Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan 9781588269874

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Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa

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Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan Haggai Erlich

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2010 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2010 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Erlikh, Hagai. Islam and Christianity in the horn of Africa : Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan / by Haggai Erlich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-713-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Islam—Relations—Christianity. 2. Christianity and other religions—Islam. 3. Islam—Ethiopia—History. 4. Christianity— Ethiopia—History. 5. Islam—Somalia—History. 6. Christianity— Somalia—History. 7. Islam—Sudan—History. 8. Christianity— Sudan—History. I. Title. BP172.E75 2010 297.2'830963—dc22 2009046170 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

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To Martha and Paul Henze

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Contents

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Preface

1 Muslims and Christians in the Horn of Africa:

Interactions Across the Centuries

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2 From Disastrous Confrontation to Pragmatic Friendship:

Ethiopia and Sudan, 1884–1898

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3 Radicalism, War, and Pragmatism:

Ethiopia and the Somalis, 1899–1920

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4 Africanism, Arabism, and Marxism:

Ethiopia and Sudan, 1930–1991

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5 The Return of Political Islam:

Ethiopia and Sudan, 1991–2009

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6 Nationalism and Conflict: Ethiopia and Somalia, 1943–1991

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7 Religion Returns to the Forefront:

Ethiopia and Somalia, 1991–2009

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8 Religion and Politics in the Horn: Options and Choices

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Bibliography Index About the Book

199 211 225

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RELATIONS BETWEEN Muslims and Christians, their mutual understanding or misunderstanding, continue to influence international and intracultural affairs on all continents. These relations were born in the Horn of Africa. Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan is an attempt to analyze the religious concepts underlying politics from the very first Islamic-Christian chapter to today’s violent dramas on the Somali-Ethiopian border. For the historian, the Horn of Africa is a good laboratory for studying the complexities of religious heritages. For the general observer, the Horn is one of the stages on which the global struggle between militants and moderates—on all sides—will be determined. In previous studies, I have followed the multifaceted relations among core countries of the Arab world, Middle Eastern Islam, and the Christian state of Ethiopia. In Ethiopia and the Middle East (1994), I presented the first meeting of Arabian Islam and Ethiopian Christianity in the early days of Prophet Muhammad and then surveyed major junctures, from the Mamluks in Egypt to medieval Yemen, and from the Ottomans to the years of Mussolini’s imperialist ambitions in Ethiopia and the Middle East. The same study went on to analyze how the initial religious concepts were transmitted and reinterpreted by modern nationalists throughout the twentieth century. In The Cross and the River: Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Nile (2002), I examined these aspects throughout Egypt’s long relations with Ethiopia and how they revolved for centuries around mutual dependency: Ethiopia as the main source of the Nile waters, Egypt as an Islamic state controlling the Coptic patriarchal center of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia: Islam, Christianity, and Politics Entwined (2007) dealt with Ethiopia’s rela-

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tions with a state embodying Islamic fundamentalism and material wealth, as well as the influence of those relations on Muslims in Ethiopia. In all these studies, concrete issues served as a platform for discussions of the conceptual worlds behind them. I analyzed how messages of Islam and of Christianity influenced unfolding realities and were influenced dialectically, and how this interplay provided options for both militancy and pragmatism. In the present book, I study this dynamism in the Horn of Africa. Sudan and Somalia are Ethiopia’s immediate Islamic neighbors. Their histories are inseparably connected to the history of the Christian state and to that of Ethiopia’s Muslims, and in both, radical Islam today is strong enough to have implications for Ethiopia, and indeed for global security. However, the history presented in this volume clearly shows that all the options still exist: that Islamic militancy and Christian Ethiopians’ siege mentality can work together to inflict misery on the region and beyond; and that religious legacies of openness and good neighborliness are equally powerful and can win a better future for the Muslims and Christians of the region. My research was assisted by three institutions. The Israel Science Foundation, founded by the Israeli Academy for Science and Humanities, and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development generously financed my four years of work on this book. It is my privilege to thank the leaders of these prestigious bodies. Having retired from Tel Aviv University, I continue my work at the Open University of Israel, contributing to its mission of spreading solid higher education and enjoying its support and its academic atmosphere. Sari Koren (in Israel), Ori Yehudai (in the United States), and Bekele Yimer (in Ethiopia) were most helpful in gathering materials. The book itself was influenced by intensive and significant input from Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel (who coauthored the section “The Sudanese Debate: African Islam, ‘Arab’ Islam, and Ethiopia” in Chapter 5); by Moshe Terdman, an authority on Somali affairs; and by Alessandro Gori of the Università degli Studi di Firenze, an expert on Islam and on other aspects of the Horn’s cultures. My ideas were also shaped during fruitful dialogues with Hussein Ahmed of Addis Ababa University and Zewde Gabre Selassie, two great scholars and dear friends who passed away this year. I also thank Shiferaw Bekele, Steven Kaplan, Meir Hatina, Avishai Ben-Dror, and the Hamburg team of the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, headed by Siegbert Uhlig. Israel Gershoni, a leading historian of the Middle East and the embodiment of scholarship, inspired me through endless discussions of our studies and human af-

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fairs. My editor, Gila Haimovic of the Open University, did the best possible with my English. Lynne Rienner was helpful in the same kind spirit that has characterized our twenty-five years of publishing together. My lovely wife, Yochi, a woman of independent career and mind, is my soul mate in all, including the work on this volume. This book is dedicated to Martha and Paul Henze, in deep gratitude for many years of warm friendship, and for sharing knowledge and care about the histories and peoples of the Horn of Africa. We lost Martha on 29 July 2009. —Haggai Erlich

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CHAPTER

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Muslims and Christians in the Horn of Africa: Interactions Across the Centuries

IN JUNE 2006, a radical, Taliban-like Islamic government connected to Al-Qaida emerged in Somalia. In December, it was toppled by an Ethiopian invasion, followed by two years of Ethiopian occupation. This drama, which underlines the global importance of religious relations in the Horn of Africa, was still unfolding after the Ethiopian evacuation of January 2009 and can be regarded as one of the focal points of today’s Islamic-Christian interaction. The local and historical backgrounds of this interaction are of universal significance, for it was in this corner of the world, in the Horn of Africa, that Islam and Christianity first met, and the legacies of that initial meeting continue to affect their relations even today. The dialectics between the mutual historical concepts and images of local Christians and Muslims and the relevance of these to the modern history of relations between Somalis, Ethiopians, and Sudanese are the subject of this book. Sudan and Somalia are Ethiopia’s immediate neighbors. Their histories have been inseparably connected to the history of both the Ethiopian Christian state and Ethiopia’s Muslims. And in both Sudan and Somalia today, radical Islam is strong enough to cause implications for Ethiopia, and indeed for global security. Muslims and Christians first met and talked in Ethiopia. The Prophet’s earliest followers, the sahaba, who were persecuted in Mecca by the local Arab pagans, were instructed by Muhammad in 615–616 to seek asylum with the Christian king, Najashi Ashama of al-Habasha (Ethiopia). Thus, the first hegira was to Christian Ethiopia, and Najashi Ashama, recognizing the refugees as believers in one God, gave them shelter and enabled them to prosper in his country. This episode, a detailed story of early Islam’s survival, redemption, and success, is in it-

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self outside the scope of this book (though I will refer to it throughout). What is of importance here is that it left a double message for Muslims. The Ethiopian Christian najashi’s generosity, his refusal to betray the first small community of Muslims to their Meccan persecutors, his befriending of and corresponding with the Prophet, and his contribution in other ways to Muhammad’s victory have continued to resonate among Muslims across the centuries. The Prophet was said to have dictated that his followers should “leave the Ethiopians alone as long as they leave you alone,” which for many ever since has been a message of flexibility and tolerance. For moderates, the Ethiopian benevolence and the Prophet’s attitude and teachings meant that Islam accepts non-Muslims and particularly Ethiopians as legitimate neighbors, provided they do not attack Islam or mistreat Muslims. This implies that living under a non-Islamic, yet righteous, government is legal, for the Prophet himself told the early Muslims to find shelter under the Christian najashi, whom he described as a just king “who oppresses no one.” Indeed Ethiopia’s saving of the sahaba not only gave the country a special place in Islam, but has also served as a message of universal significance, one often still applicable to other cases of Islamic-Christian dialogue. However, later in the story, according to Islamic sources, in the year 628, after Muhammad emerged victorious, the najashi answered the Prophet’s call and himself adopted Islam. But he was soon betrayed by his Christian subjects and died an isolated Muslim. This second part of the episode left a different, contradictory message that has been recycled ever since by less tolerant Muslims, namely, that once the Ethiopian king accepted the Prophet’s mission, Ethiopia became a part of the land of Islam. According to this interpretation, the najashi’s demise was the first defeat and humiliation of Islam, and Ethiopia’s betrayal was the ultimate sin of irtad, that is, of being a Muslim and returning to heresy. Ethiopia, it followed, must be redeemed under a Muslim king. Thus “Islam al-najashi” was, and still is, the goal and the slogan of the radical wing of Islam, ever in dispute with those preaching tolerance and acceptance. Beginning with the formative decades of modern Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia, this book examines their concrete relations and their mutual Islamic and Christian conceptualizations. The Ethiopian dimension of these relations was also nuanced and varied. The Ethiopian Christians’ conceptualization of Islam and of Muslims was similarly dichotomous, somewhat parallel to and dialectically interconnected with Islamic concepts of Ethiopia’s Christians. On the one hand, there was the ancient notion that the country’s politics and culture were anchored

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in the Middle East: in Egypt, but also in Jerusalem and in eastern Christianity. This basic connection was perhaps best manifested in the tradition of Ethiopia’s head of the church, the abuna, being an Egyptian monk (from the fourth century until 1950) and a bishop of the Egyptian Coptic Church. It was further cemented by the medieval ethos that Ethiopia’s emperors were descendants of King Solomon of Jerusalem. This essential linkage to the east, going to the very identity of and legitimizing the political order of Ethiopia, implied cultivating workable relations with Islamic rulers in the area. In previous studies, I dubbed this concept of vital proximity to Islamic countries the “Egyptian abuna.” On the other hand there was its polar opposite, a persistent legacy of suspicion, fear, and even demonization of Islam, the “Ahmad Gragn syndrome,” namely, the vivid, ever-recycled memory of the sixteenthcentury destruction of the Christian kingdom (1529–1543) by an Islamic holy warrior, Ahmad Gragn, from the town of Harar, who united many of the Muslims of the Horn of Africa, and was inspired and helped by Arab scholars and Ottoman commanders in Arabia. Throughout Ethiopian history, Christian-Islamic dialogues or confrontations always developed against the background of interplay between these dichotomous concepts: that of leaving Ethiopians alone opposed to Islam al-najashi on the Islamic side, and that of the Egyptian abuna as opposed to the Ahmad Gragn syndrome on the Christian one. Naturally, an emphasis on the negative by one side would dialectically encourage the militancy of the other, and vice versa.1 In Chapter 2, I discuss relations between Ethiopia and Sudan between 1884 and 1898. In this period, the Sudanese were reborn as a modern community through the Mahdiyya, one of the more effective movements for Islamic political revival. The movement, led by Muhammad Ahmad, the messianic, self-proclaimed Mahdi (literally, “guided [by God]”), and by his successor Khalifa (Caliph) ‘Abdallah al-Ta‘aishi, managed to overcome local tribalism, free the land of Egyptian occupation, and build an independent, militant Islamic state. It thus not only managed to herald Sudanese modern awareness, but also strove to correct, purify, and lead the entire Muslim world. It was committed to jihad against the Westernizing of Muslim countries, primarily Egypt, and was finally destroyed by the British occupiers of the land of the Nile. As a local movement with universal aspirations, the Mahdiyya was also concerned with neighboring Ethiopia. In the period of the European imperialist “scramble for Africa,” the Mahdiyya had dilemmas about this Christian state. The Mahdists’ concrete policies, ever inspired by interpretations of the Prophet’s history, were directly influenced by the initial

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Islamic dichotomy regarding Ethiopia. During the period discussed, they experienced all the conceptual and practical options and came full circle, from leaving the Ethiopians alone as legitimate neighbors to insisting on Islam al-najashi, to finally seeking an alliance with and even salvation from the Christian king of Ethiopia. Chapter 3 examines Ethio-Somali relations during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It begins in 1899, when the IslamicChristian political dynamic shifted from the Sudanese Mahdist to the Ethio-Somali theater. By that time, the Somali-speakers had been occupied and divided by European powers and by Ethiopia. Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan, nicknamed by the British the “Mad Mullah,” worked to unite Somalis under his banner of militant Islam, a somewhat similar story to that which had unfolded in Sudan. His success, however, was less than that of the Sudanese Mahdiyya. Foreign occupation and weak social cohesion among Somalis were among the reasons for his failure. However, the sayyid’s twenty-year struggle proved to be the formative period of Somali self-awareness and modern nationalism. In studying the Ethiopian dimension of the sayyid’s story, I follow his concepts of the Christian neighbor and occupier. Initially connected to the more radical wing of universal Islamic ideas, the sayyid began his mission conceiving of Christian Ethiopians as his ultimate enemies. However, facing reality, he began to pursue other options and, like the Mahdists in their time, he also came round the full conceptual circle. Indeed, this Somali holy warrior finally ended as a refugee, seeking asylum in Christian Ethiopia, claiming that he himself was an Ethiopian Muslim. During the period discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Ethiopia’s Christian leaders and rulers, like their Islamic Sudanese and Somali counterparts, wavered between their options and concepts. Each had his own emphasis and during the period there were significant changes in the state’s attitudes toward Islam and Islamic neighbors. Emperor Yohannes IV, 1872–1889, and Emperor Menelik II, 1889–1913, both worked to strengthen Christian dominance, but were also ready to switch from one concept to its opposite. Yohannes was more of a crusader in the spirit of the Ahmad Gragn syndrome, and Mahdist jihadism aroused in him a sense of siege and Christian militancy. Yet he was also ready, when circumstances dictated, to resort to moderate terms of mutual understanding with the Sudanese. Menelik was more of a self-assured conqueror, who occupied the Somali-inhabited Ogaden desert and vast areas inhabited by other local peoples. He developed into a more sophisticated diplomat, better able, paternalistically and benevolently, to open toward Islam—and in our case toward Somalis and Sudanese—within his

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Christian empire and without. His successor on the throne of Ethiopia, his grandson Lij Iyasu, the son of a converted Muslim, himself returned to Islam and apparently aimed, together with the Somali sayyid, to achieve a total revolution in the Horn of Africa and in Ethiopia’s identity and structure. He was consequently deposed in 1916, and replaced by a coalition headed by the future emperor Haile Selassie, who would restore Christian hegemony, revive the integration of the cross and the crown, and push Ethiopia’s Muslims and his Somali subjects back to a deprived periphery. These late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century episodes provide the essential background to today’s developments, when religions are again being revived as political identities. Perhaps the more important lesson to be derived from the first part of this book is that religions carry all options. Muslims and Christians, even those remembered as uncompromising militants, could and did resort, as we shall see, to more than one concept of themselves and of others. Our story of religions and politics in the Horn of Africa was interrupted more or less at the point at which we end Chapter 3. This was for two reasons. First, the Sudanese and the Somalis lost much of their independent political abilities. The Sudan was occupied by the British from 1898 to 1956 and the colonizers, conceiving of the Sudan as their safe base along the Nile, allowed the locals only a small measure of autonomy. The Somalis, after the end of the sayyid’s movement, showed little ability to overcome their sociopolitical fragmentation. They remained divided by the Italians and British until 1960, when the two colonies were declared independent and united to form present-day Somalia. The French Somali area became the separate state of Djibouti and remains outside our discussion. A good part of the Somali people remained under Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden desert, which, claimed by Somalia, would remain a bone of contention. Political relations among the Sudanese, Ethiopians, and Somalis, as a regional system of independent partners, were only resumed in the 1950s and early 1960s. The second reason was that Islam, as a political identity, was marginalized during these periods and until the late 1980s. Most of the early modern movements for universal Islamic revival in the Horn and elsewhere became the spiritual backbone of different societies and states. In our context, the Mahdiyya contributed to the shaping of modern Sudan and the sayyid’s movement remained a formative event of Somali nationalism. Other similar cases illustrate how ideas of an all-Islamic, global nation were channeled through anticolonial and other dynamisms into spheres of particular separateness. Modern nationalisms in most Is-

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lamic societies worked to redefine nearly everything, politics included. Islam, however, never bowed out. What was a most effective comprehensive identity since the seventh century has remained centrally relevant even when concepts, institutions, and energies of secular nationalism have seemed uppermost. In fact, the principal tension between those coexisting identities, their different values and legacies, can, to a large extent, explain the crisis in modern Islamic societies. The return of political Islam in our generation sharpens this inner tension and energizes arguments and conflicts throughout the Muslim world. In our story of the Sudanese and the Somalis, the forceful revival of political Islam can be dated to the 1980s. Prior to that and from the end of the Mahdiyya and of the sayyid’s movement, their inner dialogues, their anticolonial struggle, and their relations with Ethiopia were conducted mainly in the terminology of modern nationalism, itself varied. We shall follow some of this changing terminology in Chapters 4 and 6. However, since the final decade of the twentieth century, Islam has been back in full political momentum in the Horn of Africa, as discussed in Chapters 5 and 7. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze Sudanese-Ethiopian relations, together with the terminology and concepts underlying them, during three periods. Chapter 4 begins with the period of Haile Selassie from 1930 to 1974, during which, in 1956, Sudan gained independence. The major issues were the problems of Eritrea and of southern Sudan. In dealing with these, both sides faltered between new, shared concepts of modern African coexistence and the more antagonistic ones of revolutionary Arabism, on the one hand, and Ethiopian imperial domination, on the other. The second period, Mangistu’s regime between 1974 and 1991, witnessed the deterioration of relations as well as a change in the conceptual language. The interaction was now inspired by communist and socialist terminology, but also by African concepts of affinity and cooperation. However, in spite of the secular language used during these two periods, occasional resorting to religious terminology suggests that these modern dichotomies derived also from the initial, basic IslamicChristian ideas. The revival of political Islam in Sudan beginning in the mid-1980s and the resurfacing of religions in Ethiopia’s political sphere with the fall of Mangistu ushered in today’s return to the old mutual Islamic and Christian conceptualization. Chapter 5 analyzes the renewed interpretations and reinterpretations of the formative Islamic-Christian legacies since 1991. It follows the internal discussions among Sudanese and among Ethiopians about their own identities, as they revolve around the story of the najashi and the

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Prophet and around the legacy of Ahmad Gragn and similar formative memories. Here again, like in the days of the Mahdi, the khalifa, Yohannes, and Menelik, the picture reflected is multi-optional. The varied reservoirs of religious legacies continue to offer both neighborliness and enmity. Shaikh Hasan al-Turabi, for example, leader of Sudanese Islamic militancy and an associate of Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, has lately begun to preach intrareligious African neighborliness. As these lines are written, the forces on both sides that strive for Ethio-Sudanese stability and a return to the corresponding moderate historical messages seem, for now, to have the upper hand. Chapters 6 and 7 return to the Ethiopian-Somali story and follow similar periodization, but offer less optimism. The issues dividing these countries are far more difficult to resolve than those between Ethiopia and Sudan. For the Somalis, Ethiopia is an occupier of the vast Somalipopulated Ogaden, an integral part of their national identity. For many Ethiopians, the Somalis are the descendants of Ahmad Gragn, ever ready to destabilize southern Ethiopia. During the periods discussed in these chapters, 1943–1991 and 1991–2009, active hostilities erupted between the two sides. The conceptual sphere and its language, first more secular, then readdressing the old religious legacies, were harsher than in the Sudanese case. The evolution of the terminology and mutual images follows concrete developments and again, the picture is far from one-dimensional. As always, it is easier to observe the impact of Islamic-Christian legacies of suspicion and hostility. On the Ethiopian side, the Ahmad Gragn syndrome was to a great extent behind the decision to invade Mogadishu in December 2006. For the greater Islamic and the Somali side, the invasion inspired a momentous conceptual demonization of Ethiopia as the ultimate historical enemy of Islam. For the purpose of this demonization, the initial meeting point between Islam and Christianity was reconsidered and changed by the radicals from the elegant story of the Prophet and the najashi to a different episode. According to Islamic tradition, Abraha al-Ashram, an Ethiopian ruler of pre-Islamic Yemen, tried in A.D. 570 to demolish the Ka‘ba shrine in Mecca and divert the local Arabs to a church he had built in San’a. The episode, alluded to in the Quran, was eternalized in the tradition that an Ethiopian would eventually destroy the Ka‘ba, which, because of its extremely negative message, had hitherto rarely been mentioned. But today, for the radicals in the greater Islamic world and in Somalia, Ethiopia’s leader, Meles Zenawi, is widely depicted as Abraha, the would-be Ethiopian destroyer of Islamic holiness. However, the language and terms of compromise and mutual ac-

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ceptance have also been there all along. Shaikh Ahmad Shaykh Sharif, who headed the Somali militant Islamic government of mid-2006, has meanwhile also come the full conceptual circle and, when elected president in January 2009, first went to Ethiopia to seek support against the Somali holy warriors. Like in the times of the sayyid, Menelik, and Lij Iyasu, so too among Ethiopians and Somalis of today, where voices of moderation are also clearly heard. Many of the moderates, in their struggle against enmity, continue to retrieve from the same reservoirs of Islamic and Christian concepts those that inspire good neighborliness. In trying to better understand and accept the “other,” they are primarily working to define the Somali and the Ethiopian selves in more open terms. Led now by the educated classes, all connected to Middle Eastern and global developments, Islam is again concretely behind much of the political story. Relating back to the formative years, and reconnecting with and reinterpreting the initial Islamic concepts of Ethiopia and Ethiopians, Islamic legacies are today even more dichotomous and polarized. Radicals among Sudanese or Somalis, more connected to Middle Eastern Islamic militancy, have deepened their demonization of Christian Ethiopians. In so doing, they revive and resort to demonizing traditions never referred to by the Mahdists or the Somali followers of the sayyid. Moderates, more in the spirit of local African Islamic traditions and of flexible orthodoxy, are more ready to accept others, to compromise with the region’s diversity, and to legitimize constructive neighborliness with Christians. Ethiopian Christianity, as a political identity, also experienced transformations throughout the twentieth century. Ethiopia emerged victorious from the dramas of the late nineteenth century. The stemming of European imperialism and Ethiopia’s conquests and annexations of Islamic societies assured its survival as an independent Christian empire. With the exception of the 1936–1941 conquest by Mussolini, the country was spared the yoke of foreign domination. Though Muslims perhaps constituted half of Ethiopia’s population, in the eyes of Christians, being Ethiopian and being Christian remained nearly synonymous and in practice were combined until the end of Haile Selassie’s rule in 1974. Christianity and the church continued to be identified with imperial order and political hegemony. Ethiopia’s leadership and upper classes continued to conceptualize themselves and understand others through this old Ethiopian Christian prism. Victory of the traditional, however, also came with a price. Ethiopia did not benefit from what the anticolonial struggles contributed to other

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societies in Africa and Asia, namely, modernization and social change. Rather, Ethiopia continued to recycle old values and structures; its combination of cross and crown helped little on the road to progress and development. The victory of the traditional proved even more costly with the 1974 revolution and the Mangistu regime (1974–1991). Borrowing from irrelevant materialistic, communist ideologies, the new leaders seemed to identify religiosity with backwardness. They discouraged Christianity and Islam on equal terms, but in practice, all Ethiopians, including the new leaders, were never really uprooted from the religious soul of their country. Christianity and Islam survived and regained momentum after the ousting of Mangistu and the establishment of a new regime, which has attempted to rebuild Ethiopia on the basis of its diversity. Today’s Ethiopia is restructured along ethnic lines composed of ethnic states, and experiences active tensions between the main ethniclinguistic groups. No less vivid, however, is the political revival of religiosity. Ethiopia’s Muslims today are re-energized and successfully striving to fulfill their identity in Ethiopia as they rebuild their connections to the core countries of Islam. We shall address their dilemmas as well as the simultaneous revival of Christianity in Ethiopia, and the dialectical relations between them. Islamic-Christian relations, together with the ethnic question, are the main issues reshaping today’s Ethiopia. They are integrally combined with the momentum of political Islam in Sudan and in Somalia. In both countries, the main internal political arguments revolve around the meaning of Islam, and Sudanese and Somalis participate in these with their concepts of Ethiopia often in mind.

Note 1. See Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East; The Cross and the River; and Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia; Kabha and Erlich, “Al-Ahbash and Wahhabiyya.”

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CHAPTER

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From Disastrous Confrontation to Pragmatic Friendship: Ethiopia and Sudan, 1884–1898

THE MAHDIYYA MOVEMENT of the Sudan shaped the history of that country between 1884 and 1898. It succeeded in expelling the Egyptians who had occupied the Sudan since 1820 (capturing Khartoum on 26 January 1885) and in establishing an independent state, which attempted to fulfill messages of political, militant Islam. Though finally destroyed by the British, the Mahdiyya remained the formative experience of the modern Sudanese identity, and its legacies continue to influence the history of Sudan and its relations with its neighbors to this day. In its time, the Mahdist state also had a tremendous impact on the history of Ethiopia in its formative period as a modern state. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Ethiopia managed to reunite, to stem Western imperialism, to shift its center from Tigre in the north to Shoa in the south, to double its own territory, and to secure its independence. Ethiopia’s revival as an empire was integrally related to the strengthening of the political dimensions of its Christianity. Much of the dynamism underlying the relations between the two states can be traced to border issues, center-periphery relations, and personal rivalries and jealousies within both the Sudanese Mahdiyya and Ethiopia. No less important was the involvement of the British, the Egyptians, and the newly arrived Italians. This chapter will not do justice to all these issues. 1 The relations between the Mahdiyya and Ethiopia of emperors Yohannes IV of Tigre (1872–1889) and Menelik II of Shoa (1889–1913) were also a story of an Islamic-Christian encounter and confrontation, revolving around and inspired by the dichotomous conceptual mutuality presented in Chapter 1. In pursuing their concrete interests and in facing their political dilemmas, policymakers on both sides were in constant dialogue with their own histori-

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cal-religious concepts of the “self” and of the “other.” A study of these dialogues reveals that messages of history, even when sanctioned by religious interpretations, are never truly one-dimensional.

Yohannes and the Mahdi, the Ahmad Gragn Syndrome, and Islam al-Najashi

Ethiopia’s Emperor Yohannes IV of Tigre worked to deepen the Christian connection to the Islamic Middle East. He managed to arrange, for the first time in history, for four bishops to be sent to Ethiopia from Egypt (1881), and to obtain permission from the Ottomans to initiate modern Ethiopian building in Jerusalem. However, it seems that he failed to realize the complexity of Islam or to observe its softer Ethiopian dimensions. His main relevant, formative experience was his confrontation with the Egypt of Khedive Isma‘il. The latter was clearly aggressive toward Ethiopia. He sought to establish an African empire including the Sudan and the Red Sea, and the destruction of an Ethiopia located on the bridge between those areas, namely the Tigrean north. The war between Yohannes and the Egyptians (initially, frontal battles, 1875–1876, later, a war of attrition in the future Eritrea) was crucial for the histories of both countries. From the Egyptian point of view, it was basically not a religious war. Isma‘il (and his successors) were motivated, rather, by modern concepts of Egyptian imperial expansionism; their failure in Africa contributed to the early emergence of modern Egyptian nationalism. They seldom resorted to Islamic political legacies and were happy to hire Christian European mercenaries and promote Christian antislavery concepts where this helped to advance their imperial enterprise in Africa. Indeed, in the Sudan, this kind of Egyptian involvement helped the Mahdiyya to depict Egyptians as infidels, as the worst enemies of Islam. Yohannes, for his part, did not see the difference; he viewed the Egyptians from the standpoint of a besieged crusader. His response to Isma‘il’s aggression was like to a new Ahmad Gragn, and he initiated mass Christianization of Muslims under his rule. By 1880, over five hundred thousand Oromo Muslims and some fifty thousand Jabarti (Muslims who spoke Amharic or Tigrinya) were said to have been coerced to abandon their faith.2 Well before he met a true movement of political Islam, the Mahdiyya, Yohannes did not “leave” his Muslims “alone,” and did not behave like the “righteous Najashi.”3 In practice, in June 1884, Yohannes directly provoked the Mahdiyya by signing the Hewett treaty with the British (now masters

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of Egypt) and undertaking to relieve the Egyptian garrisons in eastern Sudan from the Mahdist siege. In February 1885, his men defeated the Mahdists in Qallabat and by July, five garrisons had been successfully liberated.4 However, for strategic reasons, he was simultaneously also ready to initiate a dialogue with the rising Islamic movement. Two months after the Mahdist conquest of Khartoum, in March 1885, just after the Italians suddenly landed in Massawa (in February), Yohannes recognized the Mahdist government in the disputed area of Qallabat (which he had claimed in 1878) and sent appeasing letters to the local Mahdist commander, Amir Wad Arbab. He then wrote to the Mahdi. His letter has been lost, but from the Mahdi’s reply it is clear that it was a very polite request to learn about the Mahdiyya firsthand. The letter was accompanied by gifts, a diplomatic gesture no doubt aimed at reaching some mutual understanding with the new, dynamic Muslim neighbor.5 The Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, saw himself as a direct successor of the Prophet in a time of renewed divine revelation, sent by God to save Islam. He envisioned his mission and modeled his career on that of Muhammad. At home, he built institutions after the initial model of Medina and Mecca, and called his followers ansar (supporters), like the sahaba (friends) and ansar of the Prophet. His prophetic inspiration, rather than the established Islamic schools of law which he abolished, was declared the only source of legal authority.6 A central theme in his teaching and in his building a parallel with the Prophet was his call from the very beginning to hegira, a flight for the faith from the infidels to his camp, and then the waging of a holy war for the true Islam. In 1881, he began to organize his group of followers by emigrating to the Nuba Mountains, and after the conquest of Khartoum from the Egyptians, he moved his capital to Umm Durman.7 The concept of the hegira undoubtedly made the notion of Ethiopia, the land of the first hegira, and of the role of the righteous najashi, very much alive in the Mahdi’s mind. Well educated as an Islamic scholar and always viewing the world in theological-historical terms, the Mahdi was aware of Muhammad’s friendship with the najashi. He seems to have really wanted a righteous Ethiopian najashi in his time as well, a neighbor who would be helpful during his struggle, and a king who would become his Muslim follower after his victory. Though he undoubtedly knew that Yohannes was not a savior of Islam—many refugees from Yohannes’s anti-Islamic persecutions had fled to Sudan— he preferred to ignore this fact. The Mahdi, no doubt, reread the Prophet’s letter to Najashi Ashama of A.D. 628:

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In the name of God the merciful and the compassionate. Muhammad, the apostle of God, to Najashi Ashama, king of Abyssinia, greetings. . . . I testify that Jesus, the son of Mary, is the Spirit and the Word of God, and that He sent them down to Mary, the blessed and the immaculate virgin, and she conceived. He created Jesus of his own spirit and made Him live by His breath. . . . I summon thee to worship the one God. . . . Accept my mission, follow me, and become one of my disciples. For I am the Apostle of God. . . . Set aside the pride of thy sovereignty . . . and if you refuse you will be responsible for the guilt of your Christian people.8

On 16 June 1885, the Mahdi wrote to Yohannes. Like the Prophet in his time, he explained that Islam had replaced all other religions including Christianity. He added that Islam had deteriorated because of the infidel Egyptians (he called them Turks), and that he, the Mahdi, had been sent by God to restore Islam. He reminded Yohannes that God had given victory to Islam over the kingdoms of the infidels in the days of the Prophet, and that this would inevitably happen now. Then in a conciliatory tone, he praised Yohannes for trying to understand the truth of the Mahdi: Know that we like your being a modest listener, and that I think well of you because you insisted on having a letter from me, so we can explain to you what we are all about. This is the action of a reasonable and justice-seeking person. So I write you this letter as a response to your request and out of pleasure for your gifts, and wishing you all the best and calling on you to become a Muslim, be Muslim.

The Mahdi addressed this letter to “Yuhanna ‘azim al-habasha,” the potentate of the Ethiopians, and avoided calling him al-najashi, as the Prophet had called Ashama. In the Mahdi’s mind, for Yohannes to earn that title he had to convert and adopt his true Islam: The Lord gave you the honor to live in the prophetic period of my appearance as a caliph of our prophet Muhammad. So like your predecessor the najashi, God bless him, who, when the Lord gave him the honor to live in the same time of our Prophet Muhammad, trusted and befriended him and sent him the sahaba. And the king of this world did not prevent him from doing justice, and he was given all honor by the Prophet Muhammad. And when he [the najashi], God bless him, died in his land, the Prophet prayed for him in Medina and praised his place in Islam. . . . And there were many hadith and wonderful stories on his high place with the Lord, because he followed the Prophet. I pray to the Lord who made you live in this blessed time that He will make you a successor to your predecessor by following me, and that He will lead you out of the darkness of the infidels to the light of the true belief.

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The Mahdi then ended his letter with a threat (similar to Muhammad’s to the najashi): “but if you refuse . . . it will be your fault and the fault of your followers, for it is inevitable that you will fall into our hands.”9 Though ending with a threat, the Mahdi’s letter was otherwise not hostile. Compared with his letters to the Egyptian khedive and the Ottoman sultan in the same period, it was quite cordial. On the same day, the Mahdi also wrote Wad Arbab, ordering him to take care with the Ethiopians. Earlier, in March and April, he had sent a similar order to his men who were besieging the Egyptians in Al-Jira, instructing them to annihilate these “enemies of God” (the Egyptians), but to confine themselves to defensive measures against the Ethiopians and arrest Sudanese outlaws who penetrated their territory.10 It seems that the Mahdi wanted to believe that eventually Yohannes would peacefully see the light, like Najashi Ashama in his time. Essentially, his letter was an invitation to continue a dialogue rather than an operative, immediate threat. The Mahdiyya was primarily a movement aimed at redeeming Islam, and the Mahdi’s vision was to march on Mecca, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Baghdad.11 Only later, if at all, would he lead a movement to save the entire world, of which he knew little.12 Ethiopia was part of the world he did know, a land of ancient relevance to Islam and of the same River Nile and border issues. But was Ethiopia a lost part of the land of Islam and therefore an immediate priority in his mind? Or was it a special Christian “other” deserving of tolerance and patience? This conceptual dilemma was to influence the confrontation in the following years, and be influenced by it.

The Khalifa Between Leaving the Ethiopians Alone and Jihad

Six days after sending the letter, on 22 June 1885, the Mahdi died. His successor, Khalifa ‘Abdallah al-Ta‘aishi, was to lead the Mahdiyya to its end. Far from enjoying the absolute authority of the Mahdi, he had to conduct more earthly politics and change his attitudes according to internal rivalries and external constraints. In the Ethiopian context, it seems, he initially opted to continue the Mahdi’s line of patience and nonviolence. When, in September 1885, the khalifa heard from his amir in the Red Sea coastal area, ‘Uthman Diqna, that he was spreading the word of the Mahdiyya among Muslim tribesmen in the direction of Keren and Massawa (Eritrea in 1890), he advised him to avoid confrontation with Ras Alula, the Ethiopian governor of the adjacent Mareb Melash. Ordering ‘Uthman to return to fight the British and the Egyp-

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tians as first priority, the khalifa resorted to the ultimate Islamic legacy of grace to Ethiopia and reminded the amir of the hadith, “Leave the Ethiopians alone as long as they leave you alone”: “We heard the news of your advance to Ethiopia . . . but my beloved, things should be arranged according to their importance. . . . Do not attach great importance to the Ethiopian affair . . . leave the Ethiopians and do not enter their country now.”13 The dynamism of events along the borderlands was to influence the conceptual approach of both the khalifa and Yohannes. The Ethiopian commitment to save the Egyptian garrisons and the initiatives of local commanders on both sides led to military confrontations along the vast areas between the Matamma-Qallabat and Karan-Kassala sections. On 23 September 1885, Ras Alula inflicted a humiliating defeat at Kufit on ‘Uthman Diqna (the khalifa’s order to avoid the Ethiopians came too late),14 and in that same month, Negus Takla-Haimanot (Ras Adar in Mahdist writings15), king of Gojjam, penetrated the Qallabat area and gave refuge to many Sudanese who had escaped the Mahdists (among them the last Egyptian governor of Qallabat). Takla-Haimanot also passed on to Amir Wad Arbab, his Mahdist rival in that section, the reply from Yohannes to the Mahdi’s letter. The Ethiopian emperor made a mockery of the call to adopt Islam and provocatively called on the Sudanese Mahdi to himself convert to Christianity, “the true religion and the right path.”16 Zewde Gabre-Sellassie, in his authoritative study of Yohannes, found a presumed response (the dates were not clear): “Thou hast written to me: I am a great Prophet: I will seek no strife with thee; may peace reign between us. I know not whether it lies with the will of God that we make war upon each other. Yet what follows thence? Do we not war with each other in our hearts? I am a Christian and thou a Muslim. Where I am, there canst not thou be. There, where thou art, can I not live in peace.”17 After the Ethiopian victory at Kufit, the Ethiopian-Mahdist confrontation in the Kassala-Massawa section became less active. Alula’s attempt in late 1886 to take Kassala from ‘Uthman Diqna’s men failed and Ethiopian attention was diverted to facing the Italians in Massawa. The Matamma-Qallabat section, however, heated up. As the ansar continued raiding the Ethiopian side in November 1885, Wad Arbab was authorized by the khalifa to penetrate Ethiopian territory and burn a monastic church said to be an Ethiopian military base. 18 In January 1887, Negus Takla-Haimanot invaded Qallabat, killed Wad Arbab, put his men to flight, and raided as deep as Qadarif. According to the Ethiopian historian Heruy Walda-Selasse, he then received Yohannes’s

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instructions: “You know very well that they burnt our churches, slaughtered our wise fathers. Make sure that no man remains alive. Spare the women and children.” Takla-Haimanot obeyed and all the captives were executed. 19 Retiring to Ethiopian territory, Takla-Haimanot sent the khalifa in Umm Durman four hides full of sand, telling him that his army was as numerous as the grains of sand that he sent him, and that he would shortly come and take the Sudan.20 The humiliating Ethiopian victory led the khalifa and his men to discuss their Ethiopian strategy. Were they to follow the hadith of leaving the Ethiopians alone or should they fight them to reclaim Ethiopia for Islam? From the writings of the Mahdists’ chief historian, Isma‘il bin ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Kordofani, it is clear that the debate revolved around the need to interpret contemporary developments in light of the old legacies. Yohannes, they concluded, was not “leaving us alone”: When Yuhanna established himself on the Ethiopian throne he became arrogant . . . and he invaded Islamic territory . . . and conquered from the land of Islam and he is the most hateful of the Ethiopians towards Islam. . . . And when God sent the Mahdi, . . . he wrote to Yuhanna calling him to join God, but he answered in an ugly way and sent his armies to fight [the Mahdiyya]. And from this it is clear to anyone who has the fire of God in him that fighting the Ethiopians today is not only a legal option, but a major duty for the Islamic nation. This is because they went out of their borders and they did not leave the people of Islam alone. So it is permissible for us to fight them in accordance with the saying of the Prophet, “Leave the Ethiopians alone as long as they leave you alone” . . . and if they do not, as happened with Yuhanna and his aggression towards the land of Islam, so do not leave them alone, oh you the people of Islam, but fight them.21

Takla-Haimanot’s victory over Wad Arbab occurred in the same month that Ras Alula destroyed an Italian battalion near Massawa at Dogali, and Ras Makonnen conquered and annexed the old Islamic capital of Harar to Menelik’s kingdom of Shoa.22 The image of Ethiopia as a strong power did not escape the Mahdist historian: “Know that this nation, I mean the Ethiopian nation, are of the ancient nations, most famous in bravery, their numbers and strength. And how brave [they are] in wars, their men storming like rivers of iron, confronting death as if it would not matter, and listening only to the talk of their sword.”23 According to Joseph Ohrwalder (who was a prisoner of the Mahdists) and to Walda-Selasse, a popular Sudanese prophecy circulated: that “the Abyssinians should come to Khartum; that their horses should wade knee-deep in blood, and that the King should tether his

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horse to the solitary tree on the White Nile near Khartum.”24 After the Ethiopian annihilation of Wad Arbab, argued the Sudanese historian alQaddal, the discussion in Umm Durman about the legacy to “leave the Ethiopians alone” ended.25 However, it seems that the khalifa still preferred to concentrate on his other strategic priorities. The military humiliation, to be sure, had to be answered by some threat, as well as by repeating the call to Yohannes to adopt the Islam of the Mahdi, but a new letter from the khalifa, written and sent in January or February 1887, was practically an appeal for a concrete interim arrangement: From the servant of God, the Khalifa Abdallahi to the great of Ethiopia [‘azim al-habasha], Yuhanna. . . . I am the Khalifa of the Mahdi who has come to enforce the religion of Islam and summon you to the truth. . . . If you confess this and say there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the prophet of God . . . you shall be protected, welcomed and honored. You shall become as a brother to us, and we shall share alike. True affection will spring up between us, and you shall be safe; but if you refuse this summons and reject the true religion, then the result will be on your own head.

