Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa
Lidwien Kapteijns
From its emergence in the seventh century, Islam has formed an integral part of the history of what are today Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. The old notion of Ethiopia as “an island of Christianity in the sea of Islam”1 has been abandoned, for recent scholarship has shown that the history of Islam and Muslims within the Ethiopian state is inextricably interwoven with that outside of its (changing) borders, and that it is equally as old, as complex, and as significant. This chapter tells that story.
Political History—the Seventh Century through Colonial Rule
Muslims, Trade, and State Formation before 1800
The nature of the available sources (local chronicles and religious writings, accounts by Arab geographers and travelers, and some oral traditions) allows insight into only a limited set of historical themes. Prevalent among these is Islam’s articulation with processes of state formation, foreign interventions and alliances, and shifting patterns of long-distance trade.
The sources show two kinds of early communities of Muslims: first, groups of protected Muslim traders inside the Christian state of Aksum (and then Ethiopia); and second, a string of trade-based Muslim principalities along trade routes leading inland from Zeila. From the fourteenth century on, a power struggle developed between the latter (individually and in coalition) and the Christian state of Ethiopia. The fighting culminated in the conquest of large parts of the Ethiopian state by the Muslim coalition under Imam Ahmad b. Ibrahim (1529–43). Although the Muslim victories were short-lived, the consequences of the war, which included laying the land open to the large-scale migrations of the Oromo people of the southwest, were long-lasting. The Oromo migrations drove a wedge between the two warring parties. Not until the eighteenth century, the sources indicate, did they themselves become major actors in the history of Islam in Ethiopia.
The emergence of Islam coincided with the decline of the kingdom of Aksum. Although early Muslim refugees from persecution in Mecca found asylum at the Aksum court in 615 C.E., the first communities to adopt Islam were associated with trading centers frequented by Muslim merchants. The latter conducted their trade under royal protection, but did not enjoy full freedom of worship or the right to proselytize.2 The Dahlak Islands, a significant outlet for Ethiopian trade in this early period, embraced Islam in the eighth century and was in regular contact with the center of the Islamic state in Baghdad.
With the rise of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt and the revival of the Red Sea trade in the late tenth century, the process of Islamization in the Horn intensified, with the Fatimids posing as protectors of Muslims inside the Christian state. After 1270, when the new Solomonic dynasty moved the heart of the Ethiopian state southward, Zeila eclipsed the Dahlak archipel and became both the major outlet for trade from its Ethiopian hinterland and a central point of diffusion of Islam into the interior. By then, there were many Muslim communities in the Christian highlands, and a series of Islamic principalities had risen along the long-distance trade routes from the coast to southern Amhara and Shewa in the north and to the Rift Valley lakes in the south. Fourteenth-century Arab geographers knew these principalities as “the country of Zeila.”3
The oldest documented Muslim polity inland was the sultanate of Shewa, whose dynastic family, the Makhzumis, claimed to have originated in 896 C.E. They ruled until 1295, when they were deposed by the Walashma dynasty of Yifat, or Ifat (1285–1415), once Shewa’s easternmost district. On the coast further south, Mogadishu, founded perhaps as early as the eighth or tenth century, blossomed into a sultanate in the twelfth century, as did Brava and Merca; the latter, presented by the twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi as a center of the Hawiya Somalis, was the first city-state unambiguously associated with the Somali people. A later, long-lived example of state formation among the Somali was the Islamic Ajuraan confederacy (1500–1700) in the hinterland of the Benadir coast.
There is little doubt that, in addition, by the thirteenth century many of the nomadic peoples of the region, which did not form part of any state, and included the Afar (first mentioned by the thirteenth-century geographer Ibn Said as “Dankal”), the Somali (first mentioned by the twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi as “Hawiya”), as well as groups no longer extant (such as the Gabal and Warjih), had become Muslims.4 The population of the leading principality of Yifat included some of these Cushitic-speaking nomadic groups as well as sedentary agriculturalists of Semitic speech, such as the no-longer-extant Hararle and the Harari (whose language has survived in the city of Harar).5 Reports by the Arab geographers about the religious affiliation of the Beja (straddling the modern Sudanese-Eritrean border) in the north were contradictory; yet by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some Beja had become Muslim, as had the inhabitants of the Red Sea coastal towns of Aydhab and Sawakin.6
As the Ethiopian state under the Solomonid dynasty set out on a course of southward expansion, it clashed with the Muslim principalities, especially Yifat, over control of the long-distance trade routes. A major war erupted in 1332. The temporary Muslim league that Yifat headed against the Ethiopian state led by Amda-Syon (ruled 1314–44) met with defeat and Yifat became tributary to Ethiopia. The virulent invective of the Ethiopian chronicles describing these events bears testimony to the bitterness of the struggle. Thus Amda-Syon refused to end his campaigns “as long as these hyenas and dogs, sons of vipers and seed of evil ones who do not believe in the Son of God keep on biting me.”7 Racked by internal political rivalries, Yifat weakened further, and in 1420 it was overtaken by its easternmost region and former member of its league, the sultanate of Adal (1420–1560).
Ruled by a branch of the same Walashma dynasty, Adal occupied the whole Afar plain from Sawakin to the Shewa and Chercher mountains, including a significant part of northern Somalia. Between 1400 and 1450, the fighting between Adal and the Ethiopian state went back and forth, with the latter often, but always only temporarily, victorious.8 As Adal appears to have adopted the policy of drawing on Somali fighting power, it is probably not an accident that it is in this period that the name Somali first occurs in Ethiopian documents.9 Indicative of future developments was the ability of one of Adal’s Walashma rulers, Ahmad Badlay (r. 1432–1445), to organize a Muslim coalition that included Mogadishu in the south and Bait Mala (of northern Eritrea) in the north, and that sought support from Mamluk Egypt.10 Ethiopia’s continuous military campaigns, which targeted the permanent settlements, enhanced the influence of the only partially governed nomadic groups and drove the mercantile and agricultural communities into the arms of what emerged in their midst as the war party.11 The latter, guided by a series of charismatic leaders who adopted the title of imam, defined their goals in Islamic terms, side-stepped the Walashma aristocratic establishment (the peace party), and declared holy war against Christian Ethiopia. This movement reached its apogee under Imam Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Ghazi of Harar (called Grañ by the Ethiopians, Guray by the Somalis), who conqured and ruled most of the Ethiopian state from 1529 to 1543.
