Kalge

The Kalge religion is the traditional faith of the Daju, the people who ruled the first recorded state of Darfur from the southern slopes of Jebel Marra. Their high god was Kalge, to whom they built straw shrines, and the sacred mountain of Par-Kalge took its name from him.

The geographer al-Idrisi still described the Daju kingdom as pagan in 1154, but Islam gained ground among them, and Islam is said to have become the religion of most Daju by the fifteenth century. After the Tunjur supplanted their dynasty, Daju groups survived in Dar Sila and elsewhere, many of them Muslims who kept the old customs and came to identify Kalge with Allah.