Like the Mahdi, the khalifa also refrained from calling Yohannes alnajashi. He was to earn that title only after converting to Islam. The letter went on: Up to the present time, I have ever followed the commandments of our lord the Prophet, who said, “Leave the Ethiopians alone as long as they leave you alone,” and that is why I refrained from fighting you; but it now appears to me that you are the cause of the breaking of peace by your oppression and ill-treatment of the weak Muslims who live near the frontiers of your country, inasmuch as you have killed and captured many of them, and have given refuge to those who have deserted the religion. . . . I have therefore sent a portion of my army to your frontier to watch your proceedings. If you wish for peace then you must return the captives you have taken. . . . You must also cease your raids on our frontier, and you must keep your men within your boundary. If you do what I tell you, then I will cease to wage war against you, and will instruct my army not to enter your country. Again, I repeat, if you accept the religion of Islam and follow the teaching of the Mahdiyya, then you will be most welcome and gain honor in the world to come, but if you refuse, then you must expect nothing but war.26

It is not clear if the khalifa really still hoped that Yohannes would first “leave us alone” and second, eventually, follow his predecessor the najashi as the beloved Muslim friend of the Prophet. But he surely had

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other strategic priorities than waging a costly war on the Ethiopians, and it seems that their special place in Islamic history did guide him toward restraint. “The Abyssinian sovereign,” Holt analyzed the message, “was summoned to accept Islam. The rest of the letter indicates that this was a diplomatic formality rather than a serious demand.”27 The khalifa also sent letters of warning, indharat, to other rulers, calling on them to follow the Islam of the Mahdiyya.28 His indhar, practically an ultimatum, to the Egyptian khedive and then to the Ottoman sultan was far harsher than to Yohannes. In dealing with Ethiopia, the khalifa was ready to swallow his pride and, for a while, seek no revenge. In fact, in his letter, the khalifa virtually recognized Ethiopia—“your country”—and at least for the time being was ready to cultivate pragmatic neighborliness with it. Yohannes also had other priorities in 1887 than fighting the Sudanese, but he did not bother to enter into a dialogue with the khalifa. He left it to local dynamisms along the frontier as well as to internal affairs in both camps to determine matters. Yohannes was threatened by the Italians (who were seeking to avenge Dogali), and Negus TaklaHaimanot and Negus Menelik were defying his authority. TaklaHaimanot continued his pressure on the Mahdists in the Matamma-Qallabat section, now under Amir Yunis al-Dikyam, who for his part added to the local fire by maltreating Ethiopian traders and sending a thousand of them as captives to Umm Durman.29 In September 1887, the khalifa responded to the deterioration by writing another indhar to Yohannes30 and summoning the Mahdiyya’s best general, Hamdan Abu ‘Anja, to prepare to fight the Ethiopians. Abu ‘Anja was called to the capital in April 1887, dispatched to Qallabat in October, and there assembled a substantial army. The Ethiopians now suffered inferiority in that section. In late 1887 and early 1888, their imperial forces were concentrated between Asmara and Massawa, where they faced a well-equipped Italian expedition force. It was a fitting moment for the khalifa to once again rethink, and now abandon, the legacy of “leaving the Ethiopians alone.” On 5 January 1888, he published a “prophetic vision” he had experienced, in which “the Prophet said to me, ‘You are permitted to raid the Abyssinians in their land.’ So we commanded Hamdan Abu ‘Anja to raid them. . . . He raided them in the midst of their land and was victorious. . . . Then the Prophet gave the battle cry against the Abyssinians repeatedly and we gave the battle cry with him.”31 Departing from the legacy of patience and grace toward Ethiopia and legitimizing—for the first time, clearly and openly—a war on it required the claim that permission came directly from the Prophet. The

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Mahdi’s prophetic vision, as noted, had been proclaimed as the only source of legal authority. It was indeed a matter of principle. Some 360 years earlier, a similar prophetic vision had legitimized Ahmad Gragn’s jihad on Ethiopia.32 On 6 January 1888, Abu ‘Anja defeated Takla-Haimanot’s army and on 23 January he invaded the historic Ethiopian capital of Gondar. His men massacred all those who failed to flee, burnt all the churches, and returned to Sudanese soil.33 Thus began a disastrous year for Yohannes. The khalifa, for his part, still had worries and mixed feelings. Popular rumor had it that Abu ‘Anja would be punished for invading Ethiopia. According to Heruy Walda-Selasse, the khalifa felt insecure because he had not obeyed the Prophet’s order that Muslims were not to wage war or fight against the Ethiopians. However, when twelve severed heads of Ethiopian officials from Gondar reached Omdurman, he was relieved.34 Militarily much more confident now, he did not fully dismiss the hope that Yohannes would peacefully follow in the footsteps of the najashi. Aiming first to defeat the Egyptians and the British to the north, the khalifa was still apparently interested in avoiding all-out war with Ethiopia. In February–March 1888, he once again wrote to Yohannes: You are a miserable weak servant. You are incapable of doing yourself the slightest good or harm. . . . The Mahdi wrote you and tried to induce you to embrace Islam, but you refused. I have previously written to you on the same subject, and warned you of the future if you do not listen to our words . . . and therefore our armies invaded your country, killed your men, ruined your churches, burnt your cities, captured your women, made your children orphans, and came back victorious. Now you must know that the blood of all your helpless people is on your head, because you are their shepherd. Now let bygones be bygones; we have still a liking for you, be therefore converted to the true religion and follow the percepts of the Mahdi. . . . Now become one of us, and let us cease warfare, and instead let us become friends. . . . Do not boast and trust in the number of your men. . . . If you obey and believe, you will be saved; if you do not, you and your people will be destroyed.35

In mid-April 1888, the khalifa published another prophetic vision legitimizing war on the Ethiopians and assuring victory, but still with a certain reserve: “The Lord of Being came to me and with him the Mahdi. . . . Concerning the Turks [the Egyptians], the Prophet informed me . . . that it was permitted to send the Ansar against them in Egypt. . . . In this vision, the Prophet informed me that if the enemies of God, the Ethiopians, came to battle, their hands would be chained to their necks

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and we should be victorious over them.”36 The meaning of this was that while the Mahdists were called on to attack the Egyptians, in the case of the Ethiopians the Mahdists would only fight—and win—if the Ethiopians did not leave them alone. Amir Abu ‘Anja and Negus Takla-Haimanot were in correspondence between late February and May 1888. Abu ‘Anja sent news to the Ethiopian about his children who had been captured at Gondar. One of his daughters had died,37 but a wounded son recuperated and two other daughters were well. Takla-Haimanot replied on 4 April. He was grateful and asked that his surviving children be restored “for the sake of friendship and brotherhood.” He again wrote on 11 May stating that “if my children return, we shall become firm friends.” No such understanding was reached with the now weakened king of Gojjam. The prisoners would remain the khalifa’s hostages (they would be released only by the British in 1898) and in June–July 1888, the Mahdists again raided deep into Ethiopia, this time less successfully.38 The khalifa’s plan for the future of Ethiopia was perhaps best reflected in the following episode, told by Ohrwalder. After Abu ‘Anja’s victory over Takla-Haimanot in early January 1888, Todros [Tewodros] Kasa, the son of Todros Kassa [King Theodore, 1855–1868, Yohannes’s predecessor] . . . suddenly appeared at Gallabat, and offered his services to the Dervishes to fight against his own countrymen. He was at once sent to Omdurman, where he was received with great pomp by Khalifa Abdullah, who promised to place him on the throne of Abyssinia, and in return for this promise, Todros agreed that all the Abyssinians should become Moslems, and should pay the Khalifa an annual tribute.

The khalifa, wrote Ohrwalder, believed in Kasa’s good faith and sent him to the camp of Abu ‘Anja.39 He thus prepared his own optional najashi, an Ethiopian king who would eventually redeem Ethiopia and return it to the land of Islam under the Mahdiyya.

Yohannes Between the Ahmad Gragn Syndrome and Pragmatism

Yohannes was not a man likely to abandon his Christianity. The Tigrean emperor was a profoundly devout king who compromised on political centralization and sought the religious unification of Ethiopia. For this purpose, he imposed doctrinal unification on Christians and Christianiza-

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tion on Muslims. His religious policy at home is beyond our scope here. “There was no room for Islam in his ideological world,” concluded the historian Bahru Zewde.40 His alienation of Muslims in the territories under his direct government had far-reaching consequences for the urbanization and modernization of northern Ethiopia. His response to the Egyptian challenge of the 1870s, we argued above, reflected his difficulty in realizing the nuances and complexities of Islam. When he faced Khedive Isma‘il, “the impatient Europeanizer”41 of Egypt, Yohannes turned into a crusader. Facing the Mahdists further cemented him as such. Not all leading Christians in Ethiopia of that period conceived of Islam in such terms. Menelik, the king of Shoa in the south and Yohannes’s man in the Mareb Melash, for example, worked openly with Muslims who accepted their authority (we shall return to Menelik and Islam below). Alula cultivated the Muslim merchants in his capital, Asmara, and his army in the battle of Kufit was a mixed force of Christians and Muslims (mainly Banu ‘Amir men, followers of the KhatmiyyaMirghaniyya Sufi fraternity, centered on Kassala in the Sudan42). But the Mahdiyya, one of the most effective movements of the Islamic political revival of its time, combined popular Islam with messianic orthodoxy to present a new militant challenge. For Christian Ethiopia, it represented a double threat. One was the repeated call to the emperor to convert and thus bring the country back to the land of Islam. The other was its potential impact on the Muslims in and around Ethiopia. The Mahdiyya’s rendering of Islam as politically energetic and victorious, which had proven so effective in revolutionizing Sudan, threatened to do the same in the land of al-najashi. It was undoubtedly the most vivid threat to Christian hegemony in Ethiopia since Ahmad Gragn. The Christian leaders and people of Ethiopia were quick to identify this new kind of militant Sudanese Islam. By 1885, the Mahdists had won the nickname darbush, literally, dervishes. Originally, the term connoted followers of popular Sufi Islam but in the new context, it reflected the local Christian hatred and fear of the implications of Mahdist influence. For many Christian Ethiopians, the darbush were the embodiment of heresy, of barbaric paganism: “O Lord,” the clergy of Gondar wrote Yohannes after the destruction inflicted by Abu ‘Anja, “the pagans have invaded thy preserve, thy sacred shrine they have profaned, Gondar have they laid in ruin.”43 Alula’s contemporary biographer wrote that unclean Muslims of the country of the west, whom they call Dervishes, rose up, and spoke great blasphemies against God and against his anointed one, Yohannes the king, as Sennacherib blasphemed against God the Lord and against Hezekiah the king. The

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Prophet said about them, and about those like them, “They thought vanity and spoke it; they spoke lawlessness in the highest. They lifted up their mouth to heaven, and their tongue went to and fro on the earth, and their heart passed the bounds of pride.44

We have mentioned the attempt of ‘Uthman Diqna to turn the tribesmen between Kassala and Massawa into Mahdists. “The Muslims are encouraged and they say they are all dervishes,” Ras Alula wrote the Italians in July 1885 as he was preparing for the battle of Kufit. He also wrote to ‘Uthman Diqna: “How have you dared to come against me, O evil and troublesome man? Do you not fear the Lord God who made heaven and earth and all that is in them?” The Ethiopian victory over the Mahdiyya in that section would be remembered as “the year in which the dervishes were cut down,” and Kufit was described in the most vivid religious terms: “There was a great killing from sunrise to sunset, and Ras Alula conquered and killed of the wicked and apostate men who brought division on the name of Christ and who make arguments over the Messianic law. There was not one of them left.” “Behold,” Alula reported to Yohannes, “our foes and enemies, who heaped boasting and pride upon us . . . all the Muslims, whom they call Dervishes, were destroyed.”45 The Kufit victory over ‘Uthman Diqna slowed the Mahdist encroachment in Eritrea,46 but the Mahdist influence over Muslims in the core of Ethiopia gained momentum. The anti-Muslim policy of Yohannes triggered Islamic revolts in Wallo beginning in the late 1870s. The issue was essentially an internal Ethiopian development, but external religious and military inspirations were important, mainly those of the Mahdiyya.47 The most important leader of the Ethiopian Islamic anti-Yohannes jihad in the 1880s was Shaikh Talha bin Ja‘far, a scholar and a military leader who built his connections with the Mahdiyya soon after its appearance. Shaikh Talha began his revolts a month after the Hewett treaty in July 1884, and intensified his activity in November 1885, reacting to Yohannes’s Christianization by raising jihadi slogans, burning churches, and harassing priests. Talha’s forces were finally uprooted from the center of Wallo in January 1886, and he moved his headquarters to Walqayt, nearer the Sudanese border. From there, Shaikh Talha continued what was already a close alliance with the khalifa. Looking at studies by the historian Hussein Ahmed, it appears that the shaikh himself was in constant touch with Umm Durman, through envoys and personal visits. The amount of material help rendered by the Mahdiyya is unclear, but there was little doubt about its inspiration and the potential threat of Talha’s revolt. It was claimed that he and his forces helped Abu ‘Anja’s men to

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sack Gondar, that Ethiopian Muslims were constantly spying on behalf of the Mahdists, and that Talha’s men were said to have participated on the Mahdist side in the decisive battle of Matamma, where Yohannes was killed on 9 March 1889.48 No less important than the facts was the image of Talha in Christian eyes. The contemporary Ethiopian chronicler, Asma Giyorgis Gabra Masih, suggested that the Muslim uprisings in Wallo were inspired by the Mahdists and called Talha a darbush. Though Talha’s relations with the Mahdiyya deteriorated in the early 1890s, his entire enterprise added to the Christian fear of comprehensive Islamic politicization and of uprising at home. The Mahdist influence in Wollega and in Beni Shangul undermined Ethiopian authority in areas claimed by Menelik of Shoa.49 Sadiq al-‘Azm, an envoy of the Ottoman sultan, spent time in Ethiopia in 1904 and collected information on Christian-Islamic relations. He dedicated a chapter of his book to a discussion of Yohannes and the Mahdiyya (and placed much of the blame for their deterioration on Mahdist militancy). According to his account, Yohannes only began his anti-Muslim campaign after an Ethiopian Muslim named Muhammad Jibril went to serve the Mahdi. Jibril, he wrote, was returned to Ethiopia by the Mahdi to convert the Christians to Islam: When the najashi Yuhannis heard about it he became madly angry, and from that time, he started oppressing the Muslims contrary to the policy of his predecessors, and maltreated them contrary to the spirit of religious freedom prevailing in his country. This spirit existed to the extent that even his own sister followed Islam with no restrictions and married one of the Muslim princes.50

In early 1888 Yohannes found himself threatened by a strong Italian army on the Red Sea coast, as well as by the subordination of both Menelik and Takla-Haimanot to the south, and by the Mahdist aggression led by Abu ‘Anja to the west. The detailed history of Yohannes’s fateful dilemma is beyond our scope. According to the anonymous chronicler of Alula, one of his priests, the emperor’s first priority was to fight the Mahdists. He described a royal council in Aksum in May 1888: “And the king of kings revealed their impure religion and hateful works. Their religion says as follows, ‘Say No to God and Yes to the demon which is Muhammad.’ Ras Alula opened his mouth and said, ‘What really are those pagans, who do not know God? Let us go and do battle with them, on behalf of our Lord Jesus Christ.’”51 The contemporary chronicle of Yohannes’s chief general reflects very strong anti-Muslim concepts. Later in the same year, the same au-

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thor quoted Yohannes: “The Muslims want to massacre the Christians and burn the Churches of Gondar. Many dogs have surrounded me and a gathering of evil people holds me. . . . Here we are ready to fight against the Arabians, the doers of atrocities.” Yohannes, wrote the priest, was determined to first destroy “the trap of the Satan, the Dervishes.”52 Reading such texts may be somewhat misleading. In both the Ethiopian and the Mahdist camps, religious scholars were in charge of chronicling events. If we compare the language of Alula’s biographer with that of his Sudanese contemporary, Ismail bin ‘Abd al-Qadir alKordofani, the biographer of the Mahdi, we get a totally conflicting picture. The latter was tasked by the khalifa to record the confrontation with Ethiopia. Less than three months after the battle of Matamma of March 1889, he produced his text, “The Embroidery Embellished with the Good News of the Death of Yohannes the King [again malik, not alnajashi] of Ethiopia” (Al-Tiraz al-manqush bibushra qatl Yuhanna malik al-hubush). It narrated the conflict of 1887–1889 in most radical terms, depicting the Christian Ethiopians as enemies of Islam and the Mahdiyya as led by the genius of the khalifa and aided by miracles and the wonders of God. Yohannes’s death in Matamma is described as God’s punishment, and there is no mention of Yohannes’s appeasing letter of 25 December 1888 (discussed below). Many copies of al-Kordofani’s anti-Ethiopian book (quite unreliable on facts and dates) were distributed by the khalifa’s men, but the text was so one-dimensional that a few years later, in 1893, when the khalifa was developing a better dialogue with Yohannes’s successor, Emperor Menelik, he ordered all copies destroyed and its author to be banished.53 Yohannes, with his limited understanding of Islam, was not as fanatic as might be understood from the writing of Alula’s biographer priest. Facing his strategic dilemmas, his priority in 1888 was to stem the Italians’ imperialist ambitions, and convince Menelik and TaklaHaimanot to join him in this effort. (On 16 December, Takla-Haimanot was forced to surrender to the emperor.) As Abu ‘Anja was building his force in the Qallabat area, Yohannes decided to avoid battle. He now seemed to prefer to selectively remember the khalifa’s words to him earlier that year: “Now let bygones be bygones; we still have a liking for you . . . become one of us, and let us cease warfare, and instead let us become friends.” On 25 December 1888, the Ethiopian emperor sent to the khalifa through Abu ‘Anja: a letter from Yohannes, king of Zion, supported by God, king of kings of Ethiopia, may it reach the admired dajaz [mach], Abu ‘Anja. First,

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we ask about your health and express hope that you are well. Our whole army, the commanders, the ministers are all well, thank God. . . . Until some fifteen years ago, the Turks [the Egyptians] ruled in your country up to Matamma. They also wanted to conquer the land of Tigre, they came through Massawa and entered the land of Hamasen. We fought them and with the help of God defeated them twice [the battles of Gundat and Gura, November 1875 and March 1876, respectively]. Later, when we were in the town of Asmara, ruling as Christians over Muslims, the Mahdi wrote to us and ordered us to convert to Islam. We were angered and sent a force to Matamma where we killed many people [Takla-Haimanot’s defeat of Wad Arbab]. Then you came to Dambiya, killed who you killed and destroyed many houses [Abu ‘Anja’s defeat of Takla-Haimanot and burning of Gondar]. Now if I invade your country and destroy houses and then you invade mine and inflict destruction, what good is there for us? We have no interest in your land and you should have no interest in ours. We prefer to avoid it all so that houses will not be destroyed. The truth is that the faranjis [the Europeans] are our enemies as well as yours. If they destroy us, they will turn to destroy you, and if they defeat you, they will then defeat us. The sensible thing is to agree between us to face them together. [Then] our traders will trade freely in your land and your traders will return to Gondar for the benefit of your people. If we do so we will serve a just cause, for you and we are descendants of the same grandfather, and fighting each other is of no use. The best for you and us is to solidify our brotherhood as one man and one body, always consulting each other and cooperating against foreigners from beyond the sea and against the Turks who want to rule in your country and ours, always harassing us both. These are your enemies and ours; we can beat them [together] and safeguard our lands from them. This is our advice and the wise listener should be happy. Also, some years ago, the Italians asked us to turn to the direction of Kassala . . . telling us, “The English from that direction and we from this direction, together with you, want to fight and destroy the dervishes.” [But] I prevented them from so doing and told them: “Do you forget that they are one country with us and we are one country?” I definitely prevented them from so doing. This is why the hostility between us and the Italians is still in full momentum. Know that we told you so on 25 December 1888.54

The Trap of Demonization: Are You Calling Me a Chicken?

Yohannes’s letter of 25 December 1888 was written at a crucial juncture for both countries. It carried a promise of a dialogue between the two pragmatic dimensions. The khalifa, we saw, still preferred some kind of a dialogue (which, from his point of view, would eventually lead to the Islamization of Ethiopia). Now, for the first time, Yohannes responded positively to this call for a dialogue (though, from his point of view,

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Ethiopia’s Christian identity was never to be debated). The Ethiopian emperor was now so desperate for an interim peace on his western front that he was even ready to invite Mahdist traders to Gondar, the very fresh symbol of darbush anti-Christian atrocities. He went so far as to portray his war with the Italians as if its purpose was protecting the Mahdiyya, though he had just proposed a joint anti-Mahdist campaign to the Italians (twice in 1888, in March and May).55 For all intents and purposes, this letter should have enabled both the khalifa and Yohannes to concentrate on their true priorities instead of fighting each other. However, this was not to be. In the second or third week of January 1889, Abu ‘Anja sent his reply. It was bold and violent: To the king of Ethiopia, Yohannes [ila malik al-habasha, Yuhanna]. . . . Your anger at the Mahdi’s reply to your letter is one of the most pathetic things I have ever heard. You already saw the disaster inflicted on the one who attacked Matamma [Takla-Haimanot]. If you do not learn from this, you will be the next example. . . . Matamma is now full of young lions; each has fought ten infidels . . . they are all ready to die for Allah. If you do not know them today, you will know them tomorrow. . . . As to your request for peace while you remain an infidel, it is unacceptable. It is a sign of your mental weakness and lack of intelligence. How stupid and ignorant can you be? Do you want peace and fraternity without having adhered to the true religion? The book of God forbids this; therefore, I cannot be positive about your request. If you want peace, say from the bottom of your heart: “I testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his Messenger.” For if not, we shall kill you, destroy your houses, and God willing, make your children orphans. . . . You, the Italians, the faranjis and all those loyal to you, Allah is greater than all of you together. There is nothing but the sword between us. . . . If you are as brave as you claim, come out, do not fear . . . and if not, stay where you are and be inevitably destroyed by the victorious party of Allah . . . your throne will burn and all your decisions will come to nothing.56

Was the khalifa behind this response? Abu ‘Anja received Yohannes’s letter on 11 January 1889 and forwarded it to Umm Durman,57 but his response to Yohannes was written before his death on 29 January. Yohannes’s letter to the khalifa and the khalifa’s response were lost. According to Ohrwalder, the khalifa received a small note in Amharic, which two Ethiopians translated for the khalifa, whose response was that if Yohannes “would become a Muslim, they would become good friends; but if he refused, he [the khalifa] felt obliged to brand him as an enemy of God and His Prophet, and that they had no other course open but to exterminate him.” 58 It is possible that Abu

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‘Anja, the invincible commander and the destroyer of Gondar, sought another victory, that he interpreted Yohannes’s words as a sign of weakness and purposely replied in harsher terms. He may also have persuaded his master that it was high time to beat the aggressive, defiant king of the infidels. Sudanese informers in the service of the British reported at that time that “King John wrote to Abu ‘Anja, warning him that he was coming to attack him.”59 Indeed, a later, final appeal by Yohannes to Zaki Tamal, whom the khalifa appointed to replace Abu ‘Anja in Qallabat, was rejected with similar bluntness: “There is nothing but the sword . . . until you become a Muslim and follow the Mahdi’s creed.”60 What followed was rapid deterioration to a decisive Ethiopian-Mahdist battle in Matamma on 9 March 1889. This chapter in history, in the final analysis, was indeed shaped by the dialogue between the jihadi Islam al-najashi concept on the Mahdist side, and the crusading, anti-Islamic Ahmad Gragn syndrome concept on the Ethiopian side. “Clearly elements of religious zeal,” Richard Caulk concludes, “exacerbated friction between the neighboring rulers and between their subordinates, hindering a reconciliation of expedience.”61 The option of nonviolent dialogue between the more flexible concepts, we saw, was given a chance, but the legacies of religious militancy proved stronger. The power of these legacies indeed may often blur the sphere of sobriety and calculated politics. They energize an atmosphere conducive to overreaction, mutual demonization, and gross misinterpretation. The following episode reads like a comic break in this drama, but may have been a real factor. In his appeasing letter to Abu ‘Anja, the Ethiopian emperor called him “the admired Dajach Abu ‘Anja,” and went on to wish him good health. Dajazmach, literally “commander of the gate,” was the Ethiopian rank equivalent to the Mahdist/Arabic amir, a general, a prince. It was customary in Ethiopia to abbreviate it to dajach. No doubt, Yohannes meant to honor Abu ‘Anja, but his translator—we know from Abu ‘Anja’s reply that the letter was sent in both Amharic and Arabic—innocently wrote dajach in Arabic letters.62 Unfortunately, dajaj in Arabic means a chicken, and one can only imagine Abu ‘Anja’s expression on reading that he was “an admired chicken.” The insult, in itself bad enough, came at a very inappropriate time. Abu ‘Anja had suddenly fallen ill and was to die, probably of cholera or typhoid fever,63 later in the same month. Whatever health Abu ‘Anja still enjoyed, this remark helped little, as can be understood from his aggressive response. “As to you calling me a chicken in the beginning of your letter,” Abu ‘Anja wrote in his reply to Yohannes, “know that I am not a chicken. You are a chicken because you

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are an infidel who repeatedly angers God.” To set the record straight, Abu ‘Anja presented himself rather as “the commander of the armies of Islam prepared to annihilate the cursed unbelievers.” In January 1889, Yohannes faced a dilemma: to invade Shoa in order to defeat Menelik, or to respond to the Mahdist provocation. The priests in both the Shoan and the imperial camps seem to have played a major role in influencing the emperor. They fulfilled their traditional role as mediators between Christians and managed to prevent civil war.64 They did so by appealing to Yohannes’s emotions as an anti-Muslim crusader. The monks, wrote Heruy Walda-Selasse, were said to have told him: “You may go to Shoa, for you will be victorious there, but your soul will never benefit. Go to Matamma, you will die but that will be to the benefit of your soul.”65 They kept reminding him that he was supposed to defend Gondar, the churches and the monasteries, rather than fight a fellow Christian. Arriving on the scene of Takla-Haimanot’s defeat, Yohannes vowed to fight the Mahdists. He was quoted as declaring: “If I am defeated, I will receive the martyr’s crown; if I am victorious, I will have avenged Christian blood.”66 The Mahdists, to be sure, were convinced that the Ethiopians aimed to penetrate up to Umm Durman,67 and were still trying to avoid a frontal military clash. Zaki Tamal was therefore ordered by the khalifa to keep the ansar in a strictly defensive concentration.68 By invading Sudanese territory in the Qallabat-Matamma area, Yohannes triggered a comprehensive confrontation. The battle of Matamma on 9 March 1889, between Yohannes’s imperial army and the Mahdist army, had far-reaching consequences for both sides. In the frontal clash in the open field, the Ethiopians were initially victorious. However, they lost momentum in the section where Zaki Tamal, following his master’s orders, had just built a fort manned with guns. Yohannes personally joined the action in that section.69 He was wounded and died the following night between 10 and 11 March. When the news spread, the Ethiopian army dispersed and collapsed. The fall of Yohannes resulted in the disintegration of Tigre as the political and military center of Ethiopia. It led to the Italian conquest of all of Eritrea, without Ethiopian resistance, and the transfer of imperial power south to Shoa,70 where Menelik crowned himself emperor the following November. The battle of Matamma thus demonstrated and sealed the impact of the Mahdiyya on Ethiopia’s modern history. Sudanese history was also influenced. The Mahdists seized Yohannes’s corpse and sent his head to decorate their celebrations in Umm Durman. “The Khalifa’s delight knew no bounds,”71 but the fight with the Ethiopians was

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very costly and conducted at the expense of better preparations against the Anglo-Egyptians. Later in the same year, on 3 August 1889, the Mahdists, venturing toward Egypt, were defeated in the battle of Tushki. The combined effect of Tushki and Matamma proved a turning point. It marked the end of the Mahdists’ visional drive to export their revolution through jihad along the Nile and to the entire Islamic world. “From 1889 to 1896,” Holt summarized, “although the old ideological pretensions were not abandoned, the Mahdist state adopted a policy of isolation from the unbelieving world outside. . . . Although the old apocalyptic language continued to be used . . . the Mahdist state . . . was reduced to a Sudanese sultanate.”72

Menelik and the Sudanese Khalifa: Concepts of Pragmatism

The strategic change in the Mahdist situation after 1889, combined with the rise of Menelik II, opened a new chapter in Sudanese-Ethiopian history. The khalifa and his men, now fighting to defend their regime rather than exporting their kind of Islam, began to depart from the terminology of Islam al-najashi. Not only did they prefer to concentrate on their first strategic priority, the British, but Menelik was also proving too strong to be provoked. In such circumstances, the Mahdists gradually began to accept Ethiopia as a neighbor. They had to do so, in spite of the fact that Menelik, though differently from Yohannes, did not “leave [the Muslims] alone.” He was indeed the greatest Christian Ethiopian conqueror of Islam. Throughout the period of the Mahdiyya, first as king of Shoa and then as the ruler of Ethiopia, Menelik defeated Islamic societies to the south, put them under Christian hegemony, and spread Christianity in their lands. Yet hardly a word of protest was heard from Umm Durman. No visions of the Prophet legitimizing jihad against the Ethiopians were now proclaimed. In his first letter to Menelik, the khalifa called on him to become a Muslim, but received no reply. In his second letter, the khalifa still resorted to a threat, but this was clearly for defensive purposes: From the slave of God, Khalifat al-Mahdi . . . to Menelik. . . . We inform you that we have already called on you to join the nation of Islam and the way of the Mahdiyya, because of our concern for you . . . and our fear that you would die as an infidel destined to hell. . . . If you respond to our call and testify that there is no God but Allah . . . know that we shall accept you and appoint you as our amir over your country . . . but if you fail to do so it will be your fault and you will have to

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confine yourself to your border and never penetrate the border of Islam. For if you do so and cross that border, then inevitably we shall fight you and you will be destroyed and ruined like what happened to Yohannes once he became greedy and crossed the border. We hereby serve you enough of a warning.73

Menelik also departed from the aggressive anti-Mahdist terminology of Yohannes and his time. His priority remained defending Ethiopia from the Italians. Though in 1891 he made a proclamation about a greater Ethiopia including territories up to the White Nile,74 he initiated no campaign in this direction. From the beginning of his emperorship to the fall of the Mahdiyya, he was usually positive in his communications with the khalifa. Menelik was a no less devout Christian than Yohannes. He must have been amused by the khalifa’s invitation to be his Muslim amir of Ethiopia. His true, inner concepts of the Mahdiyya were perhaps revealed in May 1888, when still negus of Shoa. Ordered by Yohannes, after Abu ‘Anja’s sacking of Gondar, to move northward to face the Mahdists (while Yohannes was still facing the Italians), Menelik exchanged messages with the Mahdist amir.75 When Abu ‘Anja tried to persuade him to actively betray Yohannes, the Shoan king chose to return to Addis Ababa, but not without expressing his Christian view. On 12 May, a week before returning, he ordered Dajazmach Mashasha Warqe to write to Abu ‘Anja. Mashasha wrote that Menelik was ready to mediate with Yohannes, but warned that the Mahdists would have only themselves to blame if, “like the amir of Harar,” they rejected peace. Harar, the capital of Islam in the Horn of Africa, had been conquered by Menelik the year before, and the king apparently purposely reminded the Mahdist of the Hararis’ painful lesson: “He [their amir] was defeated simply because he refused peace,” namely, accepted Ethiopian supremacy. Menelik, now the conqueror of Ahmad Gragn’s ancient capital, was never really to be motivated by fears of the Gragn syndrome. His man, Mashasha, went on in his letter to state that “our Lord Jesus Christ” will always give the Christians “power and victory, and will humble [their] enemies.” Mashasha then cited a proverb about an impertinent raven who told the angels to come down from heaven, to remind Abu ‘Anja that, for the supreme Ethiopians, the raven (the Mahdists) had nothing to offer, surely not their kind of Islam. He then dismissed the Mahdi’s call as a falsehood inherited from the devil through Muhammad and declared that for the Ethiopian princes to kill “the ungodly and liars like you was holy work.”76 However, once the established ruler of all of Ethiopia, Menelik did

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his best never to let such words provoke the Mahdists. He preferred to deal confidently with the Mahdiyya as one factor in Ethiopia’s ancient relations with the world of Islam. Though in May 1889, he wrote Queen Victoria suggesting cooperation “to arrest the development of the Dervishes,” in September he instructed Ras Zawde, the governor of Chelga, to correspond with Zaki Tamal in Qallabat and let him know that “our wish and sole intention is that we should be one with you. So also is the intention of our beloved Menelik, who is now the Great Negus.” Later, Menelik again instructed the ras that his correspondence with his Mahdist counterpart should contain “nothing but love and friendly messages.”77 Indeed, in terms of language and terminology, the new emperor of Ethiopia proved far more sophisticated than his predecessor, Yohannes. From his accession to the throne, in most of the letters to the khalifa Menelik and his men made it a habit to open their messages with the traditional Islamic salutation, the bismillah, and often even to praise him as a great leader of Islam. Actual relations along the frontiers improved slowly. Tigre and northern Ethiopia, under the successor of Yohannes, Ras Mangasha, were impoverished and in rebellion against Menelik, but only insignificant Mahdist raids were recorded,78 which then stopped. In the QallabatMatamma section, for a while Amir Zaki Tamal continued to prohibit trade with Ethiopians, but famine in the region and growing pragmatism in Umm Durman led to improved relations.79 In April 1891, Zaki Tamal was transferred elsewhere and his lieutenant, Ahmad ‘Ali, in practice opened the border. He corresponded with his Ethiopian counterpart in Chelga and in 1894 the two confirmed their arrangements in writing. There was even some talk about cooperation against shiftas. As Menelik was preparing to meet the Italians on the Ethiopian-Eritrean front in the summer of 1895, he sent a messenger, Muhammad al-Tayyib, with a verbal message to the khalifa to ensure that the Mahdists would not exploit the opportunity to raid his flanks. In July–August 1895, the khalifa responded quite coldly. He requested a formal, written communication and concluded with the phrase “Peace be upon those who follow the just way,” that is, the Mahdiyya.80 African Intrareligious Neighborliness

The Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adwa on 1 March 1896 and the Anglo-Egyptian army’s penetration into Sudan in May helped to upgrade relations between Menelik and the khalifa. The victorious Ethiopian emperor now preferred a weakened Muslim neighbor to hav-

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ing the Sudan under the British and being encircled by European colonialists on all sides. In April 1896, he informed the khalifa that he desired peace with all, but mainly with his “African neighbors.” Menelik’s confidant, Ras Bitwadad Mangasha Atikam, added a letter advising the khalifa, quite paternalistically, to be friendly to the emperor.81 The more the British army under Kitchener advanced in Dongola (their first victory came on 7 June), the warmer Menelik became toward the khalifa. On 17 July, Mangasha Atikam, a known opponent to all Europeans and (therefore?) Menelik’s chief adviser on Mahdist affairs, wrote the Sudanese, calling him “The Lord of All and the Protector of Islam, khalifat al-mahdi, peace be upon him.” In the same spirit of respect to Islam and to the Mahdist state, the Ethiopian letter, carried to Umm Durman by an Ethiopian Muslim, Hajj Ahmad al-Jabarti, offered peace and friendship. It proposed an active alliance against “the faranji,” described in Mahdist style as “enemies of God.” Menelik, it was stated, wished to have no foreign relations except with the Mahdists, his fellow Africans. The British, the letter went on, were common enemies of both Sudan and Ethiopia.82 By the time the letter reached the khalifa, Dongola was under attack, finally falling to the British on 13 September. For the Mahdists, this began a period of desperate defense against the invaders,83 and the khalifa decided to accept the Ethiopian offer in a letter written on 14 September 1896. He sent a delegation headed by Hajj Muhammad ‘Uthman Khalid which reached Mangasha Atikam in Bagemdir, and came to Addis Ababa in January 1897. The khalifa agreed in principle to a peace treaty, though he had some reservations and conditions. He wanted Ethiopia to break off all its diplomatic relations with the European powers: To Menelik the potentate of the army [‘azim al-jaysh, the khalifa still avoided calling him a najashi]. . . . As regards your desire for the conclusion of peace between Us and you, be it known unto you that there is no incentive to any European to come to Our Islamic territories for buying and selling or on the pretext of traveling. There is only war between Us and them. If you are thus and you forbid all Europeans to enter your country, except in war, so that there is no connection between you and them, as it is with Us, on this condition peace may be concluded between Us and you. If you accept this condition, write to Us and send an envoy of yours back with our envoy so that we can sign a peace treaty as agreed between us in a reasonable way.84

As such a condition was never to be met—Menelik was now being recognized by and benefiting from the European powers—a formal

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treaty between Ethiopia and the Mahdiyya was not signed in Addis Ababa in February 1897.85 But good relations were clearly established. Menelik now went so far as to dictate to Ras Mangasha Yohannes, the son of emperor Yohannes, to write to the khalifa, endorse the words of Menelik about love and peace, and add that “may our love be greater than the evil before.”86 Kantiba Gabru Dasta, an Ethiopian teacher fluent in Arabic, was then sent to Umm Durman, together with the returning Mahdist envoy. On his way, he was ordered to go to Negus TaklaHaimanot in Gojjam and have him sign a letter of appeasement similar to that of Mangasha Yohannes. Gabru’s delegation was received warmly in May–June 1897 by the khalifa in the Mahdist capital. To avoid giving offense to Christians in the embassy, as Holt emphasized, animals provided for food were not slaughtered by Muslims. The Mahdist law against intoxicants was relaxed to allow date wine to be made for the Ethiopians. A great fireworks display was organized by the arsenal.87 Again, there was no trace of a signed treaty, but Kantiba Gabru, on his way back in June 1897, wrote the khalifa about the rapprochement between Ethiopia and Sudan and compared it with the confluence of the White and the Blue Nile: “as they have met together [so] we have agreed with all our brothers the ansar.”88 Until the final collapse of the Mahdist state and the fall of Umm Durman to Britain on 2 September 1898, Menelik and the khalifa sent additional communications.89 They continued to assure each other of their “African” brotherhood. In December 1897, the Ethiopian wrote the khalifa, “Be strong lest the Europeans enter our midst and a great disaster befall us and our children have no rest.”90 In spite of his 1891 proclamation claiming territories down to the White Nile, Menelik refrained from exploiting the Mahdist weakness and invading the Sudan. Prior to the collapse of the Mahdiyya, he obtained control over the Bani Shangul region only in 1897, and this with the khalifa’s permission and invitation.91 After the British began their operation to destroy the Mahdist state, the khalifa’s attitude toward Menelik became like toward a potential savior. He still avoided calling Menelik a najashi but he doubtless remembered the way the ancient Christian friend of the Prophet had saved the sahaba from Mecca’s pagans. The khalifa’s invitation to Menelik to annex Bani Shangul was later followed by the local leaders of Qallabat inviting the Ethiopians in 1898 to assume sovereignty over them, rather than fall under the Anglo-Egyptians. “The Muslim Sudanese of Gallbat,” wrote the British historian George Sanderson, “preferred the rule of Christian Ethiopians with whom they have been so frequently at war.”92 According to the Ethiopian historian Aleme Eshete, “following the British successive victories and the eminent final attack against the

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khalifa at Omdurman in 1898, Abdullahi resorted to Minilik asking him for an asylum on Ethiopian territory in the event of his being defeated by the British.”93 The words of Sanderson that “the Mahdist alliance was the central feature of Menelik’s diplomacy”94 seem to be something of an overstatement. Menelik had a more significant network of negotiations and deals with the European powers. To the British, he pledged not to send arms to the khalifa, and carried out a game with the French who were then trying to entrench themselves in the upper Nile, in Fashoda. But it is clear that Menelik played his Mahdist card as a subtle strategist, surely not as a crusader.95 He continued to urge that in this crisis, ancient enmities and rivalries among Africans should be forgotten. In his talks in early 1897 with the Mahdist envoy, Muhammad Uthman Khalid, he said, according to his guest, that the Khalifa ‘Abdallah “ought not to take any notice of their difference in religion.”96 It is hard to believe that the khalifa could have possibly accepted such advice (his envoy testified that he had been shocked), or that Menelik himself would have followed it. But there remains the fact that the two leaders, the Muslim and the Christian, were ready to work together pragmatically when and where their interests met. In the 1960s and the 1970s, during the period of the rising expectations of modern nationalist and Marxist ideologies, some historians tended to view the Ethiopian-Mahdist story as ending on a note of secular all-African solidarity.97 Such a perspective is hardly convincing. Religious identities and their concepts were never really disconnected from the political developments of both Sudan and Ethiopia. They were pivotal in shaping the events discussed not only here, but throughout. From today’s perspective, as religious dynamisms are back in full political force, it is perhaps easier to understand their role during that formative period. However, it is vital to observe and emphasize how versatile and multidimensional historical religious messages are. The story above, we argue, reflects the multifaceted nature of the old Islamic and the old Christian legacies, even in a period of fundamentalist, seemingly noncompromising leadership in confrontation. The Mahdist side, we saw, chose selectively from the varied reservoir of Islamic concepts of Ethiopia and acted according to unfolding situations. As a movement of radical Islam, it was in a position to reinterpret the Prophet’s dictum. It went all the way from the Islam al-najashi message of Christian Ethiopia’s illegitimacy, to a holy war justified by the fact that the Ethiopians did not leave the Muslims alone, to accepting a status quo, and finally to making peace with Menelik as a neighbor who could be of help and save Muslims from worse enemies, like the righteous Christian

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najashi in his time, “a [Christian] king who oppresses no one.” This entire cycle, it should be re-emphasized, was well within the range of Islamic concepts and interpretations of Ethiopia. The Christian Ethiopian side, we saw, was initially motivated by the Gragn syndrome trauma, viewing the Mahdists in demonizing terms, and ended by cultivating a diplomatic, pragmatic dialogue with an Islamic state, as Ethiopia had been doing with some Middle Eastern entities since the rise of Islam. We followed the dialectics between the changing reality and the diversity of concepts. In the final analysis, we believe it demonstrated that nothing was predetermined, even when seemingly antagonistic religious beliefs were strongly at work. Throughout the twentieth century, new chapters in the histories of both countries produced renewed perspectives of the period discussed. Most Ethiopian observers, often in the service of the Shoan court, tend to remember Yohannes’s policy toward the Mahdiyya as a fatal mistake. Yohannes was too strategically isolated and too much a captive of his concepts to concentrate on his urgent priorities and avoid his tragic war with the Mahdists. (His designated successor, his adopted son Ras Mangasha, seemed to share the same ideas.98) In the collective memory of Muslims, Yohannes has indeed remained an example of an oppressing, and therefore a doomed, Christian.99 Menelik, in contrast, would be remembered as the victorious builder of the Ethiopian empire. Though the Mahdist aspect of his policy captured less attention than his successes as a defender against Europeans and as conqueror of the south, it added a dimension to his image as a righteous najashi among Muslims. His military might and diplomatic pragmatism combined to blur the fact that he put more Muslims under Christian hegemony than Yohannes. His contemporaries, the Ottoman sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II, 100 the Egyptianbased Islamic modernist Rashid Ridda,101 as well as the “Somali Mahdi” Muhammad bin ‘Abdallah Hasan,102 each in his own way in practice accepted Menelik as a great Christian emperor. Had the khalifa survived as head of a Sudanese state, we may imagine, he might well have continued to accept Ethiopia as a legitimate neighbor and perhaps, eventually, even to address Menelik as al-najashi. Deriving their terminology from their more tolerant concepts of the “self” and the “other,” these neighbors would surely have avoided calling each other a chicken.

Notes 1. For general background, see Holt, The Mahdist State; Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes; Caulk, “Partition”; Warburg, Islam, Sectarianism and Politics; Holt and Daly, A History of the Sudan.

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2. See Caulk, “Religion and State”; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 123. 3. For a somewhat different evaluation of Yohannes’s Islamic policy, see Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, mainly p. 97. 4. See Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, pp. 170–179. 5. Sanderson, “Sudanese Factors.” 6. Layish, “The Mahdi’s Legal Methodology.” 7. On the hegira in the Mahdi’s teaching and practice, see Holt, The Mahdist State, pp. 54–55; Holt, “The Mahdia and the Outside World.” 8. See ‘Aliyyan, Al-Hijra ila al-habasha, pp. 77–81. See also a discussion in Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, pp. 194–195. 9. For the full text, see Abu Salim, Al-A’thar, vol. 5, pp. 234–236. This is a collection of documents mainly from Dar al-wathaiq al-qawmiyya (the National Archives) in Khartoum, and mainly on the Mahdi’s period (less on the khalifa’s). 10. Abu Salim, Al-A’thar, vol. 4, pp. 378, 469; vol. 5, p. 237. 11. Holt, “The Mahdia and the Outside World.” 12. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation.” 13. Mahdia Y80, 1, MSS Letter-Book of Uthman Diqna, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, 101491 (Collection of the letters of the Mahdi and the khalifa to ‘Uthman Diqna, 1881–1888), the khalifa to ‘Uthman Diqna, Muharram 1303/October 1885, and the khalifa to ‘Uthman Diqna, 21 Muharram 1303/31 October 1885. See also Erlich, Ras Alula, p. 65. 14. For Kufit and later confrontations between Ethiopia and the Mahdiyya, see details in Erlich, Ras Alula. Chapter 7, devoted to the confrontation in Kufit is entitled “The year in which the Dervishes were cut down,” a quotation from a popular Ethiopian contemporary poem. 15. The negus of Gojjam was previously Ras Adal. 16. al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 39–40. 17. Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 174, n. 2. 18. al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, p. 55; for Ethiopian raids see pp. 56–59. 19. Heruy Walda-Selasse, Matamma, ch. 1, pp. 5–6. 20. War Office (WO) 106/224, British Archives, London, Intelligence Report no. 182, Memorandum by Major Wingate, 21–27 April 1889. 21. al-Kordofani, Al-Tiraz al-manqush bibushra qatl Yuhanna malik alhubush [The Embroidery Embellished with the Good News of the Death of Yohannes the King of the Ethiopians]. This manuscript was also published by Abu Salim and al-Qaddal, Al-Harb al-habashiyya. The quote is from that book, pp. 59–60. 22. For details, see Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, ch. IX. 23. Abu Salim and al-Qaddal, Al-Harb al-habashiyya, p. 59. 24. Ohrwalder and Wingate, Ten Years, p. 248; Heruy Walda-Selasse, Matamma, ch. 3, pp. 11–15. 25. al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, p. 55. 26. Wingate, Mahdiism, pp. 332–333. See also Holt, The Mahdist State, p. 150. 27. Holt, “The Mahdia and the Outside World.” For a similar view, see Caulk, “Partition.” 28. See Wingate, Mahdiism, pp. 307–311; Holt, “The Mahdia and the Outside World.”