Imam Ahmad’s jihad occurred at a strategic moment for the Muslim coalition. The Ethiopian state was weak, for during its rapid expansion south, it had overextended itself and had failed to integrate the new areas organizationally or ideologically. Internationally, Muslim sentiment had been aroused by Portuguese successes in the Red Sea and the news of a Portuguese mission to the Ethiopian king. Imam Ahmad moreover had the moral and military support of the Ottomans, who had taken control of Egypt in 1517 and the Yemen in 1525. In 1529, Imam Ahmad crushed the army of the Ethiopian king; from then until his death in 1543, he conquered one region after another, from Bale in the south to Tigray in the north, at an incredible cost in property and lives. In the conquered areas, the conquerors briefly established themselves as a small new military elite ruling and extracting tribute through the existing elites. The arrival of a small contingent of well-armed Portuguese soldiers strengthened the Ethiopian king and led to a final round of fighting. In an engagement in 1543, Imam Ahmad was felled by a Portuguese bullet. Having had no time to consolidate its rule, the Islamic imamate of Ethiopia collapsed like a house of cards. Although Adal, inspired partly by Ahmad’s widow Bati Del Wanbara,12 organized several more raids, by 1555 the Ethiopian state had restored its pre-jihad boundaries.13 The consequences of the jihad were nevertheless far-reaching.
Among these consequences the enormous loss of life and destruction of Christian Ethiopia’s religious cultural heritage ranked first. Second, more people had become Muslims, even in the highlands. As the Ethiopian reconquest did not immediately entail massive revenge on Muslims, Islam continued to grow until the reign of Yohannes I (1667–82). In c. 1630, the Portuguese missionary Manoel d’Almeida believed that one-third of the population of the Ethiopian state was Muslim.14
A third consequence of the jihad was that the imperialist appetites of the Portuguese and the Ottomans had been only whetted; in the decades to come, the Ethiopian state had to rebuff both of these powers: the Portuguese sought to replace the Coptic creed of the Ethiopian church with Roman Catholicism, and the Ottomans (in 1555 and 1576) took a course of direct territorial invasion. A further consequence of jihad, following the weakening of both the Christian state and the Muslim principalities, was that the land was laid wide open to the mass migrations of the pastoral Oromo people, who, from their homeland in northwest Borena, now moved into the fertile highlands. In the next two centuries, they were to transform the political, religious, and ethnic make-up of the whole region, including the Ethiopian state. By inserting themselves between the Muslim principalities and the Christian state (and by overwhelming both), the Oromos disrupted the hostilities between them. It was not until the eighteenth century that the Oromo themselves became central actors in the history and expansion of Islam in the region.
By 1600, the Oromo had taken over all areas south of Shewa and had established themselves on the eastern edge of the highlands. Adal had disintegrated, while the city of Harar, twice devastated, survived as a center of commerce and Islamic learning by working out a precarious coexistence with the surrounding Oromo peasantry. Yet the trade routes were often disturbed, partly because similarly tense relations prevailed between Zeila (taken over by the Ottomans in 1620) and the surrounding Somali nomads.
Eyewitness accounts of European travelers such as Charles-Jacques Poncet allow some insights into the status of Muslims in the Ethiopian state in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Yohannes I (1667–82) convened a council that ordered Muslims to live separately from Christians in villages and town quarters of their own. In Gonder, this meant that several thousands of Muslims moved down to the riverbank, where they still live. Muslims could not usually own land, and for this reason they took up commerce and craft activities and often resided in towns, where they could rent church lands. While Muslims served the state as royal envoys and leading merchants, Christian Ethiopians would not eat with them, drink from cups they had used (unless purified by a man of religion), or eat meat slaughtered by Muslims. They greeted Muslims with the left hand—a sign of contempt—and called them, pejoratively, naggade (merchant), or eslam. (A respectful name for the indigenous Muslims of the northern and central Ethiopian region was that of Jabarti.)15
The period 1769 to 1855—called the mesafint or “era of the princes,” as regional lords completely overshadowed the emperor and central state—again witnessed a further growth of Islam. It is possible and probable that some Oromo settlers in the highlands had adopted Islam before the seventeenth century.16 However, it was during the eighteenth century that some Oromo groups became central actors in the expansion of Islam in the highlands. The chiefly families of the Qallu, Rayya, and Welo Oromo had embraced Islam, given patronage to Muslim clerics, appointed Islamic judges, and made Islam an increasingly integral part of the lives of their subjects. In Welo, where there were six Muslim dynasties, the ruling elite of the Warra Himano Oromo, in particular, articulated the legitimacy of their rule, their expansion, and their efforts at regional integration in Islamic terms. Like Harar in the south, Welo became a center of Islamic learning.17 It was also during the mesafint that the Tigre-speaking nomadic peoples of the north, whose ruling families had been Christian, began to convert to Islam.18 However, by the middle of the nineteenth century the economic, religious, and political situation in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean had dramatically changed.
Nineteenth-Century Imperialism: Islamic Reform and Militance
The history of Islam in the nineteenth century (in particular 1820–80) was interwoven with European expansion and the development of local expansionist centers of capitalist enterprise and territorial aggrandizement such as Egypt and Zanzibar. Coinciding with—and to some extent in response to—these changes was the set of movements often referred to as “the Islamic revival.” The revival expressed itself in attempts to deepen Islamic piety and knowledge among rulers and commoners alike, efforts to convert non-Muslims (especially adherents of indigenous religions) to Islam, the composition of many works of Islamic scholarship, teaching, and devotion, the introduction of innovative forms of social organizations (such as the Somali jamaa, or religious settlement), and the adoption of militant stances against both the Christian Ethiopian state and the European colonizing powers.
The period 1880 to 1918 was characterized by an Islamic militancy that had its roots in the preceding period: militancy against lax Muslims and local non-Muslims, against the expanding Ethiopian state under Menilik, and against the Christian colonial powers in the area. The era of World War I, which witnessed a pan-Islamic alliance forged between representatives of the Ottoman cause and Muslim leaders in the region, represented the culmination of the Islamic reform movement, as well as its political failure.
In the early nineteenth century, two territorially and economically expansive powers had a pervasive influence upon the history of Islam in northeastern Africa. In Egypt, Muhammad ʿAli (1805–49), drawing on European capital and personnel, pursued a domestic program of industrial capitalist transformation in combination with a foreign policy of colonial expansion. Apart from occupying the Sudan (1820–85), where it set into motion an intensive private trade in slaves, Egypt expanded into the Red Sea and beyond, occupying Zeila in 1870 and Harar in 1875. Its invasion of Ethiopia in 1875–76 met with defeat, and in 1885, after the defeat at the hands of the Mahdi in Sudan, its northeastern African empire was dissolved. The second expansive power was Zanzibar, whose economy was dominated by a partnership between the Omani sultans, Indian and Arab money lenders and merchants, and European entrepreneurs in search of cheap, tropical raw materials.
