, thus producing a sort of cartouche, filled with Arabic inscriptions, like that on a rela- tively early example published by North. 2 The cartouche may take the form similar to the wooden ‘Qur’anic boards’ used by the pupils in the traditional religious ‘Qur’anic schools’— kuttāb; 3 in Sudan such schools are called khalwa , i. e. cell for religious retirement, a synonym to the Sufi zawiya (Fig. 4). The wooden board for writing is named ‘ lawh ’ (Ar. ‘board’), in the colloquial pronunciation— ‘ loh ’ (not ‘ lohr ’ as overheard by Reed 4 ). Such schools used to be the main element of the traditional educational system, now replaced by the governmental public schools. However, some of themmanaged to survive and still use the same lawh for training in writing, as in a major ‘Qur’anic school’ in Omdurman. 5 The kaskara blades blades may have Arabic inscriptions, sometimes accompanied by ‘magic squares’ — buduh , 6 as well as some sort of maker’s stamps, the latter being more typical for the imported blades or their imitations. Thus, for example, the blade of the No. 191 from 1 Clark W. T. Manners, Customs and Beliefs of the Northern Bega // SudanNotes and Records. Vol. XXI. 1938. P. 1–30; Hunley E. Kaskara Fuller Styles &Names. P. 1–2, then passim. I presume, though, these types and their classification fully developed in post-‘Ali Dinar period in Kassala. 2 North A. Op. cit. Pl. 23c, M.47–1953. The blade is heavily damascened in gold, and has some inscriptions, including the maker’s name “Abdallah b. Ibrahim Sudanese”; it is dated by the publisher as 17th C., which is difficult to confirm or otherwise; the hilt, though, is a later ‘alteration’, thus bringing us to the same point when all the available kaskara had emerged in relation to the Mahdist war, i.e. the last quarter of the 19th — beginning of the 20th C. 3 EfimRezvan. Qur’an and its World. St Petersburg, 2001. P. 337; fig. 9b. 4 Reed G. S. Kaskara from Northern Darfur, Sudan. P. 170. 5 خلاوي القرآن في السودان تدعم المعاهد والجامعات بالحفظة https://www.albayan.ae/ economy/2010–10–01–1.288645. I am thankful to my former colleague Angelica Kondra for attracting my attention to this important school. 6 Macdonald D. B. 1981. Budū ḥ // Encyclopedia of Islam. 2nd ed. Vol. XII. Supplement. P. 153–154.