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29. See Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 227. 30. See details about this letter in Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 229. It is possible that it reached Yohannes after the January 1888 battles, and was not responded to. 31. Holt, The Mahdist State, pp. 151–152. 32. See Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, p. 30, a discussion of a quotation from Arab Faqih, Futuh al-habasha. 33. See Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, pp. 238–240. 34. Heruy Walda-Selasse, Matamma, ch. 2, pp. 7–11; Ohrwalder and Wingate, Ten Years, pp. 230–231: “There was the prophecy of Mohammed, who had forbidden his followers to make war against the Abyssinians, unless the latter first provoked it. Abu Anga’s expedition was in direct disobedience to this order, and it was thought that he must suffer defeat as a punishment, and it was urged that if Abu Anga returned in safety, then the Prophet Mohammed must be a liar as well as the Mahdi . . . now the news of . . . the return of Abu Anga’s victorious troops was indeed a welcome relief to the terrible suspense.” 35. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation;” Wingate, Mahdiism, pp. 369– 370, emphasis added. 36. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation”; Holt, The Mahdist State, p. 152. 37. For the negus lamenting the capture of his daughter, see Takla-Sadiq Makuriya, Yaityopya tarik, p. 62. 38. For the correspondence, see Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation”; see also Al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 113–114. 39. Ohrwalder and Wingate, Ten Years, pp. 241–243. For a different version of this episode, see Al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 117–118. 40. Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, p. 48. 41. This refers to P. J. Vatikiofis’s chapter on Isma‘il, “The Impatient Europeanizer.” 42. Erlich, Ras Alula, ch. 7; Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 178. 43. Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 526, and a similar version in Levine, Wax and Gold, p. 28; Another similar version is in Tafla, A Chronicle of Emperor Yohannes, p. 155. 44. Erlich, “A Contemporary Biography of Ras Alula,” Ethiopia and the Challenge of Independence, pp. 81–128. 45. Erlich, “A Contemporary Biography of Ras Alula.” 46. The failure of the Mahdiyya to spread its kind of Islam among Eritrea’s Muslims was also important in the long run. They would remain oriented on the fraternity of the Mirghaniyya (headquartered in Kassala) and its connections to Egypt, where the Eritrean Liberation Front would be established in 1960. 47. See an example in Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 195, n. 1, quoting Fawzi, Al-Sudan bayna yaday, p. 120. 48. See Ahmed, “The Life and Career of Shaykh Talha”; Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, pp. 195–198. According to the Ethiopian historian Takla-Sadiq Makuriya, Ethiopian Muslims helped the darbush to penetrate and destroy Gondar: see Yaityopya tarik, p. 61. See there, p. 65, for stories about forced Islamization and massacres of Gondar’s Christians (in a later raid, August 1889). For Ethiopian Muslims helping and spying for the Mahdists, see al-Qaddal, AlMahdiyya, pp. 108–109, 120, 179.

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49. See Tesema, “Prologue to the Ethio-Sudanese Frontier”; Triulzi, Salt, Gold and Legitimacy. 50. al-‘Azm, Rihlat al-Habasha, pp. 176–177 (section on Yohannes and the Mahdiyya is on pp. 175–181). See analysis in Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, pp. 77–82. 51. Erlich, “A Contemporary Biography of Ras Alula,” Ethiopia and the Challenge of Independence, pp. 81–128. 52. Erlich, “A Contemporary Biography of Ras Alula.” 53. See the text and analysis in Abus Salim and al-Qaddal, Al-Harb alhabashiyya. See also Seri-Hersch, “Confronting a Christian Neighbor.” 54. Shuqayr, Jughrafiyat, pp. 1073–1075. 55. Caulk, “Partition.” 56. Shuqayr, Jughrafiyat, pp. 1076–1077; al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 122–123. 57. Holt, The Mahdist State, p. 173. 58. Ohrwalder and Wingate, Ten Years, pp. 243–244; Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation”; Holt, The Mahdist State, p. 154. 59. War Office (WO) files, British Archives, London, WO 106/224, Intelligence Report no. 182, Memorandum by Major Wingate, 21–27 April 1889. 60. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation.” 61. Caulk, “Partition.” 62. See also Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, p. 248; Dirar, Ta’rikh al-Sudan alhadith, p. 180. 63. Hill, A Biographical Dictionary of the Sudan, p. 143. 64. Takla-Sadiq Makuriya, Yaityopya tarik, pp. 63–64. 65. Heruy Walda-Selasse, Matamma, ch. 3, pp. 11–15; see also Makuriya, Yaityopya tarik, p. 63. 66. Caulk, “Partition.” 67. al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, p. 142. 68. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation.” 69. WO 106/224, British Archives, London, Intelligence Report no. 182, Memorandum by Major Wingate, 21–27 April 1889. 70. For details and geostrategic analysis, see also Erlich, Ras Alula, ch. 12 and 13; also, Caulk, “Partition.” 71. Ohrwalder and Wingate, Ten Years, p. 250. 72. Holt, “The Mahdia and the Outside World.” 73. Shuqayr, Jughrafiyat, pp. 1226–1227. 74. For Menelik and his foreign policy, see Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas”; Marcus, The Life and Times of Menelik II. 75. For the correspondence of Menelik and Takla-Haimanot with the Mahdists at that time, see Gabre-Sellassie, Yohannes, pp. 241–243; al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 113–116. 76. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation”; Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas,” p. 94. 78. See WO 106/224, British Archives, London, Staff Diary and Intelligence, Report no. 198, 2–9 September 1889, on a short raid of ‘Uthman Diqna in Ethiopian territory. See Takla-Sadiq Makuriya, Yaityopya tarik, p. 64, for a raid on Gondar in August 1889.

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79. On commercial relations of the time, see al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 179–182. 80. Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas,” p. 282; Sanderson, “Sudanese Factors”; Holt, The Mahdist State, pp. 215–216; al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 182–183. 81. Menelik to Abdallahi, 15 April 1896; Ras Mangasha Bitwadad to Abdallahi, 15 April 1896, English translations in Foreign Office (FO) files, British Archives, London, FO 141/333; Rodd to Salisbury, 25 October 1898. 82. Translations in FO 141/333, British Archives, London, Rodd to Salisbury, 25 October 1898. See also Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas,” pp. 614–615. 83. Holt, “The Mahdia and the Outside World.” 85. al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, pp. 183–185; Sanderson, “Sudanese Factors,” “Conflict and Co-operation”; Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas,” p. 615. 86. Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas,” p. 651. 87. Holt, The Mahdist State, p. 228. 88. Caulk, “Between the Jaws of Hyenas,” pp. 651–653. 89. See Holt, The Mahdist State, pp. 228–229. 90. FO 141/333, British Archives, London, Rodd to Salisbury, 13 October 1898. 91. FO 403/289, British Archives, London, Harrington to Cromer, 3 January 1899, enclosure 51, memorandum by A. Beru, Agency interpreter; Marcus, “Ethio-British negotiations”; Holt, The Mahdist State, pp. 228–229. 92. Sanderson, “Conflict and Co-operation.” 93. Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” He refers to his own work “The Carving of Eritrea.” 94. Sanderson, “The Foreign Policy.” 95. See a review of Sanderson’s writing by Marcus, “The Foreign Policy of the Emperor Menelik: A Rejoinder”; see also Holt, The Mahdist State, p. 210. 96. Sanderson, “Sudanese Factors”; al-Qaddal, Al-Mahdiyya, p. 184. 97. See mainly Sanderson, “Sudanese Factors,” “The Foreign Policy,” “Conflict and Co-operation.” Sanderson practically ignored the issue of Islam al-najashi. Caulk, mainly in his 1971 article “Partition” also tended to analyze the conflict between Yohannes and the khalifa more in terms of concrete border issues than religious ones: “fanaticism did not cause the friction. It was a legacy of border skirmishes and raiding which had become acute after the Egyptian conquest of the Sudan . . . the friction was stirred up by the expansionist ambitions of Yohannes and then fostered by Mahdist frontier commanders.” The Ethiopian Aleme Eshete, writing during the time of the Mangistu Haile Mariam regime (“A Page in the History of the Ogaden”), and the Sudanese communist al-Qaddal also wrote in the same spirit, attaching little importance to religioushistorical legacies: “The Mahdi’s relations with Ethiopia were no exception in the context of his relations with all other countries,” Al-Mahdiyya, p. 38. 98. As mentioned, in February 1897 Mangasha Yohannes, now under Menelik, was forced to write a friendly letter to the khalifa. In late 1898, now fighting in Tigre and seeking British help, he wrote to Queen Victoria, “King John [Yohannes] died in the ‘jehad’ against Moslems (Dervishes). He fought them with the intention to destroy them. He did not accomplish his intention.

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But . . . Kitchener Pasha accomplished it, and took vengeance for the blood of King John. Our delight was indescribable. The power of Islam (Dervishes) has been destroyed by a Christian Power, and Christianity became more proud of its greatness. There was a great rejoicing in all Ethiopia.” See FO 403/289, British Archives, London, Ras Mangasha to Her Majesty the Queen, 15 November 1898, in Rodd to Salisbury, 8 January 1899. 99. See Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, for example, on p. 116. 100. Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, pp. 72–82. 101. Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, pp. 99, 114, 117, 118, 128, The Cross and the River, pp. 90, 93. 102. Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.”

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CHAPTER

3

Radicalism, War, and Pragmatism: Ethiopia and the Somalis, 1899–1920

THE STORY OF the Sudanese Mahdiyya and Ethiopia, we saw, began

with the threat of frontal collision. Islamic concepts of Christian Ethiopia’s illegitimacy on the one hand and the conceptualization of Islam in crusading terms on the other seemed to lead inevitably to a head-on confrontation. Indeed, these conflicting concepts contributed to mutual demonization, to the distortion of images and of interests, and to the development of a conflict with disastrous implications for all. At the same time, we saw that both the Ethiopian and the Mahdist reservoir of religious and historical legacies contained messages of compromise and acceptance. As the varied concepts of the “self” and the “other” were reinterpreted, while dialectically inspiring actual dynamisms, the need to resort to pragmatism finally enabled the victory of Christian-Islamic coexistence. The last chapter of the Mahdist-Ethiopian story, indeed, seemed rather to have derived from the softer dimensions of the initial, formative episode of the Prophet and the najashi. According to that old legacy, recycled through this dimension, Ethiopia, in spite of its Christianity, was, in the eyes of Muslims, also an accepted, good, tolerant neighbor, even a trusted potential savior in time of need. As the Sudanese-Ethiopian story of political Christian-Islamic dialogue was approaching its end, a new, similar one was beginning in the Ethiopian-Somali sphere. In 1897, while the alliance between Menelik and the khalifa was taking shape, the former signed his treaty with the British and officially annexed Somali-inhabited Ogaden to Ethiopia. That was also the year in which Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan,1 “the father of Somali nationalism” (1864–1920), began his campaign to unite his people under the banner of political Islam. In that year, he left the town of Berbera, “the place of corruption,” and, like the Sudanese 43

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Mahdi’s move to the Nuba Mountains in 1881, made his hegira to the Ogaden. Claiming prophetic inspiration, never pretending to be a Mahdi, he then began his struggle to spread militant Islam, which also targeted the Ethiopian occupation. In 1899, the year the Sudanese khalifa was killed by the British, Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan, known as the sayyid (or the mawla), declared his jihad against the British, Italian, and Ethiopian occupiers of the Somalis. He thus heralded in two decades of a drama whose Ethiopian dimension we shall discuss here. Again, like in the Sudanese-Mahdist story, this Islamic-Christian engagement was inspired by the old, multifaceted religious legacies on both sides. And again, beginning with a confrontation and developing through various conceptual and strategic options, it was to end rather softly, with the Somali sayyid asking for Ethiopian protection, like at the first meeting of the sahaba and the najashi.

The Christian Conqueror and the Sayyid’s Jihad Harar and Ogaden: Two Faces of Christian Conquest

In April 1891, Emperor Menelik II sent a circular to the major European powers in which he responded to their reshaping of regional history since 1885. In his circular, he referred to the European imperialist “scramble for Africa” and to British, French, and Italian penetration and occupation of territories surrounding Ethiopia. Claiming vast lands from the Nile to the sea,2 Menelik was already playing the dual role of defender of Africa as well as of a local colonialist. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, he was successful at both. He forcefully and diplomatically stemmed the Europeans, finally crushing the Italians in Adwa in March 1896, and he doubled the territory of Ethiopia, creating its modern empire mainly at the expense of his neighbors’ local independence. The arguments over the moral and historical significance of the Ethiopian victories and expansion in that period have remained closely relevant to nearly all regional developments and national awakenings since then. The ideology underlying his enterprise was expressed by Menelik in his circular in no ambivalent terms: “I have not the least intention of remaining a disinterested onlooker, if powers from a distance come with the notion of dividing Africa between themselves. Ethiopia was, in the course of fourteen centuries, an island inhabited by Christians in a sea of pagans.” In these words, Menelik clearly presented his self-image. He

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was a Christian king equal to other rulers of the world, superior to all non-Christians in the area. In fact, by 1891 he had been long engaged in defeating Islamic societies in what today is southern Ethiopia. Depicting these local neighbors as “pagans” reflected an old Christian Ethiopian concept of Muslims as infidels who warranted occupation. Though already militarily far superior to any combination of Islamic forces in his sphere, Menelik and his generation were also still inspired by the Ahmad Gragn syndrome, namely the fear of an eventual all-Islamic militant unification that would lead to Ethiopia’s destruction, similar to what had happened in the sixteenth century during the regional Islamic politicization led by the amir of Harar. Four years earlier, in January 1887, Menelik (then still king of Shoa) had conquered Harar, Ahmad Gragn’s medieval capital. Gragn was said to be a Somali—we shall return to this later—but Harar was an autonomous entity ruled for centuries by Adari-speakers. Yet, as the ancient “capital of Islam in the Horn of Africa,” Harar was socioeconomically connected to the Oromo and Somali populations around it. The town had been, and remained, meaningful to all. For Menelik and his people, the occupation of the walled city was a significant victory over Islam. One of the most significant documents remaining from that period is a biography of Ras Makonnen written by the Ethiopian priest Hayla-Giorgis, who settled in Harar in 1891. Makonnen (Emperor Haile Selassie’s father) was a pivotal figure in the Ethiopian side of our story. He became governor of Harar and, until his death in 1906, would be the architect of the Ethiopians’ Somali policy. Following Makonnen’s career, Hayla-Giorgis gives us a glimpse of Ethiopian concepts as presented by a man of the church. A certain Dajazmach Walda-Gabriel, he wrote, had been sent in 1886 to prepare the conquest of Harar. He reported to Menelik: “The place is good to live in but her people are wicked. Earlier a person called Gragn, having been born from them, destroyed the churches of Ethiopia.” “Harar,” the author added, “was desecrated by their [the Muslims’] bad deeds. They prostituted with their idols. . . . Menelik saw a vision . . . like Jacob . . . and he decided to build a church there.”3 The history of Harar itself is part of our Ethiopian-Somali story. The town’s Adari elite and lower classes would be integrated into Ethiopian politics and economy, but they also remained well connected to the Somali hinterland of the Ogaden region and beyond. The annexation of the Islamic capital to Ethiopia removed a buffer between the Christian state and the sphere of the Somali clans, and heralded Ethiopian penetration and occupation. Moreover, the new experience of conquering an Islamic

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urban center, a town of lively commerce and ancient learning institutions, enabled Menelik and his men to rethink their Muslim policy. In fact, under Ras Makonnen, Harar became a model of religious and administrative coexistence under Ethiopian-Christian dominance. Before leaving the Harar area in early 1887, Menelik ordered his men to “let the Muslims live like their ancestors.” The annexation of the town and the areas around it was not followed by coerced Christianization. Makonnen preferred to work with Harar’s Islamic elite, who continued to lead the town’s social and religious life and were pragmatically ready to collaborate with him. Indeed, Harar’s elite quickly integrated themselves into the economy of rapidly expanding Ethiopia, and, like many other Islamic communities in the country throughout the centuries, proved more interested in trade than in politics and in tolerance than in religious confrontation. Makonnen enabled the local Islamic judicial and other systems to continue and appointed ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq as “ra’is al-muslimin,” head of the local Islamic community. Al-Sadiq had collaborated with the Egyptian occupiers of Harar (1875–1885) as an efficient tax collector in the surrounding Oromo areas and proved flexible enough to continue in that position under Makonnen.4 ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq, a man for all seasons, would play a pivotal role in SomaliEthiopian relations and their vicissitudes to the end of this chapter.5 Another prominent member of Harar’s elite, who had served the Egyptians and was now reaffirmed by Makonnen as the mufti of the town was Shaikh ‘Ali Abu Bakr.6 Political power, however, remained solely with Christians. Makonnen proved an able administrator and a good general. He introduced a new taxation system and soon was able to maintain one of Ethiopia’s strongest military forces in the town and its vicinity. Christian domination was also demonstrated in the construction of churches within the walls of the ancient Islamic capital and in all areas occupied by Makonnen’s soldiers, as Hayla-Giorgis repeatedly emphasized. The life of Amir ‘Abdallahi, the last independent Islamic ruler of Harar, was spared, but he remained in isolation. “Gragn died. Amir Abdallahi in our day was his successor,” Menelik was reported to have said, and according to Hayla-Giorgis, Makonnen told the amir, “I have forgiven your sins and I shall ask my lord Menelik to have mercy on you. Do not commit any mistake hereafter lest a worse fate may befall you.”7 The model of Christian domination and Islamic religious, social, and economic autonomy (provided the Muslims did “not commit any mistake”) continued to work under Makonnen. He turned Harar and its hinterlands into an important political center in the expanding Ethiopian

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empire, in the politics of which he was intensively involved until his death. European missionaries and traders who had settled in the town during the Egyptian occupation and newly arrived consuls added to its dynamic complexity. Their reports shed light on local Christian-Islamic coexistence. A British officer, Major J. Willes Jennings, who spent three weeks in the town in late 1903, described two of its aspects: “All Abyssinians go about armed, but the Gallas [the Oromo] and Somalis in Harar itself are not allowed to be armed. . . . Makonnen exercises his power with singular equity, and his judgments seem everywhere to command respect.”8 Perhaps the best evidence was given by a Muslim visitor, a representative of the Ottoman government, the leading Islamic empire of the time. In 1904, the Ottoman sultan, ‘Abd al-Hamid II, began a dialogue with Menelik (to which we shall return later). His special envoy, the Syrian-born general Sadiq al-‘Azm, stayed in Ethiopia between March and June of that year and in 1905, produced his extensive Rihlat al-habasha (which became the most important Arabic document on Menelik’s Ethiopia). Al-‘Azm spent a few days in Harar on his way from Djibouti to Addis Ababa. His description of his encounter with the Islamic Ethiopian town is enthusiastic. Nearly thirty-five thousand Muslims, out of Harar’s forty thousand inhabitants, marched from the town to greet him as the sultan’s personal envoy. Headed by their muftis, qadis, and the imams of the numerous mosques, they represented a flourishing town that thrived on both commerce and learning. In addition, some Ethiopian soldiers came to salute him. Al-‘Azm was especially moved when he attended the Friday prayers in Harar’s main mosque with some two thousand local Muslims, who expressed great excitement when the imam mentioned the Ottoman caliph in his sermon. His meeting with the local ra’is al-muslimin, ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq, who would remain in constant touch with the Ottomans, was significant. Al‘Azm praised Ras Makonnen as an honest Christian who allowed the Muslims to run their lives freely. Though in other places in Ethiopia, he could have seen Muslims deprived of their basic religious necessities— in Addis Ababa there was no mosque nor was there a Muslim cemetery—al-‘Azm’s general impression was of Ethiopian benevolent tolerance. (In Chapter 2, we mentioned his positive presentation of Yohannes’s policy toward the Mahdiyya.) A main motif of the book revolves around the story of the first hegira of the Prophet’s early followers to Ethiopia. In fact, al-‘Azm made a special effort to produce an extensive and a detailed reconstruction of that formative event, deriving from the major Islamic sources. His point is quite clear. Ethiopia was a legitimate land of Christian justice. Menelik was a true successor of the

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righteous Christian king who gave asylum to the pioneers of Islam, protected, and rescued them. There is hardly a hint in his narrative that, according to Islamic sources, Najashi Ashama, the Prophet’s friend, later in the story converted to Islam. This contention, which persisted throughout the centuries to serve the cause of jihad against Ethiopia, was brushed aside by al-‘Azm. His Ethiopia was a land of the righteous Najashi Menelik and of his loyal Ras Makonnen, Christians who rule benevolently over Muslims and were, by the Prophet’s legacy, legitimate neighbors.9 It was from Makonnen’s Harar that the Ethiopian enterprise of expanding into the land of the Somalis was conducted. During 1889–1891, the Ethiopian highlands were exposed to drought and famine with disastrous consequences, especially in the north. Raids, and even attempts at colonization of key places in the Ogaden, were conducted in order to take livestock from the Somalis to replenish the losses. In 1891, the British and Italians agreed on spheres of influence, but the Ethiopians hardly bothered. True to Menelik’s circular of that year, they proved more efficient than the European imperialists in asserting themselves over the Somali clans. Hayla-Giorgis described the process: In 1884 E.C. [Ethiopian calendar], after Masqal, in Tiqimt [September– October 1891], Makonnen sent Grazmach Bante to Wugade, sending with him many men with their wives and children to follow him and stay there. He reached the River Wabi. He visited the whole of Wugade and saw that it was fit for living. He received tribute and gifts from the people . . . he carefully looked after those who submitted to him and treated them like the iris of the eye. He brought them under without any confrontation.10

After the Ethiopian victory over the Italians in Adwa in March 1896 on the Eritrean-Ethiopian front, Makonnen’s men intensified their attempts at colonization in the Ogaden, further asserting their domination: In 1889 E.C. on the 12 of Hidar [21 November 1896] Ras Makonnen sent Dajazmach Mangasha, Fitawrari Amda-Amanuel, Fitawrari Sayid and Qanyazmach Tagene into Wogade the land of the Sumale. They reached Shebele and the people of Sumale submitted to them. They captured the cattle and sheep of those who refused to submit.11

As a result of Adwa, the British and Italians were ready to recognize Ethiopia as a regional empire and accepted its new boundaries. In May 1897, the British negotiated with Menelik in Addis Ababa and with Makonnen in Harar and signed a treaty (14 May), by which they also

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recognized Ethiopian sovereignty over the Haud, a Somali region that had been under British “protection.” In his negotiations with the British, Menelik revealed his concept of the Somalis, as described by the British envoy, Rennell Rodd: The Emperor then again referred to the ancient limits of Ethiopia. I asked him how the Somalis, who had been established in those regions for so many centuries, could possibly be looked upon as included within the ancient limits of Ethiopia. His majesty then propounded the extraordinary doctrine that the Somalis had been from time immemorial, until the Moslem invasion [of Gragn], the cattle-keepers of the Ethiopians, who could not themselves live in the low countries; they had had to pay their tribute of cattle to their masters, and had been coerced when they failed to do so.12

Controlling the Somalis in their deserts was not as easy as ruling Harar. The Ethiopians suffered from the heat, lack of water, and frequent epidemics. They did not actually colonize the Ogaden, but rather continued raiding and taxing there. As reflected in the writing of Hayla-Giorgis, they developed a hatred for the Somalis, who, for their part, ambushed and killed the invaders. “The Berbers rose against me and burned all my tents,” Makonnen complained to Menelik on one occasion.13 According to Hayla-Giorgis, Makonnen “encouraged his soldiers saying that the fight with the Muslims was just, right and according to God’s will.” The raid by the Ethiopians in November 1896 mentioned above and the attempt at colonizing the area of the River Shebele indeed failed. Hayla-Giorgis wrote: They [the Ethiopians] were surrounded and attacked. An epidemic disease of the stomach broke out in the camp. When they [the Somalis] heard of this and saw that their number had decreased because of the disease . . . they waylaid them and killed them by surprise . . . they took their cattle back. . . . Having killed all of those, the Somalis fought the rest but could not defeat them. They [the Ethiopians] remained surrounded for two months and twenty days without any food or water.14

Only a daring rescue operation finally saved the besieged Ethiopians. Though they failed to colonize, the Ethiopians continued raiding, and many Somalis, victims of their disunity, opted to cooperate with their new masters. No Somali-Ethiopian, Christian-Islamic coexistence, in the style of Harar, would really develop. An illustration of the mutual attitudes was provided by the British major Willes Jennings, who in 1903–1904 accompanied an Ethiopian military expedition in the Ogaden, which also included recruited Somali fighters.

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There were continuous squabbles between the Somalis and the Abyssinians, both in camp and on the march. . . . I proposed an international hockey match. . . . Before the first quarter of the game had been played, it came to an untimely end in a fierce fight. Every man became a raving lunatic. All the racial hatred in an instant fanned into flame, and Somali and Habashi fell on each other with their hockey sticks, every blow intended for a knock-out. . . . The Abyssinians . . . rushed to their tents for their rifles and swords. . . . The yelling and struggling and crashing of sticks and heads went on unabated . . . and when the rifles and swords began to come out, we fully expected that the affair would end in slaughter.15

Commenting on another minor Somali-Ethiopian collision that fed on violent animosity, the British observer concluded that “nothing, it seems, can reconcile the two races.”16 The episode, interestingly, occurred at roughly the same time that al-‘Azm was witnessing IslamicChristian coexistence in Harar. The Ethiopians’ policy in the Somali areas did not resemble their flexibility in Harar. Menelik was in no position to be a benevolent najashi in the Ogaden. Up to 1900, until the rise of the sayyid, the Somalis presented no unified challenge and Ethiopia’s attention was elsewhere. The Somali sphere was rather to be exploited to feed Menelik’s armies and reward his generals’ loyalties. While the British and the Italians did little to interfere in the inlands, the Ethiopians were committed by their system to rob the Somali clansmen. Their territory, according to Willes Jennings, was in the eyes of Ethiopians “fit only for infidels and hyenas. . . . If it had been intended for Christians it would have been a land rich in crops and full of rivers like Abyssinia.”17 According to Laitin and Samatar, indigenous testimony puts the number of Ogaadeen livestock seized by Menelik between 1890 and 1897 at 100,000 head of cattle, 200,000 head of camel, and 600,000 sheep and goats. . . . The Somali clans that particularly suffered from Ethiopian raids included the sedentary Geri and Bartire on the plains of Jijiga, the Reer Shabeele in the Shabeele valley, and various sections of the Ogaadeen, such as the Amaadin and Maalinguur, who were repeatedly harried.18

Somali society offered little meaningful resistance. The clan system provided little cohesion and Islam still failed to unite Somalis. Popular Islam and its fraternities had been re-enlivened among Somalis since the early nineteenth century.19 Holy men in the coastal towns and in the hinterland established small religious settlements, tariqas, in the Ogaden and elsewhere. However, since Islam was still predominantly led by the Qadiriyya fraternity, the oldest in Islam, popular religiosity had only in-

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direct impact on Somalis’ daily lives. The Qadiriyya scholars, confining themselves to mediating rather than uniting, in practice endorsed clan politics and the locally enshrined cultural and social codes, beliefs, and customs. In facing the new challenge of Ethiopian—and European— penetration and exploitation, this kind of popular Islam proved far from providing political or military leadership. 20 Moreover, the Ethiopian raiders purposely and efficiently targeted the tariqa settlements in the Ogaden.21 Unlike their policy of preserving all mosques in Harar, the Ethiopians pursued a deliberate policy of destroying the modest Qadiriyya settlements during their raids in the Ogaden. They thus contributed only to the rise of a new kind of Islam among Somalis. The Sayyid’s Jihad: Militant Islam and Ethiopia

The sayyid’s twenty years of anticolonial struggles reinvigorated Islam as a political identity and heralded the later emergence of modern nationalism. Though the stormy drama he led inflicted more misery than it brought salvation, he left an enduring legacy to Somalis. In later years, but already in his time,22 he was thought to be the successor of sixteenthcentury Ahmad Gragn, the principal leader of the struggle against Ethiopians for independence and unity. Modern nationalist myths would unite them,23 in spite of the fact that Gragn’s identity as a Somali-speaker was never fully established.24 The historical connection is not unfounded. Whatever language Gragn spoke, he was primarily a leader of political Islam, a religious warrior inspired by scholars from Arabia who mobilized the various Muslim groups in the region to fight Christian-Ethiopian domination. Gragn managed temporarily to implement a revolution of Islamic unity in the early sixteenth century, and was successful at both deepening Islamic religiosity and building a state of Islamic institutions in the Horn of Africa. More than three and a half centuries later, this goal was revived by Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan. Like Gragn, he strove to unite the Somalis primarily as Muslims, followers of a renewed, fundamental Islam, energized by a holy war against the “other,” a jihad against Ethiopian and European Christian occupiers, as well as against Somalis who would not follow his kind of Islam. In the words of I. M. Lewis: “Since Ahmad Gragn’s wars against Abyssinia in the sixteenth century there had been no tradition of political unity on anything approaching a national basis such as the Sayyid sought to inspire.”25 Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan was also considered a successor of the Sudanese Mahdi. Though he never claimed to be a messianic Mahdi, he was frequently referred to as such, even by modern scholars. Chronologi-

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cally, he did follow the Sudanese Mahdiyya in raising the torch of militant Islam. His movement, together with the Wahhabiyya in Arabia, the Sanussiyya in Libya, and the Mahdiyya, could be seen as part of a religious and political dynamism in the wider periphery of the Ottoman world of that time. The sayyid was personally influenced by those movements and their ideas. Having completed his basic Islamic education with Somali scholars, and been recognized as a shaikh at the age of nineteen, he began pursuing higher studies in Harar. This was the period of Egyptian occupation, 1875–1885, and the young scholar apparently suffered severe deprivation there “for the name of that city would rankle with him as a God-forsaken place that would not extend succor to a needy Mussulman.”26 He also studied in Mogadishu and is said to have spent part of the year 1897 in the Sudan,27 where he purportedly met with ‘Uthman Diqna. “If such a meeting did occur between the two men,” wrote Said Samatar, “the sayyid’s notions of his jihad in Somalia must have been inspired by the Sudanese example.”28 His formative period of training, however, was during a year or more spent in Arabia, Mecca, and Medina (the dates are not clear29) before returning to Somalia in 1895. It was in Arabia that he became a follower of the Salihiyya Sufi fraternity, established at that time in Mecca by the Sudanese scholar, native of Dongola, Shaikh Muhammad Salih (1854–1919). The shaikh was a follower of Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi, the father figure of many movements in support of Islamic political revival in other parts of Africa. ‘Abdallah was declared by Shaikh Muhammad Salih a khalifa of the Salihiyya, and on his return, his followers in Somalia gave him the title of sayyid, implying descent from the Prophet’s Arab tribe of Quraysh. The sayyid’s ideological training rooted him in the sphere of fundamental-political Islam as a universal, uncompromising doctrine. In abstract terms, he was wholly committed to the rigid purity of Islam and to its victory over all others, including, and in his case, arguably mainly Christian Ethiopians. Analyzing the sayyid’s later Arabic writings, B. G. Martin asserted that “Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan’s political and religious opinions classify him quite clearly as a follower of Ibn Taymiyya, as a man to some extent influenced by the Arabian Wahhabis, and as a champion of reforming Islam in general.”30 Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) was the medieval spiritual founder of Sunni fundamentalism, and his writings continue to inspire Islamic radicals the world over. Ibn Taymiyya molded the main political Islamic concepts that directly influenced the eighteenth-century scholar Shaikh Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabiyya movement and the spiritual founder of the Saudi state

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(which was revived by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud during the first two decades of the twentieth century). “To all practical purposes,” wrote Martin, “Salihis and Wahhabis are doctrinally interchangeable.” The writings of Ibn Taymiyya and the concepts of the Wahhabiyya are keys to understanding the abstract conceptual world of the Somali sayyid. The Arabic texts that were preserved in part from the sayyid’s writings shed light on two main themes connected to his ideological interpretation of Islam and of Ethiopia.31 One theme was his call to purify popular Islam of habits like smoking and the chewing of the narcotic qat. He preached strict observance of the sharia, forbidding men to talk to women other than their wives, and forcing women to wear the veil.32 It is widely believed that he opposed tawassul, intercession, though on that issue, he was less systematic. The worshipping of graves of holy men as a way to reach God, a pillar of popular Islam, was widespread among Somalis. Following the Wahhabi model, the sayyid was said to have waged his war against tawassul mainly when confronting the Qadiriyya. In the sayyid’s ideology, Somalis who would not follow him and his kind of Islam were considered infidels, as much so as Christians. Muslims like the Qadiris, who proved unable to stem the invading Christians, were not real Muslims. However, he had a strong attachment not only to imported fundamentalism but to Somali Sufism as well, and in his writings and messages he compromised explicitly with elements of tawassul.33 Those who cooperated with the Ethiopians, he preached repeatedly, were infidels like them (but when it suited him, as we shall see, he himself strove to ally with Ethiopia). Nowhere in the sayyid’s writings or in his popular songs was there any mention of the initial grace of Christian Ethiopia toward Islam, of their king protecting the followers of the Prophet. In a poem he composed against his own kinsmen who sought Ethiopian protection, he declared that “such men deserve disgrace on earth and damnation in the other world.” Oh! Huseen [the sayyid’s poem-memorizer] . . . You are my comrade. You did not go to the Amhar[a] king when your relatives departed. Those who sought protection under the infidels are kinsmen of Hell; By the Qur’an they are Hell-ordained.34

Like Ibn Taymiyya, the sayyid avoided any positive mention of the historical Ethiopian context and ignored the famous hadith that sanctioned their legitimacy and conditionally ordered to avoid jihad against them. In fact, the sayyid was in no position to leave the Ethiopians alone in a period when the Ethiopians harassed his fellow Muslims and clans-

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men in the Ogaden. In December 1896, a few weeks after the Ethiopian defeat at Shebele by local clansmen, the sayyid told his listeners: We are permitted to fight them . . . for they oppressed our religion and invaded our lands. These four nations that invaded our country from all directions, they divided it as if it was their inheritance. They had no other aim but to destroy our religion and force us to abandon it. . . . Oh my listeners, do not think that the destiny of the English, the Ethiopians, the French, and the Italians will be better than that of the nations who invaded our land. Take for example the king of Ethiopia, who in this very year sent a huge army to destroy the people of Shebele and to treat them like they had in the Somali Harar ten years earlier. Namely, to imprison women and children, confiscate property, spill the blood of thousands within the walls [of Harar], and destroy mosques and places of prayer. But the blessed God did not want the destiny of the people of Shebele to be like that of Harar. The Ethiopians were therefore defeated by the Somalis in an unimaginable battle.35

In the sayyid’s doctrine, justice and Christianity could never be compatible. A true Muslim, he preached, should totally sever connections with Christians. More relevant to Ethiopian history, emigration to a land ruled by Christians is forbidden. Any Muslim who goes to a Christian country and lives there exposes his faith—to say nothing of his way of life—to eventual contamination and degeneration. 36 “A man who joins the kafirs [infidels],” he wrote to his fellow Somalis, “becomes like a kafir himself, for so I read in the four books of the Qur’an.”37 In his “Letter to the Bimal,” one of the main Arabic-language documents the sayyid left (composed 1905–1907), he stated: Whoever promotes earthly interests under the protection of the infidels misses the chance to strengthen his religion, for he follows their ways and becomes an adulterer, a wine drinker and a pig eater. . . . What do you say about a country that militant Christians or other infidels occupied? What do you say about Muslims who went there, settled, prospered and accepted the government which is against the Islamic Shari‘a? . . . A Muslim land occupied by the infidels remains a land of Islam [dar al-Islam] even though it became a land of war [dar alharb]. For the Prophet said: Islam should rule, not be ruled. As this country is dar al-Islam, it is the duty of Muslims to save it from the infidels, to fight, lay siege, and undermine them by every means.38

In the same message, the sayyid quoted a hadith, “I have no contact with a Muslim who lives among the infidels,” and stated that this meant that a true Muslim should remove his home away from the infidels’ homes. A Muslim who by living and trading brings prosperity to the land of the

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infidels defies the sharia, breaks the law of God, and accepts the law of the Jahiliyya.39 The sayyid categorically opposed the idea that a non-Muslim could be a just king; he ignored and actually indirectly denounced the first hegira to Ethiopia. In his “Letter to the Bimal,” he mentioned that “There are those who attribute to the Prophet a saying: ‘I was born in the time of the righteous (‘adil) Anusharwan’ [the Persian king Khusraw I (531– 578)].” He then refuted the validity of this hadith and wrote that “attributing justice to him needs evidence as he ruled not in the name of God.”40 According to the sayyid, Martin explained, any Muslim who calls Christians just makes God an unbeliever. It seems that as a faithful student of Ibn Taymiyya, the sayyid must have theoretically adopted his concept of Christian Ethiopians as the worst enemies of Islam. The ultimate demonization of Ethiopians by Muslims stemmed from the old tradition that during the Aksumite Ethiopian occupation of Yemen between 524 and 590, Yemen’s Ethiopian ruler, Abraha al-Ashram, was said to have raided Mecca in 570 (the year the Prophet was born) in order to destroy the Ka‘ba and to divert all attention to a church he had built in San‘a. The Ka‘ba, as attested in the “Sura of the Elephant” in the Quran, was miraculously saved from the Ethiopians when Allah “sent against them birds in flocks . . . who hurled clay stones upon them.” The image of the Ethiopians as the worst enemies of Islam was consequently preserved in a hadith: “A lean-legged from among the Ethiopians [dhu alsuwayqatayn] will [eventually] destroy the Ka‘ba.”41 Probably because of its extreme message, this saying has been quoted throughout the centuries mainly by the most extreme radicals. It was quoted at least twice by Ibn Taymiyya.42 It would be circulated again by today’s militants. In 1897, the sayyid made his own hegira. He left Berbera, where he had engaged in verbal conflict with Qadiriyya scholars and preached against the British occupiers, and moved to the Ogaden. There, among his mother’s Dolbahante clansmen, he began to build his camp of holy warriors. Influenced by the Mahdiyya, he called them dervishes, and was initially successful at mobilizing a supra-clannish force. He told his followers: Unbelieving men of religion have assaulted our country from their remote homelands. They wish to corrupt our religion, to force us to accept Christianity, supported by the armed force of their governments, their weapons and their numbers. You have only your faith in God, your arms and determination. . . . If you see persons who aid the Unbelievers . . . attack them. They are not Muslims. . . . Our aim is to cleanse the land of Unbelievers.43

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He would persist in his call for such all-Somali unity under his flag of Islam until his death. His actual success, however, would only be partial. Somali society lacked the institutional tribalism and other elements of social cohesion that had enabled the Mahdi and the khalifa to establish a viable state in the Sudan. The sayyid would never become the paramount all-Somali leader; he was opposed and denounced by many in equally harsh terms.44 The main instrument in his effort to unite his people was his call for war on the occupiers. The oppressive presence of the Ethiopians in the Ogaden and the failure of the Qadiriyya scholars to provide leadership and stem them, combined with what he had absorbed and developed of the old negative concepts of Ethiopians, led him to opt first for fighting the Ethiopians. On 19 April 1899, Britain’s representative on the Somali coast, Consul J. Hayes Sadler, reported on “the doings of a Mullah45 . . . who is collecting men and arms with the ultimate aim of heading a religious expedition against Abyssinia. The Mullah is himself an Ogaden man, others from Ogaden are with him, and the treatment the Ogaden tribes have for years received at the hand of the Abyssinians would nourish a feeling of hatred towards them.”46 In May 1899, Sadler added: The general opinion is that the Mullah is collecting the tribes together for two purposes: one so that he may get them all to obey in the Dolbahanta country, the other to repel a fancied attack by the Abyssinians on the Dolbahanta. He has given it out, it is written in his books, that someday the Abyssinians will invade the Dolbahanta, and he is calling on the tribes to rally to their own defence. . . . He is an Ogaden man and therefore he is imbued with hatred for the Abyssinians.47

The sayyid’s first message to his inland countrymen is quoted by Said Samatar: “In the name of God . . . it is He who is with me and guides my steps. . . . The Muslim chafes under the tyranny of the unbeliever. Are there any among the Ogaadeen who have not felt the scourge of the Amhaar [Somali for Amhara]? Any who have not been despoiled by their odious raids? . . . If you follow me I will deliver you from the Amhaar.”48 The sayyid’s eyes at that time, no doubt, were on Harar.49 For him, Harar was a Somali city whose liberation should be the founding stone of his jihad. He probably envisioned himself making Ahmad Gragn’s capital the renewed center of an Islamic state. In March 1900, the sayyid inaugurated his two decades of war by launching a campaign against the Ethiopian fort in Jijiga, the key to Harar. Some six thousand warriors “inspired by an assurance that the Abyssinian bullets had been rendered

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powerless by the Mullah” stormed the positions held by Grazmach Banti. According to the Ethiopian report, it proved a disaster; the sayyid’s men were repelled “with a loss of 2,600 killed.”50 Indeed, the sayyid’s power and prestige dwindled in the wake of this failure. “When the Isaaq poet, ‘Ali Jaama ‘Haabiil . . . the chief poetic antagonist of the Sayyid, learned of the Dervish reverses at Jijiga,” wrote Samatar, “he composed his poem ‘Muhammad the Lunatic,’” thereby immortalizing in prosodic form the sayyid’s enduring epithet (the mad mawla or Mad Mullah): The incontrollable man—he who’d seek Menelik in battle, Who says: “With my sword I’ll smite the Abyssinians” . . . Who’d weave lies around us, Who’d take away our minds as if we were brainless camels.51

The Jijiga battle proved to be a turning point. Though some of the Ogaden clansmen continued to join his camp, the sayyid seems to have decided to restrain his anti-Ethiopian policy and rather emphasize the role of the British as the main Christian enemies and conquerors of Islam and Somalis. His thinking, it seems, was adapted accordingly. Sorting out the sayyid’s references to Ethiopia and Ethiopians reveals a set of varied attitudes. The sayyid was not only an Islamic scholar educated in Arabia and connected to the greater Islamic world. He was also, and indeed mainly, a Somali leader integrally connected to local tradition and culture. He was, as agreed by all experts, the greatest Somali poet ever. His Somali-language poems, recited orally and inspiring Somalis to this day, promoted his political leadership and reflected his concepts. Unlike his Arabic texts, which derived from radical thinkers of the Middle East, the sayyid’s Somali poetry, always bold in treating his enemies, expressed less hostility toward the Ethiopians. Discussing the sayyid’s poems against the British is beyond our scope. Their number, as seen in modern compilations and analyses,52 and their harshness, are far greater than the sporadic lines that mention the Ethiopians. The latter were denounced as exploiters, and the Somalis who cooperated with them were exposed as infidels, as “black pagans,” and not to be trusted:53 They who’ve gone to the Amharas in Harar, Whose father-judge and ruler is Menelik Who’d become servants and toadies of the Abyssinians. Let no one else revenge upon them for me . . . One day I will jump over the fence, I will descend upon them unawares.54

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But there is little in these lines to imply that the sayyid was really as bothered about the historical negative role of Christian Ethiopia as can be expected of a follower of Ibn Taymiyya or a student of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s texts. There is no reference in his poetry to the concept that Ethiopia itself had to be re-won for Islam. In a way, he even downplayed his hatred for the Ethiopians: “Three I despise: The gossip of the Somalis, the weakness of the Italians, and the tasteless manners of the Abyssinians.”55 In the sayyid’s poetic terminology, as well as that of other Somalis of the period,56 the Ethiopians were referred to as “Amharas.” For example, in his poem “Path of Righteousness,” among the righteous ones he mentioned he “who does not follow the Amharas as though they were his fathers.”57 Another poem in which the sayyid expressed his bitterness against the Ethiopians said: O God, in the short time when the day after tomorrow has passed; I shall move on swiftly in the lightning-flashes of the . . . rain; O God, we have set out on a long journey, I and [my horse] Boodays; O God, Burco and Looyo are [enemy territory for me] towns of the Amhara.58

The popular usage of the term Amhara seems to suggest that rather than a principal, religious enemy, as prescribed by the universal concepts of radical Islam, the Ethiopian “other” was for the sayyid and for the Somalis in general also a concrete ethnic-linguistic invader. It further seems to mean that the sayyid’s concepts of Ethiopia were not onedimensionally hostile, and that in time, in the face of daily options and earthly constraints, there was also room in his world for an eventual, neighborly compromise. By implication at least, he distinguished between Ethiopian and European Christians; for example, he referred to the Christian enemies as “uncircumcised infidels,” while Christian Ethiopians were circumcised.59 In his speech of December 1896 (following the Somalis’ victory of Shebele, quoted above), the sayyid made a clear distinction: “If this was the imperialism of the Ethiopians, what do you think of the imperialism of the Europeans? If the imperialism of the Ethiopians is like malaria, that of the Europeans is like tuberculosis.”60 “As for the Ethiopians,” wrote Aleme Eshete, “the Sayyid does not use the harsh words he reserved for the British.”61 It would indeed be more valid to claim that, like the Sudanese Mahdi and the khalifa in their time, the sayyid was a Muslim militant whose conceptual world, in spite of his bold language, remained a diverse reservoir, and perhaps more so when it came to his image of

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Ethiopia. The Christian Ethiopians too, we saw, had a diverse view of Islam and different approaches to their hegemony over Muslims. In the two decades that lay ahead after the clash in Jijiga, the interplay between conceptual options and strategic developments would create meaningful changes on both sides, as well as in their mutual relations.