The expansion of Egypt and Zanzibar, themselves under increasing pressure from western European (and American) powers and markets, led to an intensified exploitation of their vast hinterlands and an upsurge in the trade in slaves.19 In parts of this hinterland, such as the Benadir coast of southern Somalia, this led to large-scale, slave-based agriculture and the increased importation and local use of slaves. Other areas of the region, such as the nonstate societies of the south and southwest of the Ethiopian region, were forced to supply increasing numbers of slaves. The latter consisted of Oromo, Sidama, and Agew-speaking communities, adhering to indigenous religions.20 Muslims and Christians participated in, and profited from, this increased trade in slaves, but in the capital-intensive, long-distance transport and sale of slaves, Muslim merchants had an advantage and were prevalent.21
These developments of course shaped the history of Islam and the patterns of Islamization in this region. In a pioneering attempt to theorize this impact, Levtzion distinguished two patterns: Firstly, when Muslim traders obtained slaves from across the border separating Muslim lands from areas inhabited by adherents to indigenous religions, these areas were not deeply influenced by Islam22—a pattern that may have obtained in the stateless societies of the south and southwest, which remained non-Muslim. We do not know whether local people turned away from Islam as the religion of the slave traders; nor do we know whether the local traders, who often collected the slaves at their source and handed them over to local rulers or long-distance traders,23 became Muslims. The second pattern obtained when Muslim traders “opened up new regions for exploitation far from their base,”24 and this may help explain the expansion of Islam in the Gibe area, part of the southwest of the Ethiopian region, west of the Rift Valley. There, between 1800 and 1830, at the terminus of many trade routes from the coast, five Muslim Oromo states emerged: Jimma, Gumma, Limmu Enarya, Gomma, and Geru. Influenced by Muslim merchants and sufi teachers, the first to embrace Islam were kings and nobility, legitimizing their rule in its name, but by the 1860s, Islam had also become part of the lives of the common people.25 However, more research is needed, for, as exemplified by Kaffa, some of the principalities of the south deeply involved in the slave trade did not become Muslim; they preserved their indigenous religions until the conquest by Menilek and beyond.
Although it is essential to understand the nineteenth-century history of Islam in the context of changes in political economy and trade relations, as important was the religious reform movement known as “the Islamic revival.”26 Its most relevant aspect in Ethiopia and the Horn was the emergence of new brotherhoods founded by students of Ahmad ibn Idris (1785–1837), together with an intensification of the activities of existing orders. The reformist agendas of the new orders encompassed all areas of life, from intellectual, theological, and political thought to religious and sociopolitical practice. They emphasized religious devotional practices that avoided sensual stimulation (through coffee, qat [catha edulis, a mild intoxicant], dancing, or drumming) and rejected tawassul, the belief that deceased or living “holy men” could intercede with God for the common believer. Many reformists adopted militant and uncompromising stances toward both Christians and those who practiced local indigenous religions. Although the older orders such as the Qadiriyya (in Harar, perhaps established as early as 1500) played a central role in the revivification of Islam among kings and commoners alike, it was the reformist orders that, as the century wore on, led the struggle against European colonial rule.
In Welo, the Qadiriyya was introduced by Shaykh Muhammad Shafi b. Askari Muhammad (1783–1806); the Sammaniyya came via al-Hajj Bushra Ay Muhammad (d. 1823).27 Both orders were instrumental in the Islamic revival, and many sufi teachers interacted closely with the heads of the Welo Oromo dynasties, often receiving grants of land to sustain themselves and their followers. At times, the secular rulers supported a shaykh in his forceful expansion of Islam, as when Shaykh Muhammad Shafi of Qallu raided neighboring villages to convert them to Islam.28 Religious leaders who criticized the local rulers are even better remembered. In the 1830s or 1840s, at a religious celebration in Qallu, a shaykh translated into Amharic a tradition that declared the marriage contract of wine-drinking men void and their children illegitimate. The ruler, Berru Lubo, who was present, took offense, and the shaykh was exiled for his trouble.29 The religious leaders also took a hard line against ordinary believers who were lax in their observance of Islam. They criticized the drinking of wine and the ritual slaughter of livestock at funerals (involving the sprinkling of blood on the participants).30 They also attempted to put an end to the customary wayyane ritual feuds—“periodic inter-ethnic or individual fights primarily intended to test courage and sharpen fighting skills”—by threatening to refuse to perform the proper funeral prayers for the victims.31 Islamic education was central to the activities of the sufi shaykhs. The centers they established served as institutions of higher learning, spiritual training, and devotional practice, and they made written contributions to the Islamic scholarship of their era.32
While the Muslim teachers of Welo were part of the Islamic revival radiating out from the Hijaz, they were also radicalized by local conditions. In 1855, the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros (ruled 1855–68) set out to restore and reunify the kingdom by emphasizing its Christian identity and suppressing regional autonomy. In Welo, this policy led to a series of devastating campaigns that aimed both at breaking the power of the local Oromo dynasties and the elimination of Islam. Tewodros’s successors—Yohannes of Tigray (ruled 1872–89) and Menelik of Shewa (ruled 1889–1913)—continued the military campaigns, after having promulgated the compulsory conversion of Welo Muslims (and later those of Gonder and Shewa) at the council of Boru-Meda in 1878. These forced conversions, the obligation to build churches, pay church tithes, and provide quarters for the states soldiers, and the execution of thousands of Muslims who refused to give up Islam, in the 1880s inspired some religious leaders like the Oromo Shaykh Talha b. Jafar (c. 1853–1936) to take up arms against the Christian state. Resistance, however, elicited more destruction, which was followed by a devastating famine (1888–92). Other shaykhs moved to Harerghe and the Gibe region, where they contributed to the revitalization of Islamic devotion and learning. In the 1880s, the small state of Jimma had eighty madrasas.33
