Collins, Robert O. 1933–2008

(Robert Oakley Collins)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 1, 1933, in Waukegan, IL; died of cancer, April 11, 2008, in Santa Barbara, CA. Historian, Africanist, educator, and author. Collins lived a relatively quiet life as a respected scholar of the Upper Nile Valley until 2006, when he and coauthor J. Millard Burr published Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World. The book unleashed the fury of the Muslim world and the considerable financial resources of Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, who threatened a defamation lawsuit in British courts. A settlement was reached and all copies of the book were recalled and destroyed, but Collins defended the accuracy of his book and the authenticity of his sources for the rest of his life. Collins was no newcomer to the field of African history, which unavoidably includes the history of Islam, because of the numerous African populations that are officially or largely Muslim. His special interest was in the Sudan, whose eastern border is immediately across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and whose population in that area is overwhelmingly Muslim. Collins first visited the Sudan in 1956 and returned there many times, receiving the country's gold class award of the Order of Sciences and Arts in 1980. He taught for nearly thirty years at the University of California in Santa Barbara, retiring in 1994, and was a life fellow of the African and Asian Institute of the University of Khartoum, located in the Sudanese capital city. Collins was a consultant on Africa and the Islamic world to both Hollywood filmmakers and the U.S. government. He received several awards for his scholarship, including a book prize from the John Ben Snow Foundation for Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918-1956 (1983). Collins edited more than a dozen books on African history and related topics and authored more than a dozen others, including Requiem for the Sudan: War, Drought, and Disaster Relief on the Nile (1995), Historical Dictionary of Pre-Colonial Africa (2001) and A History of Modern Sudan (2008).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2008, p. B8.

Washington Post, April 27, 2008, p. C8.