Mutual Relations: Conflict and Pragmatism, 1900–1914 Confrontation and Disengagement

The sayyid’s 1899 declaration of jihad62 and his assumed aim of liberating “the Somali Harar”63 from the Ethiopians created panic in the walled city, which lasted until after the battle of Jijiga in March 1900. “The Abyssinians, it seems, fear the Somalis very much,” the British viceconsul at Harar reported. “I have never seen men so afraid as they are now.”64 The idea that the dervishes were about to recapture Gragn’s capital undoubtedly evoked the old Christian fear of an Islamic awakening. While Ras Makonnen, leading his provincial army in the service of Menelik, was occupied elsewhere, the confrontation between Grazmach Banti and the sayyid’s forces in Jijiga acquired strategic significance. The Ethiopian victory there was to ensure the safety of Harar and the continuation of an Ethiopian presence and raids in the Ogaden. HaylaGiorgis described the battle in religious, Christian terms: On Yekatit 23 [3 March 1900], Grazmach Bante set out from Harer to go to Wigade and left Dejach Birru behind to guard Harer. Taking with him a few soldiers who had been left to protect the territory, he arrived in the land of the Wigade and fought with the Sumale people. He fought them and captured their cattle, sheep and goats. While returning with this booty, the people of Wigade gathered from far and near including their prophet named Kebira. They said: “Can’t you see the mishap that has fallen upon us? Our country has been destroyed and the Wigade plundered.” While the Sumale people were discussing this among themselves, Kebira was trembling and did not dare to face Grazmach Bante. Nonetheless, because of the fear of the Sumale, he [Bante] did not turn back. He [Kebira] followed him, spending the days and the nights where he [Bante] did, until they reached Jijiga. On Megabit 12 [22 March 1900], the day of St. Michael the archangel, Grazmach Bante and his men confronted and fought them.65 They were not terrorized by their uproar or their number, for they were as many as the sand of the seas which cannot be counted and they covered Jijiga like a swarm of locusts. Those few select people of Harer fought them strongly. They defeated the men of Kebira. There the wrongdoers fell

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and were unable to resist; thus they fled as the book says. . . . When Minilik heard that the people of Sumale had risen and surrounded the Christians, he sent noblemen and princes to help them.66

Makonnen’s priest biographer, Hayla-Giorgis, went on to recount how in January 1903, Abuna Matewos came to Harar to celebrate timqet (baptism) together with Makonnen and how “on that day he separated all heretics and the unfaithful in matters of religion from the Christians, for Harer was sanctioned by the steps of Mathew the Evangelist going up and coming down.” In April 1903, wrote Hayla-Giorgis, Makonnen went to Jijiga; “he brought the tabot [ark] of St. Michael from Giri and placed it in a tent. He was thinking of building a church for it but the decision was not taken.”67 However, after the Jijiga battle, Hayla-Giorgis referred much less to the role of the sayyid’s movement in the history of Makonnen. His apparent reluctance to deal with the ensuing Somali-Ethiopian events seems to reflect the fact that both Menelik and Makonnen had now become pragmatists rather than crusaders. The political and military aspects of Ethio-Somali history between 1900 and 1920 cannot be elaborated on here. The Ethiopian confrontation with the sayyid’s movement was closely connected to the histories of British and Italian colonialism in Somalia, and to the relations of these powers with Ethiopia. Menelik, self-assured and confident, became the pivotal player in the all-regional game. His policy toward the sayyid’s movement seemed to stem from his strategic considerations more than from the old concepts of Ethiopia’s siege culture. His first response to the sayyid’s jihad was to call for military Ethiopian-British cooperation, but after the battle of Jijiga, the sayyid no longer threatened Ethiopia’s security, but rather its domination of the Somalis in the Ogaden. Between November 1900 and late 1904, several AngloEthiopian campaigns were launched against the sayyid’s dervishes. Though this attracted much attention in Britain at the time, the sayyid and his men remained elusive and were never actually defeated.68 The Ethiopians, for their part, did not go out of their way to capture the sayyid. Their expeditions, coordinated with the British and accompanied by British advisers, focused on blocking the sayyid’s movements rather than on active pursuit. This can partly be explained by the weather and the nature of the terrain. However, in the final analysis, Menelik was not overly concerned with the sayyid’s threat. His main interest was to cement his relations with the British and the Italians, assure their recognition of his independence and of his domination in the Ogaden, and

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frustrate their own ambitions in Ethiopia. In 1896–1898, we saw, Menelik had been ready to cooperate with the Sudanese khalifa and to help him face the British in the Nile valley. He preferred a weakened Muslim neighbor to a strong European one. Though Menelik went on to speak of affinity with the British and the Italians, he was not unhappy to see them endlessly busy with the sayyid. In time, as we shall see, he even toyed with the idea of allying, on his terms, with the sayyid’s movement against European ambitions. Ras Makonnen, Ethiopia’s man in the Harar area, also influenced Menelik’s strategy on many other issues. We have already mentioned his Somali policy. Makonnen’s taxing raids in the Ogaden supported his involvement and aspirations in all-Ethiopian affairs. Fighting the sayyid was hardly Makonnen’s top priority, and before the battle of Jijiga, he was ready to try to win Somali cooperation through diplomacy.69 In Harar itself, Makonnen went on to solidify the Christian hegemony combined with local Islamic autonomy, headed by the ra’is al-muslimin, ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq. After his Jijiga defeat, the sayyid moved his emphasis back to the British sphere. Although he survived the Anglo-Ethiopian expeditions of 1901–1904 militarily, he failed to overcome the endless rivalries among his own people. On 5 March 1905, he signed the treaty of Ilig with the Italians, in which he undertook to avoid war and to settle in an allotted territory in the Nogal country, as though he were an Italian protégé. This uneasy arrangement lasted until 1908. Already in the summer of 1904, the sayyid had tried to reach some understanding with the Ethiopians. Shaikh Mahmud, a representative of his in Istanbul, approached Mashasha Warqe, Menelik’s envoy to the court of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II, who went there accompanied by ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq, ra’is al-muslimin of Harar.70 No details remain about alSadiq’s role in this initiative, but Mashasha Warqe (who, back in 1888, had written the Mahdists that “our Lord Jesus Christ” will always give the Christians “power and victory, and will humble [their] enemies”71) dismissed the idea and reported the event to the British and the Italians.72 In January 1906, following a clash in the Ogaden between the Beh Geri clansmen loyal to the sayyid and Somali clansmen under Ethiopian protection, the Italians learned of “the sayyid’s intention to negotiate peace also with the Ethiopians in Harar.”73 The man tasked with establishing contact was ‘Abdallah al-Shihri, the sayyid’s most intimate friend from childhood, one of his first supporters and now his agent in Aden. But whatever al-Shihri tried to do, most probably by contacting the ra’is al-muslimin in Harar, came to nothing and it is hard to

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believe that Ras Makonnen would have accepted anything less than the sayyid’s recognition of full Ethiopian hegemony. In Search of Cooperation

In March 1906, Ras Makonnen died. In London in December of that year, the British, Italians, and French signed a tripartite treaty dividing Ethiopia into spheres of influence. Their blunt disregard of Menelik followed their disregard of Ethiopia in the Ilig treaty, even though it related to the Ogaden. As a result, the Ethiopian emperor was now ready to consider some arrangement with the sayyid and to prepare the ground for cooperating with him in case of an open rupture with the Europeans. Makonnen’s death removed the architect of Ethiopia’s pro-European orientation. Harar came under Makonnen’s son Dajazmach Yilma and in town, as well as in Menelik’s court, the influence of ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq now grew. He had long been suspected by the British as a link between the sayyid and the outside Muslim world, especially the court of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid in Istanbul. (In 1906, the British had ordered al-Sadiq to leave India, from where they thought he was trying to transmit the sayyid’s message to Afghanistan.) 74 It seems that after the death of Makonnen, al-Sadiq undertook to persuade Menelik on the one hand, and the sayyid on the other, to work together. His initiative did not lack personal ambition: such an alliance would enhance the importance of Harar’s Islamic community as well as his own position as the pivotal figure in eventual local Christian-Islamic cooperation. Probably due to ‘Abdallah al-Shihri, al-Sadiq’s contact in Aden, the first step in this direction was taken by the sayyid. In March 1907, the sayyid in Nogal wrote Menelik: A paper issued from the Dervishes to the respected king. It is our duty to inform your highness that as you know, there was war between the English and us, and there happened what happens in battles and the like. The reason for that war is that we found out that they want to rule us, subjugate our country, exploit our resources and defeat our religion. Strife occurred between us and a war broke out, which lasted nine or ten years until they had enough and they retreated asking us for peace and security. And now we heard that the French and the Italians and the English made a treaty and are helping each other to occupy your country. If they occupy your country, we shall suffer in our land. And if they occupy our country, you will suffer in your land. The reason for that is that they want to rule both your country and ours for they say that [we] are [all] black people. As this is the case, we would rather not help them to destroy us. We had better join forces, for you

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and we are sons of this motherland and our land is one. We ask for your response by way of Aden or by way of the Ogaden.75

Compared with the sayyid’s earlier words, this was a revolutionary document. The enemy was now only the Europeans; all Ethiopians were black brothers. No religious barrier was mentioned. Compared with the messages from the Sudanese Mahdi and the khalifa to the Ethiopians, the sayyid’s letter can be read as one written by a modern pragmatist, even a man of all-African solidarity. Islamic militancy befitting a student of Ibn Taymiyya was replaced by concepts compatible with modern nationalism. In referring to a common motherland with the Ethiopians, the sayyid used the term watan, which in abstract form, wataniyya, connoted modern territorial nationalism in other Islamic societies in the Middle East of the time. Indeed, in retrospect, the sayyid would be regarded by modern Somali nationalists as their father figure. No doubt, he was working to unite Somali-speakers and build a renewed Somali political culture. Yet he remained primarily a Muslim leader, inseparably connected to the world of Islamic thought and concepts. His new pragmatic flexibility toward Ethiopia had its roots in this sphere. Like the Sudanese khalifa who pursued an alliance with Menelik when facing more dangerous enemies, so Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan, a devout Muslim, had the option of resorting to the old reservoir of legacies. He could be inspired by an early Islamic message of neighborliness with, and even salvation from, Christian Ethiopia. The sayyid was a complex person. On the one hand, he demanded that his people follow a strict Wahhabi-style sharia; on the other, he occasionally supported popular customs when it suited his policy. In his “Letter to the Bimal” (written in 1905–1907), he strongly condemned those denouncing tawassul. Moreover, the sayyid personally and continuously broke moral codes through his autocratic, capricious cruelty. His foreign relations man, ‘Abdallah al-Shihri, was one of his many victims, and bore a grudge because of the sayyid’s interference in his family affairs. While negotiating in 1905 with the Italians toward the Ilig treaty, al-Shihri secretly entered their service. In early 1909, he would break openly with the sayyid and persuade Muhammad al-Salih in Mecca to denounce the sayyid, publicly and strongly, on moral Islamic grounds.76 This development is outside our scope and in any case, the sayyid managed to recover from that disaster as well. However, in 1907, the sayyid still trusted this double agent, al-Shihri, and through him sent the letter quoted above to Menelik. Rather than relaying it to the Ethiopians, alShihri, in Aden, passed the letter to the Italians who naturally began

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working to sabotage any chance of rapprochement between the Ethiopians and the Somalis. But a similar message from the sayyid did reach the Ethiopians through the Ogaden. In this message, the Italians discovered, the sayyid informed Menelik that he was an Ethiopian subject by birth and should consequently receive Ethiopian protection and support. As such, he asked for the government of the Ogaden, which he promised to appease.77 In his last year, 1920, the sayyid would indeed claim openly that he was an Ethiopian. We shall return to that in the appropriate context. Meanwhile, Menelik was now ready to play the benevolent Christian najashi. Unlike Emperor Yohannes in his time, Menelik was well aware of the positive aspects of the Islamic conceptualization of Ethiopia as legitimized by the “first hegira.” In June 1904, as we noted, he had hosted the Ottoman envoy Sadiq al-‘Azm: He [Menelik] then asked me about the historical relations between Ethiopia and the Muslim world, and I started telling His Highness in general and in detail about the connection and the exchange of presents between the Prophet and the Najashi Ashama, and how the refugees found the best of shelters in Ethiopia, and how many of the followers of our master Muhammad were Ethiopians. . . . It all made the Emperor very happy and he said he wanted the good relations to continue forever, and that he loved his fellow Muslim Ethiopians like he loved the Amhara without distinction.78

Menelik’s response to the sayyid’s letter was to try to co-opt the Somali leader and turn him into one of his autonomous Muslim vassals. He would not correspond directly with the sayyid but, as he had done with the Sudanese khalifa, he used one of his men as both a messenger and as an adviser to the sayyid on how to approach Menelik. Naturally, the man chosen was ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq. On 21 July, in Addis Ababa, ‘Abdallah wrote a letter to the sayyid. It opened with long quotations from the Quran about Islamic unity and solidarity, and followed with other quotations expressing devotion to pure Islam as well as awareness of the punishment awaiting Muslims who deviated from the true path. Next, the letter conveyed the message that Muslims, as true Muslims, do prosper in Ethiopia. They are “united in love and friendship and we have all the best in our country.” Then al-Sadiq promised the sayyid that “King Menelik will help you in everything you may need.” To further emphasize Menelik’s friendship with Islam, and show that his strategic options were not restricted to cooperating with European invaders, the letter ended with special regards to the sayyid from the Ottoman Ibrahim Bakir. Bakir, Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid’s agent in Addis Ababa, “wishes

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you all the best, as do all the Muslims in our country who love you and pray for you.”79 Al-Sadiq’s letter, which was surely approved by Menelik, also introduced a certain Hajj Jami‘, an Ethiopian messenger who was tasked with carrying it to the sayyid. Jami‘ also carried a second letter, more detailed and important, signed by al-Sadiq and three other leading Islamic scholars of Harar. It opened with verses from the Quran praising Islam, and then addressed the sayyid in the following words: The brave Imam, master of the believers, the model for all Islamic scholars, the man of pleasant conversation, the honorable, faithful, glorious Muhammad bin ‘Abdalla, may God preserve his rule. I, your loving brother, the head of the Muslims in Harar, the Haj ‘Abdalla the son of Haj ‘Ali Sadiq, and your admirers the scholars of Harar, the Qadi ‘Abd al-Rahman, the Qadi Yunis bin al-Shaykh ‘Uthman, and the Mufti of Harar the Shaykh ‘Ali Abu Bakr, we all wish you the best of peace. We hope that God will make peace [sulh] between your honor and King Menelik, the king of Ethiopia. The peace is good for us and for all Muslims in Ethiopia. Under the protection of you and of Menelik, we are relaxed and secure about our religion and about our affairs in this earthly world of ours [dunyana]. We shall be even happier if there is peace between the two of you, and if you loved each other. When you are united with King Menelik [on equal terms—wujudukum ma‘ suhbat al-malik minilik], we will be very happy, as all the Muslims in Ethiopia are very, very happy. [This is] because our country and our waters and our skin color and our creator, are all the same. If we make this peace, our country will be peaceful and free of foreign enemies like the British and the Italians, who caused friction between the two of you [the sayyid and Menelik] through intrigue. All this tension is because of the British and the Italians. King Menelik hates evil and likes friendship. He respects the Muslims and loves them. He counts them among his people, feeds the hungry and clothes the naked among them. And the Muslim princes, who are their leaders from the time of their ancestors, were not replaced and are not opposed because of their Islam. For example, Abba Jifar the Sultan of Jima and, for example, the people of Harar—no one else rules them. For this is King Menelik, who hates treachery and does not betray his friends. He loves those who love him and respects those who respect him. Now his country is free of intrigues and Muslims and Christians are at peace with each other. Under Menelik, no one can be hostile to the other.

The letter from the four Harari scholars included operative advice: We look forward to your positive response through our envoy Haj Jami‘, and we ask that your response will express acceptance and satisfaction, and that you send it by a trusted confidant and that the response be addressed to King Menelik. In that way, it would be written

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proof for King Menelik and he will see in his mind and eyes that the Muslims love him in return. After that, it would be between him and you in friendship and love and we shall all be satisfied and happy. He [Menelik] will help you against the foreign enemies who crave this land. All that you ask for, he will help you with. And we pray to God that he will give you all the best for the good of our motherland under our kings. I, the head of the Muslims in Harar, will take care of your envoy to Menelik who will carry your cherished letter and especially, I myself shall take care of him in Addis Ababa where he will be respected in [the court of ] King Menelik.80

Though in theory, as we have seen, the sayyid considered Muslims living under Christians to be infidels, in practice, he continued to strengthen relations with the Muslims of Harar. In September 1907, Hajj Jami‘ met with ‘Abdallah al-Shihri (the double agent) in Aden and gave him presents from Menelik. Al-Shihri had secretly arranged with the British to stop the Ethiopian envoy who, unaware that al-Shihri was actually in the service of the Italians, hurried to hand over the letters to him. The Italians thus learned of Menelik’s readiness to ally himself with the sayyid and began to suspect that he was considering appointing the sayyid over the Ogaden once he had sworn allegiance to him. The Ethiopians and the sayyid remained unaware of the fact that their correspondence had been intercepted.81 Interestingly, in the field itself, the routine of clashes continued. That same month, September 1907, the Ethiopian government sent an expedition to the Ogaden to collect taxes. It was attacked by the sayyid’s men and sustained heavy losses.82 After Dajazmach Yilma died in October 1907 and as Dajazmach Balcha would be appointed over Harar only in April 1908, ‘Abdallah alSadiq grew confident in Harar. He presented himself to his Muslim fellows as ‘Umda hakim, namely, the mayor of the town, and claimed to be governor of the Ogaden. While Menelik’s court continued with internal intrigues, ‘Abdallah took upon himself to revive and move the Somali option forward. Sometime in January or early February 1908, ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq wrote again to the sayyid from Harar. His letter opened with quranic verses about the diversity of humanity as created by God, and the need to maintain connections based on blood relations (i.e., not on religious grounds only). It went on: Peace of God and his blessings to our master and our beloved sayyid Muhammad ibn al-Sayyid ‘Abdalla, the pure man loved by every Muslim man and woman . . . whose family tree is like the tree of Islam whose roots are strong and whose crown is in the sky. My thanks to God for your close relations with the Prophet and I pray that he will

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protect you and give you victory in every valley, plain, and mountain, and will instill fear in the hearts of your enemies, the infidels and the unfaithful. . . . And that your army will be brave like Muhammad was brave in the battle of Uhud and his followers in the battle of Badr.83 We ask for your forgiveness for what happened between you and your neighbor, the king Menelik. He asks you for appeasement and reconciliation. His plan is to give you friendship, love and brotherhood. He is aware of our common ethnic origin. He appointed me a mediator for this call. . . . I am the governor of all the Muslims in Harar and the Ogaden. Now I reveal to you my wish to go to the Ogaden . . . please do respond through one of your trusted ministers with whom we can meet where you choose. [Also send] another special response to King Menelik to make him happy. . . . This will not be difficult for you, for God told Muhammad that if you make a treaty with the infidels and they do not break it and if they do not plot against you, trust them and fulfill your part until the treaty expires. For God loves the believers, and an infidel is pardoned as long as he does not make a pact contrary to the one he had with a believer. From here, all the Muslims send you greetings and pray day and night that God will give you victory over your enemies.84

It was a letter from a Muslim to a Muslim in the spirit of legitimizing Christian Ethiopians “as long as they leave you alone.” The opening phrases about diversity and blood relations were intended to suggest “African” interreligious solidarity, justified by the Prophet’s words. At the end of the letter, the case for treaties between Muslims and nonMuslims was included to remind the sayyid of the agreement of Hudaybiyya between the Prophet and the infidels of the tribe of Quraysh, which was signed (in 628) for practical reasons only. The allusion implied that such an agreement with non-Muslims is conditional and temporary. The treaty of Hudaybiyya was indeed soon abrogated, and the Prophet defeated Quraysh and conquered Mecca. Al-Sadiq’s letter was sent through ‘Abdallah al-Shihri in Aden and therefore fell immediately into Italian hands.85 Al-Sadiq also wrote a personal letter to al-Shihri in which he implied that the two of them should work more intensively to promote the desired alliance between Menelik and the sayyid and invited al-Shihri to come to Harar for that purpose.86 Al-Sadiq was rumored at that time to be preparing a military expedition to the Ogaden, the actual aim of which was to meet with the sayyid and negotiate an arrangement. To foil that plan, the Italians instructed al-Shihri to respond to al-Sadiq’s invitation and go to Harar as if he were the sayyid’s envoy. In March 1908 in Harar, al-Shihri established contact (by telephone, probably) with the emperor. He later reported to the Italians that indeed Menelik wanted to suggest that the

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sayyid rule the Ogaden under Ethiopian sovereignty. Al-Shihri then persuaded al-Sadiq not to lead an expedition to the Ogaden and instead come with him to meet with the sayyid. Having acquired this intelligence and having foiled the expedition, al-Shihri abandoned al-Sadiq in Djibouti, and on 25 April 1908 the ra’is al-muslimin returned emptyhanded to Harar.87 Meanwhile, in the same month, the British and Italian ministers in Addis Ababa caused Menelik to admit that he was in touch with the sayyid. The emperor did not deny the fact, but claimed he was planning nothing against the Europeans, and that he never promised the Ogaden to the sayyid; on the contrary, the sayyid asked for it under Ethiopian protection. His own intention, Menelik said, was to lure the sayyid to come to where he could catch him.88 In 1908, the sayyid returned to active hostilities against the British and Menelik had to make a clear choice. He told the Italians and the British that he knew nothing of ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq’s attempts to re-establish contact with the sayyid, and on 16 May 1908, he agreed with the Italians on the final delineation of their border in the Ogaden. Ill and occasionally physically paralyzed, the emperor was losing touch. In Harar, probably under al-Sadiq’s influence, the new governor, Dajazmach Balcha, was said to be sending arms to the sayyid. Due to the improved British blockade on the coast, the sayyid now needed to acquire supplies from inland. In 1909, he sent his uncle, Amir Argoleh, to the Ogaden to recruit more local clans and coordinate the smuggling of arms from Harar. The sayyid himself, for his part, continued to seek Ethiopian help and protection. Some time before July 1909, he approached Balcha again, claiming to be an Ethiopian by birth and promising tribute in exchange for protection.89 At the same time, this policy did not stop the sayyid from composing yet another poem in 1909, strongly denouncing Those [Somalis] who say we are followers of the Ethiopians and came under the government of Harar, And Menelik became their father, controlling all their affairs, And the Ethiopian army became the shield protecting them, They committed the worse evil and caused fratricidal war in the land.90

In April 1910, the sayyid once more asked for Ethiopian help,91 but this time it was much too late. A month earlier, in March 1910, following a strong demand by the powers, Menelik removed Balcha from Harar and appointed Makonnen’s other son, Dajazmach Tafari. Though Tafari tried to stop local smuggling and trading in arms with the Somalis,92 he observed the sayyid’s growing influence in the Ogaden. However, he

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would not make contact with the sayyid, and resumed Ethiopian raids in the Ogaden.93 In early 1912, the sayyid again tried to come to terms with Ethiopia. He sent a deputation to Harar with a letter and presents, but Tafari refused the presents and sent his men back.94 Tafari, the future Emperor Haile Selassie, would follow in his father’s footsteps as a political Christian as well as an Ethiopian statesman, oriented toward working relations with the powers. The sayyid also continued to waver between his options. At the same time that he was trying to befriend Tafari, he composed one of his more famous poem-messages, denouncing Muslims who were in touch with Christians: “It is no offense when you fight the infidels and hypocrites, for fighting them is the duty of every Muslim. . . . I am a pilgrim and a holy fighter and have no wish to gain power and greatness in this world. . . . This is a time when corruption and adultery spread; it is a time when the infidels defeat the Muslims. . . . It is a time when learned men serve the Christians. This is the end of all things. May God guide us.”95 In August 1912, Major Dodds, the British official in Harar, met with Tafari to urge him to stem arms smuggling to the Ogaden more efficiently. He spoke of the sayyid: “We must consider his words which he has spoken on more than one occasion. . . . The Mullah has said that he will not be satisfied until he comes to Harar. He has sworn to come to Harar with all his forces! . . . At the present moment, I think we may safely assume that the Mullah can not come to Harrar. But it is to the future that we must look.”96 Indeed, the very near future was to change the whole premise of the game being played out between the sayyid and the Ethiopians, open new strategic options, and energize another cycle of mutual Christian and Islamic concepts.

Islam, Christianity, and World War I in the Horn The Ottomans’ Jihad, the Sayyid and Iyasu

World War I, 1914–1918, had a formative impact on the history of the twentieth century within and outside Europe. The war expanded into the Middle East, where it ended with the region’s transformation from an Islamic Ottoman empire into a sphere of new, modern nation-states. The Horn of Africa, in contrast, saw no frontal collision between the major powers, and remained on the sidelines throughout. Yet, the war directly affected the history of the Horn itself. In the Middle East, the war had a

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very vivid religious dimension. The Ottomans, allied with the Central Powers, did their best to render it an Islamic holy war against the British and their allies. The battles in the Middle Eastern theater and the vicissitudes of the war there also raised or shattered the expectations of Somalis and Ethiopians, and directly influenced the story of the sayyid and Ethiopia, which was now reaching its culmination. Already in 1914, the Ottoman Empire was led by pioneers of modern nationalism. In 1908, the “Young Turks” deposed ‘Abd al-Hamid II, the last sultan to rule the empire as a political Muslim; his successor remained a rather symbolic figure with no political authority. These leaders were inspired by a blend of Turkish history and Ottoman Islamic heritage, not yet separated, as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk would do in the 1920s. When the leading triumvirate of Enver, Jemal, and Tal‘at dragged their empire into the Great War in early November 1914, they resorted to nationalist Turkish ideology (primarily on the Russian front), as well as to Islamic ideology (on the Middle Eastern front). On 14 November 1914, the Ottoman government published a fatwa issued by the imperial shaikh al-Islam that declared a holy war against the enemies of the empire. The call for jihad was actively answered by some peripheral figures in the region, Imam Yahya of Yemen, the Sanusis of Libya, Sultan ‘Ali Dinar in Sudanese Darfur, and also the Somali sayyid. The impact of the Ottoman jihad was potentially far more significant for Arab societies in the core of the Middle East, and especially in India, where many Muslims were recruited to serve in the British armies. The British worked to counter the Ottomans’ religious-war ideology by allying with local nationalist movements. In India in 1916, the British hastened to come to terms with the modern nationalist movement, and in the Middle East, they did the same with the emerging Arab nationalists. They encouraged the outbreak of the famous Arab revolt in the Hijaz in June 1916, which, as we shall see, also had an impact on Somali-Ethiopian developments. It was in this context of stemming the influence of the Ottoman jihad that the British, French, and Italians would intervene in Ethiopian affairs, and, in September 1916 would help the local Christian national establishment to stem the momentum of political Islam in the Horn. On the eve of the war, the sayyid was almost beaten by the British, but the global conflict saved him from a collision with their improving technology. The struggling powers could not afford to send forces to the Horn and the sayyid, from his headquarters in Taleh, could continue his effort to unite the Somalis. Joining the Ottoman cause was quite risky. The Allies controlled the Red Sea and the Somali coasts, and the sayyid’s warriors were short of ammunition. Though the Ottomans throughout

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1915 and the first half of 1916 had their share of victories against the British in the Middle East, they were too far away to arm the sayyid. Just prior to the outbreak of the war, the Ottomans learned that the Somali dervishes had only four or five cartridges for each rifle, and that the Ethiopians in Harar, under Tafari, were defeating them in the Ogaden. In September 1914, some fifteen hundred Somalis were killed by Tafari’s army, which raided the desert (and suffered only a hundred casualties).97 Paradoxically, however, the sayyid’s salvation would come not from the Turkish army but from Ethiopia, from a struggle within the Ethiopian ruling establishment that itself also had vivid religious dimensions. As Emperor Menelik was deteriorating physically and mentally, he decreed in 1909 that his grandson Lij Iyasu, his only male descendant, would inherit his throne. Iyasu was the son of Ras Michael, formerly Imam Muhammad ‘Ali, the leader of the Wallo Muslims, who had been Christianized by Yohannes in 1878. The story of Iyasu as Ethiopia’s head of state after the death of Menelik in December 1913 was one of the more controversial issues in modern Ethiopian history. Here we shall confine ourselves to his relations with the sayyid and with the Ottomans, until his deposition by the Christian establishment on 27 September 1916.98 From our vantage point, Iyasu’s reign can be divided into two phases: before the outbreak of the war and after. In the first phase, Iyasu tried to solidify his authority by playing only on the Ethiopian field. Young, inexperienced, and ambitious, he worked to build new coalitions in defiance of the already entrenched Shoan nobility created by his grandfather. Seeking new local allies, mostly on Ethiopia’s periphery, Iyasu also flirted with Islam, as if returning to the faith of his father and ancestors in Wallo. Wallo’s Islam, flexible and moderate, had coexisted for centuries with Ethiopian-Christian political culture and rulers. Iyasu’s new connections and behavior irritated the leading elite, but did not yet cause an open crisis. On his part, he avoided being officially crowned as a Christian emperor, and rather symbolized his being a king of kings by having his father crowned (in May 1914) king of Wallo and Tigre. Significantly, inscribed on Negus Michael’s new seal was the fact that he had been a Muslim leader. The outbreak of World War I and the Ottoman jihad changed Iyasu’s perspective on Islam. No longer merely the religion of his ancestors and a useful card in rebuilding his Ethiopian power base, Islam, as it radiated from the Middle East, was now a political ideology fighting for victory. As can be concluded from the story that would unfold up to his deposition, Iyasu, mixing caution with miscalculation, gambled on an Ottoman victory. In preparing for it, he worked to build an alliance with

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the sayyid, hoping to have the Somalis included in his future empire. Iyasu apparently visualized a new order emerging after the war, under him, centered on Harar and stretching over the entire Horn of Africa, a wing of a renewed, Ottoman-oriented land of Islam. From Ethiopian Islam to Militant Islam

During the 1911–1912 Italian-Ottoman war over Libya, the Young Turks resumed their interest in Ethiopia. In April 1912, they sent a permanent consul to Harar, and replaced him on 7 April 1913 with a consul to Addis Ababa, Ahmed Mazhar, former head of the Translation Department of the Ottoman government. He was Iyasu’s main connection to the Ottomans. The new, energetic consul had studied Sadiq al-‘Azm’s book thoroughly and was apparently influenced by his descriptions of Ethiopia’s military ability and its 1896 victory over the Italians. Mazhar was no less impressed by al-‘Azm’s presentation of Ethiopia as a land of good Christian-Islamic relations and of the centrality of Harar as the capital of Islam in Ethiopia and the Horn. In November 1913, he sent a report to Istanbul detailing how the Ottomans should help Ethiopia against the colonialist powers and win it to their side by encouraging the Muslims while avoiding undermining Christian hegemony.99 Posted to Addis Ababa, Mazhar’s first action was to move his office and residence to Harar. From there, he developed intimate relations with Lij Iyasu as well as with the Somali clans in the Ogaden (who complained to him about Tafari’s raids). Mazhar also became very close to ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq, who had been in contact with Istanbul since 1904. Al-Sadiq had been in constant touch with the Somali sayyid, and was already close to Iyasu. The new Ethiopian emperor tended to seal his local alliances by marrying women, mostly daughters of Muslims, including one of ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq’s daughters.100 Iyasu essentially viewed the Harari scholar as his guide on his road back to Islam. The connection between Iyasu, Mazhar, ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq, and the Somali sayyid would, after the outbreak of the war, develop into an axis around which the Islamic-Christian struggle of 1914–1916 over the future of Ethiopia and the Somalis revolved. Harar was naturally the hub of this connection. However, when the war broke out, it was governed by Dajazmach Tafari, who was already emerging as the leader of Ethiopia’s Christian establishment. To undermine Tafari’s power and promote his Islamic option, in early December 1914, Iyasu appointed ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq as subgovernor of the Ogaden. That same month, the appointment was interpreted by the British as part of Iyasu’s new master plan to invite the Mullah (namely,

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the sayyid) to extend his sway over the whole of the Ogaden country in the confines of Ethiopia itself, once the ground had been prepared by ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq in “return for which he would undoubtedly render valuable assistance to Abyssinia when an emergency arose.”101 To further tighten his control, Iyasu appointed an Ottoman subject of Syrian origin, a friend of Mazhar and resident of Harar, Hasib Ydliby, as naggadras, the official in charge of commerce and taxation, of the town and the region.102 Tafari had little choice but to swallow his pride. For the next year and a half, he would pretend to be unaware of the activities in and stemming from Harar on behalf of the future victory of Islam, 103 and would share desperate observations with the British consul.104 He had long detested ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq who, for his part, was quickly changing from a Muslim, loyal to Christian Ethiopia—as he had been in the heyday of Menelik—into a busy agent of jihad. Al-Sadiq was now overseeing sending arms to Ogaden clans loyal to the sayyid, sending missions from Iyasu to the sayyid’s headquarters in Taleh, and spreading among Somalis and Ethiopians the word of Ottoman holy war in leaflets prepared by Mazhar. On 19 December 1914, Mazhar wrote his superiors in the Ottoman foreign ministry: It is possible to get the Ethiopians on our side if we manage some compromise with them. By using this situation, we can profit in Sudan and in Somali. . . . I sent the missionaries to Somali and to the Sudan with the declarations. I even published the fatwas. I sent these fatwas to Yemen for translation purposes which will be published in India, Aden and Hadarmaut. The Mawla has rebelled in Somali. I am trying to involve the other tribes. With all Muslims, we are praying for the Sultan.105

Mazhar, as is apparent from his other messages as well, envisioned an all-Islamic holy war in the Horn, which, after victory, would lead to an Islamic Ethiopian-Somali empire. He initiated the reproduction in Arabic and spread the fatwa of jihad issued in Istanbul in the Ogaden and beyond. The fatwa, phrased like questions from the Ottoman government to the shaikh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire, included the following: If several enemies unite against Islam, if the countries of Islam are sacked, if the Moslem populations are massacred or taken captive; and if in this case, the Padishah [namely, the Sultan] in conformity with the sacred words of the Koran proclaims the Holy War, is participation in this war a duty for all Moslems, old and young, cavalry and infantry? Must the Muslims of all countries of Islam hasten with their bodies

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and possessions to the Jihad. Answer: “Yes.” . . . Those who at a time when all Muslims are summoned to fight, avoid the struggle and refuse to join in the Holy War, are they exposed to the wrath of God, to great misfortunes, and to the deserved punishment? Answer: “Yes.” . . . If the Muslim subjects of the [enemy] countries should take up arms against the government of Islam, would they commit an unpardonable sin, even if they had been driven to war by threats of extermination uttered against themselves and their families? Answer: “Yes.”106

In early February 1915, Iyasu visited Harar and was reported to have prayed for three hours with ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq in a mosque.107 Mazhar, following conversations with Iyasu, wrote to Istanbul on 13 February: “The Ethiopians want to have a harbor. . . . If the British are thrown out of Ottoman Somali, it might work to give Ethiopia part of the coast between Zeila and Bulkar and the territory between the coast and the eastern border of Harar.”108 In order to throw out the British, Mazhar thought, the sayyid should be armed by Iyasu. The same message continued: According to our information, the Mullah sent an army of 12,000 men against the tribe of Warsangeli, the tribe most loyal to Great Britain. On the coast, this army burnt some villages. At present, the army is still busy destroying. The only problem he [the Mullah] has is arms and ammunition. If an agreement is reached with the Ethiopians, this need can be covered from here. The Mullah is ready to conquer whatever the Sublime Porte orders, and his power is enough. He only applied for our help in ammunition for next year.

According to Turkish historian Cengiz Orhonlu, Mazhar envisioned a united Ethiopian-Somali-Sudanese army joining the Ottoman cause and marching on Egypt. In early March 1915, he asked his superiors “for the authority to work for a treaty of friendship if the situation allows, and to officially negotiate with the Ethiopian government,” and was in fact authorized to do so by Enver Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war.109 In mid-March 1915, Mazhar decided to move from Harar to Addis Ababa, closer to Iyasu.110 He and ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq went together to the capital and at first were quite successful in promoting contact between Iyasu and the sayyid. On 12 (or 27) May, Mazhar reported to Istanbul: Lij Yasu sent an imperial letter to the Mullah of Somali, by means of one of my servants. This man carried 10,000 cartridges too with this letter. The text of the letter refers to cooperation with Germany and with our government. This imperial letter has been adorned with the

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word of witness for Islam [the shahada]. In this letter, Lij Yasu advised the Mullah to push on against the Italians and the British. For this purpose, he will help the Mullah in any case. I have sent more statements [the fatwas of jihad] to the Mullah and to the other tribes. Our attempts are going well, with the help of Allah. Lij Yasu supports us whole-heartedly. He will give the imperial orders soon. I am waiting for your answers, which will increase his efforts and encourage him in our favor.111

Assessing the situation, the British minister in Addis Ababa, Wilfred Thesiger, wrote in June 1915: Every week offers fresh evidence of Lij Iyasu’s sympathy with the Mahomedan religion and with the Moslems whom he goes out of his way to propitiate, even at the expense of the customary politeness to Abyssinian Christians of far higher standing. . . . I am coming to the opinion that the heir of the throne of Solomon is at heart a Moslem and is entertaining dreams of one day putting himself at a head of the Mahomedan Abyssinians, who considerably outnumber the Abyssinian Christians, and of proclaiming a Moslem kingdom which will stretch far beyond the frontiers of his present empire. . . . This intention is being probably strengthened by the conviction of an ultimate Turco-German victory.112

However, in the middle of 1915, Iyasu was in no position to commit himself to such a cause. Defying both Ethiopia’s Christian establishment and the surrounding European allies while the war in the Middle East was in its initial stages was too risky. Iyasu’s policy was to evade Mazhar’s pressure to enter the war (in June, the impatient Ottoman consul suggested that his government send two planes as a gift to Iyasu). Iyasu preferred to wait while preparing for eventual cooperation with the sayyid. Opting for this wait-and-see policy, Iyasu left the capital in June 1915 and did not return until April 1916. He wandered between Wallo, eastern Shoa, and the fringes of the Ogaden, and enabled ‘Abdallah alSadiq to impose in Harar what the British consul called “a reign of intrigue,” further undermining Tafari by building a new police force in Harar based on “a collection of undesirable Arabs.”113 At the same time, Iyasu allowed both al-Sadiq and Mazhar to cultivate the connection with the sayyid. In late June 1915, it was reported that Iyasu had invited the sayyid to move his headquarters to the Ogaden in Ethiopian territory,114 but the sayyid declined. In August, an Ethiopian mission, handpicked by al-Sadiq, was sent to the sayyid in Taleh. It was said to be an official imperial mission, headed by Muhammad Matiba, an Ethiopian of Somali

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origin who had received some Turkish education; Farah Haji, the commander of al-Sadiq’s armed followers; and ‘Abdi Sarur, al-Sadiq’s confidant. They brought presents from Iyasu to the sayyid and camels loaded with arms. More camel caravans from Harar to Taleh were reported in the following months. The Ethiopian-Islamic mission remained with the sayyid during the coming months and in January 1916, ‘Abdi Sarur returned to Harar, bringing a gift from the sayyid to Iyasu of a Maxim gun that had been captured from the British in 1904.115 The British, for their part, could barely swallow the provocation.116 Indeed, the sayyid went on to provoke them and raid their loyal clansmen in the Berbera area and the coast. His confidence grew to the extent that he paternalistically wrote to the British suggesting that he would mediate between them and the Ottomans if the British recognized his rule over all the Somalis. In practice, however, the sayyid was in a position to bother the British but not to collide with them,117 as Mazhar hoped. In February 1916, another mission from Ethiopia “apparently presented the Mullah with a Turkish flag,” but the sayyid was said to have promised “to fly this [flag] . . . when the Turkish troops land there to join hands with him and march on Berbera.”118 Expecting a Turkish victory in the spring of 1916 was not unrealistic. Though the Turks had failed to storm Egypt in February, they were preparing new forces in Palestine. They had also failed to capture Aden from Yemen, and the Libyan Sanusis, under the flags of jihad, were driven back from Egypt in March. But major victories were scored against the British in two main arenas. In January 1916, the British campaign in Gallipoli that aimed to capture the Dardanelles ended with heavy British losses and their bare escape. The British advance in Mesopotamia (future Iraq), was stopped in late 1915, and an entire British army came under a long Turkish siege in Kut al-Amara, finally surrendering on 29 April 1916. Iyasu was biding his time. On the one hand, in October 1915, he told Mazhar that he and his father would soon enter the war;119 on the other hand, his men told the Italian minister in March 1916 that Iyasu was trying to avoid the Ottoman intrigues, and that he knew that Ethiopia’s interest was never to fight its European neighbors.120 But in April 1916, Iyasu seemed to have decided to throw his lot in with the Ottomans and draw even closer to the sayyid. Around the middle of the month, Muhammad Matiba returned to Harar from the sayyid’s camp, carrying the sayyid’s letters to Iyasu and to the Ottoman sultan. The letters were lost,121 but whatever their message, on 27 April, Iyasu made a clear statement. He returned to Addis Ababa (together with ‘Abdallah

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al-Sadiq, “who is the living spirit behind all of Iyasu’s Islamic intrigues”122) to attend a gathering of the capital’s leading Muslims, held in the Turkish consulate on the occasion of Sultan Reshad’s birthday. At the event, Iyasu bestowed on Mazhar the Grand Cordon of the Star of Ethiopia and an Ethiopian flag on which the shahada was embroidered.123 A week later, the captured British Maxim gun, the sayyid’s gift, brought from Harar where it had been stored, was presented to the public of the capital at an official ceremony.124 In late May 1916, Mazhar received instructions from Istanbul: We are following with interest your relations with the Mullah of Somalia. It is understood that he is ready for any action under Ottoman supremacy. A guarantee can be given that if he conquers any area from the Italians or the British, that area will be given to him. The Ottomans and their allies are defeating their enemies and shall win. The enemy has been defeated at the Dardanelles. In addition, Ottoman success is continuing in Iraq and the Caucuses. At Kut al-Amara, a British army surrendered and after that, five generals and 130,000 men were captured. Our allies also have become victorious over our enemies. Sanusis took action against the British and won a victory on the border of Egypt. . . . If Ethiopia takes action against our common enemies as we hope, you have permission to say that whatever they capture from Italy, Britain, and France [namely, Djibouti], we will support the Ethiopians so that they will keep these territories even in peacetime. If they want a document on this subject, you can satisfy them by saying “whatever territories the Ethiopians can take from the British, the Italians, and the French, who captured these areas from the Ottomans in the past, we will support them even in peacetime to keep their conquest.” This suits the Ottomans, too.125

