Rubatab tribe

The Rubatab people (Arabic: الرباطاب, romanized: ar-rubāṭāb) constitute one of many riverine tribes of Northern Sudan. They inhabit the region of the Fourth Cataract of the Nile, roughly equating to the Abu Hamad District. Similar to their neighbouring tribes, the mid-stream Manasir and the downstream Shaiqiyah (الشايقيّة), the Rubatab are an Arab tribe in the Northeastern Sudan, with an archaic Arabic mother tongue. Their tribal homeland traditionally stretches north of Berber, Sudan until the town of Abu Hamad. The Rubatab border the Ababda people, the Bishari tribe, and the Manasir.

The Rubatab, a group consisting of around 38,000 people in 1991, are a sub-group of the Ja'alin tribe, one of the three prominent Sudanese Arab tribes in northern Sudan. Like the Ja'alin, they consider themselves Arab, even though various scholars have classified the Ja'alin as a "Afro-Arab hybrid", a mix of "the indigenous Africans and the Arabs who came to the Sudan between the 9th and the 14th centuries." Earlier Western scholars have used various phrases to describe this mix--"as having bastardized Arab blood, paganized Islam, and creolized Arabic".