Magyarab Erotic

The Magyarab are a small Nile community strung along the border between Egypt and Sudan who are, by every ordinary measure, Nubian. They speak Nobiin and Arabic, pray as Sunni Muslims, work the same narrow shelf of silt between the river and the desert as their neighbors, and marry into the families next door. What sets them apart is a name and the claim folded into it. Magyar is what Hungarians call themselves, and -ab is a Nubian suffix marking a clan, so the word reads as the clan of the Magyars. Their own account matches. They say they descend from Hungarian soldiers taken into Ottoman service after the fall of Hungary and posted to the empire's far southern frontier at Qasr Ibrim, and from one man in particular, Ibrahim el-Magyar, who married a Nubian woman and stayed. Almost nothing else of that inheritance survived. No Hungarian is spoken, no Hungarian custom is kept, and within a few generations the community was indistinguishable from the Nubians around it. The name did the remembering.

Europe heard about them in 1935, when the Hungarian desert explorer László Almásy encountered them near Wadi Halfa and the story ran in Budapest: a lost splinter of the nation, four centuries out, on the Nile. Hungary has kept up a sentimental interest ever since, in visits, journalism and the occasional delegation, and the Magyarab have generally been glad to receive it. Genetics has been less obliging. Y-chromosome testing on Magyarab men has turned up no distinctive link to Hungarian populations, which is roughly what four hundred years of local marriage would predict, and which most Magyarab treat as beside the point. The tradition is theirs whether or not a lab signs off on it. The harder rupture was water. Their settlement on the island of Magyarabirqi, upriver from Wadi Halfa, went under when the Aswan High Dam filled the lake in the 1960s, along with most of Nubia. They scattered with everyone else, to the resettlement zones around Kom Ombo in Egypt and New Halfa in eastern Sudan, then on to Cairo, Khartoum and abroad. Estimates of their number run from a few hundred to a few thousand. What they carry now is a surname, a story about a soldier, and the same displacement every Nubian family on that stretch of river is still absorbing.