This indicates that the Ottoman government wanted the Ethiopians and the Somalis to cooperate, but had different ideas about their future. Ethiopia, the letter implied, should be pushed in the direction of French Djibouti and could annex other Somali areas. After victory, Ethiopia would be recognized by the Ottomans as an independent, friendly entity. Moreover, in another letter from the Ottoman foreign ministry, Mazhar was instructed to promise the Ethiopians, in return for their cooperation, the keys to Deir al-Sultan, the Jerusalem monastery whose gate was disputed with the Egyptian Copts.126 (Mazhar, unwilling to re-emphasize Ethiopian Christianity, asked permission to tell that to the Ethiopians at a more appropriate moment, and would never make the offer.) Istanbul envisioned that after victory, the sayyid’s Somali land would be an Islamic entity under the Ottomans. Mazhar was told to clarify to the German consul that “Molla Muhammad is in the Ottoman service and under

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its rule. In the land that he already occupies, he uses the Ottoman flag and actually has spread Ottoman supremacy to the harbor of Eila.” To ensure that the sayyid would be recognized as an Ottoman subject, Mazhar was further instructed: “The title of sheyh al-mesheyih will be given to the Molla of Somali and in addition the [military] rank of Feriq or Mushir can also be promised to him. Whatever he has conquered from the Italians and the British [not the French] will be left to him.”127 Instead, Mazhar clearly did his best to make Iyasu believe that he would be the master of the entire Horn of Africa. Iyasu, on his part, was ready to raise the stakes for this purpose. In mid-April 1916, the Italians intercepted letters from Iyasu to Somali chiefs in which he claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet and his daughter Fatima.128 He now allowed Mazhar to re-intensify his holy war campaign and spread harsh antiBritish propaganda in this spirit. Some of the leaflets, with the apparent consent of Iyasu, were even distributed in Addis Ababa. One of the leaflets, addressing the Somalis, called on them to join the war of the sayyid: Three of the Christian nations, England, France and Russia, our strongest enemies since the beginning, made an alliance in order to destroy Islam; and their intention was to destroy the temples of Mecca and Medina . . . and moreover, to demolish the prestige of the Caliphate and the influence of the Koran, together with the humiliation of all believers. German and Muslim armies have already destroyed the Christian nations. . . . Oh Somali Moujahedin, you who are famous for your righteousness and calm temper, the present day is a day of trials you have been ordered to fight . . . by the wish of our almighty God . . . collect yourselves and be united under the flag of the Messenger of God; throw down the fortifications of Berbera and Zaila and Djibouti, and Bulhar. . . . Give up the last quarrels between yourselves. . . . Concentrate your forces under the command of the Said Muhammad bin Abdullah Hassan. He is now holding the standard of our [Ottoman] Caliph in the Somali countries. Consult him. Do not disobey him, follow his views. . . . Oh, brethren and sympathizers, be it known that the Abyssinian Government is not with our enemies and they are not in the war against the Government of Islam. They are friends and advisers of the Ottoman Government. The interests of Islam in this country concur with those of the Abyssinian Government.129

Similar leaflets were distributed all over. On 19 July 1916, for example, a particularly venomous three-page anti-British pamphlet was posted in Harar’s public places. After the British consul complained, they were removed by Tafari’s men (Tafari himself was staying in the

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capital at that time). They would be redistributed after 21 August 1916, when Iyasu removed Tafari from Harar’s government.130 The End of Iyasu and of the Sayyid

The months of June and July 1916 brought little promise to the Ottoman cause. On 5 June, the Arab Revolt broke out in Arabia and Mecca was captured from the Turks in five days. The fighters under the new Arab flag went on to expel the Ottomans and, by August, had captured the Hijaz, leaving behind a besieged Turkish garrison in Medina and an isolated army in Yemen. The impact of the Arab Revolt on Horn affairs was twofold. First, the Ottomans lost all contact with the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden theaters. From now on, Mazhar would have to send his dispatches via Europe, as communications through Yemen were impossible. Second, the revolt helped the British to undermine the very concept of the Ottoman jihad. The Arab movement was led by the Hashemite family of Mecca, descendants of the Prophet, and rebelled not only in the name of Arab heritage but also, inseparably, in the name of Islam. The Hashemite princes were in a position to expose the Young Turks as the destroyers of the Ottoman dynasty and of the political authority of the sultan caliph. In contrast, they could present themselves as fighters for the restoration of pure, authentic Islam under a renewed Arab caliphate. The British were quick to utilize this message, and their men in Berbera spread the Hashemite word among Somali tribes.131 No less significant from our perspective was the Ottomans’ failure in July–August 1916 to launch yet another attack on Egypt. Their defeat in this area ended the hope that any Turkish army would land on the shores of Somali lands, and that they would have any direct leverage in the Horn of Africa. On 13 August 1916, Iyasu decided to cross the point of no return. He removed Dajazmach Tafari from the government of Harar and declared it a crown province, in practice, under Muslim administration.132 In so doing, Iyasu undertook to defy the Christian establishment openly and to turn Harar into a capital of jihad. Assessing it retroactively, this was a miscalculated move with strange timing. Explanations should perhaps be sought in the psychological sphere. It seems that Iyasu was carried away by his own illusions and propaganda. Just before his removal of Tafari, more pamphlets were distributed that accused the British of desecrating the Quran, aiming to enslave all Muslims, and planning to destroy the Ka‘ba and steal the holy black stone, with the intention of exhibiting it in the British Museum. (As mentioned, the most radical Muslims in fact expected a “lean-legged from among the Ethiopians” to

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destroy the Ka‘ba). Iyasu was now also ready to seal his alliance with the sayyid. He sent a German mechanic, Emil Kirsch, to Taleh to repair the sayyid’s guns and render other technical services. In the middle of August, Iyasu sent another mission from Harar to Taleh to offer marriage to one of the sayyid’s daughters. Preparations for her arrival and for the wedding in Harar133 never materialized. Iyasu and the sayyid would never meet. The Ethiopian invited the Somali to see him in Jijiga; the sayyid invited Iyasu to come to Taleh. Beyond these gestures were pointed messages. Taleh was the headquarters of a proud Somali who would take second place to no one; Jijiga was where the Ethiopians had defeated him. The sayyid believed that after the victory, he would be master of all Somalis, including those of the Ogaden. Iyasu was led to believe that after the victory, the Ottomans would recognize him as the ruler of the entire Horn of Africa. Yet in spite of these contrasting agendas, they had to cooperate. Moreover, the sayyid needed the alliance with the Islamizing king of Ethiopia to prove to all Somalis that victory would be his.134 Iyasu needed the sayyid, not only for fighting the British and their allies, but also for the future war with Ethiopia’s Christian establishment. Indeed, some involved observers believed that this was Iyasu’s real agenda.135 Mazhar, for his part, continued to push Iyasu to join the war. On 4 September, he reported to Istanbul: The prince should be careful. . . . He is openly in touch with Islam. He is completely inexperienced. . . . Our enemies probably will not recognize him in the future. His position is in our favor. If we convince him that we are the only power that will maintain his political position, he will come under our influence and we can maintain the balance of power. The German consul is hesitant about this. It is our duty to convince Germany about the personality of the prince, and she must help to maintain his kingdom.136

According to Italian information, the Turks continued to spread disinformation about imagined victories in Egypt and Arabia. This was most probably the work of Mazhar. Iyasu, in any case, was acting as if he had the wind in his sails. In early September, he dared to re-enter Harar, where Tafari’s loyalists and soldiers were still stationed. In spite of their protests, he ordered the local police force to be dismantled and a new one to be built, based on al-Sadiq’s armed men. He also arranged for the arrest of the British consul’s translator and for sending him to Addis Ababa in chains.137 After proclaiming that he was a descendant of the Prophet’s family, Iyasu left Harar for Dire Dawa, where he attended

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an Islamic festival, overseeing a religious parade and hoisting the Ethiopian flag with an embroidered symbol of the shahada. In the second week of September, Iyasu proceeded to Jijiga, where his men had organized a gathering of Somali chiefs from the Ogaden and from the British protectorate. Iyasu gave them money and arms and swore on the Quran that he was a devout Muslim; together they performed Islamic rituals. He made speeches on Islamic unity and declared that the Ottoman caliph had designated him to liberate the coast between Massawa and Berbera, a duty he hoped to fulfill soon.138 Iyasu failed in his reading of the Somalis. The sayyid was apparently unhappy with Iyasu’s territorial claims and was already maltreating Iyasu’s gift, Emil Kirsch. None of the sayyid’s men attended his meeting in Jijiga. The sayyid’s Somali opponents were now less willing to fight the British. The sayyid’s kind of leadership did not unite the Somalis in the risky spirit of an anti-British holy war. Already in June 1916, the British assessed that: “The general loyalty of our Somali tribes may be counted on at present. . . . The mistake he [Iyasu] and our enemies in Abyssinia are making is that they believe that the Mullah Muhammad Abdullah Hassan is held in veneration and respect by the Somali tribes. They are exhorted . . . to unite under his leadership. But this they will never do willingly.”139 The British, as mentioned, had been spreading anti-Turkish propaganda about the Arab Revolt among the Somalis, and in August they were also in a position to prove to their chiefs that the Ottomans had been defeated in Egypt and Arabia. A group of Somali leaders was taken on a tour to see camps of Turkish prisoners in Egypt.140 Iyasu’s gamble of September 1916 to mobilize an Islamic-Somali army was heading nowhere. Iyasu’s provocation was stronger than his abilities. In gambling on Ottoman victory and relying on Somali-Ethiopian Islamic unity, he also failed to assess the Ethiopian Christian response. Turning Harar into the headquarters of a jihadi enterprise was sure to inspire Christian reaction and energize the ever-present Ahmad Gragn trauma. On 27 September 1916, at an official Christian ceremony in Addis Ababa, Iyasu was deposed. Only Abuna Matewos, who, on Menelik’s order had sworn (in May 1909) that all Christian Ethiopians would be loyal to Iyasu,141 was hesitant, but he had to yield to the Shoan leaders. The indictment against Iyasu, read during the ceremony, reflected the political Christian ethos of Ethiopia’s elite: The Christian faith, which our fathers hitherto carefully retained by fighting for their faith against the Muslims and by shedding their

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blood, Ledj Iyasu exchanged for the Muslim religion and aroused a commotion in our midst. In order to exterminate us by fighting, he has converted to Islam and, therefore, we shall henceforth not submit to him; we shall not place a Muslim king on the throne of a Christian king; we have ample proof of his conversion to Islam.

After listing ten such proofs, Abuna Matewos excommunicated anyone who would follow Iyasu. Menelik’s daughter Zawditu was proclaimed empress and Tafari, now ras, was declared heir to the throne.142 A few days later, Christian soldiers massacred some four hundred Somalis while regaining control of Harar.143 Tafari would continue to develop as the strong man of Ethiopia and, in 1930, be crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I. In his memoirs, Haile Selassie described the deposition of Iyasu as the removal of a Muslim from a Christian throne. We have no reason to dispute that. Iyasu challenged Ethiopia’s entrenched political ethos and provoked its old siege culture to the full. All the evidence we examined supports the assumption that Iyasu was returning to Islam, expecting an Ottoman victory and a military alliance with the sayyid’s movement. His steps cannot be interpreted other than as leading toward a new Ethiopia, centered on Harar as the capital of an Islamic, African empire, allied with Istanbul and under his rule. However, what Iyasu did in practice was to re-enliven and restrengthen the Christian nationalism of Ethiopia’s elite. Before 1916, the empire of Ethiopia had gradually been adopting a more pluralist nature. If Yohannes IV can be described as a crusader, Menelik II led a political culture of relative openness. It combined Christian domination with Islamic autonomies and with growing participation of Muslims in the life of the empire. That a son of Ras Michael, previously Imam Muhammad ‘Ali of Wallo, was designated as Ethiopia’s emperor was definitely the promise of an improved Christian-Islamic dialogue in Ethiopia. However, Iyasu’s transformation into a political Muslim, and his apparent striving for the victory of Islam as both religion and state, undermined the likelihood of such a dialogue for many decades. Iyasu’s history after September 1916 is beyond our scope here. In October 1916, the army of his father, Negus Michael, was defeated by a coalition headed by Ras Tafari, and Iyasu spent the next two decades in or escaping from prisons. In 1935, when Mussolini threatened Ethiopia and prepared to restore its Islam as a political identity, Haile Selassie saw to the elimination of Iyasu in prison. The sayyid’s story, however, headed more quickly toward its end. The deposition of Iyasu in 1916 was a tactical blow to the Somali leader, but also a mixed blessing. He was so severely weakened that as

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long as the war lasted, the British had no reason to bring additional forces against him. They could contain his dwindling power by helping his Somali opponents (mainly the Yishaq clans) to retaliate against his sporadic actions. The sayyid, for his part, continued to hope for Ottoman protection. In late 1917, he officially yielded to the Ottomans and was declared their protégé.144 He managed to survive the war, but not long thereafter. In the succinct words of Robert Hess, “Ignored by the Qadiriyya Somali, by the British, by the Italians, and by the Ethiopians, the dervish movement lost its strength. Muhammad Abdullah, unable to lead a jihad, found that peace was his worst enemy.”145 In October 1919, a year after the end of the war, the British government finally approved new operations against the sayyid. He was now exposed to modern British air power. The campaign against Taleh began on 25 January 1920 and the devastated fortress was taken on 12 February. The sayyid and his followers fled to Ethiopian territory where in July they were attacked by Somalis loyal to the British. Some seven hundred sayyid followers were killed and almost all the cattle that were supposed to feed his men were captured. The sayyid, with around a hundred remaining men, fled to Immi on the Webbi Shebeli, deeper in Ethiopian territory. Composing his last, and famous poem, “The Will” (Dardaaran), the sayyid summarized his life, condemning the “white” colonialists and their collaborators: There never was a gain in dealing with the whites . . . You soften up to the unbelieving white man and he is bound to deceive you . . . In the end, he will place a heavy load, like a pack donkey’s, on your wretched backs; . . . in my flight I have gone beyond the plains of Limey and the hills of Harar.146

The Ethiopians, the old nonwhite occupiers, were now the sayyid’s only chance. In October, the last remaining dervishes were spotted by Fitawrari Seyum, the Ethiopian commander of the area. A British report summarized the end of the sayyid: The Mullah said [to Grazmach Ayele, Seyum’s man] that he had been beaten by the English, and had come to Abyssinia in search of protection. After two days Ayele returned to Ginir. He took with him as presents from the Mullah two rifles and a revolver for himself and two Lee-Metford rifles for the Fitaurari. Before leaving he undertook to send provisions to the Mullah. Fitaurari Seyum reported the matter by telephone to Ras Tafari who gave orders not to attack the Mullah, but

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to keep him under observation, and prevent his escape. The promised provisions were not given, and the Mullah sent one of his brothers and a follower, Abdi Sheikh, to ask the Fitaurari for food. The latter, acting on the orders of the Central Government, threw these envoys into chains. Sickness and famine fell on the Mullah’s camp. In December he died; his death was caused by bleeding and vomiting blood. He was buried in a hut at Goanneh. In accordance with Moslem custom, a small oval mound was erected over his grave. The spot is not regarded as holy, nor is it a place of pilgrimage.147

The sayyid, who twenty years earlier had declared that those who went “to the Amhara king . . . who sought protection under the infidels are kinsmen of Hell; by the Qur’an they are Hell-ordained,”148 the man who stated (in his “Letter to the Bimal”) that those living under the protection of Christians become themselves pig eaters, adulterers, and wine drinkers, now himself sought asylum with an Ethiopian najashi. But Ras Tafari was unwilling to play the benevolent Christian king. For the rest of his life, Tafari/Haile Selassie would not tolerate a challenge to Ethiopia’s Christian political culture. He was cautious enough not to provoke Islam by arresting the sayyid and preferred him to die of hunger and disease. Such shrewdness would typify all aspects of his policy in the coming decades. In seeking asylum in Ethiopia, the sayyid closed an Islamic conceptual circle. He had begun as a student of Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine, preaching total political victory for Islam as a set of radically interpreted beliefs. He turned the concept of Islamic holy war into a pivotal dimension of his mission, and directed it initially against Christian Ethiopia. Realizing after a while that he could not storm Ethiopia like a new Ahmad Gragn, he resorted to a pragmatic approach, which, by 1907, had become transformed into a policy of seeking an alliance with the powerful Christian kingdom. The rise of Iyasu and his Islamic tendencies, as well as the Ottoman strategy during World War I, re-enlivened the sayyid’s jihad. Finally, facing destruction by the British, the initially holy warrior against Ethiopia sought asylum there, from a Christian prince whom he hoped would be his savior. Moreover, in that final stage, the sayyid was ready to claim again, this time more clearly, that he was himself an Ethiopian. In the last days of April 1920, while taking refuge in Ethiopian territory, the sayyid met with a deputation of ten Somali leaders sent by the British to talk him into a dignified surrender. The sayyid refused to discuss it with the British. He was in Ethiopia and claimed to be an Ethiopian. According to Douglas Jardine, the sayyid told the envoys and his followers:

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The only thing that did hurt me was that in the Arabic letters which the [British] aeroplanes dropped, I was described as Mohammed bin Abdulla, Ogaden, Bagheri, Rer Hamar? That is dreadful. . . . My origin apparently has been forgotten. I am the son of Ras Mikhail’s brother, and I am the cousin of Lij Yasu, the prince of Abyssinia, and this I can prove. [Turning to an Arab]: You have read it in the Qoran? [The Arab assents.]149

In his despair, the sayyid returned to the ultimate positive Islamic image of Christian Ethiopia as a land of justice ruled by a king (whom the Prophet had descripbed as a righteous najashi) “who oppresses no one,” the Ethiopia that protected the Prophet’s original followers in their time. The sayyid was now even ready to relate himself to the most famous Ethiopian Muslim who converted to Christianity, to Imam Muhammad ‘Ali (the father of Iyasu), who was baptized Ras Michael in 1878, and would become one of Menelik’s prominent chiefs. While Iyasu, on his way to becoming a political Muslim, claimed he was a descendant of the Prophet, the sayyid, trying to shed Islamic militancy, now claimed he was a member of Ras Michael’s family. In claiming to be a Muslim Ethiopian, the sayyid fully endorsed the legacy of the first hegira, namely, the concept of Ethiopia as a culture of interreligious tolerance. Seeking salvation under presumed Ethiopian benevolence, he ended up as far as possible from his initial jihad.

Notes 1. For variations on his name and its spelling as well as a short biography, see Samatar, “Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan.” 2. The text of Menelik’s letter of 1891 is in FO 1/32, Rodd to Salisbury, 15 May 1897. See also Greenfield, Ethiopia, app. III, pp. 464–465. 3. Hayla-Giorgis, Zenahu Lele’ul Ras Mekwennin (hereafter Ras Makonnen), a Ge‘ez-language history of Ras Makonnen with a preface by Blatta Welde-Qirqos. A 97-page English translation was prepared for the late Richard Caulk and is available at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES), Addis Ababa University. See ch. 4, pp. 9, 11. 4. See Ben-Dror, “The Egyptian Hikimdariya of Harar.” 5. ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq would survive all the dramatic changes culminating in 1916, and would die peacefully in Harar in the mid-1920s. See a short article on him by Tafla in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, p. 38. 6. ‘Ali Abu Bakr was related to the family of Harar’s rulers and opposed the government of Amir ‘Abd al-Shukur (1856–1875). He then collaborated with the Egyptian occupiers of the town (1875–1885), and persuaded them to execute this last amir in October 1875. When the Ethiopians occupied Harar in 1887, they put ‘Ali Abu Bakr in charge of collecting taxes in town. See BenDror, “The Egyptian Hikimdariya of Harar.”

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7. Hayla-Giorgis, Ras Makonnen, ch. 5, pp. 13–14. 8. Jennings, With the Abyssinians in Somaliland, pp. 36, 37. 9. The passage above is based on Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, pp. 72–82. Al-‘Azm’s Rihlat al-Habasha was first issued in Turkish (1905). The book, a very important description of Ethiopia in 1904 from an Islamic point of view, was republished in Abu Zabi in 2001 in collaboration with the Arab Institute for Studies and Publications in Beirut, forming part of a series of classical Arabic voyage books. It was edited by Nuri al-Jarakh who added an introduction. The publishers renamed the book A Voyage to Ethiopia, From Istanbul to Addis Ababa, 1896. They unfortunately ignored the difference between the Ethiopian calendar and the European one (even though it was discussed by the author, pp. 177–178). Misled by dates of Ethiopian letters quoted by the author, they added the year 1896 to the book’s chapter headings as if this appeared originally; the book was written like a diary and discusses events in the early 1900s (for example, on pp. 48, 81). This new edition of Rihlat al-Habasha is quite popular in the Middle East today, but gives a misleading picture of Menelik’s Ethiopia during the crucial year of the battle of Adwa. 10. Hayla-Giorgis, Ras Makonnen, ch. 11, p. 26. 11. Hayla-Giorgis, Ras Makonnen, ch. 19, p. 38. 12. FO 1/32 Rodd to Salisbury, 9 May 1897. 13. Hayla-Giorgis, Ras Makonnen, ch. 7, p. 17. 14. Hayla-Giorgis, Ras Makonnen, ch. 19, pp. 38–39. 15. Jennings, With the Abyssinians, pp. 231–233. 16. Ibid., p. 255. 17. Ibid., pp. 150, 167. 18. Samatar, Oral Poetry, pp. 109–112; Laitin and Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State, p. 55. 19. Hess, “The Poor Man of God.” 20. Lewis, The Modern History of Somaliland, pp. 63–65; Swayne, Seventeen Trips, pp. 240–241; Hess, “The ‘Mad Mullah’”; Samatar, In the Shadow of Conquest, ch. 1 (by Martin), ch. 2 (by Bemath). 21. Laitin and Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State, pp. 56–57; Hess, “The Poor Man of God”; Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 96. 22. Keenadiid, Ina Cabdille Xasan, pp. 115–117. 23. See also Hess, “The ‘Mad Mullah’”: “Ahmad Gran is for the Somalis a symbol of their past conquests; similarly, Muhammad Abdullah has become for modern Somalis a symbol of national unity transcending tribal lines but true to Islam and the Somali’s love of independence.” 24. Lewis, “Continuing Problems in Somali Historiography”; Touval, Somali Nationalism, ch. 5, “Two Heroes of Somali Nationalism,” pp. 49–60. 25. Lewis, The Modern History of Somaliland, p. 81. 26. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 102. 27. Samatar, “Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan.” 28. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 102. 29. Sheik-‘Abdi, Divine Madness, pp. 47-48. 30. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, ch. 7, “Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan of Somalia,” pp. 177–201. On the sayyid and Wahhabism, see also Sheik‘Abdi, Divine Madness, pp. 56–61.

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31. See analysis in Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, “Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan Writings,” pp. 195–201. 32. Lewis, Pastoral Democracy, p. 226. 33. The Italian scholar Alessandro Gori, who is studying the sayyid’s text “Risalat al-Bimal,” argues that the sayyid clearly approved of tawassul. Responding to Martin’s article, he wrote that “a more balanced approach to the sayyid’s theoretical way of thinking may be envisaged and one should recognize his strong ties to the traditional Sufi world.” The passage in the “Risala” approving tawassul is in the version published in “Somalia. Antologia storico-culturale,” published by the Somali Ministry of Public Instruction, Mogadishu, 1967, p. 22 in the Arabic text. Personal communication from Professor Alessandro Gori, 2008. 34. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 157; see a different translation in Sheik‘Abdi, Divine Madness, p. 70. 35. Marzuq, Tha’ir, p. 21, emphasis added. 36. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, ch. 7, “Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan of Somalia,” pp. 195–201. 37. FO 371/2228, Translation of an Arabic letter from the Mullah, 1915. 38. ‘Isa, Ta’rikh al-sumal, p. 156. 39. Ibid., pp. 155–156. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharh al-‘umda, vol. 4, p. 427. 42. Ibid., p. 494, Kutub warasa’il, vol. 27, pp. 355–356. 43. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods, ch. 7, “Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan of Somalia,” p. 182, quotes ‘Isa, Ta’rikh al-sumal, p. 59. A similar text can be found in Marzuq, Tha’ir, p. 37. 44. Samatar, “Sheikh Uways Maxamad of Braawe”; see also Keenadiid, Ina Cabdille Xasan, pp. 261–277. One opposing poet compared the sayyid with the Ethiopian Abraha who was said to have planned to destroy the Ka‘ba, see p. 272. See Abbink, “Dervishes, Moryaan, and Freedom Fighters.” 45. The sayyid (as noted in Chapter 1) would be nicknamed the “Mad Mullah” by the British, but its origin was the Somali expression wadaad wal, lunatic religious leader or priest, used in the late 1890s by Somalis opposed to him. See note 51 below, a passage from the poem of ‘Ali Jaama ‘Haabiil, “Muhammad the Lunatic.” See also Abbink, “Dervishes, Moryaan, and Freedom Fighters.” 46. Omar, History of Somalia, p. 325. Omar’s book is based on British reports stored in the Indian archives. See also Jardine, Mad Mullah, p. 41; Laitin and Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State, p. 57. See also Archivio Storico dell’ Ministero dell’ Africa Italiana (hereafter ASMAI), busta (envelope) 65/1, Governor of Benadir to Consul in Zanzibar, 26 September 1899. 47. Sadler to Salisbury, 4 May 1899, quoted in Omar, History of Somalia, p. 331. 48. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 112. 49. ASMAI 65/1, Governor of Benadir to Consul in Zanzibar, 26 September 1899. 50. Jardine, Mad Mullah, pp. 45–46; War Office, Official History, vol. I, p. 126; Hess, “The Poor Man of God.” For a different interpretation of the battle,

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see Lewis, The Modern History of Somaliland, p. 71; Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 118. 51. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 138. 52. Samatar, Oral Poetry; Keenadiid, Ina Cabdille Xasan; Andrzejewski and Lewis, Somali Poetry; Laitin, Politics, Language, and Thought. 53. Keenadiid, Ina Cabdille Xasan, pp. 115–117. 54. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 115. 55. Ibid., p. 147. 56. See examples of fear of the Amhara in the 1890s in Swayne, Seventeen Trips, pp. 189, 192. 57. Andrzejewski and Lewis, Somali Poetry, p. 88. See also Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” 58. Kakwenzaire, “Sayyid Muhammad Abdile Hassan.” 59. Andrzejewski and Lewis, Somali Poetry, pp. 86–93. Hess, “The ‘Mad Mullah,’” provides his translation from Italian: “He who in these times is loyal to the Faith / Who does not flee in disorder, like the Obo to the Amhara / Who does not fight for the uncircumcised heretic /. . . Is he not perhaps a true Muslim?” 60. Marzuq, Tha’ir, p. 23. 61. Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” 62. See text in Marzuq, Tha’ir, pp. 36–37. 63. The sayyid referred to the last amir of Harar, ‘Abdallah, as a Somali. See Sayyid, Mahdi al-sumal, p. 55. 64. FO 403/297, Gerolimato to Sadler, 27 March 1900; Jardine, Mad Mullah, p. 46. 65. See Bante’s description of the battle in Jardine, Mad Mullah, pp. 45– 46. 66. Hayle-Giorgis, Ras Makonnen, ch. 23, pp. 46–47. 67. Ibid., ch. 28, p. 51. 68. War Office, Official History, vol. I; Jennings, With the Abyssinians. For general analyses, see among others, Hess, “The Poor Man of God”; Jardine, Mad Mullah; Caroselli, Ferro e Fuoco. 69. ASMAI 65/1, Console in Zanzibar to the Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), 9 September 1899; see also Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” 70. Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, p. 83. 71. See Chapter 2, p. 31. 72. Caroselli, Ferro e Fuoco, pp. 71–72; FO 371/2227, Archer to CO, 11 January 1915. Earlier in 1904, according to Marzuq, Mashasha Warqe went to Aden to establish contact with the sayyid but was persuaded by the Italians not to do so. Marzuq, Tha’ir, p. 75. 73. ASMAI 65/8, Vestalorra to the Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), 22 January 1906. 74. FO 371/2227, Archer to CO, 11 January 1915; Omar, History of Somalia, pp. 448–449. 75. The passage below is based also on Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” Eshete’s emphasis is on modern pan-Africanism as connecting Menelik and the “Somali Mahdi.” He was the first to work on these relations in ASMAI. The letter is in ASMAI 65/9/52. Its dating to March 1907 is in ASMAI

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65/9/54, Console Generale, Aden, to Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), 24 July 1908. 76. See Jardine, Mad Mullah, pp. 183–186, 231; Caroselli, Ferro e Fuoco, pp. 127–131. 77. ASMAI 65/9/52, Colli to Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), 17, 24, 25 April 1908. See also Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” 78. al-‘Azm, Rihlat al-Habasha, p. 230. 79. ASMAI 65/9/54. The Arabic text is attached to Console Generale, Aden, to Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), 24 July 1908. 80. Ibid. 81. ASMAI 65/9/54, Console Generale, Aden, to Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), 24 July 1908; ASMAI 65/9/61, Console Generale, Aden, to Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), “Attitudine del Mullah,” 19 February 1908, “Rapporto di Abdalla Sciahri,” 14 pp., no date but February 1908. 82. Caroselli, Ferro e Fuoco, p. 108. 83. In the battle of Badr in 624, the Muslims scored a victory over the Meccans, but the next year in Uhud they were defeated. In his message, ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq reversed the order of events. 84. ASMAI, 65/9/61, Arabic text attached in Aden to Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), 25 February 1908. 85. ASMAI 65/9/54, Console Generale, Aden, to MAE, 24 July 1908; ASMAI 65/9/61, Console Generale, Aden, to Italian Ministry of Affairs (MAE), “Attitudine del Mullah,” 19 February 1908, “Rapporto di Abdalla Sciahri,” 14 pp. no date but February 1908. 86. Text in ASMAI 65/9/61. 87. ASMAI 65/9/61, “Relazione di Abdalla Sciahri.” 88. ASMAI 65/9/54, MAE to Governor of Benadir, 1 May 1908; 65/9/62, Salvage from Asmara relaying Colli’s telegraph from Addis Ababa, 25 April 1908, Salvage in Asmara to MAE, 3 June 1908; Console Generale, Aden, to MAE, 24 July 1908; ASMAI 65/9/61, Console Generale, Aden, to MAE, “Attitudine del Mullah,” 19 February 1908. 89. ASMAI 65/11/73, Hervey’s telegram from Addis Ababa, 29 July 1909; Eshete, “A Page in the History of the Ogaden.” For Balcha and the sayyid, see also FO 371/595, WO to FO, 18 October 1909 and enclosures. 90. Marzuq, Tha’ir, p. 106. 91. Eshete, “A Page in the Historyof the Ogaden.” 92. Caroselli, Ferro e Fuoco, pp. 148–149. 93. FO 371/1043, Wylie to Grey, 20 July 1911; FO 371/1541, Abyssinia, Annual Report 1912, in Thesiger to Grey, 20 January 1913; FO 371/1541, CO to FO, 21 June 1913, enclosures. 94. Omar, History of Somalia, pp. 427–430. 95. Hess, “The Poor Man of God.” 96. Omar, History of Somalia, p. 429. 97. Turkey, Sublime Porte, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, UH (General War) Dossier 120, Mazhar Bey to the Grand Vizierate, 3 Teshrin Awel, 3 October 1914 (hereafter Turkey, UH 120). The correspondence in this dossier was studied by the late Cengiz Orhonlu for his book Habesh Eyaleti (reprinted 1996), where Mazhar’s policy and his relations with Iyasu are discussed on pp. 167–175. At the request of Sven Rubenson, these documents were translated

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into English by Orhonlu. I used some of them for the passages I wrote on these affairs in my Ethiopia and the Middle East, ch. 7. I have now had the chance to use these documents more extensively, and I am most grateful to Sven Rubenson for letting me photocopy their translations (a set of copies is available at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University). 98. For a detailed and more general analysis, see Marcus, The Life and Times of Menelik II, ch. IX, “The Abortive Reign of Lij Iyasu.” 99. Orhonlu, Habesh Eyaleti, p. 166. 100. FO 371/2228, Thesiger to Grey, 31 March 1915. See a list of Iyasu’s four wives in Haile-Selassie, Autobiography, p. 48. 101. CO 535/36, Archer to CO, 19 December 1914. 102. FO 371/2227, Intelligence Report for January 1915. 103. FO 371/2228, Thesiger to Grey, 31 March 1915: “There is no chance that Dejaz Taffari will be strong minded enough to follow this course [arresting Iyasu when he was in Harar in February 1915 and acted like a Muslim].” 104. FO 371/2595, Dodds to Thesiger, 14 February 1916. 105. Turkey, UH 120, Mazhar to Foreign Ministry, 19 December 1914. 106. Horne, Source Records of the Great War. 107. FO 371/2228, Thesiger to Grey, 7 and 31 March 1915. 108. Turkey, UH 120, Mazhar to Foreign Ministry, 13 February 1915. 109. Orhonlu, Habesh Eyaleti, p. 171. 110. Turkey, UH 120, Mazhar to Foreign Ministry, 7 April 1915. 111. Turkey, UH 120, supplement to Mazhar’s letters of 12, 27 May 1915. 112. FO 371/2228, Thesiger to Grey, 16 June 1915. 113. FO 371/2595, Dodds to Thesiger, 14 February 1916. 114. FO 371/2228, Somaliland Report, 30 June 1915. 115. ASMAI 65/11, Cerrina to Ministero Colonie, 7 February, 27 April 1916, Sola in Harar to legation in Addis Ababa, 9 February 1916. 116. FO 371/2593, Thesiger to Grey, 1 February 1916; ASMAI 65/11, Cerrina to Colonie, 17 June 1916. 117. FO 371/2228, Somaliland Report, 30 June 1915. 118. CO 535/42, Archer to CO, 1 March 1916. 119. Turkey, UH 120, Mazhar to Foreign Ministry, “updated and sent in October 1915.” 120. ASMAI 65/11, MAE to Colonie, 23 March 1916; also Colli to MAE, 25 May 1916. 121. ASMAI 65/11, Cerrina to Colonie, 27 April, Martini to Colonie, 3 May 1916. 122. ASMAI 65/11, Colli to Colonie, 16 May 1916. 123. Tepedelen, “A Forgotten Diplomatic Front”: “The fate of this flag, probably sent to Istanbul by Mazhar Bey, is being researched at present at the Topkapi Museum.” Mazhar Bey died in Djibouti in January 1920 and was posthumously awarded by Istanbul the title of sehit (Arabic shahid), namely a Muslim who died for his country and faith. 124. ASMAI 37/11, Colli to MAE, 30 April, 5 May 1916; Cerrina to Colonie, 2 May 1916; Haile-Selassie, Autobiography, p. 49. 125. Turkey, UH 120, Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Mazhar, 22 May 1916. 126. Erlich, The Cross and the River, pp. 62–64.

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127. Turkey, UH 120, Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Turkish Ambassador in Berlin, 22 August 1916. 128. ASMAI 37/11, Governo Somalia to Colonie, 19 May 1916; Colli to MAE, 9 June 1916. See the genealogy and more details on Iyasu’s Islam in Budge, A History of Ethiopia, pp. 542–547; see also Haile-Selassie, Autobiography, p. 49. 129. CO 535/42, “Manifesto from Turkish sources in Addis Ababa,” enclosure in Archer to CO, 15 June 1916; see also ASMAI 37/11, Colli to MAE, 9 June 1916. 130. ASMAI 65/11, Memorandum della Legazione Britanica in Addis Abeba, July–August 1916. 131. ASMAI 65/11, MAE to Colonie, 13 July 1916. 132. FO 371/ 2595, Thesiger to Grey, 23 August 1916. 133. ASMAI 65/11, Cerrina to Colonie, 17 August 1916. 134. ASMAI 65/11, Governo Somalia to Colonie, 10 September 1916. 135. ASMAI 65/11, Colli to MAE and Colonie, 1 September 1916. 136. Turkey, UH 120, Mazhar to Foreign Ministry, 4 September 1916. 137. ASMAI 65/11, Colli to MAE and to Colonie, 4 September 1916. 138. ASMAI 65/11, Colli to MAE, 11 September 1916; FO 371/2595, Thesiger to Grey, 14 September 1916. 139. CO 535/42, Archer to CO, 15 June 1916. 140. Kakwenzaire, “Sayyid Muhammad Abdile Hassan.” 141. ASMAI 65/11, Colli to MAE and to Colonie, 4 September 1916. For Abuna Matewos’s proclamation of 11 May 1909 and its Christian terms, see FO 371/594. 142. Haile-Selassie, Autobiography, pp. 48–50; the quotation is from p. 48. 143. Jardine, Mad Mullah, p. 246 wrongly described the massacre as predating the deposition of Iyasu. 144. Caroselli, Ferro e Fuoco, pp. 222–225. 145. Hess, “The Poor Man of God.” 146. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 180; see another translation in Sheik-‘Abdi, Divine Madness, pp. 178–181. 147. Omar, History of Somalia, pp. 474–475, quoting Claud Russell’s report, a copy of which is in the National Archives of India, Foreign and Political Department, External, File 740, 1-7, 1923. 148. Samatar, Oral Poetry, p. 157. 149. Jardine, Mad Mullah, p. 303.

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CHAPTER

4

Africanism, Arabism, and Marxism: Ethiopia and Sudan, 1930–1991

ETHIOPIA AND SUDAN share a long border and have much in com-

mon. Their twentieth-century relations revolved around several major concrete issues that are not the focus of this volume.1 Our interest in the religious-political conceptualization of the “self” and the “other” directs us to pay less attention to the nine decades from the collapse of the Mahdiyya until the late 1980s. During these years, the religious-political concepts underwent modern redefinitions and were expressed in new terminology. But Christianity and Islam never really bowed out. The Sudanese did not shelve the spirit of political Islam when they began resorting to that of modern nationalism. Sudanese nationalism itself was diverse. It was at times torn between a territorial, African notion of Sudanese identity and an Arab-oriented Sudanese identity inspired by ideas of Middle Eastern movements and regimes, radiating mainly from Cairo.2 In discussing relations with Ethiopia, classic Islamic legacies regarding the land of al-najashi were only seldom mentioned before the late 1980s. The old religious conceptual dichotomy was temporarily modified and expressed in the terms of modern politics. Options and dilemmas were argued in the more earthy language of concrete interests, of African identity or of Arab revolutionary aspirations. Ethiopia’s political establishment also never fully abandoned the country’s Christian heritage. Christians and Christianity remained dominant throughout. During the twentieth century, however, religious terminology was gradually replaced with modern terms: first, by Haile Selassie who, in the 1955 constitution, legitimized his imperial absolutism through a territorial African, rather than a religious, definition of the Ethiopian state; then, after 1974, by the Marxist-Leninist phraseology introduced by Mangistu’s men to legitimize their dictatorship and to 93

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weaken religions altogether, in order to move Ethiopia along the road of their envisioned materialistic revolution. The traditional diverse political concepts of Ethiopia’s old Christianity, in any case, always remained behind the new words. The urge to belong to the Middle East and appease Muslim neighbors on the one hand, and the siege tradition couched in the memory of the Ahmad Gragn trauma on the other, was often behind policies external and internal.

