In DarfurA merchants account of his travels through an independent African state Muhammad ibn 'Umar al Tunisi (d. 1274 1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants trading with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Al Tunisi was raised in Cairo and a graduate of al Azhar. In 1803, at the age of fourteen, al Tunisi set off for the Sultanate of Darfur, where his father had decamped ten years earlier. He followed the Forty Days Road, was reunited with his father, and