Omdurman

Omdurman stands on the western bank of the Nile near the meeting of the Blue and White Niles. A small settlement here was associated with the Quranic school of Shaykh Hamad wad Umm Maryam, a holy man of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century merchants valued the village for its access to the river and to routes leading west towards Darfur and north towards Dongola and Egypt.