Sudan's current Darfur conflict did not begin arbitrarily and without reason. Instead, many underlying factors that have been fomenting and resulting in breakouts of violence are still at work in Sudan. The ethnical differences of the Arab Muslim ruling majority and the African and primarily animistic inhabitants of the southern state of Darfur have caused Sudan to have been mired in a nearly constant state of civil war since 1955. The application of Islamic law to all citizens has always been the sparkplug that more than anything else caused the non-Muslim population in Sudan to feel the need to rebel. The effects of the civil wars and more importantly, the most recent conflict in Darfur, are massive, and the death tolls, especially of Africans, are so immense that this conflict is being labeled as genocide.
             To understand the conflict that is ongoing currently in Sudan it is necessary to understand the history and how Sudan has been a state of comprised mostly of Arabs since olden times. In 642 A.D., ten years after the prophet Mohammed's death an Arab army invaded Nubia, in present-day Sudan Later in the 1820's Egypt's Muslim rulers conquered Sudan and enslaved 2 million Africans by the end of the 19th century (Anderson 64). The enslavers were mostly Muslims from the Ottoman Empire, yet Sudanese Muslims also took part in the slavery. In the 1880's the Ansar, a Muslim group from the Kordofan province took over control of a new Islamic Sudanese state through the leadership of Mahdi, the "rightly guided one." After expulsing Turco-Egyptian troops and killing General Charles Gordon, the viceroy from Britain via Egypt, Mahdi took up a campaign of spreading Islam throughout all of Sudan (Anderson 65). However, before the Ansar could take over what is now present day Sudan, Britain took over control of all of this area. Britain's policy was one of promoting Christianity and Eng...