In the Gibe region, the religious orders played a role both in the adoption of Islam as an ideology of state by the local rulers and in the deepening and mainstreaming of Islamic belief and practice among the common people. By the 1860s, the Oromo commoners fasted, began to use Islamic rather than customary law in marriage and inheritance, paid the zakat levied by the kings, circumcised their sons at an age earlier than before, used the Islamic calendar next to the Oromo one, and went on pilgrimage to Mecca.34 There were nevertheless resilient communities of non-Muslims, too, as is evident from songs of this era collected by Cerulli in 1927 and 1928. In these songs, non-Muslims ridiculed Muslims by calling them “bottom-rinsers” (a reference to their ritual ablutions) and comparing the muezzin to the leader of a troop of monkeys who would create a loud racket at the approach of danger.35
The Qadiriyya was the oldest and most popular order, but the Tijaniyya and Ahmadiyya also had a presence. Rulers appear to have vied with each other in their patronage of men of religion, who often received grants of land to establish religious centers. From the late 1860s onward, Gumma in particular experienced a strong religious fervor; its kings conducted a jihad first against non-Muslim neighbors who belonged to stateless societies and, after 1882, against the occupation armies of the Ethiopian emperor Menilek.36
In Eritrea, the revitalization of Islamic belief and practice among the Bani Amir and the Tigray-speaking nomadic peoples of modern Eritrea was associated with the Qadiriyya and the Mirghaniyya. The latter was introduced in Massawwa in 1860 by Shaykh Hassan al-Mirghani, son of the order’s founder, and became the dominant order in the area. The conversion to Islam of the Habab, Marya, and Bayt Asgede, Trimingham reports, dates from the 1820s, coinciding with Egypt’s conquest of the Sudan.37
In Somalia, long before 1800 religious leaders had played central roles in the multiethnic (or multi-clan) Muslim principalities of southern Somalia such as the sultanate of Mogadishu, the Ajuraan confederacy (c. 1500–1700), and the Geledi federation (after 1750). Moreover, the Qadiriyya may have been established in the coastal cities of Massawa, Zeila, and Mogadishu, as well as in Harar, as early as the late-fifteenth century. However, the influence of the brotherhoods in the interior appears to date from the early 1800s, for the Qadiri shaykhs credited with the popularization of the order in Somalia all lived in the first half of the nineteenth century.38 Thus Shaykh Uways Muhammad Muhyi al-Din (1847–1909) founded a tariqa settlement (called jamaa by the Somalis) in Biyole, along the upper reaches of the Juba River,39 Shaykh Abd al-Rahman b. Abdallah al-Shashi (d. 1919), better known as Shaykh Sufi, had a center in Mogadishu,40 and Shaykh Abd al-Rahman al-Zaylai (1820–82) had a jamaa at Qulunqul in the Ogaden.41 The Qadiri shaykhs were known for their insistence on a humble, pure Islamic lifestyle, for their miracles, and for their commitment to the teaching of Islam and Arabic (the latter as a tool toward teaching the former). Like the heads of other orders, they, moreover, sought to promote a communal identity defined in Islamic rather than kinship terms; in their religious settlements, Somalis of various clan backgrounds lived together as ikhwan (brothers), jointly engaged in cultivation, livestock husbandry, and religious study and worship. Shaykh al-Zaylai had women students (muridat), and his daughter Shaykha Fatima became a religious figure in her own right.42
The brotherhood that developed into the Qadiriyya’s most important rival was the Salihiyya, established in Mecca by Muhammad Salih (1854–1919) as an offshoot of the Rashidiyya founded by Ibrahim al-Rashid (d. 1874). In Somalia, the Salihiyya was introduced by Shaykh Muhammad Gulayd (d. 1918), who took it to the Jowhar area.43 Its most famous representatives were Shaykh Ali Nairobi (d. 1920), who established a jamaa along the middle Juba,44 and Sayyid Muhammad Abdallah Hassan (1856–1920), whose reformist program included purifying the country from the Ethiopian and European “unbelievers.”
The antagonism between the Salihiyya and Qadiriyya came to a head during Sayyid Muhammad’s jihad, which began in 1898. By then, the Qadiriyya in Somalia had become associated with the colonial status quo and was prepared to collaborate with the Christian European entrepreneurs and administrators. It also stood for a longer established, mystical, less puritanical form of Islam; it accepted popular belief in intercession by holy men and engaged in devotional practices that promoted a heightened sensual awareness and ecstatic absorption. The Qadiriyya may also have had a more inclusive attitude toward the religious participation of women and their presence in public. The Salihiyya, on the other hand, at least as interpreted by the Sayyid, insisted on militancy and holy war against both the Christian invaders and their Muslim associates. It was against tawassul, puritanical and sober in its religious worship, and intolerant of anything that could be considered a corruption of or cultural accretion to Islam. It appears to have followed a harder line against the association of male and female believers.45
In the period 1880 to 1918, the three forms of Islamic militancy referred to above—that against adherents of indigenous religions and lax Muslims, that against the expanding and intolerant Christian Ethiopian state, and that against the colonizing powers from Christian Europe—became interconnected and fueled the pan-Islamic sentiments roused by Ottoman participation (and defeat) in World War I. In the Gibe region west of the Rift Valley lakes, militant reform movements that had targeted non-Muslim neighbors and backsliding Muslims channeled their energies after 1882 into vain attempts to stem Menilek’s southward expansion.46 In Welo, the targets of Shaykh Talha’s revolts (1884–95) were the same. The shaykh was moreover in contact with the Mahdist state in the Sudan, the Italian invaders of northern Ethiopia, the leader of the Somali jihad, and, after 1913, indirectly with the pan-Islamic movement.47 The trait dʾunion between the seething discontent of the Muslim victims of the Ethiopian and European expansion and the pan-Islamic cause promoted by the Ottoman Empire was Emperor Lij Iyasu (1909/13–1916). Lij Iyasu, who was Menilek’s grandson and successor, was also the son of that very Welo Oromo leader who in 1878 had been forcibly converted to Islam. When he, as head of state, openly adopted Islam and began to court his Muslim subjects, the nobility and church elite combined to excommunicate and depose him.48
In Somalia, the jihad of Sayyid Muhammad (1898–1920) targeted local colonial collaborators, the tax raiders of Menilek’s expansionist state (overrunning western Somalia after the occupation of Harar in 1887), and the colonial administrations of British and Italian Somaliland. In many ways, the Sayyid was like the Islamic leaders described above. He was a shaykh of the puritanical Salihiyya, founder of a jamaʿa, a teacher and author of theological treatises, a jihad leader, and an advocate of communal definition in terms of Islam rather than clan affiliation.