Haile Selassie and Sudan, 1930–1974 Marginalizing Religions, Enhancing Solidarity

When Sudan was declared independent in January 1956, Emperor Haile Selassie had already been the strong man of Ethiopia for four decades. In the mid-1950s, he was at the height of his power, an absolute monarch, king of kings. No modern nationalist movement emerged to challenge his absolutism, no political parties of any sort, no other forms of modern representative systems. His regime, in itself, will not be discussed here, only its religious dimensions. In essence, it preserved the Christian self-identity of medieval and early modern Ethiopia. Power and arms remained with Christians alone; the church was identified with the state; the emperor remained a Christian king with all the related symbolic elements. His coronation as emperor in 1930 was a Christian ceremony, and as a devout Christian, he continued to strengthen Christianity. In the years before and after World War II, he saw to the translation and printing of the Bible in Amharic, when previously it had only been available in the practically dead Ge’ez language. He ensured the economic welfare of the church and conducted a long struggle with the Egyptian Coptic Church to regain and safeguard Ethiopia’s religious rights in Jerusalem. Like all effective Ethiopian rulers from medieval times, Haile Selassie was the de facto head of the religious hierarchy. In that respect, he was also a nationalist modernizer of the church. Already as Ras Tafari in 1929, he persuaded the Coptic Church to ordain five Ethiopian bishops to serve under the Egyptian Abuna Paulos. His efforts to nationalize the church resumed after World War II and in 1948, he concluded an agreement with the Coptic patriarchate that the next abuna would be an Ethiopian. In January 1951, the first Ethiopian head of the church, Abuna Baselyos, was ordained, still under the Coptic Church. Finally, in June 1959, Haile Selassie proclaimed the Ethiopian Orthodox Church autocephalous, breaking sixteen centuries of Christian dependence on Egypt.3

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The process of nationalization of the church was part of Haile Selassie’s comprehensive national modernization enterprise. It was in itself an exercise in improving the state apparatus and his personal control, while avoiding meaningful political progress. The paradox had to be hidden under new phrases and terms, derived mainly from the sphere of modern nationalism. Throughout his reign, Haile Selassie tried to avoid resorting to the Christian language of Yohannes and Menelik. Though Christians and Christianity remained dominant, he liked to portray himself as the emperor of all Ethiopians. In 1935, when Mussolini threatened to invade Ethiopia, the emperor spoke of equal citizenship and praised the patriotism of his Muslim subjects. The 1955 constitution defined Ethiopia in clear territorial terms and defined being Ethiopian as based on civil citizenship, not Christian heritage. Up to the 1950s, Ethiopia’s Muslim neighbors no longer represented a challenging “other”; this was rather the attitude toward their European occupiers. The major external challenge to Ethiopia came from the Italians, the British, and the French, and, in facing them, Christianity was far less relevant. When it came to Ethiopia and Sudan between 1899 and 1956, on the political level, Ethiopia’s relations were actually with the British rulers of Khartoum. The two main issues were border relations and the Nile. After the British had destroyed the Mahdist state and conquered Sudan, they signed an agreement with Menelik in 1902, which defined the border but created new local problems.4 The issue of the Nile was perhaps of greater significance. As some 80 percent of the waters reaching Egypt stemmed from Ethiopia, mainly from the Blue Nile, the British, seeking an all-Nile water control system, had to deal with Ethiopia. On the one hand, they pretended to ignore Ethiopia by securing the signing of a water agreement between the Egyptians and the Sudanese in 1929, which distributed all waters between them. On the other hand, they continued to pressure Ethiopia to agree to their idea of a dam at Lake Tana, the main source of the Blue Nile. The Tana dam was the pivotal enterprise in the British vision of controlling the entire basin. This was to store a huge amount of water at a high altitude, exposed to little evaporation and enabling both regulated irrigation and the production of hydroelectric power. Ethiopia had much to gain in terms of modernization but risked much in terms of independence. The British insisted on building the dam from the Sudanese side and the Ethiopians had reason to fear that they would eventually lose portions of western Ethiopia to Sudan and the British. Negotiations and diplomatic contacts persisted up to the early 1950s, until the end of British rule in Sudan. The discussions were all frustrated

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by the Ethiopians, and though no dam was erected, the diplomatic dimension of this Ethio-Sudanese issue had important implications for BritishEthiopian relations. 5 The patronizing anger of the British at Haile Selassie’s Tana dam policy was apparently among the factors explaining their 1935 strategy of sacrificing Ethiopia to Mussolini.6 On the popular level, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, 1936–1941, connected Ethiopians and Sudanese more closely. Prior to that, few educated Ethiopians went to Sudan to pursue modern learning or to continue from Khartoum to Cairo and Europe. This now became one of the routes of Ethiopian pilgrims to Jerusalem or of Ethiopian Muslims on their way to al-Azhar in Cairo. Some important leaders of Ethiopia’s Muslims, like Shaikh Talha, whom we mentioned in Chapter 2, had completed their Islamic education in Sudan. An emerging group of educated Ethiopians (graduates of the Menelik II elementary school established in Addis Ababa in 1908 and the Makonnen School established in 1925) began seeking reforms in the country’s traditional system, and were looking at Sudan from their new perspective. Most prominent among the “young Ethiopians” during the first two decades of the century was Gebre-Hiwot Baykedagne, a native of Tigre who was educated in Eritrea and then Germany before returning to Addis Ababa to serve in Menelik’s court. Unhappy with the atmosphere of self-indulgence and conservatism prevalent among the country’s elite after the Adwa victory, Gebre-Hiwot angered the emperor’s wife, Taytu, and fled to Sudan. In Khartoum, he was struck by the progress achieved there in ten years of British rule. Back in Ethiopia, he published a short tract of twenty-five pages entitled “Emperor Menelik and Ethiopia,”7 which he hoped would serve as a guide for Lij Iyasu. Ethiopia, he wrote, could learn a lot from Sudan. “If our countrymen do their best to acquire basic literacy, I think, that will be very good. It is also very easy. I know of a friend from Wallo who lives in the Sudan. This friend of mine could neither write nor read until he was thirty five, but now he can write and read both in Arabic and in Amharic.” He even dared to doubt Ethiopia’s military ability, adding, “Our army has no discipline. I strongly feel that it needs the expert guidance of the Europeans. Let a military academy be opened by the Europeans here in Addis Ababa. They say a reputable military academy has opened in Khartoum, Sudan. Our government will benefit greatly if a mission of observers is sent there.” Ethiopia, he wrote, should also learn a lesson in good administration and economic progress: “There should not be too many trade barriers for tax collecting in the country, as this will negatively affect the government in the long run. Let our leaders learn what their Sudanese and Eritrean counterparts

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have achieved by sending observers to these countries.”8 Disillusioned by Iyasu and his road to progress, Gebre-Hiwot became Ras Tafari’s man. He died prematurely in 1919.9 In 1935–1936, Haddis Alamayhu, who would develop into arguably Ethiopia’s greatest author, was among the anti-Italian guerrilla fighters in western Ethiopia. In 1993, he republished his memoirs (originally written in 1943), in which he described his exile in the Sudan: It is not surprising to see people who had scars from the past making peace in a time of conflict. Ethiopians in the Sudan during the Fascist invasion lived in harmony in a foreign land. What is surprising was the attitude of the Sudanese towards the Ethiopians. When they learnt that we had come to the Sudanese territory after a failed resistance, they gave us a warm welcome and also a hug. When my friend Zerihun and I were in the Sudan, the land was a condominium of British and the Egyptians. In practice, however, the British were in control. At any rate, the Sudanese were aware of how it feels to be dominated by an alien power. They were, therefore, not only sympathetic to the Ethiopians residing in the Sudan, but they used to regard the Ethiopians as their relatives. In return, we the Ethiopians also used to regard them as if they were our brothers, especially when we saw them disgusted with the activities of the Fascists.10

Another writer, Heiwot Hidaru, published his memoirs in 1974 and praised his Sudanese hosts of that time in similar terms. “If I understand the thinking of the peoples of the Sudan,” he wrote, “it can be said that they were all disheartened by what happened to the Ethiopians. I have never seen any xenophobic attitude from them.” He testified that the British tried to create a wall of alienation by paying a certain Sudanese to write in one newspaper that “the Ethiopians are flooding our country at an alarming pace and they are driving the Sudanese out of jobs.” But the father of this columnist hastened to reply that “had it not been for our constraints under the yoke of colonialism, we would have fought on the side of the Ethiopians.” In fact, the author added, some Sudanese tried to kill the writer, who had to go into hiding.11 The Sudanese soon had their chance to fight together with the Ethiopians. On 3 July 1940, after the Italians had entered the war, Emperor Haile Selassie arrived in Khartoum from exile in London. Meanwhile, the British were organizing a force that included various Sudanese units, which, by the summer of 1941, had completed the liberation of Ethiopia from the Fascists. The Sudanese regular forces proved highly courageous and efficient and Sudan provided volunteer drivers and camels. Of perhaps greater symbolic importance was the contribu-

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tion of a Sudanese special force that accompanied Haile Selassie and his men. As the British were ready to restore Ethiopia’s independence under his emperorship, Haile Selassie leading a guerrilla force into Ethiopia had historic significance. On 20 January 1941, the emperor crossed the frontier from Sudan into Ethiopia escorted by a mixed Ethiopian and Sudanese force. Some 70 British, 800 Sudanese, and 800 Ethiopians fought the Italians in Gojjam province, undermined the Fascists’ morale, and paved Haile Selassie’s way back to his capital. Sudanese and Ethiopian fighters, together with British advisers headed by the guerrilla expert Orde Wingate, formed the guard of Haile Selassie when he re-entered Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941. This chapter of Ethiopian-Sudanese solidarity would be engraved on the collective memories of both nations, ever to be recalled in moments of good will. The popular Sudanese solidarity with the Ethiopians in their years of defeat and misery reflected the spirit of Sudanese self-identification as it was developing at that time. From the perspective of the 1930s, the political Islam of the Mahdiyya had long been shelved. The idea of religious militancy legitimizing a unified, supra-tribal state committed to exporting Islamic purity to Egypt and the Middle East was rendered irrelevant after the British conquest. Educated Sudanese began to adopt concepts of modern nationalism and most Sudanese returned to the more flexible interpretations of Islam. Islam in Sudan initially spread in popular forms. Introduced in practice there as late as the fifteenth century, it was not backed by a conquering power but rather spread by roving Sufi scholars. This was among the reasons that it was successfully adopted by various local groups. The popularity of the Sufi fraternities was assured partly because their Islam was not compatible with a centralizing, coercive ethos. According to Gabriel Warburg, it was this kind of Islam, endorsed by sectarian diversity, that energized a local, pluralist Sudanese history, which endures as the backbone of Sudanese culture to this day. The Mahdiyya movement and state, argues Warburg, was an effort to eradicate this organic sectarianism and impose a centralizing order. Under the British, he maintains, with their colonialist policy of divide and rule, Sudanese Islam was revived in its Sufi, flexible form. Under the leadership of the Mahdi’s son, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi (1885–1959), the Mahdiyya was transformed from a messianic movement into a coalition of local groups and interests, developing rivalry with the other major Sufi fraternity of the Mirghaniyya (Al-Khatmiyya). After World War I, the British were finally convinced that the Mahdiyya was no longer a militant expression of political Islam. The movement now radiated a

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message of a spiritual jihad and worked to liberate Sudan through nonviolent struggle. By shedding the concept of universal, all-Islamic victory, the neo-Mahdiyya became more consonant with the concept of Sudan’s separate identity. Paradoxically, it was its Sufi rival, the historically more moderate Mirghaniyya, which began promoting the idea of a supra-Sudanese future. The Mirghaniyya endorsed the idea of unity with Egypt, in accordance with the Egyptian nationalist slogan of “Unity of the Nile Valley.” In the aftermath of World War II, new political parties emerged, which in many ways represented that rivalry. After the Nasserite revolution in Egypt, the two main wings of Sudanese society gradually drew closer. On the eve of independence, they preferred to assure their own Sudanese diversity over the revolutionary authoritarian Arab nationalism emerging in Cairo. When Sudan was declared independent in January 1956, it was indeed led by a parliamentarian system based on the interplay of local Sudanese forces. It was perhaps somewhat less oriented toward the Arab Middle East, and for a while, emphasized a more Sudanese-African dimension.12 As long as active political Islam in Sudan was marginalized—it would be revived in the 1980s—the terminology of Sudanese identity was inspired by two rising and rival approaches, that of pan-African and pan-Arab nationalisms. The revolutionary ideas of Arabism fueled problems with Ethiopia. Africanism, however, was based on accepting territorial integrity and respecting old borders, and worked toward better neighborliness. For many Africans, Ethiopia symbolized their aspirations, more emphatically after Mussolini’s aggression against this last bastion of African freedom. After the Sudanese contributed to the liberation of Ethiopia, the spirit of African solidarity was again expressed in 1945, just as World War II ended. For example, a group of Sudanese artists toured Ethiopia, performing Sudanese dances and songs. Among them was a young musician and singer, Ahmad al-Mustafa, who adapted the popular lyrics and composed what would become almost a hymn to Ethiopian-Sudanese affinity. In free translation: Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan, Ikhwan [brothers, brothers] We are neighbors, good is the land / children, grandchildren, hand in hand Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan, Ikhwan We all together, here and there / the same history we do share Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan, Ikhwan The Nile unite us crossing the land / bringing love end to end Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan, Ikhwan The same music all along / same poem, same song Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan, Ikhwan13

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“Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan, Ikhwan” was translated into Amharic and into Tigrinya and would be sung in moments of good will. The singer, Ahmad al-Mustafa, was a distant relative of Amir al-Mahdiyya Muhammad Wad Arbab (both related to the great seventeenth-century Sufi leader, Idris Muhammad Wad Arbab) who, as discussed above, bitterly fought the Ethiopians in the days of Yohannes and was killed by Negus Takla-Haimanot in January 1887. Another symbolic reflection of the change in attitudes was the first exchange of ambassadors after Sudan was declared independent. On 13 October 1956, a “Special Writer” for the Ethiopian Herald discussed the occasion under the headline, “Mutual Comprehension Binds Ethiopia, Sudan”: The two countries and indeed their peoples are so alike that we can remain confident that the distinguished representative of the Sudan can feel at home in our midst. . . . Everyone who spends some time in the Sudan cannot fail to be impressed by the great sympathy and affection which the Sudanese entertain for their Ethiopian neighbors. This sentiment is absolutely reciprocal. Those Ethiopians who have been to the Sudan and especially those who spent their years of exile in that country can never forget the hospitality which is so great a characteristic of the Sudanese way of life. Throughout the years Ethiopia was a firm up-holder of the cause of self-determination of the Sudanese people. It was thus with sincere feeling of joy that she welcomed the emergence in the continent of Africa of an independent Sudan dedicated to the principles of international justice as the only basis for relations between nations.14

The first Sudanese ambassador to Ethiopia, Sayyid Yusuf Mustafa al-Tini, made a short speech as he presented his credentials. Addressing Emperor Haile Selassie, his main point was that he was a close relative of Muhammad ‘Uthman Khalid, the khalifa’s envoy to Menelik in 1897, who had been “the first Sudanese ambassador to the Solomonian Court.”15 Muhammad ‘Uthman, as noted in Chapter 2, was the khalifa’s chief diplomat in his effort to build close relations with Ethiopia when the British were threatening to destroy him. Never really a devout Mahdist, Muhammad ‘Uthman married an Ethiopian woman while he was in Addis Ababa. The son of an important scholar, Hajj Khalid Ahmad, who was respected enough to survive criticizing the khalifa, Muhammad ‘Uthman was quick to join the British as they were destroying the Mahdist state.16 In responding to the new ambassador, Haile Selassie did not miss the historical point: “We note that by good fortune, you should be of the same family of the great Hajj Khalid as was the

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envoy who came from Sudan to the court of our great predecessor the Emperor Menelik II. So fortunate a conjuncture constitutes indeed an augury of your success in furthering . . . the historical friendship between our two peoples.”17 Turning to history in trying to build a future of African neighborliness, the Ethiopians and the Sudanese of the mid-1950s seemed happy to remember Menelik and the khalifa, not the Mahdi, Abu ‘Anja, and Yohannes, namely, moments of mutual understanding based on moderate interpretations of Christianity and Islam, rather than chapters of conflict enhanced by the terminology of radical religiosity. Africanism and Arabism

The period between Sudanese independence in 1956 and the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 saw the concretization and intensification of mutual relations. To the old border problems and the now worsening Nile issue, were added two new ones, Eritrea and southern Sudan. The two countries were now heading toward different strategic orientations. The Sudanese, once assured of their separate statehood, drew closer to the momentous pan-Arabism of the Nasserite period in the Middle East. Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia undermined Eritrean autonomy in the spirit of imperial expansionism, and in 1962 annexed it and waged war on the Eritreans’ Arab-inspired nationalist movement of the time. As the Sudanese had helped the Eritreans, the Ethiopians helped the Christians of southern Sudan in their struggle for independence. Yet, in spite of the potential confrontation between the Sudanese and the Ethiopians over these issues and the temptation to resort to ideological rhetoric, relations remained workable throughout. It seems that avoiding the terminology of political Islam and of political Christianity helped to prevent a frontal collision. Toward the end of the period, the sides even reached an understanding and compromise. Official expressions throughout the period tended to ignore problems. The same rosy words recurred: “The Sudan and Ethiopia are so close that historians find it difficult to tell when they became two separate countries,” ran the Ethiopian Herald when the Sudanese prime minister, ‘Abdallah Khalil, visited Ethiopia in May 1957. “The people are brothers more than in an ethnic sense, for the proof of true fraternity was shown by Sudan and the Sudanese when, in the struggle for the defense of the integrity of Ethiopia in 1940–1941, the Sudanese gave their lives. What is most significant is that the PM and Brigadier Akhmad Khalil Wahba who visited here, both saw service in that campaign.”18 Similar

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terminology was used on both sides even when circumstances changed and problems were aggravated. In November 1958, a coup in Khartoum brought the military regime of General Ibrahim ‘Abbud to power,19 raising fears in Addis Ababa that he would turn to revolutionary pan-Arabism. But the Ethiopian Herald praised the bloodless coup, stating that the old friendship would ever be there, and again recalled the Sudanese help in 1940–1941.20 No official bitterness was expressed when it came to the issue of the Nile either. In the aftermath of World War II, the Ethiopians were afraid that Egypt and Sudan would unite following Sudanese independence. Such a great Arab, Nile Valley empire, they feared, would dominate the region and continue to ignore their water rights. The emergence of an independent Sudan was celebrated in Addis Ababa and the Ethiopians followed with satisfaction the stalled Sudanese-Egyptian talks on a new Nile agreement. However, after ‘Abbud gained power, it seemed that Sudanese-Egyptian relations would deepen and even lead to unity in the context of an all-Arab, Middle Eastern republic. By that time, Egypt and Syria had united to form the United Arab Republic (UAR) (February 1958) and a revolution in Iraq (July 1958) seemed to further boost panArab antimonarchical unity. As UAR president Nasser was launching the construction of the Aswan High Dam project on 8 November 1959, he signed a new Nile agreement with ‘Abbud, in which Egypt and Sudan distributed all the waters between them, openly ignoring Ethiopia. For Haile Selassie, the momentum of pan-Arabism, combined with an Arab claim to the Nile, was a threat to be responded to by allying with Israel, cutting off the church’s relations with Egypt, and turning energetically to African diplomacy. There, in the rising sphere of Africanism, the Ethiopian emperor led the continental camp, which would soon prevail on the principle of territorial integrity, and by 1963, secure the establishment of the Organization of African Unity’s headquarters in Addis Ababa. Whatever the issue between Sudan and Ethiopia, both Addis Ababa and Khartoum preferred to remain verbally loyal to this kind of neighborly Africanism. At the time he signed the Nile agreement with Nasser, ‘Abbud invited Emperor Haile Selassie to Khartoum to celebrate Sudan’s fourth independence day. The visit on 1 January 1960 was staged as a demonstration of mutual friendship. The following day, the editorial in the Ethiopian Herald repeated the 1940–1941 bond ethos, and emphasized the mutual commitment to African friendship. No mention was made of Sudan ignoring Ethiopia as a Nile country. In Sudan, the emperor sailed down the river and inaugurated an electronic plant at the Sennar dam.

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Ethiopia, the editorial noted, supplied more than four-fifths of the Nile waters, implying that the Sudanese and the Ethiopians needed to plan together and cooperate.21 Nothing came of this wish but the editorial of 9 January praised a cultural agreement signed in Khartoum ensuring that “the two governments shall endeavor to encourage cooperation between scholars and historians of their respective countries with a view to discovering and reconstructing the common historical past of the two countries. . . . There are not nor have there ever been any sharp cultural differences between the Sudanese and Ethiopian peoples.”22 An article of 29 June 1961 in the Ethiopian Herald did mention Sudan and the Aswan High Dam, but only in the context of the need to preserve “African archeology” in Nubia. In September 1961, the Sudan House was inaugurated in Addis Ababa. A Sudanese musical group performed in Amharic and Arabic, singer Ahmad Mustafa leading the event with “Ethiopia and Sudan / Ikhwan Ikhwan.” According to the Sudanese ambassador, Haile Selassie was so elated that the ever majestic monarch allowed himself to sing in public and laughed so wholeheartedly that the Ethiopians attending could finally see his teeth. In his speech, the emperor recounted how he had felt at home among the noble Sudanese while preparing Ethiopia’s liberation from Mussolini.23 As long as Haile Selassie was in power, the Nile issue would rarely be raised in public as a disturbance on the Sudanese-Ethiopian agenda. An issue of a religious nature was that of southern Sudan.24 Under the British, the Christian and animist southern Sudan was administered separately from the Muslim Arab north. In 1955, just before independence, the southerners, fearing for their culture and basic rights, initiated a struggle and established their liberation movement, the Anya-Nya. When ‘Abbud suspended the constitution, closed the parliament, and banned political parties, he also tightened the hard line toward the south. His new policy included forced Arabization of schools and government offices and the placement of restrictions on Christian institutions. In September 1963, the conflict in the south escalated to a full-fledged civil war that would last until 1972. Ethiopia was not indifferent. In practice, the Ethiopians rendered help to Anya-Nya, and enabled others, including Israel, to help the Christian cause against the Khartoum government. A major reason for this was the need to counter and restrain Sudan from helping the Eritrean struggle for independence from Ethiopia. While both governments intervened in the internal affairs of the other, they retained a strategic balance and avoided frontal collision. The practical aspects of Ethiopian intervention in southern Sudan will not be discussed here. The verbal, ideological aspect was described by a Western ob-

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server who commented in 1969 that “Haile Selassie says little about the genocide in the Southern Sudan . . . the Sudan says little about the genocide in Eritrea.”25 Reading the official newspaper, the Ethiopian Herald, of those years could create the impression that the Ethiopian government was only a bystander, rather than a Christian neighbor. On 21 February 1963, the newspaper published a statement by the Sudanese embassy in the United States that allegations that Sudan limited religious freedoms were unfounded, and that Khartoum acted against missionaries in the south only because they intervened in Sudan’s affairs. The paper added no comment of its own. On 13 March 1963, it published a long article on administering education in Sudan, explaining why the missionaries were expelled from the south and replaced by teachers from the north. This was part of the struggle for African liberation, explained the article, which was, in fact, written by the Sudanese embassy in Addis Ababa. An article of 18 April 1963 praised ‘Abbud for developing education in southern Sudan. Only after the 1967 Six Day War, when Ethio-Sudanese relations reached a low ebb in the Eritrean and southern Sudanese arenas, did a religious tone enter into the Herald’s articles. On 17 May 1969, it wrote about the oppression of the black Christian minority in Sudan and quoted the Bible on hypocrisy. It called on the UN to render more aid to southern Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia, but emphasized that this was an internal Sudanese matter and Africa should remain loyal to the principle of nonintervention, or be Balkanized. “The Sudan continues to be plagued by the unresolved conflict between the interests of the northern Islamic majority and the African population of the South,” the Herald concluded. “This is basically a continuing crisis of confidence and communication, and its solution is a sine qua non of the development of the Sudan into what it potentially is: the natural bridge between the Arab and African worlds.” The African formula of refraining from religious or ethnic vocabulary was also applied in the Eritrean context. Here again we need to be brief.26 After the establishment of the Ethiopian-Eritrean federation in 1952, Sudan became a natural center for exiles from neighboring Eritrea. When the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) was established in 1961, many of its political leaders had their headquarters in Khartoum, and the military command was at Kassala. Willingly or not, Sudan was also the host country for the tens of thousands of refugees who fled Eritrea whenever the Ethiopian army accelerated its drive against Eritrean nationalism. Some of the refugees were recruited by the movement and trained in its camps. In October 1963, a month after the beginning of the rebellion in southern Sudan, the Sudanese government of ‘Abbud extra-

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dited thirteen Eritrean fighters, who were later hanged in Addis Ababa.27 In early 1964, the two governments discussed an extradition agreement. If implemented, it would have constituted an insurmountable problem for the Eritrean separatists. By the end of the year, however, ‘Abbud’s military government had been toppled and a multiparty regime established, in which leftists on the one hand and Muslim fundamentalists on the other advocated a pro-Eritrean policy. In the religious wing of Sudanese politics, there was a strong element representing the Mirghaniyya sect, centered in Kassala and with many adherents among Eritrean Banu ‘Amirs, the backbone of the ELF. In January 1965, the new Sudanese government laid aside the draft of the extradition agreement, and from then on, the Eritrean separatists had free rein in Sudan and occasionally received direct, though not generous, support. In February 1967, Haile Selassie visited Khartoum and exchanged friendly declarations with President Isma‘il al-Azhari and Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi.28 In practice, however, the situation deteriorated and on the eve of the Six Day War in the Middle East, both countries were concentrating forces along their common border.29 The same pattern continued during 1968 and into early 1969. While joint Ethiopian-Sudanese committees held discussions, Ethiopians went on interfering in southern Sudan and the Sudanese intensified their interference in Eritrea. Following the split in the Eritrean movement, Sudanese aid was channeled to the ELF–Revolutionary Council, the extremist wing of the ELF. On 25 May 1969, a revolutionary regime under Colonel Ja‘far alNumayri came to power in Khartoum. Sudan was declared a “people’s republic,” which was to follow a line of “Sudanese socialism.” The new leadership strengthened the Sudanese commitment to pan-Arabism and liberation movements in Africa, and declarations by Sudanese officials aroused Eritrean expectations.30 Immediately following Haile Selassie’s visit to Khartoum in early 1970, Sudanese support for the separatists became visible and even massive by Eritrean standards. In early 1970, the number of Eritrean fighters being trained in Sudan was estimated at four hundred. 31 Sudanese authorities enabled the Libyans, the Iraqis, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and others to send significant quantities of weapons to the area: assault rifles, heavy machine-guns, mortars, bazookas, mines, explosives, and the like. This new Sudanese policy directly contributed to the 1970 escalation in Eritrea. Following the killing of the Ethiopian commander Teshome Ergetu later that same year, Ethiopian officers pushed for retaliation against the Sudanese,32 and some border clashes did take place. More significantly, the Ethiopi-

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ans intensified their help to Christian separatists in southern Sudan, enabling the Israelis to render more support to the Anya-Nya movement.33 Throughout that period, the governments of Khartoum and Addis Ababa were careful not to drift into a verbal war. The ELF had developed a strong pan-Arab orientation, claiming Eritrea for the Arab world and portraying Haile Selassie as both a reactionary, feudal monarch and a Zionist enemy of the Arab cause. Literature in this spirit was produced in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad, but almost none in Khartoum. Official Ethiopia, for its part, remained silent regarding the Sudanese help to the ELF. Refraining from ethnic or religious rhetoric would prove helpful when mutual interests led to a compromise.34 In July 1971, events in Khartoum brought about the termination of Sudanese support for the Eritrean separatists. Frustrated by Numayri’s conciliatory policy vis-à-vis the Ethiopians, the Khartoum-based Eritreans ventured to interfere in Sudanese internal affairs. An abortive coup against Numayri engineered by communists supported by Iraqi Baathists (who were then the main suppliers of the ELF General Command) took place on 19–22 July. After the failure of the coup, Numayri was reportedly furious with the Eritreans involved. Their lives were spared only thanks to a personal request by Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, a great friend of Numayri’s at the time. Subsequently, their activities in Sudan were closely watched by local authorities, and they were prohibited from carrying arms on Sudanese soil.35 The Sudanese president was now determined to solidify his power and build a rapprochement with Haile Selassie. In the first week of November, Numayri spent six days in Addis Ababa, and the Ethiopian Herald went out of its way to recycle the story about Sudan’s noble friendship in moments of truth, its progress in the economy and in education, and the great leadership of Numayri.36 In January 1972, Haile Selassie was enthusiastically welcomed in Khartoum amid a similar verbal demonstration of African friendship.37 On 28 February 1972, the two states signed a treaty recognizing each other’s territorial integrity. In July 1972, another agreement settled the border dispute and both parties agreed to avoid helping subversive movements in the other country. As a direct result, Anya-Nya leaders in southern Sudan negotiated a political solution with Numayri, and Sudanese patrols sealed the Eritrean-Sudanese border. 38 The Ethiopian-Sudanese rapprochement was a great blow to the Eritrean movement, and until after the 1974 revolution, its ability to challenge the Ethiopian army was seriously diminished. In retrospect, it seems that verbal restraint played a role in shaping these events. Both sides, in referring to each other, continued to ignore old religious legacies, espe-

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cially the negative ones. The Sudanese, for their part, refrained in the Ethiopian context from using the language of pan-Arabism, which, as used by other Arabs at that time, served to delegitimize Ethiopia, its imperial regime, and its domination in Eritrea and Somalia.39

Mangistu and Sudan, 1974–1991 The Language of Revolutionary Enmity

The language of African neighborliness during the 1960s and in the final years of the reign of Haile Selassie was in no way sincere. Imperial Ethiopia faced serious challenges, some connected to revolutionary panArabism and to strategic developments in the Middle East. Sudan was involved in Eritrea, an issue of great significance for Ethiopia; Ethiopians interfered in the major issue of southern Sudan. Yet the terminology of mutual recognition, though often covering mutual subversion, proved constructive. Verbal restraint finally did help to reach some solutions. Following the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia, however, a new chapter opened in Sudanese-Ethiopian relations. The following sections will focus on the Ethiopian side, since it was mostly the revolution in Ethiopia and its political language that reshaped the relations between the two neighbors until the late 1980s. Ethiopia’s revolution was a multifaceted internal drama. The first three years were marked by bloody competition for power and then, following the emerging absolutism of Mangistu Haile Mariam, by a cruel, disastrous exercise in overcentralization, all couched in imported communist terminology. The country was plunged into endless conflicts at home and into worsening enmity with its neighbors; the two dimensions became integrally connected. Opposition to the new regime was oppressed at the center amid the “red terror” of 1975–1978 and beyond, and opposition in the periphery and in exile caused a deterioration in relations with Sudan. The Eritrean separatists, strengthened now by new recruits, mostly Christian Tigreans, renewed the war in the north. The people of Tigre, and especially their young generation, joined in the action. Personalities representing the old Ethiopian guard formed another movement, the Ethiopian Democratic Union (EDU), and added to the fighting in the north. The Oromos began their revolts in the south. These and other groups had bases in Sudan, offices in Khartoum, and camps along the border.40 Until December 1977, Numayri was one of Mangistu’s bitter ene-

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mies.41 He first developed his hatred for him following the murder of Major-General Aman Andom on 23 November 1974. Aman, Ethiopia’s head of state after the deposition of Haile Selassie, was an Eritrean who had spent many years in Sudan. His brother was Haile Selassie’s ambassador to Khartoum. As chairman of the Derg, in September 1974, Aman initiated a plan to confer extensive autonomy on Eritrea, which Numayri supported. The ensuing brutal killing of Aman by Mangistu’s men caused the situation in Eritrea to deteriorate and Sudanese aid to Eritrean nationalists to be renewed. This aid, however, was cut back by mid-1975 because of troubles in southern Sudan. In May and June of that year, some six thousand refugees from southern Sudan crossed into Ethiopia, thus giving Ethiopia a strong case against Numayri. When, on 9 May 1976, the Derg published a nine-point plan for a solution in Eritrea based on self-administration, Numayri urged the Eritreans to accept it. But mutual suspicion was far stronger than moments of understanding. In July 1976, Numayri barely survived an attempted coup that he also blamed on Ethiopia. At the trials that followed, ninety-six of the conspirators were accused of having undergone training in Ethiopian camps. Sudanese-Ethiopian relations, which since 1972 had been correct, now became openly hostile. Numayri allowed the EDU to broadcast propaganda against the Derg from a Sudanese radio station. Later in 1976, Sudanese army units supported the EDU military campaign inside Ethiopia. Numayri called Mangistu a pirate and in early 1977, Sudan and Ethiopia recalled their ambassadors and exchanged threats of armed invasion. At the end of January 1977, Sudan announced its open support for the Eritrean movements and Numayri urged the UN to recognize the “just struggle of the oppressed Eritreans.” At the same time, Numayri was among the builders of a Red Sea regional front, which aimed to block the Soviets’ growing influence in the area. Sudan, together with the Egyptians and the Saudis, declared in February 1977 that the Red Sea was “an Arab lake,” and the three states coordinated diplomatic and military efforts to stem the Soviet attempt at controlling this vital artery of oil transportation.42 The “Arab” effort, with US blessings, included co-opting the more Arab-oriented wing of the Eritreans and aimed to lure the Somalis from the Soviet camp. Among the officers of the Derg in Addis Ababa, the slogan of “Arabization of the Red Sea” evoked the old fears of Arab subversion through local Muslims, and Mangistu, in any case, had long been working to win over the Soviets to his new socialist Ethiopia. By February 1977, he had managed to destroy his rivals, or rather any person of independent mind in the Derg, re-energize the war in Eritrea, and pave the way to gaining

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Moscow’s aid and arms. Internally, he was tightening his grip on all aspects of life; externally, he became the enemy of the Red Sea Arab front. The Somali ruler, Siyad Barre, as will be discussed later in Chapter 6, fearing that the Soviets’ arming of Mangistu would be at his expense, rushed to invade Ethiopia in July 1977, initiating the 1977–1978 Ogaden war. Mangistu tried to redefine nearly everything Ethiopian. Radical changes were introduced and imposed in all spheres, naturally including ideology. A new conceptual world imposed from above was often adopted from below. The terminology of Marxist materialism replaced the spiritual vocabulary of the religious culture. Old traditions were expected to die, and revolutionary, secular, communist language was expected to advance the total transformation of society, economy, and politics. The Ethiopian “self” and the non-Ethiopian “other” were to be conceived through this new prism. The old popular official language of a Christian Ethiopian siege culture was out, and the language of Stalinist demonization of its enemies was in. Like in imperial days, the Ethiopian Herald, still the only newspaper (together with the Amharic Addis Zaman) in the country, remained the official voice of the regime. It was fully controlled by the government and was hardly reflective of authentic public opinion, nor could it be considered a reliable source of the regime’s actual policy. Reading its articles about Sudan throughout 1977, however, is a lesson in communist style and verbal aggression. Of dozens of articles, we shall quote two short samples. “Nimeiry—the Trojan Horse,” by Solomon Gorfu, was published on 10 February 1977: Counter-revolutionary efforts are being extensively exerted at present manipulated by the reactionaries and coordinated by imperialists to undermine the unity of Ethiopia and to reverse the course of our revolution. The pressure is said to have been increasingly felt around the Northern Ethiopian region particularly because the Sudanese authorities have, with the expressed aim of disrupting the unity of the oppressed masses and sabotaging the revolution, left their frontier wide open for the service of anti-revolutionary and anti-unity elements. Those of us who have been following the developments in the region were not at all surprised by the fact that the reactionary government of Nimeiry in addition to making Sudan a transit for such groups has also turned it into their headquarters where mercenaries and terrorists are trained . . . if there was anything surprising about the whole matter it was simply the fact that the information that Nimeiry is the arch enemy of the oppressed masses of Ethiopia was disclosed belatedly. . . . The reactionary Nimeiry had turned Sudan into a military headquarters of reactionary forces in order to suppress the genuine

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movement of the oppressed masses . . . he plays the role of a Trojan horse by surreptitiously harboring an aggressive force and at the same time present a peaceful posture. It is an open secret that he is maintaining an army inimical to the oppressed peoples of the two sister states.

“Nimeiry Sides Openly with the Enemies of Ethiopian People’s Revolution” was published the next day, signed by Tiglu Yashenfal: As the history of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean and Albanian peoples’ revolutions amply demonstrated that, whenever a hitherto oppressed people attempt to over-throw an oppressive socioeconomic and political system, and try to build a new social system, free of exploitation of man by man, inevitably the representatives of the over-thrown socio-economic and political order, in league with their external supporters devise every conceivable tactic and strategy so as to foil the establishment of the new socio-economic and political order. . . . The recent open declaration of war against the Ethiopian people’s revolution, their unity and the territorial integrity of their country by the reactionary leader of Sudan, General Jaafar Nimeiry is part and parcel of this general international counter-revolutionary plot directed against the success of the Ethiopian people’s revolution.

Various other writers competed to better please their leader. The following is a sample of headlines of the Ethiopian Herald articles on Sudan throughout the rest of 1977: 11 February, “Nimeiri, Usher of Reactionaries,” by Abubakr Said; 15 February, “On the Eritrean Question, the Feudalists, Their Sons and Nimeiri Are One in Three,” by Tekle Beyene; 13 April, “Sudanese Masses Are Our Friends,” by staff writer; 13 April, “Nimeiri: A CIA Agent,” by Nawd; 14 April, “Nimeiri—The Trojan Horse of Imperialism,” by staff writer; 15 April, “Acts of Aggression Reflect Policy of Nimeiry”; 17 April, “Masses Angered by Blatant Aggression,” editorial; 21 April, “We Will Fight Till They Surrender,” Abiot [revolution] Forum; 24 April, “Trepidations of Reactionaries,” editorial; 26 April, “By an Oppressed Sudanese: Nimeiri’s Lies Blasted”; 17 May, “Nimeiri: A Wolf in Sheep’s Skin,” by Mohammed Hasan; 18 May, “Plight of Southern Sudanese Masses,” by staff writer; 20 May, “Raving of a Mad Despot,” editorial; 21 May, “The Fascistic Rule of Nimeiri,” by John Makuol; 25 May, “Nimeiri’s Suicidal Adventure”; 27 May, “Nimeiri’s Sham Autonomy, Not Even the First Originator of the Concept,” by Makoul; 5 June, “The Khartoum-Mogadishu Axis”; 17 June, “El-Nimeiri: The Running Dog of Imperialism”; 18 June, “The Nimeiri-Bare Unholy Alliance,” by Serawitu Ashenafi; 19 June, “Nimeiri’s Ugly Face Unmasked”; 21 June, “Nimeori: Pawn in Imperialist Intrigue”; 30 July, “Nimeiri of the Sudan—Dic-

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tator Sitting on a Volcano”; 4 September, “Reactionary Arab League Members Taking Sides with Mogadishu”; 25 October, “Nimeiri Policy of Reaction,” by staff writer; 28 October, “Nimeiri Betrays Sudanese Masses”; 28 October, “Coordinated Conspiracy,” editorial. To African Terminology and Back

For about eight weeks in November and December 1977, no article on the “fascist,” “feudal,” “reactionary,” “CIA agent” Numayri appeared in the Ethiopian Herald. All attention, in any case, was diverted to the Somalis and the Ogaden war, which reached its climax in the Somali siege of Harar in September. It was during those crucial weeks that Mangistu and Numayri decided, each for his own reasons and through their diplomats, to lessen the fire between them. Like the khalifa and Menelik in their time, they had other urgent priorities, and had little to gain and much to lose (in Eritrea and southern Sudan) from their verbal conflict. On 21 December 1977, the readers of the Ethiopian Herald must have been surprised to read the headline of the editorial, “Ethio-Sudanese Agreement: Victory of Africa.” It ran: Ethiopia and Sudan have agreed on the immediate cessation of all hostile acts and propaganda as well as the re-establishment of air links between them following a meeting of the O.A.U. mediation committee in the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown. The agreement once again demonstrates the good will and preparedness of Africans to overcome their transient contradictions through dialogue . . . to settle African problems in an African way.

It was external enemies, contended the article, that had caused misunderstandings in the past: The governments of Ethiopia and Sudan, by taking the wise decision to resolve their differences peacefully have frustrated the enemies of Africa who want to see disunity and disorder reigning in the continent. As such, the Freetown meeting is also a re-affirmation of the two countries’ desire to live in peace with all nations, particularly among each other, and their strong support for the charter principles of the Organization of African Unity. . . . A positive stage has been reached for the further development of the age-old ties between the peoples of Sudan and Ethiopia.

In 1978 and in 1979, Mangistu went from strength to strength. With the help of the Soviets and the Cubans, he defeated the invading Somalis, and then recaptured most of Eritrea from the local nationalist organi-

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zations, weakened by internal rivalries. It was time for him to consolidate his victory in Eritrea by warming up relations with Numayri. In March 1980, Ethiopia and Sudan agreed to respect each other’s territorial integrity. They also agreed to end mutual interference in internal affairs and strengthen economic and cultural relations. Mangistu visited Khartoum in May; Numayri reciprocated in November. While visiting the Ethiopian capital, he agreed to stop support for the Eritrean rebels and close down their offices in Khartoum. It was time to resort to the vocabulary of African brotherhood. The writers of the Ethiopian Herald shelved their Marxist terminology and competed now in rephrasing and enriching the language of continental fraternity. “Enhancing Ethio-Sudanese Friendship,” published on 14 May 1980, opened some twelve months of frequent articles in this spirit. Heralding Mangistu’s visit to Khartoum, it praised the commitment of the head of states of Socialist Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Sudan to maintain and develop traditional Ethio-Sudanese ties and friendship. . . . It need hardly be emphasized that the peoples of the two countries have highest regard for each other. They are not only linked through the Nile but have also historic blood ties between them. Both people have proved their valor and heroism while confronting common enemies and have rejoiced together in peacetime.

The editorial of 28 May 1980, “Deepening Fraternal Ethio-Sudanese Ties,” was published during Mangistu’s visit: “As was explicitly stated by Comrade Chairman Mengistu,” it ran, “our Sudanese brothers and we Ethiopians are closely linked by the great and eternal Nile River; we indeed share a genuine sense of belongingness to the same river. No force can erase this objective reality.” Mangistu addressed the Congress of the Sudan Socialist Union and, like in the old days, mentioned the Sudanese help and identification with Ethiopia during the days of Mussolini: Our feeling and spirit of good enduring friendship is all the more renewed when we recall the fact that at the time Ethiopia was attacked by the arrogant fascist forces, this land, the Sudan, served as a haven and shelter for our refugees and as a rear base for organizing the assault by patriots against the enemy. Similarly, whenever our Sudanese brothers faced certain difficulties, Ethiopia has provided them ready shelter and protection.

On that occasion, Mangistu was awarded the Medal of Honor of Historical Relations and Friendship of the Democratic Republic of the

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Sudan. To better honor history, it seems, Mangistu might have mentioned Haile Selassie as the man who led the 1940–1941 campaign from the Sudan. Talking of Ethiopia as a shelter for Muslim neighbors must have reminded him, or surely his advisers, of the najashi and the Prophet’s friends. However, in Mangistu’s mind, the deposed emperor was never to be mentioned in a positive context; Christianity, even as an Ethiopian historical memory and a legacy of neighborliness, should preferably be ignored. Other articles followed, written in the same vein. “Ethio-Sudanese Friendship,” of 29 May by Melese Telahoun, came with a picture of both leaders smiling wholeheartedly at each other. The editorial of 30 May was titled “Ethio-Sudanese Friendship and Cooperation.” The editorial of 18 November 1980, “Welcome Sudanese Brothers,” led the extensive media coverage of Numayri’s visit in Addis Ababa. The guest, for his part, showered compliments on Mangistu. Practically declaring withdrawal from the concept of the Arabism of the Red Sea, Numayri promised that “the promotion of bilateral relations is the most significant guarantee for the stability of this part of Africa, including the Red Sea, and the Sudan would endeavor to ensure that the Red Sea be kept as a waterway safeguarding the interests of the littoral states.” In the same issue of the Ethiopian Herald, the writer Belay Feleke contributed a piece entitled “Historical Ties Between Ethiopia, Sudan.” He quoted extensively from the works of three leading historians from Addis Ababa University: Sergew Hable Selassie, Merid Walda-Aregay, and Richard Pankhurst.43 Carefully selecting points to depict a rosy picture, he mentioned medieval Sudan as a commercial partner, a route to the outside world, and a receptive shelter for Ethiopians during the Ahmad Gragn invasion. Ignoring the Mahdiyya-Yohannes period, the article again mentioned “the assistance rendered to the Ethiopian patriots during the Italian fascist invasion of our country.” The next day’s “Ethio-Sudanese Friendship,” by Melese Telahoun, brought to life again the old fraternity hymn: “We often hear a Sudanese song titled Ikhwan Ikhwan, Ethiopia wa Sudan which means Ethiopians and Sudanese are brothers. It is currently being played over the radio and on TV. It is a captivating Sudanese song which has been composed as a result of the growing Ethio-Sudanese relations. This song evokes the deep feeling of brotherhood that Ethiopians and Sudanese cherish for one another.” On 17 and 22 January 1981, the writer Dereja Balcha contributed “Sudan—25 years of Independence” and “Deepening Ethio-Sudanese Relations,” and the editorial of 26 April 1981 was dedicated to the “Ethio-Sudanese Sport Festival,” a week-long athletic and musical event held in the Addis Ababa Stadium.

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The Ethiopian-Sudanese honeymoon was short-lived. Numayri was allied to Egypt’s pro-Western president, Anwar al-Sadat, and in 1983 began flirting with political Islam, two orientations that Mangistu could not tolerate. Mangistu, for his part, grew confident in his pro-Soviet regional strategy and in the adoption of communist structures, terminology, and symbols. Between them, the two leaders were on a collision course. This became apparent, especially after August 1981, when Mangistu signed a tripartite treaty with Marxist South Yemen and Libya under Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, now Numayri’s arch enemy and an active supporter of Sudan’s internal opposition groups. Relations continued to deteriorate. In February 1982, Mangistu began a new offensive in Eritrea, disregarding Numayri’s efforts to get the Eritreans to the conference table. In November 1983, the war in southern Sudan was resumed, led now by John Garang and his new Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).44 Garang’s men had offices in Addis Ababa and training camps in Ethiopia, which helped to enlarge his army, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement Army (SPLA), to some twenty thousand fighters by 1985. Ethiopian units rendered the SPLA occasional help inside Sudan. Numayri, for his part, added to the fire. Sudan increased its support for the Eritreans, and now also helped the emerging forces of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which had one of its headquarters in Khartoum and was free to act and move across the border. As refugees from southern Sudan were fleeing to Ethiopia (some joining the SPLA), refugees from northern Ethiopia fled to Sudan from Mangistu’s wars and the worsening famine in 1984.45 Amid these conflicts, in 1984 and early 1985, the Israelis initiated “Operation Moses,” smuggling thousands of the Beta-Israel Jewish community of Ethiopia to Sudan and from there, with Numayri’s secret cooperation, to Israel.46 When this matter was exposed, the Ethiopian Herald of 27 February 1985 responded in its editorial. It called it a “shameful act of brigandage,” accusing the Sudanese of assisting a massive kidnapping and collaborating with the Zionists’ “slave trade,” and their “forcibly taking the Falashas to Israel.” Interestingly, this article was a rare exception. A search of articles on Sudan in the Ethiopian Herald from mid-1981 to the downfall of Mangistu ten years later is frustrating. Next to nothing was written on the relevant burning issues between the two states, or on Sudanese developments. Even Numayri’s leaning toward political Islam (especially after September 1983), his demise in 1985, and the coming to power in 1986 of Sadiq al-Mahdi, leader of the Umma Party that advocated restoration of the Mahdiyya national and religious ethos, were all practi-

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cally ignored, in spite of their symbolic, historical, and strategic importance for Ethiopia.47 In June 1989, the new military Islamic regime of General ‘Umar al-Bashir came to power, allied with the National Islamic Front (NIF) of Hasan al-Turabi with its militant political agenda, and this too was barely discussed by the Ethiopian Herald. The new tendency to refrain from verbal commitment must have been orchestrated from above. After encouraging the revolutionary terminology of ultimate demonization and then suddenly switching to African brotherhood, it is possible that Mangistu was attempting to leave his options open through ambiguous silence. Surely, no one from below now dared to volunteer an opinion. In the Ethiopia of Mangistu, failing to aim exactly where the wind was blowing could be fatal. For many Ethiopians in imperial days, avoidance had been a first option. This was even more so under Mangistu. An illustration of the way voices from below were silenced during this period of uncertainty can be found in the library of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. Students’ theses on Sudan were few and devoid of judgment. During the period of tension with Numayri, the Derg commissioned the university to produce a study on relations with Sudan. Some of the best experts were tasked with the job, including the historian Merid Walda-Aregay, the geographer Mesfin Walda-Maryam, the historian Berhanu Abebe, the legal expert Worqu Tefera, and others. All were reputable independent scholars in the days of Haile Selassie, and in later years would express their thoughts very openly, even defiantly. This was not the case now. The members of the team took their time and produced a 202-page (Amharic) document titled, “The History of the Ethio-Sudanese Border.” It reads like an exercise in remaining as vague as possible. There are sections devoted to relations between the Ethiopian and the Funj state, relations between Egypt and Sudan, British-Ethiopian diplomacy concerning the border, Sudanese-Ethiopian agreements and disagreements about various sections of the border, and a long detailed list of minor local episodes and minor clashes from 1956 to 1970 (pp. 114–124). The document, probably submitted to Mangistu, was never published and remained in the IES library. Since it was not available for photocopying, the author hired (in 2008) an advanced history student to go through the text and send me a detailed summary, which he did. Ending his e-mail message, he wrote. “And so, dear Professor, I think you will be most disappointed, for the authors’ views of Islam, of Sudanese politics and of their history do not come out that much. For example, their dealing with Sudanese politics does not go beyond providing the available facts only. They did not engage in the task

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of analysis; hence we may not be able to know how the Sudan was conceived at the time in their minds.”

