The story
Holiya of Sheikh Idris wad al-Arbab in Eilafun/Khartoum State
An annual hawliya, or saint's-day commemoration, honoring Sheikh Idris wad al-Arbab, a foundational seventeenth-century Sufi scholar of Sudanese Islam, held at his shrine in Eilafun on the Blue Nile south of Khartoum.
Sheikh Idris wad al-Arbab, who lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is remembered in Sudanese religious history as a pivotal teacher whose students went on to found their own centers of Islamic scholarship across the country, making him a kind of common ancestor in the genealogy of Sudanese Sufism.