The Sayyid resembled the Oromo militant clerics further west, even when he appealed to both the “religious impulse and cultural nationalism” of his fellow Somalis—asking, “If the land is your land, why aren’t you its government? If Islam is your religion, why submit to infidel overlords?”49 The Sayyid, however, was also unique. First, he was uniquely contradictory; thus, he both sought to overcome Somali clan divisions and at the same time intensified, perpetuated, and embittered them. Second, while he strove to purify Islam, his strategies (including the taking of Muslim lives and his at times vicious and obscene polemic poetry in Somali) were incompatible with Islamic ideals. Third, and perhaps most unique, was the Sayyid’s political ambition—that of establishing an independent Islamic state for Somalis, together with his exceptional ability to articulate his goals. In his poem Dardaarran (“Parting Words of Wisdom”), the Sayyid, faced with defeat, argued:
There is no remedy if you expect a good reward from the Christian foreigners. Once you let down your guard, the infidel will ensnare you. The money he squanders [on you] now, will come back to haunt you. First he will rob you from your firearms, as if you are women. Then he will brand you like cattle. Next he will order you to sell the country [to him], and then he will put loads on your backs as on donkeys.50
The Islamic reform movement found both its nadir and its culmination in the Sayyid’s movement. The destruction of Somali life and property in the name of Islam represents its lowest point, while the Sayyid’s attempt to found an independent Muslim state can be seen as its climax. After his defeat, the sayyid looked back on his career:
Although I failed to have a flag flown for me from here to Nairobi, did I not gain religious honor in victory and defeat? Although I failed to obtain the luscious grazing of the ʿIid and the Nugaal as pasture, did I not successfully ride my steed out to war? Although I failed to get people to show me sympathy and acknowledge their kinship with me, did I not gain God’s mercy and [the reward of seeing] the Prophet’s countenance?51
Islam and the Establishment of Colonial Rule after 1885
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Britain, France, and Italy established colonial rule over parts of the region. In British, French, and Italian Somaliland, the colonial powers were mostly neither defenders nor promoters of Islam. Administering their colonies by direct rule, they limited the application of Islamic law and based policy on the conviction that kin-based realities and relations were the most truly traditional and authentic ones. They promoted certain representatives and representations of Islam over other ones, appointing functionaries (and with them, values) who were often middle-class and foreign, imported from Muslim colonies in which colonial dominion was old and well-established (India, Egypt). In their attempts to make local Muslims “upgrade” their Islam, colonial rule divided local Muslims along emerging class lines and to some extent undermined the latter’s confidence in their own rich devotional life and religious knowledge. Only Italy, after its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36, promoted Islam and Muslims explicitly, with the objective of both defeating the Ethiopian state and suppressing resistance against the Italian occupation. This policy was reversed after Haile Selassie regained the Ethiopian throne.
The attitudes and policies of the European colonial powers toward Islam were complex. Trimingham was at least partly correct when he criticized them for favoring “both the consolidation of orthodox Islam and its spread among pagan peoples.” As the colonial administrations undertook to introduce written legal codes, as in Europe, he argued, “they seized upon the shariʿa, as a ready-made code to regulate the religious and social life of any people who could, however superficially, be called Muslim.”52 Thus the British, who had excluded Christian missionaries from the northern (but not southern) Sudan since their conquest in 1898, after 1909 also refused any missionary body entrance to British Somaliland. However, the French in Djibouti and the Italians in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland did allow missionaries to operate, even if they did not share missionary optimism that uneducated Muslims were necessarily “superficial” ones.
All in all, the colonial powers in the region were not defenders or promoters of Islam. First, all colonial administrations in the area established direct rule, concentrating vast administrative and judicial powers in the hands of governors who were often directly accountable to a specific metropolitan minister. Islamic and customary law, while accepted as a source of law in the colony, could only be applied if (in the case of the Italian colonies) it were compatible with Italian law, or if (in the case of the British protectorate) it were not “repugnant to justice, equity and good conscience” or inconsistent with any written law in force.53 Second, while the colonial governments, especially the British, indulged the Islam of the collaborating, “useful,” local elite (such as Shaykh Mattar of Hargeisa), they based administrative policies on the firmly held conviction that kin-based (clan or subclan) relationships were the relevant and authentically traditional communal realities. When the colonial administrations of the area recognized Islamic-cum-customary laws as one of the sources of the colony’s laws, they did not distinguish between the two. Thus qadis were expected to administer customary as well as Islamic law, in particular in regard to marriage and child-support payments. In British Somaliland, the power of Islamic judges was moreover restricted to a limited number of enumerated civil issues, “marriage, including divorce and maintenance, guardianship of minors and family relationship, wakf [waqf], gift, succession and will.”54 Although in Italian Somaliland qadis had wider judicial powers, as they until 1958 administered penal law,55 there, too, the administration continually balanced Islamic and customary law against each other, without an explicit acknowledgment of their contradictions or a reasoned systematic subordination of one to the other. The result was, as Trimingham observed,56 that non-Islamic “tribal” customs that were unacceptable to colonial administrations when encountered among non-Muslim populations were accepted when practiced by Muslims.
Colonial administrations also influenced the development of Islam by authorizing some representatives and representations of Islam, while undermining the legitimacy of others. In Somaliland and Sudan, where the British confronted militant Islamic resistance, the colonial authorities were eager to present themselves to the Muslim population as closely allied with the most authoritative and prestigious sources and representatives of Islam. The British willingness to help local Muslims “upgrade” their Islam was aimed at creating goodwill for the administration and delegitimizing anticolonial Muslim militants; it also served to undermine the confidence of local Muslims in their own, culturally specific, interpretations of Islamic belief and practice. Thus the British, while courting those members of the local Islamic elite who were willing to cooperate, appointed Islamic qadis and imams who had been educated abroad (for example, in Aden or Egypt), who were initially often foreign-born, and who had been exposed to a strong and seasoned colonial British administration. For example, to counteract the pan-Islamic enthusiasm for the Ottoman cause during World War I, the British sent a group of Somali notables, including the major religious leaders, to Egypt, where they could be dazzled by British military and political power and experience Egyptian Muslim support for the Allies.57
While making some room for Islamic law and legal experts in the apparatus of colonial rule and indulging the leading brotherhood shaykhs, the British administration showed little interest in mystical Islam and the rich devotional life of Somali Muslims. Preoccupied with the Somali clan structure as the key to understanding Somali society and maintaining law and order, officials were always more interested in genealogies and secular political poetry than in praise-songs for the Prophet and qasidas (poems) for the awliyaʾ. When feasible, the French in Djibouti and the Italians in their colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland also allied with existing political and religious elites. However, their legitimizing ideologies appear less designed to hide the iron fist in the colonial glove, less concerned with creating formal legal rationales articulated in terms of “authentic tradition,” and less obsessed with wresting approval and admiration for their justice from the colonized than the British.58
In Ethiopia, Italy changed its policy toward Islam only in the context of its invasion and occupation from 1936 to 1941. First, Italy, then under Fascist rule, enlisted many Muslims from northeast Africa in its army of invasion. As many as thirty-five thousand Muslims from northern Ethiopia as well as forty thousand Somalis were reported to have joined the Italian armies, and others served as guides, spies, and informants.59 After the conquest, Italy counted on the support of Ethiopian Muslims (whom they estimated as numbering about six million, or one half of the population) to contain the old ruling class, in particular the Amhara resistance. The Italians therefore posed as the great champions of Islam. In Ethiopia, they immediately granted Muslims full freedom of religion and undertook an active program of mosque building. Apart from the “gratitude” mosque in Addis Ababa, they built and restored mosques (with mosque schools) wherever there were Muslims.60 In Harar and Jimma, they planned higher institutes of Islamic learning and introduced Arabic in all Muslim schools. Newspapers now had Arabic sections, and there were radio broadcasts in Arabic. In Harar, Arabic became the official language. In Muslim areas, the Italians replaced Amhara judges with qadis; they appointed new Muslim chiefs, and created two new governorships (Harar and Oromo-Sidama) to bring Muslims together administratively. They facilitated the pilgrimage to Mecca for collaborating chiefs and allowed Muslims to proselytize among the Arussi and Christian Oromo.61
The End of Colonial Rule and the Disintegration of Ethiopia’s Christian State
Italian rule over Ethiopia was short-lived. In June 1940, Italy declared war on the Allies; by April 1941, British troops had put an end to Italy’s East African empire, and soon thereafter Haile Selassie was restored to the throne of Ethiopia.62 Haile Selassie not only turned the clock back by restoring discriminating practices against Muslim Ethiopians, but he also took punitive action against them for having sided with the enemy.