Notes 1. For a general discussion of Sudanese-Ethiopian relations, see Shinn, “Ethiopia and Sudan.” 2. For an extensive, updated analytical survey of Sudanese internal affairs and changing regimes, see Collins, A History of Modern Sudan. 3. For Haile Selassie, the church, the Copts, and relations with Egypt, see Erlich, The Cross and the River, mainly ch. 6, 7. 4. For a summary of the border issue and an updated bibliography, see Shinn, “Ethiopia and Sudan.” 5. For the issue of the Nile between Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia, see among others: Collins, The Waters of the Nile and “In Search of the Nile Waters”; Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley; Swain, “Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Egypt.” 6. See Erlich, Ethiopia and the Challenge of Independence, ch. 7, mainly n. 102. 7. Baykedagne, Atse Minilikna Ityopia. 8. Ibid. The quotations are from pp. 19, 22, 23, respectively. 9. See Zewde, “Gabra Heywat Baykadan” and Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia. 10. Haddis Alemayhu, Ye Haddis Alemayehu Tizita, pp. 129–130. See also Damte, “Haddis Alamyyhu.” 11. The memoirs of Heiwot Hidaru are available in the IES, Addis Ababa University. I am grateful to Bekele Yimer who sent these passages to me. The quotation is from p. 37. 12. For a detailed analysis, see Warburg, Islam; Collins, A History of Modern Sudan. 13. For the song, see, among other sources, www.yarranile.com/lailla.htm. For the singers’ tours in Ethiopia and more information, see www.alsudani.info /index.php?type=3&id=2147532222 and www.alsahafa.info/index.php?type= 3&id=2147505415. 14. Ethiopian Herald, 13 October 1956. 15. Ethiopian Herald, 13 October 1956. 16. Hill, A Biographical Dictionary of the Sudan, p. 278. 17. Ethiopian Herald, 14 October 1956. 18. Ethiopian Herald, 4 May 1957. 19. For an updated analytical survey of Sudanese internal affairs as of 1956, see Collins, A History of Modern Sudan. 20. Ethiopian Herald, 22 November 1958. 21. Ethiopian Herald, 2 January 1960. 22. Ethiopian Herald, 9 January 1960. 23. See www.alsahafa.info (18 March 2008). 24. For a detailed history and relevant literature, see Collins, A History of Modern Sudan and Civil Wars and Revolution; and Deng, War of Visions.

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25. Kramer, “Hidden War in Eritrea.” 26. The following paragraphs are based on Erlich, The Struggle over Eritrea, pp. 64–66. 27. Radio Dar es-Salaam, 17 October 1963, BBC/ME, 19 October 1963. 28. Africa Report, April 1967. 29. Africa Diary, 9–15 July 1967. 30. Interview with Numayri in Al-Ahram, 23 July 1969; and with the Eritrean ‘Uthman Salih Sabbe in Al-Jarida (Lebanon), 25 June 1969. 31. Africa Confidential, 13 March 1970. 32. Africa Confidential, 18 December 1970. 33. Times, London, 7 and 12 April 1971. 34. See Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, ch. 12: “The Arabs, Ethiopia, and Eritrea’s Arabism.” 35. Erlich, The Struggle over Eritrea, pp. 65–66. 36. Ethiopian Herald, 2, 4 November 1971. 37. See the editorial in the Ethiopian Herald, 1 January 1972, “Friends in Need.” 38. Africa Contemporary Record, 1973/1974, p. B155. 39. For the Ethiopia and the language of pan-Arabism of that time, see Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, ch. 12, and The Cross and the River, ch. 9. 40. See also Young, “Along Ethiopia’s Western Frontier.” 41. The paragraphs below are based also on Erlich, The Struggle over Eritrea, ch. 4, “Eritrea and the 1974 Revolution in Ethiopia,” and ch. 9, “The Ethiopian Revolution—Unity or Death,” and on Shinn, “Ethiopia and Sudan.” 42. See Erlich, The Struggle over Eritrea, ch. 7, “Arabization of the Red Sea.” 43. The writer derived this especially from Walda-Aregay and Hable Selassie, “Sudanese-Ethiopian Relations.” 44. For Ethiopian involvement in southern Sudan in 1983, see Ronen, “Ethiopia’s Involvement in the Sudanese Civil War”; Collins, A History of Modern Sudan, ch. 9. 45. See Weaver, “Sojourners Along the Nile.” We cannot expand here on the issue of the refugees that polarized the discourse and raised tensions between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia. 46. The paragraph above is based also on Shinn, “Ethiopia and Sudan.” 47. For Ethiopian-Sudanese relations during those years, see Collins, A History of Modern Sudan, pp. 180–181.

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CHAPTER

5

The Return of Political Islam: Ethiopia and Sudan, 1991–2009

RELATIONS BETWEEN Ethiopia and Sudan during the last two decades or so were influenced by the revival of religions as active dimensions in the affairs of both countries. In Ethiopia, following the 1991 demise of Mangistu, Christianity was readdressed and re-energized as an embodiment of the country’s history and identity. Freed from communist antireligious policy, traditional Ethiopian Christianity now became enriched through challenging interactions with other emerging churches in Ethiopia and in diasporas, and through new intensive connections with the greater Christian world. Islam, as a cultural and social identity, also became an active, integral part of the Ethiopian fabric. Ethiopia’s redefinition as a federal state based on ethnic diversity contributed to the country’s openness toward its Muslims and toward Islam. The Islamic momentum in today’s Ethiopia also has important political aspects that are very relevant to the country’s relations with Sudan and its other neighbors. In the late 1980s, Sudan also returned to religious concepts of identity. With the demise of secular, revolutionary pan-Arabism in the 1970s, a new generation of Sudanese—scholars, generals, intellectuals, the young, the professional, the poor—introduced newly reinterpreted political dimensions of Islam. These renewed ideas are in themselves varied and offer different prescriptions for the future of the state, its culture, regime, and external relations. The wing that is more connected to Middle Eastern fundamentalist circles strives to maintain an Islamic centralization of politics and culture, and their ideology is often referred to as “Arab Islam.” Their opponents strive to build a more open, diverse Sudan. They often define their Islam as “African,” or “African-Arab,” which displays a more flexible attitude toward local Christians, and other

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minorities and traditions. For both wings, as we shall see, the historical significance of Ethiopia as a Christian neighbor and the land of the first hegira is meaningful. For the Sudanese, beyond concrete relations with a relevant neighbor, when they return to the dawn of Islam as they discuss and argue about their identity and future, Ethiopia is instrumental.

To Radicalization and Back

It is tempting to observe the changes introduced in Ethiopia in May 1991 by the new Tigrean leadership that ousted Mangistu and has led the country ever since, and compare it with the period of the Tigrean emperor Yohannes. The similarity lies in the rearrangement of Ethiopia as a decentralized system, but ends when we examine the political-religious aspects. It is also tempting to compare the political-Islamic regime of General ‘Umar al-Bashir and (until 1999) the Islamic scholar Hasan al-Turabi with the Islamic militancy of the Mahdiyya during the period of Yohannes. But though some elements of similarity can be discerned, the differences are multidimensional.1 We thus confine ourselves to the observation that, like in the late nineteenth century, religious militancy again worked to aggravate relations (until 1998), but the appearance of a common enemy (Eritrea) and other developments led to compromise and good neighborliness. In the process, more flexible interpretations of religious messages continued to compete with militant ones over the very future of the entire region. The ousting of Mangistu in May 1991 by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Forces (EPRDF), the all-Ethiopian movement initiated and established by the TPLF in 1989, seemed to usher in a Sudanese-Ethiopian honeymoon. In spite of its Islamist philosophy, the Bashir regime supported the Ethiopian movement, which at that time was still Marxist-oriented. In response, the EPRDF made it clear that it intended to establish good relations with the new Sudanese government. The new leaders of Ethiopia were quick to divorce themselves from revolutionary Marxism, open the economy, and embark on rebuilding Ethiopia as a federation of ethnic states. They were also grateful for Sudanese help during their struggle and were interested in regional stability. As Eritrea was on the road to independence in 1991, Khartoum lost its leverage on Ethiopia and was interested in neutralizing Ethiopian aid to the SPLA. In October 1991, Ethiopia and Sudan signed a friendship and cooperation agreement and as a result, Addis Ababa closed SPLA bases in Ethiopia, ended military support, and shut down its radio sta-

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tion. In 1992, together with Sudanese military units, Ethiopia actually drove SPLA forces out of several border towns.2 The language of African affinity and mutual recognition was revived. “The impediments to the development of genuine cooperation between the peoples of Ethiopia and Sudan,” ran the editorial of the Ethiopian Herald of 25 December 1991, “have now been removed, and henceforth both sides have ample opportunities to promote close friendship and collaboration.” “There was a time when the obnoxious regime [of Mangistu],” ran the article titled “Ethio-Sudanese Relations,” threatened to build a dam over the Blue Nile with the farcical objective of cutting the flow of the water to our neighboring country. There was a period, too, when all sorts of non-existent religious differences were fanned as if there were not adherents of both the Christian and the Islamic faith in the two countries. All this notwithstanding, the despotic government attempted to provoke the peoples of Ethiopia and the Sudan to war . . . all these machinations, sinister as they were, had not been to any avail.3

Other articles, like the 29 November 1992 editorial, “Good Neighbourliness Enhanced,” again mentioned the solidarity of Mussolini’s days and the cultural affinity between the peoples. “If the current momentum is kept up,” predicted the editorial of 25 December 1993, entitled “Capitalizing on Shared Values,” “it may not be too long before national boundaries cease to be formidable barriers to unlimited collaboration in diverse areas of endeavor.” However, it was not long before the language of political religiosity took over. On one side of the equation, there began a rapid process of the politicization of Islam in Ethiopia.4 The opening up of culture and the economy and their reconnection with the external world energized major developments in the country’s revitalized religiosity. Christianity was exposed to new influences from the West; Islam resumed its direct contact with the Middle East. Inspired and aided by the various trends of global Islam, benefiting from the new open economy, gradually adopting Arabic especially by the young generation, Ethiopia’s Muslims, since the early 1990s, have again been facing the Islamic dual conceptualization of their own country. Most of them, it seems, have chosen to identify with their Ethiopian identity. In the spirit of Muhammad’s legitimization of the “land of righteousness,” they are now working to promote equality, tolerance, and to advance their new options in the redefined country. Quite a number, however, have begun to work toward the political victory of Islam.

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A good example of the dichotomous approach of Ethiopia’s Muslims to the redefinition of their own country was offered by Tim Carmichael, who analyzed a series of six articles in the new Addis Ababa monthly Bilal (named after Bilal ibn Rabbah, the first Ethiopian follower of the Prophet in Mecca, the first mu’adhdhin), between September 1992 and February 1993. Under the title, “Islam in Ethiopia,” different Muslim authors anonymously discussed the first hegira. The first four pieces, in line with the old Ethiopian Muslim approach, told the story as one of Ethiopian tolerance and as a model of Ethiopian identity built on Christian-Islamic coexistence. In contrast, the fifth and sixth articles presented the old argument of Islamic militants of the greater Islamic Middle Eastern world. Namely, that the najashi converted to Islam, that Ethiopia was therefore already in old times a part of the land of Islam, and that indeed this was more so now since Muslims—it was claimed—constituted two-thirds of the population. (An official census published in December 2008 claimed that Muslims constituted only 33.9 percent of Ethiopia’s 73.9 million inhabitants. 5 ) To this day, the sixth article argued, the Muslims of Ethiopia have responded to their constant oppression by complaining, instead of reviving their glorious history. This is a period of Islamic momentum throughout the world, the argument went on, and Ethiopia should join in.6 Two different kinds of Islam have remained in competition for the collective souls of Ethiopia’s re-energized Islamic communities. One is Ethiopian or African Islam, which combined, from the very beginning of Islam in the country, a flexible, popular set of beliefs, traditions, and customs with the acceptance of Ethiopia and its legitimacy as a land led by a Christian establishment. The opposite kind, that of religious fundamentalism and political militancy, was in the past mostly imported from or inspired by its followers in the Middle East. Its religious interpretations often included the call not to participate in the life of Christian-led Ethiopia but to win it for Islam. The distinction between “African” and “Middle Eastern, Arab” Islam is also a pivotal argument among Sudanese over the identity and future of their country. It is hardly necessary to isolate the Sudanese influence on Ethiopia’s Muslims from influences from other directions. In any case, the Sudanese influence was never one-dimensional. We have discussed the role of the Mahdiyya in inspiring Ethiopia’s Muslims at that time. Hussein Ahmed, the leading historian of Islam in Ethiopia at Addis Ababa University, dealt with the connection between today’s Sudan and Ethiopia’s Muslims. In a paper of 2006, he elaborated on a sample of

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Ethiopian professionals who had pursued higher education in Sudan. Most of them returned to be employed by the Ethiopian government; some came back to serve as religious scholars and functionaries. In presenting his initial observations, Ahmed indicated that practically all the Muslim students returned in the end to Ethiopia, but he noticed that in Sudan they concentrated on deepening their study of Islam in general, rather than on researching the history of Islam in their country. The influence of Sudan on religious scholarship and activism among Ethiopia’s Muslims had always been meaningful, Ahmed asserted, and at the beginning of his paper, he discussed the career of Shaikh Talha, who studied in the Sudan and at a certain stage collaborated with the Mahdiyya against Emperor Yohannes and his oppression of Islam.7 Sudan, as mentioned above, was for Ethiopians a bridge to the greater world and itself a center of education. Its influence on Ethiopia’s Muslims was varied. However, in the period 1992–1998, Sudan radiated more strongly the spirit of Islamic militancy. In June 1989, as has been noted, General ‘Umar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan with the strong backing of Hasan al-Turabi’s NIF. AlTurabi, the leader of Sudan’s Islamic militancy, an intellectual and a theoretician, developed a comprehensive ideology that derived from Sunni, Shi’i and Sufi philosophies and combined liberal aspects of Islamic democracy (such as women’s rights and social planning) with a violent anti-Western approach in the vein of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brothers. An opponent of what he considered Saudi-Wahhabi rigidity and Saudi cooperation with the Western enemy, in 1991 alTurabi initiated the establishment of the international Popular Arab and Islamic Conference as a radical alternative to both the Arab League and the Saudi-led Organization of the Islamic Conference. The government of Bashir and al-Turabi, whose radical Islamic regime in the 1990s was referred to as Turabiyya,8 was the only member of the Arab League that supported Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait. In 1992, alTurabi began a close collaboration with the more militant wing of radical Islam. In that year, Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia (his citizenship was revoked in 1994) and moved to Sudan. He and his men made Khartoum their main base and the headquarters of their international operations, and remained there until May 1996, when they were forced, following US and Saudi pressure on Sudan, to move to Afghanistan. In Khartoum, al-Turabi and bin Laden found common ground in their anti-Western global vision and their aim of achieving an Islamic victory through terrorism.9 Sudanese input in Ethiopia during most of the 1990s intensified,

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as Khartoum became the main source of external, militant Islamic interference, including Al-Qaida’s.10 In Al-Qaida’s eyes, today’s redefinition of Ethiopia is indeed meaningless. Nothing short of an Islamic victory is acceptable. Bin Laden’s concept of Ethiopia is part of his philosophy regarding the need to actively defend Islam globally. In 1996, he stated that there were fourteen places where Islam was actively oppressed and needed to regain its strength and prevail. Three of these were in the Horn of Africa.11 The joint effort of al-Turabi and bin Laden of 1992–1996, in our context, was aimed at helping local movements that identified with their vision of Islamic victory. The three main movements were the Eritrean Jihad, the Somali Al-Ittihad al-Islami (Islamic Union), and the Islamic Oromo Liberation Front. Representatives of the three movements, as well as of the Benishangul Liberation Movement, often visited Khartoum to participate in the advisory council of the NIF and Al-Qaida. Volunteers from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia were trained in NIF camps under the supervision of al-Turabi’s associate, the guerrilla expert ‘Ali alHajj. In the autumn of 1992, the volunteers were sent back to their respective countries and al-Turabi instructed them to begin undermining the regimes in the Horn of Africa. The concrete story of these movements of radical Islam and their failure by 1996 have been summarized elsewhere.12 We shall return to the Somali experience in greater detail in Chapter 7. Ethiopia warned Sudan to stop exporting Islamic ideology and charged Sudan with interference in Ethiopia’s internal affairs. In 1994, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared that Ethiopia would not hesitate to fight and authorized the SPLA to reopen training centers in Ethiopian territory. Sudan accused Ethiopia’s army of attacking Sudanese forces and occupying Sudanese border villages. Relations deteriorated dramatically after 26 June 1995, when an Egyptian terrorist organization tried to assassinate the Egyptian president, Husni Mubarak, as he arrived in Addis Ababa for an Organization of Africa Unity meeting. The killers came from Sudan, and Ethiopia accused Khartoum of involvement in the attack and then of harboring the conspirators. Amid mutual accusations, Ethiopia recalled its ambassador from Khartoum and accorded the SPLA diplomatic status, permitting it to carry out logistical operations from its territory. 13 The Sudan of Bashir, al-Turabi, their guest bin Laden, and their impact on the radicalization of Islam in Ethiopia was now conceived by Addis Ababa to be a great threat. Under the heading, “Sudan Fundamentalist Menace,” by Salim Ahmed, the Ethiopian Herald of 28 September discussed the attempt to assassinate Mubarak:

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It revealed to the whole world that the National Islamic Front led by Alturabi is in full control of the government machinery, including the decision-making process. Judging from events and official statements made over the issue in Khartoum it has become clear that the nature of the regime is fanatic, violent, uncompromising and cunning. Such a regime cannot be trusted to play the game according to the rules and in respect of the international law. Therefore, it will be foolhardy to think that Khartoum’s current problems with its neighbors can be solved through diplomacy, and that good friendly, neighborly relations would be restored in the future. There will always be problems because fundamentalist regimes believe in violence and not diplomacy. There is also an antagonistic contradiction between Islamic fundamentalist ideology, which is totalitarian, anti-democratic in nature, and secularism which is the negation of that very ideology. It is not a coincidence that Mr. Alturabi’s government in Khartoum has never condemned officially any acts of terrorism committed by terrorist groups in Algeria, Egypt, or any other part of the world. On the contrary, it considers terrorism as a political weapon that has to be used against political opponents in order to achieve political aims thus making the world safe for theocratic, fanatical states. Many of the active terrorist groups in the Middle East are given sanctuary in Sudan and assistance by the regime because they are viewed by the NIF as freedom fighters and not terrorists. Moreover, there is strong evidence that some of these groups undergo military training on Sudanese soil. . . . It’s no wonder that Sudan’s human rights record is one of the worst in Africa. It is axiomatic that a government that mistreats its people will not be able to treat its neighbors fairly and squarely. . . . Within this context and against this background, it is highly likely that the fundamentalist regime in Khartoum will seek to destabilize neighboring countries politically and create conditions of political chaos in the hope of overthrowing present governments and installing pro-fundamentalist ones in power.

The ousting of bin Laden from Khartoum in 1996 did not reduce the tension or the propaganda war. In late 1996, Ethiopia called for the overthrow of al-Bashir and stepped up its support for the SPLA, while Sudan continued aiding opposition groups in Ethiopia. In early 1997, the SPLA, with the active support of the Ethiopian military, seized two Sudanese border towns, Kurmuk and Qessan. Al-Turabi, then speaker of Sudan’s parliament, threatened that if Ethiopia did not end its occupation in eastern Sudan and terminate its support for the SPLA, Khartoum would assist Ethiopian opposition forces. The Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denying involvement, described his words as a call for a jihad.14 Meanwhile, the old situation of the Nile waters deteriorated once again. After Haile Selassie and Numayri had managed to avoid verbal

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confrontation over water rights, Mangistu targeted the 1959 EgyptianSudanese water agreement and threatened to block the Blue Nile. Most of his rhetoric on the Nile was aimed at Egypt and has been discussed elsewhere.15 However, when the EPRDF came to power, the EthiopianSudanese dialogue on Nile water usage improved, and in 1992, the two countries signed an agreement to reduce the sediment load from the Blue Nile, the Atbara, and their tributaries. As relations deteriorated, in 1996, Sudan re-emphasized that Sudan and Egypt should have exclusive rights to the waters of the Nile. A series of articles in the Ethiopian Herald of 14 and 15 August 1998 implied that a regional war would develop from al-Turabi’s threat to implement a one-sided Nile policy. In late 1998, a new chapter in Ethiopian-Sudanese relations began. Like in the days of the Mahdiyya and Menelik, a common threat from a third party helped the two governments to come closer. The main factor behind the change was the outbreak, earlier in May of that year, of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Eritrea, under Isayas Afaworki, had built a strong army and for reasons outside our scope developed active conflicts with all its neighbors. The invasion of Ethiopian territory and the ignition of a long and bloody war drove Addis Ababa and Khartoum to mend fences and they have retained good relations ever since. Ethiopia stopped aiding the SPLA and Sudan avoided supporting antiEPRDF groups and movements. In November 1999, Bashir, having broken with al-Turabi, visited Addis Ababa. He came again twice in 2001 and Meles Zenawi reciprocated in 2002. After the 11 September 2001 Al-Qaida attacks in the United States, Bashir began to appease Washington, and in 2003, he reached an agreement with Ethiopia on cooperating in combating terrorism. Agreements were also signed on trade, cultural activities, regional cooperation, and finally in November 2004, on a common border. In early 2005, an agreement was signed between Khartoum and the SPLM, also with the help of Ethiopian mediation.16 As bilateral problems of a religious nature were marginalized, the two sides returned to the old terminology of African affinity in relating to each other. On 9 May 2001, the Ethiopian Herald editorial titled “RoleModel Relationships” admitted that there had been ups and downs in the past, but stated that the tradition of close affinity, mutual help, and shared destiny had been restored for good. (As these lines were being written in 2009, both Meles Zenawi and ‘Umar al-Bashir were still doing their best to refrain from interfering in each other’s affairs.) Symbolically, in December 2001, Sudan and Ethiopia signed an agreement to improve the road between Gondar and Qallabat, the two sites, one in Ethiopia and one in Sudan, which had been the more tragic

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scenes of disastrous hostility, when religious radicalism had its way in the days of Yohannes and the khalifa.

The Sudanese Debate: African Islam, “Arab” Islam, and Ethiopia17 Local Islam and Universal Islam

The improvement in Ethio-Sudanese relations after 1998 did not render religiosity irrelevant. Islam and Christianity remained central to a sphere deeper than diplomatic politics; namely, to issues of identity and of the very definitions of the Ethiopian and the Sudanese selves. In both countries, active processes are at work to redefine old structures and political cultures, and to reinterpret history and goals. In both, the presence of the neighborly “other” influences public discourse. In Ethiopia, the main factor in this respect is the tension between Ethiopian Islam—moderate, popular, flexible, and compatible with local cultures—and political Islam connected to Middle Eastern fundamentalist movements. The same distinction is also applicable to the Sudanese case. The internal debate among Sudan’s Muslims about their identity revolves around the forms of local Islam and of Islam as it was shaped in and brought from the Middle East, or, in the terminology of today’s Sudanese public debate, between “African” Islam and “Arab” Islam. This internal debate in Sudan is also part of a comprehensive intraIslamic debate in various countries on the periphery of the Arab world. In societies that adopted Arabic as part of their Islamization, there has been a discernible effort in recent decades to redefine and revive the authentic ethnic self with all its cultural, linguistic, and religious aspects. The Berbers in North Africa, the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, the Nubians, the Somalis, are all cases in point. Reasserting their local identity, working to revive their languages and heritage, they also differ in their goals. The majority of the Berbers, for example, strive to redefine their participation in multicultural bilingual states; many Kurds strive to break away from Arab Iraq. The defenders of the Arab hegemony in those countries, as well as their opponents, turn to history and offer their various interpretations. Ethiopia’s neighbors often readdress the relations between early Islam and the Christian kingdom, and mainly as these turned on the various legacies of the first hegira. In general, three approaches can be observed in the debate among today’s Sudanese Muslims concerning their self-identification. These

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are uniquely African Islam; African-Arab or Arab-African Islam, with an emphasis on the integral connection between the local and the all-Islamic; and Arab Islam, preaching the universal hegemony of fundamental values. African Islam and the Ethiopian Abraha

Those who call for purely African Islam are seemingly a minority, but their voice is clearly heard. Their main argument is that the Arabs were and are “white imperialists” who invaded, dominated, and humiliated the native Africans. The Arabs, they maintain, were the first slavers, long before the Europeans. Though the Arabic language was an important tool in spreading Islam, Africans should emancipate themselves from the Arabs, detach themselves from their kind of Islam, and revive their cultures and their languages as components of a better Islam. The goal, they contend, is to rebuild open societies that would better address local diversity and respect non-Muslims. The leading issue promoted by those holding this viewpoint is the call, or rather, the renewal of the call, to rename Sudan. The name, which means “the blacks” in Arabic, they contend, is a reflection of the old Arab racism and slave trading, as is the name “al-Habasha” (for Ethiopia), that in Arabic connotes people of mixed origin.18 A Sudanese who presented himself as “the black ‘Imad’” spurred a controversy when, on 26 May 2003, he posted a message on the sudaneseonline website, saying that that “the name Sudan is no longer valid. . . . Let us think of a new name through which we will be able to cleanse the past, a name that will be relevant to all parts of our land, the north, the south, the east, and the west. . . . Many states changed their names. . . . Let us also change the logo of the national television, for it is not relevant to our new republic.” When surfer “Fatima al-Hajj” remarked that the logo contained the shahada, “the black ‘Imad” responded that Christians, Jews, and even pagans should also have their say. To another surfer, “Ayman,” who asked for more explanations, he answered: “Let me ask. Does the name Sudan represent the various ethnic and tribal groups whose existence underlines the sharp contrast between our Africanism and Arabism? . . . Is the name Sudan a product of the self-image of locals, or is it a product of aliens . . . [for whom] the name Sudan implies slavery and inferiority?” A Sudanese who lives in Saudi Arabia, by the name of Muhammad Sabri, supported “the black ‘Imad’”: “I tell all those who identify with the name Sudan that it was imposed on us by others who were tyrannical and aggressive. Many nations changed their names, even friends of the Prophet did so

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after they adopted Islam. . . . We are Africans penetrated by Arabs. Why consider ourselves Arabs and not Africans when our Africanism is so much more obvious?”19 The suggestions included names such as “The New Sudan,” “The Heart of Africa,” and “The United States of Africa.” No doubt the Ethiopian experiment of ethnic federalism has been espoused by those who would like to decentralize Sudan, but there is also an identification with Ethiopian history as being at the root of Africa and of African identity. On 29 July 2002, an unidentified Sudanese wrote an article on the same website aiming to bring African-Arab antagonism to the very edge. Under the title of “Abraha—the King Who Should Not Be Ignored,” the surfer returned to the well-known story of “the year of the elephant,” A.D. 570. In that year, to reiterate, the Ethiopian ruler of Yemen, Abraha alAshram, “Scar-face,” was said to have raided the still pagan Mecca in order to destroy the Ka‘ba, and to divert the local pagans to a church that he had built in San‘a. The Ka‘ba, as attested by the Quran, was miraculously saved from the Ethiopians by Allah. As will be addressed again below, the image of the Ethiopians as the worst enemies of Islam was consequently preserved in a hadith: “A lean-legged from among the Ethiopians will destroy the Ka‘ba.”20 This saying, probably because of its extreme message, has been quoted throughout the centuries mainly by the most extremist of Islamic radicals. However, the Sudanese advocate of African Islam turned the story into an anti-Arab one: “Abraha, the king whom Arab-Islamic culture mocked and stained our memory of his image, was in fact a great leader. He had an enduring impact on human history. The black Muslims of today should sober up and distinguish between what was sacred and what was twisted by ideology. If they do so, they will smash to pieces what the Arab-Islamic culture twisted and will discover the ugly, racist face of that culture.” Reminding the readers that the Christian Abraha worked at the time to make the pagan Arabs of Mecca believe in one God, the Sudanese surfer turned his Ethiopian hero into a symbol of African religious superiority and purity.21 African-Arab and Arab-African: The Najashi and Bilal

The majority of Sudanese who contribute to the public debate apparently belong to our second category, namely, to those who conceive of the Sudanese-Islamic self as a combination of African and Arab dimensions, a formula rich enough to support pragmatic systems. All promoters of this line return to history and often refer to Ethiopia and Ethiopians. Those who like to emphasize that the African contribution is

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the more significant one naturally refer to the role of Ethiopians as pioneers of Islam and to the role of Ethiopia as a shelter for the first community of believers. A leading figure in this group is ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘Abd al-Ghani Ibrahim, a lecturer at the African University of Khartoum, who, in 1994, published a book entitled The Family of Bilal: The Historical Roots of Islam in Ethiopia. Bilal ibn Rabbah was the Ethiopian slave of a prominent Meccan in the early days of the Prophet. Bilal followed Muhammad and was said to have been tortured by his pagan master for believing in his Islamic mission. Purchased and freed by Abu Bakr, the future caliph (632–634), Bilal the Ethiopian became the third person to adopt Islam. He later gained prominence as one of the Prophet’s leading companions and the first mu’adhdhin, the caller to prayer. Bilal the Ethiopian was also a warrior for Islam and his grave in Damascus became a sacred shrine. In Islamic tradition, Bilal is often mentioned together with the najashi as a righteous Ethiopian. He was eternalized in the names of countless mosques and in the saying “The Caliphate goes to [the tribe of] Quraysh, the call to prayer, to the Ethiopians.” All the Muslims of Africa, argues Ibrahim, are the spiritual descendents of the first Ethiopian Muslim; they are all members of the family of Bilal. The main message of the book, which offers more interpretations of the first hegira to Ethiopia and the najashi’s protection of the sahaba and his later conversion, is presented in the introduction: The Africans have to fully grasp the fact that the early Islam, born in Mecca, was carried on the shoulders of Africans before it was carried by any other nation on earth. The mission of Islam was first protected on African soil [in Ethiopia] and defended there from the Arab infidels [of Mecca at the time]. It was preserved there until God decided that it would prevail with the help of his African believers. A serious and deep study of the subject would reveal that the African kind of Islam, from the humanistic point of view, is superior to the Arab one. Serious scholars are sure to conclude that Africa of today, the way it is now, is the continent of Islam.22

In the eyes of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibrahim, the terms “Sudan” and “Ethiopia” historically were the same. Ethiopia, he argued quoting Islamic sources, was more of a geographical concept of Africa, Sudan more of an ethnic one. Both terms, however, implied a vast land of diverse human groups. This land was the origin of great men whom the Prophet instructed to take as models of wisdom, righteousness, and heroism, like the najashi and Bilal. The najashi was a great man and his land was the first safe haven for Islam: “The Ethiopian Najashi opened his arms and his land to

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accept and host the Muslims in a way that no Arab leader in the Arab peninsula or elsewhere had done, and he turned his country into a land of Hegira before the Hegira to the Arab Medina. He did so knowing well that the pioneer emigrants were Arabs from Mecca.” Throughout his book, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibrahim makes the point that the peoples on both shores of the Red Sea are members of the same family, and that Ethiopians have made significant contributions to Arab and Islamic cultures. Many Arabs, especially from Mecca, were indeed descendants of Ethiopian slaves and soldiers, he wrote, and the mixing of Arab and Ethiopian blood only improved the virtues of both. 23 In Ibrahim’s eyes, it is Islam that completed the bridge between Ethiopians and Arabs. The image of Abraha, he asserts, was twisted by Arab-Islamic historiography (it is from this book that the surfer quoted above derived his “African” argument). The Ethiopian soldiers of Abraha, after he was defeated, assimilated into the local Arabs and in time were among the first Muslims, like Umm Ayman, the Prophet’s Ethiopian nurse and lifetime friend.24 Indeed, the entire book implies that a flexible and just Islam should also prevail in Ethiopia. The hero of the last quarter of the book is Ahmad bin Ibrahim Gragn, his reign, and his sixteenth-century Islamic conquest of Ethiopia. According to Ibrahim’s interpretation, the Solomonian emperors of Ethiopia were both ruthless toward Muslims as well as greedy exploiters of their own Christian people. Ahmad Gragn brought the justice of moderate Islam: The Somali tribes followed the Imam, and the Muslims of Ethiopia saw the light of his call and willingly revolted against their rulers. The war ended with the deposition of the Amhara kings and the establishment of an Ethiopian Islamic Imamate in which many oppressed Muslims were redeemed and many Christians joined Islam. They did so because of the positive attitude of the victorious Islamic army and because they learned that Islam was not a religion supporting a small class of priests, and was not a religion of tribalism. Rather, it is a religion of openness that accepts the citizenship of non-Muslims as well. And thus, Ethiopian society under the Imam knew that no one was coerced to change his religion, no one was oppressed, and there was no violence except against tyrants. The Amhara Solomonian government collapsed because it was based on a tiny layer of a self-interested class detached from the masses, but now the Ethiopian man can feel secure in his religion, tradition, and property.25

A distinguished Sudanese scholar took this argument of African Sudanese-Ethiopian Islamic prominence a daring step forward. ‘Abdallah al-Tayyib (b. 1921), a London University PhD (1950), professor of Ara-

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bic literature and Islamic culture, and former president of Khartoum University, published an article in 1998 entitled “On the Abyssinian Hijra” (English version) or “The Hegira to Ethiopia and the Truth Behind It” (Arabic version).26 Its essence was that the first Muslims emigrated not to a land that is in today’s Ethiopia, but to a land that is in today’s Sudan, and that the najashi, first as a Christian and then as a Muslim, was in fact a Sudanese. “In my opinion, in light of the above mentioned account of the Habasha Hijra . . . the land of the Habasha to which the companions went, could not have been Axum or any place in the heart of the Ethiopian Plateau. . . . I am inclined to think that the Najashi Ashamah lived somewhere on the Nile between Berber and Khartoum, most probably the ancient Ethiopic Meroe.” In the context of today’s Sudanese discourse, he seemed to imply that Sudan was the true representative of African Islam at its best, most pluralist and open, an African Islam connected to the Arab pioneers of Islam and centrally relevant to the formative chapter of the Prophet’s period. Al-Tayyib’s short article, first presented at the Second International Sudan Studies Conference in Durham, UK, in 1991, prompted reactions from every quarter, but only a minority supported the idea. Even keen advocates of an emphasis on the African dimension in the Sudanese Islamic soul rejected the concept of a Sudanese najashi. For example, ‘Abdallah ‘Awda al-Hamur (b. 1937), a graduate in Arabic literature of Cairo University, published an article in the Khartoum newspaper, AlRay al-‘Amm, of 18 September 2000, entitled “Was al-Najashi a King of Ethiopia?” Analyzing the geographical and historical backgrounds according to Islamic sources, he asserted that the sahaba went to Ethiopia and that the najashi was an Ethiopian. “Sudan, from the days of ancient Kush . . . to the days of the Mahdi in Umm Durman, is rich enough in history,” he wrote. “We have no need to appropriate the history of Ethiopia. It is good for Ethiopia and good for Islam that the story of the first hegira took place in Ethiopia and not elsewhere. This can serve us when we face people like [British prime minister] Tony Blair and his like, and show them the way inter-religious relations were conducted here in the past, and how Christianity contributed here to the success of Islam by love and peace, not by enmity and war.”27 A good example of how dynamic the dialectics of concepts and the ever-changing political reality were can be seen in the developments in Hasan al-Turabi’s thought and politics. The man who in the mid-1990s, together with Osama bin Laden, led Islamic extremism in the Horn of Africa and aspired to Islamic victory over the West in the global context, by early in the next decade had become a promoter of an African-Arab

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blend of anti-Westernism and Islamic moderation. In a long interview published by the London-based newspaper, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, on 30 October 2005, al-Turabi went out of his way to denounce all Islamic militant movements: Even bin Laden and his movement are merely a movement for fighting only, and not a movement for building. Their [bin Laden’s and others’] words are only hostility to the other, clashing with the other, and defiance of the other. . . . Religion teaches us to build and purify ourselves first, and to win over the other and not to kill him. . . . Jihad above all is not only fighting. It is interaction with the other. But they consider it fighting. If he is peaceful with you, then be peaceful with him. If he greets you, then greet him with a better greeting. If he is neutral, not on your side nor against you, God has not given you power over others. If he comes to you with false thought, argue with him. If he comes to kill you, defend yourself, but we are not allowed to initiate aggression against anyone. The religion that is called Islam holds that people’s lives remain safe.28

The old al-Turabi who worked toward Islamizing Ethiopia had bowed out; the al-Turabi of 2005 accepted Ethiopia as the land that had given asylum to the sahaba. The interview quoted above was conducted in Eritrean Asmara, after al-Turabi had paid a visit to Massawa where he led the prayers “in the mosque established by the first immigrants from among the companions of the Prophet Muhammad.” Today’s Ethiopia, al-Turabi contended, should open up, “for despite the spread of education and the media throughout the world, Ethiopian nationalities have been sleeping, except for one nationality [the Tigreans] that was awake and exercised its domination over the others. However, if all the people now wake up, they cannot be held under one fist. The Ethiopians must loosen up and find formulas that organize Ethiopia through consent within the country.” His criticism of the Ethiopian regime seems devoid of religious aspects. In fact, the new Hasan al-Turabi calls for all–Horn of Africa unity, as a model of humanistic resistance to the West, a unity in which issues of religion, as well as of borders, should be secondary: The Horn of Africa has one common history and one linguistic base. Each country should not have tried to resolve its problems and crises independently, but we should have come together because doing so would have made us stronger and more influential, and we should even tackle our domestic problems together, for we are kith and kin. . . . The leaders in those countries . . . can compete with Europe in this regard, for we have not killed each other by the millions, as they have done. There are no religious conflicts. On the contrary, there are no quarrels

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between the religions here. The dialog should begin here and we should spread it to them, just as we have spread Christianity and Islam from these areas.29

On 18 March 2008, in an interview in Al-Sahafa, al-Turabi declared that if he came to Ethiopia he would be warmly welcomed, even more than in Sudan.30 While (the new) al-Turabi implied that African Islam is more human, other Sudanese thinkers worked to emphasize the integral harmony between “Arab” Islam and that of Africa. For example, Mudaththir ‘Abd al-Rahim, the author of many studies on Islam in Africa and former head of the Political Science Department at Khartoum University, gave a lecture on the subject in Washington, DC, in September 2007. Arabism, he said, is not about ethnicity. With the spread of Islam, it turned into a linguistic and cultural bridge connecting Muslims and even non-Muslims. Africanism was not a racial but a geographic and demographic identity that includes Arabs as well. Arabs are not of one skin; they differ in color and geographical affiliation and are the product of cultural and religious integration. Sudan, he said, is a “microcosm” embodying this African-Arab integrity.31 Hasan Makki is perhaps a more prominent promoter of the concept of Arab-African integrity. A prolific writer on Islam in Africa, and editor of the journal Dirasat Ifriqiya (African Studies), Makki has often referred to the first hegira and to the Prophet’s days as the formative time of that harmony. The Red Sea, he has argued, has ever since been a bridge between parts of the same world. Relations between the African shore, namely Ethiopia, Sudan, Nubia, and Egypt, and the Arab side, namely the Arab Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent beyond it, were and should remain built on a constructive balance, never on patronizing enmity. Chapters of historical antagonism should be studied to avoid their recurrence. The lesson of Abraha al-Ashram, the Ethiopian who tried to destroy the Ka‘ba, should be learned and marginalized; the future, rather, should be built on the legacy of the Prophet’s praising of the Ethiopian najashi as a righteous king “who oppresses no one.” In Makki’s view, like for ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibrahim, the story of Bilal ibn Rabbah is an important model. But while Ibrahim interpreted it as emphasizing the African dimension, for Makki it is proof of Arab-African harmony. The emancipation of Bilal from slavery by Abu Bakr, Makki argues, is the emancipation and liberation of Africa as a whole. It ushered in a lasting bond, symbolized by Bilal. One of the prominent members of the sahaba was Abu ‘Ubayda ‘Amir ibn Jarah, who commanded an army sent by the early Muslims to conquer Syria. Bilal the Ethiopian joined Abu ‘Ubayda on that mission and the two established a strong bond.