While Haile Salassie’s regime did not openly or actively hinder Islamic worship, it undermined Islam and Muslims through purposeful and systematic disregard. In official rhetoric, the country belonged to all, with religion a mere private affair. In reality, state and nation were defined in terms of Christianity, with Muslims excluded from land ownership and higher government service. As a result, the economically most successful and wealthy Muslims continued to be engaged in commerce or the crafts.63 The Ethiopian church was heavily subsidized, as was religious (Christian) education in state schools, where Amharic was imposed and Arabic banned. Muslim employees had to work on Fridays and observe Sunday as a holiday. Foreign missionaries were allowed to proselytize in Muslim areas.64 The civil code of 1960 regulated marriage, divorce, and family property in ways that conflicted with Islamic law and practice. No Muslim experts were consulted, and while the draft code had included a section on provisions regarding Muslims, this was missing in the final text. While Haile Selassie allowed Muslim courts to operate, he neither acknowledged or legalized them. As late as 1974, just before Haile Selassie’s fall, Ethiopian Muslims were still officially referred to as “Muslims residing in Ethiopia.”65
The range of Muslim grievances is evident from the list of demands they submitted to the new regime that took power in 1974. Muslims petitioned for the organization of independent Islamic courts with their own budgets; for the right to establish religious organizations, to own land, and to work in administration, justice, and the military; for the teaching of Islam in all schools and via the national media; and for the official observation of Islamic holidays.66 For several years, Muslims made great gains, with Muslims even serving as members of the highest organ of state, the Darj.67 However, as the Darj gradually turned against all forms of religion, its relationship with Muslims soured. The government’s move against wealthy merchants as enemies of the people harmed Muslim wholesalers (as well as Christians), and its abolition of land tenancy drove Muslim tenants in the north off the land. The fall of the Darj in May 1991 again led to a temporary improvement in the position of Muslims,68 not least as a result of the new freedom of the press (curbed again in 1992).69
Haile Selassie’s regime, which had presented Ethiopia abroad as a Christian country, had carefully kept two secrets: the size of the nation’s populations of Muslims and Oromos. On the basis of the first census of 1984, the authors of Ethiopia: A Country Study estimated Ethiopia’s 1991 population at 51.7 million people; of these, 40 percent were believed to be Oromo, 50 percent to be Muslim.70 In neighboring Eritrea, the population, estimated in 1984 at 2.7 million, was approximately evenly divided between Muslims (largely in the coastal cities and lowlands) and Christians (in the highlands).71 As in Ethiopia, social prejudice existed in the Eritrean highlands as well and wealthy Jabarti traders and poor tenant farmers often lived segregated from Christians. However, in Eritrea, economic inequalities (such as serf status) and ethnic conflicts did not coincide with religious dividing lines.72 Religious identity indeed partly shaped political stances; however, neither Christians nor Muslims succeeded in creating an internal consensus about any of the large political issues of the 1940s and thereafter—whether this was about the political fate of Eritrea after the end of British military rule or about the Eritrean war of independence (1960–91). In the early 1990s, however, in the context of the intensification of Islamist activities in all of northeastern Africa, some of the opposition to the newly independent government of Eritrea (1993) mobilized support in exclusively Islamic terms.73 In Somalia, a number of Islamist movements, most of them with headquarters abroad, have emerged since the 1970s and 1980s, when they played a significant role in opposing Siyad Barre’s regime.74 It is unclear, however, whether the quasi-Islamic kangaroo courts of Mogadishu and northern Somaliland, which have imposed and executed Quranic sentences in the midst of cheering crowds, are formally related to these organizations.75 In some inland areas (such as Hudur), morally irreprehensible leaders, with long-standing religious prestige, have succeeded in recreating some sense of community through appealing to the common bond of Islam, without formal ties to international Islamist organizations.
In all the countries under study here, the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed important developments in the ways Muslims lived and gave expression to their faith. Individuals and groups were drawn to what they defined as a lifestyle of greater personal piety and a stricter adherence to the tenets of Islam, and they did so as part of (and in response to) a wider international movement for the revitalization of Islam. Often the energies flowing from these new commitments and from the financial support provided by organizations in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere were directed toward local communal development projects, charity, and education. Side by side with this socioreligious movement, and not always easily distinguishable from it, a variety of political movements have emerged that have used international Islamist aid to become major political players locally. Who sets the agenda of these movements and what impact they will have both on the political power struggles of the area and on the nature of Islamic belief and practice remains to be seen.
The History of Islamic Learning and Devotion
Of the three legal systems (madhhabs) represented in the region, the Shafiʿi school, associated with influence from Arabia, is most common, particularly among the Somalis and Oromos. In Eritrea, the Maliki school is influential, indicating a common history with neighboring Sudan. The Hanafi school is represented mainly in the coastal towns, where it was introduced by the Ottomans.76 Of the oldest Islamic principalities, only the town of Harar is still functioning as a center of Islamic learning, although part of its Islamic heritage has passed to the modern population centers such as Dire Dawa and Djibouti, heirs to the ancient city of Zeila.
The kinds and levels of learning historically pursued in Harar is evident from the work of Drewes, who described the library of the amir who ruled Harar from 1856 to 1875.77 Shariʿi legal texts figured prominently in this library, which also included Qurans and Quranic commentaries, hadith collections, texts on Islamic history, including the life of the Prophet, and collections of mawlids and praise-poetry for the Prophet. Given the scarcity of data on the roles of women in the history of Islam in the region, it is noteworthy that the manuscripts the amir inherited from his aunt Gisti Amat Allah constituted the beginnings of his library.78
The oldest memories of the history of Islam in the region are memories of Islamic holy men such as Shaykh Husayn of Bale, Aw Yusuf Barkhadle, and Shaykh Umar Abadir al-Bakri of Harar.79 It is significant that oral memory does not explicitly associate these earliest teachers of Islam in the region with a particular brotherhood, as it does in regard to the holy men who lived after 1800. Instead, they are associated with the old city-states. Thus, in Lewis’s words, Shaykh Husayn presents “the spiritual residue, so to speak, of the ancient Muslim state of Bale,” as Aw Barkhadle, the ancestor of the founder of the Walashma dynasty, represents “the spiritual legacy of the Islamic state of Yifat/Adal.”80 A second group of early, pre-sixteenth-century holy men are remembered not in relation to the city-states but as founding fathers of various Somali clans.81
However, most of the holy men whose tombs Muslims of the region still visit, whose birthdays they still celebrate, and whose intercession they actively seek out, are the sufi leaders associated with the early nineteenth-century Islamic revival. These truly shaped some of the specific features of Islam in northeastern Africa. The communities they founded set three significant precedents: they experimented with new forms of social organization, undertook organized political and military action, and constituted centers of Islamic learning, teaching, and devotional practice throughout the region.
The nineteenth-century Somali jamaʿas, mentioned above, represented a radically innovative form of social organization in two ways. First, they sustained themselves through settled cultivation, even in areas where pastoralism was more common and more prestigious. Second, they brought together individuals of various clan backgrounds, even members of the agricultural riverain groups who were excluded from the “noble” Somali clan genealogies and therefore had low social prestige. Hersi, who gives an overview of the jamaʿas, referred to “the flocking of servile classes to the settlements” in the south of the early nineteenth century.82 Late-nineteenth-century European visitors to the northwest (such as the Swayne brothers) noted the large numbers of sick, old, and disabled individuals present in the settlements.83 Some of the jamaas became the nuclei for towns; thus Baardheere on the Juba flourished as a small city-state in the 1830s, while the colonial town of Hargeisa in the northwest had developed around the jamaʿa of Shaykh Mattar.
Many of the political and militant movements of the region articulated their motivation and goals in Islamic terms, were led by sufi shaykhs, and sometimes originated from the social frame of the jamaa. Thus in the early 1840s, the jamaa of Baardheere conducted military campaigns in and around the towns of Brava and Luuq, against whose economic and religious practice it objected. Economically, it opposed the trade in ivory, the product of a ritually unclean animal, the elephant. Religiously it took offense at the indulgence of the senses during worship, against dancing, and the social mixing of men and women.84 The shaykhs of the tariqa settlements that the Swayne brothers encountered in northwest Somalia in the late 1880s were politically quietist, friendly to European visitors, and in complete disarray because of Menelik’s tax-raiding parties and armies.85 As they perceived it, the Europeans who set up administrations in Somalia in the mid- and late-1880s not only failed to offer help against Ethiopia but also scrambled to divide Somalia among themselves.
It was in this context that the formidable Sayyid Muhammad founded his humble jamaʿa at Qoryaweyn and then proceeded to set the country afire with his jihad against Ethiopians, Europeans, and Somali collaborators alike.86 As late as 1936, some of the tariqa leaders of British Somaliland led a militant protest movement against the introduction of a primary-education system based on Somali, rather than Arabic, as the language of instruction. After the arrogant but well-meaning director of education had narrowly escaped death by stoning in Burʾo, Somali was dropped and Arabic triumphed. Taking their cue from Kenya, where Somalis, as Muslims, struggled to be classified with the Asians rather than the Africans, British Somalis, too, objected to a policy that seemed to underplay their Islamic identity.87
The educational mission of the sufi orders and their local representatives was permanent and universal. The most significant religious centers (and most areas had at least one) served as seats of higher learning, of teaching, and of devotional practice. Here gathered the leading Islamic scholars who were not only conversant with the kinds of texts the amir of Harar had in his library but also wrote their own commentaries and treatises. The treatise on theology and law by the Oromo shaykh Jafar b. Talha (1853–1936) of Welo was a relatively late example, written, probably for pedagogical reasons, in Amharic in Arabic script. Shaykh Talha also translated the Quran, wrote a multivolume manuscript biography of the Prophet, and prepared a religious manual in Arabic.88 Other examples of theological and jurisprudential argumentation are Arabic prose polemics exchanged by, for example, the Salihi shaykh Sayyid Muhammad and his Qadiri opponents. The sufi shaykhs also taught the Arabic language. Thus Sharif Yusuf Barkhadle is remembered for having devised a system of notation for Arabic short vowels for Somali-speaking students.89
Many men of religion studied with several of the leading teachers and eventually settled down to found their own network of schools. Apart from serving as institutions of religious scholarship and higher education, the sufi centers also were at the heart of the devotional practice of Islam in the region. As they were the seats of both contemporary sufi shaykhs and the sites of the tombs of deceased holy men, Muslim men, women, and children from throughout the region would seasonally make a pilgrimage (lit., ziyara, “visit”) to these centers. The annual celebration of the birthday of the Prophet or the holy man associated with the shrine attracted the largest numbers of believers. All came to celebrate their faith and devotion, but many came with a special purpose as well, asking the holy man to intercede for them with God and the Prophet for solutions to specific problems such as illness, infertility, poverty, thwarted love, or drought. During the festivals, the pilgrims participated in a range of devotional acts. They held dhikr and hadra sessions for the ritual mentioning of God’s name. They recited the mawlid al-nabi, the epic poem about the Prophet’s family background, birth, and life; they recited praise-poetry for God and the Prophet (madih; Somali: nabi ammaan); they sang qasidas and recounted oral or written legends (manqabas) extolling the virtues and miraculous deeds of the deceased holy men of the order.90 Many of the devotional songs of the Oromo of Gimma, like their Somali and Amharic counterparts, deal with death and the tomb. The following song, collected by Cerulli, addresses Shaykh Husayn of Bale:
When my soul is about to depart
and the angel will examine it
and tell it to “think about your life”
When my fate will be discussed
Mercy, oh Shaykh Husayn.91
In Somalia, women organized women-only prayer groups to sing hymns, called sittaat, to the leading women of early Islamic history, from Eve to Fatima. Through the sittaat, women praised the heavenly women and asked them for assistance, especially when giving birth. As men believed that they could bring about the spiritual presence of the Prophet through the recital of the mawlid al-nabi (at which women were present but not central participants), women believed that the sittaat would bring Fatima into their midst: “Madaad, madaad, Fatima, daughter of the Chosen One, madaad, madaad, Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, give us that for which we call upon you.”92 Also, although it was (and is) frowned upon as a non-Islamic (or pre-Islamic) practice by most Muslims of the region, the therapeutic trance-dance called zar continued to be performed at some Islamic centers and saints’ tombs as recently as 1982.93 Thus the sufi centers seasonally became a microcosm of all the believers and forms of worship of the whole region.
Islam in northeast Africa has been characterized by two traditions, an exuberant mystical and a sober reformist one. To help them attain spiritual absorption, many common believers—and not only Qadiris—engaged in exuberant forms of devotional practice. They burned incense, doused themselves with perfume, and tied fragrant herbs into their clothing. They drank coffee, chewed qat, sang hymns, and danced to the rhythm of the drums.94 However, equally integral to the Islamic tradition of the region is belief in more sober devotional practices that avoid the ritual indulgence of the senses and exuberant mystical Islam of the common believers. Today, the adherents of this tradition are called fundamentalists or Islamists. Rather than seeing themselves as heirs to a local reformist tradition, they appear to have turned their backs on the rich and complex historical legacy of Islam in northeastern Africa and to focus instead exclusively on the new international religious and politico-religious agendas of the Middle East.
Notes
1. Quoted in Ahmed 1985, 777.
2. Tamrat 1972, 50. For Ethiopia’s relations with Fatimid and then Mamluk Egypt, see Ehrlich 1994, 23–25, and Cuoq 1981, 93–114, 177–96.
3. Tamrat 1977, 139.
4. Ibid., 136–39
5. Braukämper 1977, 22–38.
6. Ibid.
7. Demoz 1972, 9.
8. Tamrat 1977, 143–49; Braukämper 1977; Abir 1965, 19–28.
9. Tamrat 1977, 154.
10. Ibid., 155; Ehrlich 1994, 27.
11. Abir 1965, 33; Martin 1975, 376.
12. Trimingham 1965, 91.
13. For accounts of the Imam’s movement, see Tamrat 1977, 164–81; Abir 1965, 69–107; Ehrlich 1994, 29–40.
14. Trimingham 1965, 101.
15. Ibid., 103. Also A. Ahmed 1992, 102–16; H. Ahmed 1992, 20, 29–30.
16. Hassen 1992, 77; Ahmed 1989, 17; 1990, 62; Marcus 1994, 50.
17. Ahmed 1985, 122–87. Trimingham 1965, 193–98.
18. Trimingham 1965, 112–13.
19. Abir 1985, 129–33; Fernyhough 1989, 107 ff.; Sheriff 1989, 161.
20. Abir 1985, 128–30; Sheriff 1989, 175.
21. Abir 1985, 127; Fernyhough 1989, 112.
22. Levtzion 1985, 192.
23. Fernyhough 1989, 108.
24. Levtzion 1985, 193.
25. Hassen 1990; Trimingham 1965, 199–205; Cerulli 1933, 2:191.
26. Trimingham 1965, 114; Hersi 1977, 244.
27. Ahmed 1985, 188–251; 1990, 63–65.
28. Ahmed 1989, 14.
29. Ahmed 1985, 282.
30. Ibid., 273.
31. Ibid., 283.
32. See below.
33. Ahmed 1985, 323–63; 1989; Hassen 1992, 89–96.
34. Hassen 1990, 156–58.
35. Cerulli 1933, 2:192.
36. Hassen 1990, 159–60.
37. Trimingham 1965, 113, 239, 245.
38. Hersi 1977, 246.
39. Ibid., 250; Samatar 1992a, 48–74.
40. Trimingham 1965, 241.
41. Martin 1992, 11–32.
42. Ibid., 14–15, 22.
43. Hersi 1977, 255; Trimingham 1965, 243.
44. Trimingham 1965, 243.
45. Martin 1976, 200.
46. Hassen 1990, 160–61.
47. Ahmed 1989; Hassen 1992, 96.
48. Marcus 1994, 104–15; Trimingham 1965, 130–31.
49. Sheik-Abdi 1992, 205; quotation from 211.
50. Ciise 1974, 127–28; Sheik-Abdi 1992, 180. My translation.
51. Ciise 1974, 293; Sheik-Abdi 1992, 175–76. My translation.
52. Trimingham 1965, 277.
53. Noor Muhammad 1972, 117.
54. Ibid., 117.
55. Ibid., 89–90, 97.
56. Trimingham 1965, 277–78.
57. Public Record Office, London, Colonial Office Records on Somaliland, vols. 42, 43, 140.
58. Kapteijns, unpublished 1996.
59. Sbacchi 1985, 162; Lewis 1965, 111.
60. Sbacchi 1985, 163.
61. Ibid., 162–64; Trimingham 1965, 137.
62. Marcus 1994, 130–63.
63. Ahmed 1995, 776–79; Markakis 1990, 73–74.
64. Markakis 1990, 74.
65. Ahmed 1995, 776–78.
66. Ibid., 780–81.
67. Ibid., 784, 788.
68. Ibid.
69. Africa South of the Sahara, 379.
70. Ofcansky and Berry 1993, 71. Cf. Africa South of the Sahara (375, 384): 39, 868, 501 in 1984; 49, 947, 400 in 1991. Of these, 45 percent were estimated to be Muslim and 40 percent Ethiopian Orthodox.
71. Markakis 1990, 60.
72. Ibid., 60–62.
73. Africa South of the Sahara, 369, 371.
74. Aqli 1993.
75. Amnesty International 1994; Watson 1994.
76. Trimingham 1965, 232, reports that in 1931 65 percent were Maliki, 26 percent Hanafi, and 9 percent Shafii.
77. Drewes 1983, 68–79; Cerulli 1971 published Harar’s historical chronicles.
78. Drewes 1983, 71.
79. Trimingham 1965, 249–51; Lewis 1980, 409–14; 1966, 75–81; 1955–56.
80. Lewis 1980, 412.
81. Lewis 1955–56; Hersi 1977, 18, 121–23; Trimingham 1965, 251; Tamrat 1972, 138.
82. Hersi 1977, 249.
83. Swayne 1985, 101, 260.
84. Cassanelli 1982, 135–46; Hersi 1977, 249–50. It is uncertain whether Baardheere was a Qadiri or a Ahmadi/Salihi settlement.
85. Swayne 1985, 91, 101, 129, 202–3.
86. Lewis 1965, 65–85; Jaamac Cumar Ciise 1976.
87. Kakwenzire 1976, 543–55; Lewis 1965, 103–4.
88. Ahmed 1989.
89. Lewis 1966, 75.
90. Ahmed 1990; Andrzejewski 1974a; Trimingham 1965, 247–56.
91. Cerulli 1933, 1:95.
92. Kapteijns 1995.
93. Ahmed 1990.
94. Mekouria 1988, 583, reports that the fourteenth-century amir Sabr al-Din boasted that he would conquer the capital of Christian Ethiopia to plant qat there.
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