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This bond between Bilal and Abu ‘Ubayda had spiritual, ideological and political aspects. Abu ‘Ubayda was not merely one of the Sahaba; he was one of those who emigrated to Ethiopia. His stay in this country purified his soul and cleansed him from racism and ethnic paternalism. While Abu ‘Ubayda’s ancestors witnessed the Ethiopians’ greatness as conquerors of Yemen, Bilal’s ancestors were the soldiers of Abraha who went to Mecca to destroy the Ka‘ba. From the seed of the soldier who came to destroy the Ka‘ba was born Bilal, the first mu’adhdhin in Islam. When Bilal the Ethiopian went out to Syria and died there for Islam, he fulfilled and symbolized the continuous Islamic harmony between the African and the Arab shores of the Red Sea.32

Voices of Universal Radicalism: They Are All Abraha

Those who call for a combination of African and Arab heritages represent pragmatic Islam and are ready to accept others as partners and neighbors. As strong, however, are the voices of those who call for the implementation of fundamental Islam in the sense of the centralization and hegemony of values, as initially molded in Arabia. Their argument naturally deals with the nature of Sudan’s internal system and external relations, but it is often also inspired by their interpretations of Ethiopians and of Ethiopia’s historical roles. In their eyes, Ethiopia has always been a Christian state of oppression, heresy, and of the initial sin of dethroning the Muslim najashi, humiliating and defeating the only true religion. After the Ethiopian army entered Somalia in December 2006 and destroyed the radical government of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in Mogadishu (as will be discussed below), the defenders of Islamic fundamentalism worldwide denounced the Ethiopian invasion. Many equated Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, with Abraha al-Ashram, and Meles’s campaign in Mogadishu with medieval Ethiopians’ campaign to destroy the Ka‘ba. Voices in this vein were also raised by Sudanese defenders of Islamic rigidity. For example, one surfer on the al-Hora website33 contributed to a discussion on Meles, the new Ethiopian Abraha, and presented himself as the “Little Ibn Taymiyya.” Ibn Taymiyya, as will be remembered, was the medieval spiritual father of Islamic fundamentalism whose writings still inspire today’s radicals. “The messenger of God,” wrote “Little Ibn Taymiyya,” “told us that the one who would destroy the Ka‘ba would be a lean-legged from among the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians . . . are indeed destructive and they corrupt others. They will destroy the Ka‘ba at the end of days, turning every stone upside down.” Another surfer, Isma‘il ‘Uthman Daud, contributed to the Kowika website on 14 January 2007, discussing the three Ethiopian figures of al-Najashi, Abraha, and Meles Zenawi. “We respect the Na-

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jashi,” he wrote, “for the Prophet praised him. But Meles Zenawi and Abraha are the same; they are both barbarous invaders and Ethiopian destroyers of Islamic holy places.”34 For these radicals, Ethiopia and its government is the successor of Abraha and other demonized infidels. The same goes for the government of Eritrea, even though the two states are hostile to each other, and Eritrea supported the Somali Islamicists. For the promoters of this kind of Islam, “all infidels are one nation.” In October 2008, for example, the al-Hora website began a discussion on a medieval tradition that in the end of days all Muslims, having been beaten in Spain, would gather in Aswan in Upper Egypt where they would be attacked by “a man from Ethiopia called Asis who would come with a huge army. The Muslims would all run to Fustat and Asis will camp near them. . . . The Muslims will finally fight them and beat them and imprison so many of them that the price of a black slave would be less than the price of a piece of cloth.”35 The initiator of the discussion, one Qasid al-‘Anazi, expressed the opinion that Asis, the commander of the evil Ethiopians, is none other than Isayas Afaworki, the president of Eritrea. There was no difference between Eritreans and Ethiopians as oppressors of Islam, he argued, and “since we live in a time of such oppression, the Mahdi would soon return.” In their effort to provoke their African opponents, Sudan’s Islamic radicals sometimes go so far as to allude that Abraha, the ultimate enemy, was a Sudanese African, and not necessarily an Ethiopian. In their effort to demonize not only their opponents and their Ethiopian neighbors, but all of Western civilization, some even contended that the new “lean-legged from among the Ethiopians” who will destroy the Ka‘ba was in fact none other than Barack Obama, the new president of the United States. “He is a black man,” wrote one surfer, “a leader of a huge army, whose origin is in [historical] Abyssinia. He is lean-legged, his head is small and his ears are big. As for his legs, the name Obama comes from a word in a language in southwestern Kenya that means ‘a man of twisted legs.’”36

Other Voices

The debate among Sudanese on their Islam is primarily a discussion about the future of their country. Those who stand for African Islam are basically interested in a decentralized Sudan, a land of various cultures coexisting and cooperating. Those who promote Arab Islam as a doc-

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trine of universal militant fundamentalism aspire to a centralized Islamic state, in which other cultures, as well as Muslims more open to themselves and to others, would be delegitimized. Following the public debate led us to observe that the majority would like to combine the two spheres, namely, to promote Islam as it was initially molded in Arabia, but to reinterpret it as compatible with African heritages: a combination leading to an Islamic, tolerant Sudan, the home of many and the neighbor of others. The voices of Sudanese who conceive history in secular terms are also clear, and in turning to history, they usually emphasize religions as sources of conflict. The Sudanese scholar Muhammad Sa‘id al-Qaddal, a Marxist by approach, worked intensively on the MahdiyyaYohannes period and in 1991, edited and published the Mahdist book, Al-Tiraz al-manqush, which (as discussed in Chapter 2) described the tragic religious conflict of that time. Al-Qaddal ended by saying, “What is important is that the two states learn from that conflict and work to strengthen the eternal friendship between them.”37 Another Sudanese scholar of communist background, ‘Abadalla ‘Ali Ibrahim, a lecturer at various American universities, paid a visit to Ethiopia in 2007, and published his impressions and thoughts on www.shrooq2.com. In four articles, “Days in Ethiopia,” he dwelt on the spirit of an anti-Islamic Ethiopian crusade during the times of the emperors Tewodros, Yohannes, and Menelik, but added: “We do not have to remember only the bad days between Christians and Muslims. We also need to remember good days of cooperation inspired by the principle that religion should be a personal, apolitical matter. After all, Ahmad Gragn failed to Islamize Ethiopia and the Christians have failed to unite the country under their flag.”38 The fact that one of the principal neighbors is Ethiopia, and that the historical base of the various approaches to the Sudanese Islamic self refers to Ethiopia, make the debate relevant to the future of the entire region and to that of Ethiopia. It does so in two ways. First, in the sphere of concrete relations: in the past, during the early Mahdiyya (1885– 1889) and then during the subversive joint ventures between al-Turabi and bin Laden (1992–1996), a militant Islamist Sudan collided with Ethiopia.39 When the Sudanese were less committed to militant religiosity, relations were good. For example, when Ethiopia was exposed to Mussolini’s aggression, the Sudanese public rendered cordial and useful help to the Ethiopians, the memory of which is still cherished. Second, Sudan has influence on developments inside Ethiopia. From the Mahdiyya until today, Sudan has been directly or indirectly behind both militancy and moderation among Ethiopia’s Muslims. The

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history of these relations deserves more than a mere mention. Here we can only conclude by saying that, in essence, the various options facing Sudan’s Muslims are nearly the same as those facing Ethiopia’s. What the Sudanese call African Islam is essentially compatible with Ethiopian Islam. It similarly calls for local coexistence and is inspired by the same tradition of the first hegira and its legacy of Ethiopia as a land of righteousness, a land of renewed openness toward Muslims, who should apolitically express their identity. The African-Arab or Arab-African combinations in the Sudanese debate seem similar to current orientations among young Muslims in Ethiopia. These include studying Arabic, deepening religiosity, and being inspired by the wider Islamic world in order to actively make their mark in an Ethiopia that is a land of all its citizens. Finally, the Arab Islam of Sudan’s radicals is not dissimilar from the ideology of those in Ethiopia who do not seek participation in a redefined land, but total victory and instituting an Islamic government. The latter are known as Wahhabists, for their inspiration and aid come mostly from Saudi Arabia, the land of the Wahhabiyya. For the moment, indeed, it seems that developments in the Red Sea area, Somalia, and also Harar and southern Ethiopia will be more detrimental to the future of Ethiopia’s Islam than developments from the direction of Sudan.

Notes 1. See Ronen, “Between the Mahdiyya and the Muslim Brotherhood.” 2. See details and more sources in Shinn, “Ethiopia and Sudan”; Young, “Along Ethiopia’s Western Frontier.” 3. Ethiopian Herald, 29 December 1991. 4. Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, ch. 7. 5. See the weekly summary of the Ethiopian press, Seven Days Update, 9 December 2008. The results of this official census remained controversial and raised heated debates in the country. 6. Carmichael, “Contemporary Ethiopian Discourse.” 7. Ahmed, “Ethiopian Muslims Studying in Sudan.” 8. See analysis in Ronen, “Between the Mahdiyya and the Muslim Brotherhood.” 9. For al-Turabi’s concepts of jihad during that phase, see Abdel Salam and de Waal, “On the Failure and Persistence of Jihad.” 10. For details and analysis, see de Waal and Abdel Salam, “Islamism, State Power and Jihad”; de Waal, “The Politics of Destabilization”; Shay, The Red Sea Islamic Terror Triangle; Shinn, “Al-Qaeda in East Africa and the Horn.” 11. See Alexander and Swetnam, Usama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, app. 1, p. 1.

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12. For a summary and sources, see also Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, pp. 201–210. 13. The paragraph above is based also on Shinn, “Ethiopia and Sudan”; Shay, The Red Sea Islamic Terror Triangle. 14. Ethiopian News Agency, 20 January 1997. 15. See Erlich, The Cross and the River, pp. 163–177. 16. See articles by Kinfe Abraham in the Ethiopian Herald, 25 January, 3 and 6 February 2005. 17. This section was written in cooperation with Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel. 18. See an article by Abu Bakr al-Qadi on www.sudaneseonline.com (21 September 2005). 19. See www.sudaneseonline.com (26 May 2003). 20. al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 2, p. 159; Ibn Taymiyya, Sharh al‘umda, vol. 4, p. 427. 21. See www.sudaneseonline.com (26 May 2003). 22. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibrahim, Ahl Bilal, p. 1. 23. See mainly pp. 13, 38, 57. 24. See pp. 26, 30. 25. The discussion of Gragn’s period is on pp. 198ff. The quotation is from pp. 253–254. 26. See al-Tayyib, “Hijrat Al-Habasha” [On the Abyssinian Hijra]. 27. See ‘Abdallah ‘Awda al-Hamur, “Hal kana al-najashi malikan ‘ala alhabasha?,” Al-Ray al-‘Amm, 18 September 2000, and his “Jazirat Dahlk alhabasiyya tunafi muqawalat hijrat al-muslimin ila al-Sudan,” Al-Ray al-‘Amm, 14 June 2004. See also Jalal al-Din Muhammad Salih, “Al-Habasha wal-Ahbash fi al-ta’rikh al-‘arabi wal-islami,” www.islamher.org (11 May 2005). 28. See “Sudanese Opposition Chief Al-Turabi Terms USA ‘World’s Ignoramuses,’” BBC Monitoring Middle East–Political, 3 November 2005. 29. Ibid. Emphasis added. 30. www.alsahafa.info (18 March 2008). 31. ‘Abd al-Rahim’s lecture was summarized by Hasan Makki on www .alsahafa.info (23 September 2007). 32. Hasan Makki, “Mu‘awadat qira’at al-istihlasat wal-muqadamat fi alsira al-nubuwiyya,” Al-Ray al-‘Amm, 19 November 2006. 33. www.al-hora.net. 34. www.kowika.com (14 January 2007). 35. The tradition is in al-Hakim al-Nisaburi, Al-Mustadrik, vol. 4, p. 462. 36. See, for example, www.benaa.com. 37. Abu Salim and al-Qaddal, Al-Harb al-habashiyya. See the Introduction and the back cover. 38. www.shrooq2.com (29 December 2007). 39. See de Waal, Islamism and its Enemies.

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CHAPTER

6

Nationalism and Conflict: Ethiopia and Somalia, 1943–1991

LIKE IN THE CASE of Sudan and Ethiopia, the basic, formative Islamic and Christian political legacies have always remained relevant to Somali and Ethiopian affairs. In the Sudanese context, we discussed the religious concepts at work during the late nineteenth century, and then how they were transmitted to the terminologies of modern Sudanese and Ethiopian nationalisms. We saw how the traditional dichotomous religious concepts continued to inspire the language of nationalist dilemmas, and how, as of the early 1990s, they themselves returned to the front. The same was true in the Somali-Ethiopian sphere, only ever more dramatically. While Sudanese-Ethiopian relations revolved mainly around issues between neighbors, Somali-Ethiopian relations were concerned with an active conflict. For many Somalis, the Ethiopian government in Somali-inhabited Ogaden has remained a painful wound in their identity; in the eyes of many members of the Ethiopian Christian establishments, the Somalis, because of their aspirations, remained the descendants of Ahmad Gragn, the medieval Islamic destroyer of Ethiopia. Both sides conceived their relations in existential terms, and they continue to do so today. The Sudanese-Islamic dialogue with the greater Islamic world was mainly with Egypt. In many ways, the Mahdiyya was a popular, messianic, and militant local Islamic response to the Egyptian government in Sudan, which mixed Islamic orthodoxy and Westernized values and methods. Modern Sudanese awareness was variably influenced by Egyptian nationalism and politics, first parliamentarian and later Arab revolutionary. The re-emergence in Sudan of political Islam had roots in the Egyptian-centered Muslim Brothers movement. From the Mahdi to al-Turabi, Sudan was an active partner in this Sudanese-Egyptian di-

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alogue, and even aspired to the leadership of universal Islam. Seen from this angle, the Somalis’ dialogue with political Islam was different. The Somalis, with the exception of the sayyid, did not produce scholars or political leaders who were able to lead Islamic unification over their fragmented clan society, let alone have an impact on the Arab Middle East. Their partner in the core lands of Islam was not Egypt but Arabia, and the connection was hardly stable. It was, however, most meaningful, and applied to all aspects. Somali popular Islam and its various tariqas remained ever connected to centers of learning in Arabia, but of greater significance was the Arabian contribution to Somali movements of Islamic politicization. It was scholars from Mecca and Hadarmawt and Ottoman soldiers from Yemen, who inspired and helped Ahmad Gragn, and it was the Meccan-centered Salihiyya, we saw, who inspired the militant dimensions of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan’s enterprise. From our perspective, the same pattern has continued to this day. Local, popular Somali Islam would remain flexible and pragmatic in facing the challenges of internal fragmentation and foreign occupations. After the sayyid and closer to our time, efforts at unification would be led by nationalists, first liberals and then socialists, but they would also always be inspired by the Islamic momentum connected to Arabia. Moreover, like in the days of Gragn and the sayyid, Islamic politicization and Somali unification would also be connected to the issue of Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden. After Somalia became independent in 1960, the Ethio-Somali conflict would nourish religious momentum among Somalis, and Islamic inspiration from Arabia would dialectically feed that conflict. The Middle Eastern–Somali connection, in turn, would activate the Ethiopians’ Gragn trauma with all due consequences. It is easy to observe how militant legacies of the past influence today’s developments. Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006 fearing a Gragn-like undermining of its system, a threat pioneered by Somali Islamic revolutionaries and supported, as was the case in the sixteenth century, by global Islamic forces. Many Somalis and many in the greater Islamic world viewed the Ethiopian capture of Mogadishu as the ultimate aggression on Islam by Christian infidels. While the argument in today’s Sudan about the Islamic self and the Ethiopian other concerns itself mainly with the positive historical image of the righteous najashi, the contemporary Somali debate about Ethiopia and the definition of their own Islam often revolves around the image of Abraha al-Ashram, the Aksumite Ethiopian engraved in Islamic memory as a Christian who tried to conquer Mecca and destroy the Ka‘ba. We shall analyze this de-

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bate in Chapter 7, when we address today’s Ethiopian-Somali drama. However, conflicts and polarized enmities were never the whole picture. We saw how nuanced and multi-optional the history actually was in Chapter 3, which discussed the period of the Somali sayyid and Ethiopia. The Ethiopian establishments’ attitudes toward Islam and Somalis, ever varied, underwent essential changes between Menelik II, Ras Makonnen, Lij Iyasu, and Ras Tafari. The Somali leader, Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Abdallah Hasan, the father of Somali’s modern identity, we saw, was both a militant holy warrior inspired by Middle Eastern fundamentalists, as well as a pragmatist pursuer of neighborly African cooperation with Ethiopia. In trying to reconstruct the more balanced, complicated past, we may also express the hope that its more moderate dimensions, ever optional on both sides, will remain no less effective than the militant ones.

Haile Selassie and Somali Parliamentarians

After the end of the sayyid, the emergence of a meaningful all-Somali political movement had to wait until the 1940s. Only in 1943 did the first political organization in the name of modern Somali nationalism emerge. The Somali Youth Club was a movement led by members of the tiny intelligentsia, police officers, and civil servants. They had the active blessings of the British who needed local support and sought to manipulate the emerging modern awareness primarily against Italy’s postwar aspiration to regain Italian Somalia, now administered by the British (1941–1950). The new movement, renamed the Somali Youth League (SYL) in 1947, proved a success. It attracted young Somalis from various walks of life and in 1946 the British estimated its membership at over twenty-five thousand. When the UN decided to return Somalia to Italy in 1950, the voice of the nationalists contributed to defining the arrangement as a trusteeship lasting only ten years. In July 1960, an independent Somalia, uniting the former British Somaliland and Italian Somalia, was declared. The SYL meanwhile developed into an effort to rebuild Somali society on supra-clannish modern nationalism of the liberal kind. From its incipience, the league leaders made an effort to conceal their own clan affiliations, and the 1961 constitution prescribed a multipartisan parliamentarian system; the first elections were held in 1964. Leaders of the league were presidents and prime ministers of Somalia until the October 1969 military coup, led by Siyad Barre.

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The first episode involving the new Somali nationalist movement and Ethiopia had a religious-political dimension.1 After the end of World War II, the future of the Somalis was debated in the UN. Emperor Haile Selassie, restabilizing his empire, sought to expand it by annexing the former Italian colonies of Eritrea and Somalia. In time, he succeeded in Eritrea. The UN arranged for a federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1952, and the emperor turned it into the full annexation of Eritrea in 1962. The emperor’s main instrument was the first modern party of Eritrea’s Christians, the Unionist Party, which helped to undermine the local separatists and later destroy Eritrean autonomy and its federal structure. In the Somali case, Haile Selassie was led to believe he could follow a similar strategy, namely, to manipulate the SYL and its antiItalian agenda in order to initiate a process leading to the annexation of the former colony to Ethiopia. By the time the UN mission tasked with assessing the situation in Eritrea and Italian Somalia began touring the region, in late 1947, the SYL had branches all over the country, including in the Ogaden region, still temporarily in British hands. In early 1947, a branch was also opened in Harar, which had been returned to the emperor immediately after liberation in 1941. The Harar branch was inaugurated with the emperor’s consent and numbered a thousand members by October 1947. Haile Selassie’s belief that the Somali nationalists would opt to join his empire, and that the SYL branch in Harar would advance this cause, proved illusionary. For the purpose, he was ready to shower benefits and titles on his Somali subjects. Maqtil Tahir, the head of the SYL among the Ogaden clans, was given the title of qannazmach; leaflets and posters combining the cross and the crescent were distributed. The emperor was apparently reminded of the days of ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq as a Harari agent of Menelik II and later of himself, working to deepen Ethiopian hegemony in the Ogaden. In practice, the branch of Somali nationalists in the historical capital of Ahmad Gragn soon came under the influence of political Islam and, like ‘Abdallah al-Sadiq during World War I, rather worked in the other direction. In November 1947, a group of non-Somalis in Harar, led by Wahhabi fundamentalists who had studied in Saudi Arabia and who had long been attempting to promote local Harari independence and victory for Islam in the entire region, joined the SYL branch and gave it a militant religious dimension. Ceremonies commemorating Ahmad Gragn were organized in Harar and a rumor was spread that the town would be restored as capital of an Islamic state. When the UN mission came to Mogadishu, in January 1948, the SYL Harari branch secretly sent a delegation to the Somali capital to

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lobby for establishing Harar as capital of an Islamic Somalia. The UN mission refused to see them and the British, stating that Harar was Ethiopian, ordered them to leave Somalia. In March, they left for Saudi Arabia, then in May they were hosted in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna, leader of the Muslim Brothers. In September 1948, the Ogaden was returned to Ethiopia, but the emperor’s plan to win Italian Somalia came to naught. By January 1949, the members of the delegation, having been promised clemency, returned to Ethiopia to serve a year of exile in Ethiopia before returning to Harar and the Ogaden. The “plot of the club,” as the episode is remembered in Harar, was the last for the next thirty years to give Ethiopian-Somali affairs vivid religious colors. It was in a way a brief echo of the 1916 Iyasu and the sayyid chapter, during which the Gragn legacy, inspired by a Middle Eastern connection and Somali momentum, was revived in Harar and worked for Islamic anti-Christian political unity. However, like ‘Abdallah alSadiq in his time, most of the Hararis and the Ogaden Somalis soon returned to flexible Islam and to an acceptance of Haile Selassie’s regime. The Middle Eastern connection that broke off after World War I resumed only minimally in the aftermath of World War II. The Saudi Wahhabis would begin their active interest in Somali-Ethiopian affairs only during the 1977–1978 Ogaden war. The Egyptians, ever in touch with the Horn, would spread their influence during the 1950s and 1960s in the language of modern, mainly revolutionary Arab nationalism, rather than in religious terms. It was only after the Ogaden war, and more so, in the early 1990s, that religious legacies returned to provide the main conceptual fuel for Ethio-Somali dynamisms. Until then, the Somali-Ethiopian relations and conflict were conducted in the language of modern nationalism. Somalia was committed to the idea of “Greater Somalia” (a term first used by Mussolini’s men during their 1936–1941 occupation of the Horn and again after World War II by Ernest Bevin, British foreign minister), namely, a state encompassing all Somali-speakers. Article 4 of the 1961 constitution stated that “the Somali Republic shall promote by legal and peaceful means, the union of all Somali territories,” and the new republic’s flag and emblem was a five-pointed star, its five points representing former British Somaliland, former Italian Somalia, Djibouti, the Northwestern Province of Kenya, and the Ogaden Province of Ethiopia. The conflict over the Ogaden became violent in January 1961 and deteriorated in 1963 following the establishment of the Ogaden Liberation Front led by Islamic scholars, notably Shaikh Dahir Maqtal, who attempted to revive the legacy of Gragn and of the sayyid as liberators from the Christian

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Ethiopian yoke.2 The tension led to a short war in February 1964, in which the Ethiopian army defeated the Somalis, but the struggle over the Ogaden, which represents about one-fifth of Ethiopia’s territory, has never ended. Though the Somali parliamentarian regime resorted mainly to ethnic nationalist concepts in its verbal war for the Ogaden, it was naturally also full of religious motifs. Somali radio continually denounced Ethiopia, using phrases like “savage Abyssinia,” and depicting it as “a Christian country under a stone-age, savage, feudalist rule” that oppressed Muslims.3 Haile Selassie was portrayed as a medieval despot, and on one occasion, in line with the old tradition of Somali popular political poems, predicted (accurately, in fact) that the time would come “when all will unite against him. He will be killed and his body thrown into an unknown place.”4 But in general, the religious dimension in the Somali verbal campaign was underplayed. Somali leaders were probably too mindful of their fragile parliamentarianism to toy with political Islam. They also seemed reluctant to join the ideological train of Middle Eastern pan-Arabism in the years of its momentum, the 1960s. Mogadishu enabled the Eritrean ELF to open an office and broadcast their anti-Ethiopian messages, but was not keen to adopt its revolutionary Arabism. The inter-Arab war in nearby Yemen, between the Nasserite revolutionary camp and its conservative adversaries in 1962–1969, made it too risky for the regime to create a close connection to the Arab and Islamic worlds. The Ethiopian response to the Somali claim to the Ogaden was expressed mainly in the terminology of the African principle of the inviolability of territorial integrity of existing states. This was the cardinal principle of the newly established Organization of African Unity, headquartered since its 1963 inauguration in Addis Ababa. Ethiopian spokesmen repeatedly accused Somalia of undermining peace on the entire continent by introducing principles of ethnic and religious selfdetermination imported from the Arab world. Ethiopia’s strategy also included staging manifestations of loyalty to the emperor by Somalis in the Ogaden, and claiming, as was enshrined in the 1955 Ethiopian constitution, that they were Ethiopian nationals, like all other inhabitants of all the empire’s provinces.5 “The Ogaden province like any other province in the Empire is an indivisible and inalienable part of Ethiopia,” wrote the Addis Zaman on 18 May 1961. “The devotion and allegiance of the Ogaden tribes to the Ethiopian sovereign is beyond question.” Six days later, the Addis Zaman summarized the overall imperial Ethiopian position:

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Agitators and other political instruments of colonialism have at no time relented from sowing the seeds of disunity. . . . In Ethiopia, for example the Fascist agitators [during the Italian occupation] did not depict the people as a people but as so many Amharas, Gallas [Oromos], Somalis, Danakils [Afar], Tigres, Wollamos, Kaffas, Gurages, and such like. As if this was not enough, they then moved into the religious field in an attempt to divide Christians and Muslims. . . . There is valid evidence to prove that the people of the whole of East Africa are not only culturally and ethnically linked together but they were under one government for the greater part of their history. But as the years went by and Arab influence spread along the Red Sea coast and the Indian Ocean, the common bond tying the various peoples of East Africa became looser and looser, to the extent that it is now threatening to cut off the Somali tribe from the Ethiopian family.6

Ethiopia, this implied, was a historical melting pot of the Horn of Africa; ethnic and religious differences were politically manipulated by outsiders, mainly Arabs. Somalis, it followed, should therefore all come under the imperial benevolence of Ethiopia, but if Mogadishu refused, it surely should not dream about the Ogaden. Religion, in any case, was irrelevant to politics, as noted by the Ethiopian Herald on 16 May 1965: The Somali policy is . . . to forge division on religious basis, aimed at balkanizing neighboring states. And this is the concealed instrument which today threatens to poison the atmosphere of peace and unity in Africa. Somalia has accused us of suppressing, oppressing, and what not, our brothers and sisters of Moslem persuasion. . . . Remote acquaintance with events in Ethiopian history is sufficient for anyone to realize that the united Ethiopian people, whatever their religious persuasion, have one deterrent against external influences, i.e. they have above everything else one faith—Ethiopianism. By introducing religious ingredients into a political war of its own creation . . . Somalia is perhaps igniting its last missile to grab Ethiopian territory which she knows pretty well she can annex neither by propaganda persuasion nor by force, because the concept of modern Ethiopianism, eloquently pronounced by His Imperial Majesty, is not based on religion or hostility; it sprouts from the spring of nationalism.

In October 1965, the two governments signed an agreement to cease hostile propaganda. As Ethiopian military and strategic superiority grew, and especially after the all-Arab defeat by Israel in June 1967 and the weakening of Nasser’s army in Yemen, the Ogaden remained relatively calm. The coming to power of Siyad Barre’s regime in October 1969 brought no immediate change in this respect. Siyad ended the Somali

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parliamentarian experiment, arguing that it was based on clannish divisions and deepened them, and had failed to bring about real unity of all Somalis. His formula was an authoritarian, Marxist regime based on the military and on a single party. Oriented toward the Soviet Union and its support in building a national army capable of enforcing unity, Siyad believed his regime was destined to fulfill the vision of a Greater Somalia as part of the Arab world. Until that time came, the Somalis desisted from any action, patiently awaiting the death of Haile Selassie. To avoid further provocation, Siyad even cut off the support that Somalia had been giving to rebels in the Ethiopian province of Bale and as a result, the revolt of the local Oromos collapsed in 1970. Meanwhile the Somalis modernized and enlarged their armed forces with generous Soviet aid and supervised the establishment of the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) in Ethiopia’s Ogaden.

Mangistu and Siyad: Marxists, War, and the Return of Islam

The Soviets were happy to play their part, but had their own game and priorities. They were efficient in building, training, and advising a modern, mechanized Somali army, which by mid-1973 had absolute superiority over the Ethiopians. The latter had been neglected by the United States, which after the closure of the Suez Canal in 1967 attached little importance to the strategic theater of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.7 At that time, Ethiopia had only about forty old US tanks in the Ogaden, facing some two hundred Soviet-made Somali T-34s. The Ethiopian imperial regime, wholly dependent on an old, weary, absolute autocrat, was paralyzed. The Soviets, in any case, were not ready to let Siyad invade Ethiopia. Their strategy, soon to be revealed, was to bring Ethiopia into their camp and make it a pillar of their presence along the Red Sea and the oil route to the West. Though they were arming the Eritrean and the Somali Marxists, they clearly preferred a regional Soviet-oriented alliance. Siyad was soon to discover this; after the 1974 revolution when Ethiopia adopted Marxist terminology, Moscow would not allow the Somalis to invade the Ogaden. Mangistu Haile Mariam’s harsh measures for building his kind of Ethiopian socialism paved his way to a warm reception in Moscow. The Ethiopian-Soviet alliance was sealed in January 1977, and the following February, Cuba’s Fidel Castro toured the region trying to build a Soviet-dependent axis, consisting of Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and South Yemen, stretching along the oil artery of the West. In

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April 1977, the Soviets, still supervising Siyad’s army, also began to massively arm the Ethiopians, helping Mangistu to rapidly modernize and expand his forces. Throughout that period, Siyad was building another option, secondary but meaningful. The efforts of Ahmad Gragn and of the sayyid at Somali unification and anti-Ethiopian struggles had centered on Middle Eastern connections and backing. Siyad was pursuing the reconstruction of similar Middle Eastern alliances, but he had already missed the train of pan-Arabism. In the 1970s, revolutionary Nasserism and Baathism, and the idea of secular, socialist Arab unity no longer existed, not as an all-regional drive compatible with Siyad’s programs. Neither Sadat of Egypt nor the Saudis would accept his socialism and Soviet orientation. In 1973, Siyad applied for membership in the Arab League but had to present more Islamic arguments than Arab ones, namely, that he was facing Ethiopia, an oppressor of Muslims and a destroyer of mosques. Somalia was admitted to the League in 1974, but Arab aid (namely, Saudi money) was denied to his government as long as it was allied with the Soviets. Moreover, the Saudis and other wealthy Arabs were furious at Siyad’s policy toward Islam. Religion, according to Siyad, while an integral part of the Somali worldview, belonged in the private, spiritual sphere; it was scientific socialism that dealt with material concerns, such as poverty. Religious leaders should exercise their moral influence but refrain from interfering in political or economic matters.8 Following his Marxist concepts, the Somali leader combated religious traditions as well as the social and political influence of Islamic scholars. In the early 1970s, he considered the latter as promoters of clannish divisions, enemies of progress, and agents of foreign, reactionary interests. In a speech on 28 January 1972 he said: The defunct regime led and driven by imperialism, was bent upon disrupting the unity of the people, sowing the seeds of tribalism. . . . We have liberated ourselves from foreign tutelage and colonialist domination. . . . A tiny number of elements serving imperialism either directly or indirectly are trying to jam the minds of the people. These elements claim to be learned men of religion. We ask them to bring a proof of this from the Holy Koran that socialism contradicts Islam.9

Siyad’s Marxist policy culminated with the establishment of the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party whose ideologues were also behind an antireligious campaign. Advocates of political Islam in Somalia of the time were relatively weak. The Al-Ahali movement had been

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founded in southern Somalia in August 1969 by some graduates of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University and of Saudi schools, and a year later Wahdat al-Shabab was established in the north, both molded after the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and both soon fragmented. When Siyad came to power, he outlawed such organizations, but groups like Al-Nahda, AlSalafiyya, and Al-Takfir managed to survive and initiated activities like the translation of the Quran and its interpretations into Somali. However, they were unable to resist Siyad’s anti-Islamic policy. In 1972, Siyad took a major step in an attempt to uproot Somali culture from its Islamic roots when he abolished the Arabic script of the Somali language and dictated the adoption of the Latin alphabet instead. Like Ataturk in Turkey of the 1920s, Siyad of the first part of the 1970s worked to identify religiosity with backwardness and combated Islam in the name of his socialist version of secular nationalism. In 1974, the year he was admitted to the Arab League, Siyad directly challenged and defied Islam by outlawing polygamy and declaring that women had the right to inheritance on an equal basis with men. When Muslim activists tried to organize a protest, many were arrested and ten of their leading scholars were executed in January 1975.10 Nonetheless, the seeds of change toward the re-Islamization of Somali politics in the 1990s were already being sown in 1973. In that year, Siyad authorized the establishment of a Somali underground movement in the Ogaden. In the same year, the rising financial power of Saudi Arabia would begin to connect intensively with Islamic opposition circles in Somalia, in the Ogaden, and in southern Ethiopia. Together, this would lead to a war in 1977 that would take on a religious nature.11 Already in the 1960s, the Saudis, mainly through their semiofficial Muslim World League, were giving scholarships to young Somalis to study in Saudi Arabia and absorb Wahhabi influences. With the new funds available after the global oil crisis of 1973, more opportunities were opened. Thousands of Somalis flocked to Saudi Arabia to find employment, many found their way to the Islamic University of Medina, the Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, and the Imam Sa‘ud University in Riyadh. Back home, these graduates strengthened Islamic opposition to Siyad. Of the ten Islamic activists hanged in early 1975, most were reported to be graduates of Saudi schools. The impact of Wahhabism on Somalia beginning in the 1960s recalled the time of Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Abdallah Hasan and of Harar of the 1940s. The sayyid, as noted, was educated in Mecca and adopted the fundamental, activist Islam of the Salihiyya, a doctrine directly influenced by the Wahhabiyya. Upon returning to Somaliland in 1897, he began working for Somali unity

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through a holy war against foreign occupiers, as well as against the apolitical Islam of the Qadiriyya. The sayyid began his 1899 campaign by moving to the Ogaden and declaring a war of Islamic liberation against the Ethiopian government in Somali territory. Dimensions of continuity are always present in societies guided by religions. Aspects like the connection to Middle Eastern movements and ideologies, the tension between fundamentalism and local, apolitical Islam, and the drive of the activists toward unity through war were to reoccur in our time and bear resemblance to the sayyid’s period. Siyad Barre, to be sure, never conceived himself as an Islamic warrior. He prepared a Soviet-trained Somali army and planned a modern, nationalist war. When in 1973 he authorized the establishment of the WSLF in the Ogaden, he was planning to undermine the Ethiopian government there through modern guerrilla warfare and the terminology of Somali irredentism. The leader of the new front was Yusuf Dheere Mohamed Sugaal, a young native of Hargeisa who had studied, not in Saudi Arabia, but in Baathist Syria. Siyad instructed Yusuf Dheere to recruit fighters in the Ethiopian Ogaden but to be patient and wait until the Somali army was ready.12 In practice, however, events in the Ogaden and in southern Ethiopia shaped the developments that led to the 1977 Ogaden war more than Siyad and his plans. The 1974 revolution in Ethiopia and the rise of Mangistu changed the situation in the Ethio-Somali theater. In his last year in power, Haile Selassie’s fear of the Somalis contributed to the general paralysis of the imperial regime. When Major-General Aman Andom seemed to be leading the revolution, from July to November 1974, he began working toward pluralist decentralization and regional appeasement for Ethiopia, including a dialogue with Siyad Barre. The short moment of good will was expressed in articles in the official newspaper, the Ethiopian Herald, praising the Somali revolutionary regime. For example, on 22 November 1974, the newspaper published a piece supplied by the Somali Ministry of Information titled, “Successful Venture. Somalia’s SelfHelp for Self-Reliance.” It read, “Self-help is deeply rooted in Somali traditions. . . . The architects of the October Revolution and the government under Siad Barre gave the concept of self-help a national significance of far reaching effects. . . . The nation has indeed lived up to the expectation of its inspiring leader [Siyad] and the tremendous progress achieved is real testimony to the nation’s response and action.” However, the day after the publication of this article, on 23 November 1974, Aman was killed by Mangistu’s men and the history of the entire region changed course.

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Under the emerging leadership of Mangistu, a policy of radical political centralization and harsh social and economic measures alienated intellectuals in the center and groups in the periphery. In the north, the Eritrean separatists swelled quickly into a full-fledged nationalist movement. In the south, resentment led to uprisings and ethnic and religious grievances. In less than a year, the WSLF in the Ogaden doubled the number of its fighters, and the Oromos established liberation movements in other southern regions. On 15 January 1976, supported and inspired by the Saudi Muslim World League, the WSLF was reorganized. Some of its Oromo members, headed by the veteran leader of the 1965– 1970 Oromo rebellion in the Bale region, Wako Guto, declared the establishment of a sister movement called the Somali Abbo Liberation Front (SALF). Under the guise of a Somali identity (Wako Guto’s father was an Oromo and his mother a Somali), it was an overtly Oromo-Islamic movement which extended its operations to the provinces of Bale, Arusi, and Sidamo. For all intents and purposes, the Oromos, whether Christian or Muslim, never intended to become Somalis. Oromos and Somalis are not natural allies and have in fact been rivals over most of modern history because Oromos in the south and east of Ethiopia gradually moved toward Somali-dominated areas. However, what was now in the making was an all-Islamic movement, complete with the participation of Harari Islamic activists of Adari origin, already associated with the WSLF and trained in the Arab Middle East, with Somali and Saudi help. They now joined forces with the WSLF and the SALF and all coordinated their anti-Ethiopian guerrilla activities from late 1976. The Harari-Adari fighters called themselves the “Ahmad Gragn Forces,” and indeed, nothing could have been more similar to Ahmad Gragn’s movement to unite Muslims in all of southeastern Ethiopia through an Islamic holy war. In the first half of 1977, the more Mangistu resorted to crude revolutionarism, the more this anti-Ethiopian, militant Islamic-Somali movement gained momentum in the south. As the new Soviet alliance with Ethiopia became clearer, Siyad Barre’s dilemma grew. The early signs of Soviet rebuilding of the Ethiopian armed forces on the one hand, and the successful operations of the WSLF and the SALF on the other, pushed Siyad to gamble on invasion. Defying the Soviets, he abandoned Marxist terminology and gradually adopted militant Islamic language. On 7 July 1977, Radio Mogadishu stated in the name of the guerrillas in the Ogaden that “when the liberation fighter dies in battle, he believes that dying in jihad is going to heaven.” Mangistu, for his part, spared no verbal fire. In the vocabulary of the Soviet school, Siyad was now de-

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scribed daily as a Fascist and heir of Mussolini, as well as a religious fanatic. The Ethiopian Herald wrote on 12 July: In today’s Africa, countries with various religious groups abound. Since February 1974, the people of Ethiopia are deep in a class struggle that does not depend on religious affiliation but for the liberation of all oppressed classes. It is clear that there is no room for differences based on religions, nationality etc. In fact in a Marxist-Leninist revolution, the rights of nationalities and freedom of worship are respected. On the other hand narrow nationalists and religious fanatics claiming that they are fighting a jihad against Ethiopia have heightened their adventures.

Under the headline, “Mussolini, Hitler in the Horn of Africa,” the Herald added, “The ruling clique in Somalia . . . tends to create contradictions among nationalities and also use religious differences instructing infiltrators stationed within their territory that they are engaged in a ‘jihad’ or holy war against people of ‘Habesha.’” Siyad’s army crossed the border on 23 July 1977 and with this began a decisive war over the Ogaden and in fact over the whole region. Thanks to massive Soviet, South Yemeni, and Cuban help, the Ethiopian army managed to stem the invasion, and in November, Siyad officially broke with the Soviets. Due to Saudi and US support of Siyad, the war continued until March 1978, and it was mainly because of threats by the Saudis and the Egyptians that the Ethiopian army, having defeated the Somalis, was prevented from crossing into Somali territory. The major battle of the war was the Somali siege of Harar. This strategic springboard to southern Ethiopia was defended by the Ethiopians and their Soviet and Cuban backers, and the Somali failure to capture it determined the outcome of the entire conflict. Though both sides used Soviet arms, the battle for Ahmad Gragn’s sixteenth-century capital, for the town that symbolized the nineteenth-century Ethiopian Christian conquest of the Somalis, underlined the historical, religious significance of the war. On 27 July, the Herald wrote: “The Somali government had the audacity to put in black and white the ‘extermination’ of the Amhara and other nonMoslem Ethiopian people as a praiseworthy revolutionary feat . . . that their armed infiltrators are fighting a religious war, a ‘jihad’ and that dying for such a ‘sacred cause’ automatically guarantees them a special place in heaven.” Under the headline, “The Jihad Siad Barre Is Waging,” the official Ethiopian newspaper added on 28 July 1977: Currently the Somali ruling clique has launched a campaign of jihad or a holy war against Ethiopia’s unity and territorial integrity. . . . Fur-

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thermore, to incite and enflame the tribal and religious passions of the jihadist hordes of invaders, the Somali rulers and mass media narrate and glorify how Imam Ahmed of Harar, nicknamed Gran, waged the 1527–1543 jihad of the Christian highlanders (Habesha) of Ethiopia and destroyed churches and slaughtered tens of thousands of Christians for a period of two decades. It seems that the Somali ruling clique has failed to remember that the grave of Ahmed is still in Ethiopia, where he perished prior to the total destruction and defacement, without a trace of his jihadist invaders. In a defensive war and just struggle, the oppressed masses of Ethiopia finally destroyed Ahmed’s jihad army, and his expansionist enclave. Likewise, today, the revolutionary people of Ethiopia are defending themselves against Barre’s jihad, whose main objective is territorial expansion.

The Ethiopian victory in the Ogaden seemed to ensure the marginalization of religiosity in the Horn until the early 1990s. The second half of the 1970s saw a momentous rise of political Islam in the Middle East and one can imagine it spreading to the Horn had the Somalis captured Harar under an Islamic banner. Ethiopia’s victory further ensured the cementing of Mangistu’s alliance with the Soviets and the temporary strengthening of Marxist orientations among other forces in the Horn of Africa. Though Mangistu was now confident enough to appear more tolerant of Christianity and Islam, and on major celebratory occasions senior figures of both religions shared the podium with the ruler, religions and politics were separated totally in his Ethiopia. Not in Somalia, however. The connection now built between Somali Islamic radicals and the Wahhabi and other Islamic circles in the Middle East would continue to undermine Siyad’s regime and result in the forceful re-emergence of Islam as a political option in Somalia from the early 1990s.

Notes 1. The passage below is based on Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, ch. 4, mainly pp. 85–92. 2. See Seid, “The Role of Religion,” http://hornofafrica.ssrc.org/mealin/ printable.html. 3. Radio Mogadishu, 5 August 1965; BBC/ME, 7 August 1965. 4. Radio Mogadishu, 2 May 1963; BBC/ME, 4 May 1963. 5. See, for example, descriptions and quotations in the Ethiopian Herald, 1 September 1957, 14 February 1964. 6. Addis Zaman, 24 May 1961. 7. The Soviets were eager to get a foothold in the Horn of Africa from the end of World War II and first attempted to gain a role in administering the former Italian colonies. They were rebuffed by the Western powers, but pulled

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back so as later to jump forward when the situation seemed more opportune. They offered Somalia military support in the mid-1960s when the United States and its European allies were trying to keep arms in the Horn at a very low level. The Soviets maintained a military mission and probably encouraged Siyad Barre, the army’s chief of staff, to take over in 1969. When Siyad worked to overcome clan politics by creating a Marxist-style system, the Soviets responded by massively increasing the flow of arms and establishing a military advisory structure, which was at the time their largest in Africa. Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia was alarmed, but the United States and the Western powers stuck to their cautious policy of holding Ethiopia’s military to very low levels of manpower and arms, in spite of increasing Ethiopian demands for support in anticipation of aggression from Somalia. 8. Terdman, “Islamism in Somalia.” 9. Mangistu Asfaw, “The Expendable Siad Barre,” Ethiopian Herald, 3 May 1978, quoting “Collected Speeches of Major General Siad Barre,” published by the Somali Ministry of Information. 10. Terdman, “Islamism in Somalia.” 11. The passages below are also based on Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, pp. 133–152. See there for sources. 12. See http://yusufdheerewslf.com, the Halyayga Nool website, Colonel Yusuf Dheere Mohamed Sugaal.

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CHAPTER

7

Religion Returns to the Forefront: Ethiopia and Somalia, 1991–2009

The Redefinition of Ethiopia: Islamic Options

Mangistu, with all his revolutionary pretensions, changed little in Ethiopia’s dialogue with Muslims in and around Ethiopia. His regime recognized Islamic holidays as national ones, declared all religions equal, and deprived the church of its assets and cultural hegemony. But beyond the facade of symbols, Muslims remained marginalized. Mangistu’s socialism destroyed their trade and urban entrepreneurship; his centralization oppressed them and all others on the periphery. The aggravating conflicts with Sudan and Somalia revived and boosted the Christians’ medieval Gragn syndrome. In spite of the imported communist terminology, Mangistu’s period should be understood against the background of the old Christian siege culture, with renewed implications for home affairs and external relations. The ousting of his regime in 1991 ushered in a comprehensive change, a multidimentional revolution tantamount to a fundamental redefinition of the country. We have already seen part of it in Chapter 5. The new government of Ethiopia, headed by the TPLF leader Meles Zenawi, president between 1991 and 1995, and prime minister since then, introduced two new approaches. One, stemming from traditional Tigrean concepts of Ethiopia, was that of ethnic pluralism. The old Amhara ethos of political centralization and a cultural melting pot was sidelined, and Ethiopia was rebuilt as a federation of nine ethnic states. Two of them are of direct interest to us: the new Somali state of Ethiopia including the Ogaden and the Somali-inhabited areas within Ethiopia; and the city of Harar, which was declared an autonomous entity. Each of these regional states, while answerable to a federal gov157

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ernment in Addis Ababa, was expected to develop its own local cultural identity. The second new element introduced in 1991 was openness toward Islam and Muslims. In their formative years, the TPLF fighters had been young guerrillas hosted and helped by the Sudanese and others in the Middle East. Their vision of Ethiopia as a land of diversity was expressed mainly in ethnic terms, but also had clear religious aspects. Ever since 1991, under their EPRDF government, Islam in Ethiopia—a topic to which we cannot do suitable justice here—has undergone a fundamental revolution.1 A brief mention of developments and options is, however, necessary. Ethiopia was redefined from a country dominated by Christians into a pluralized land in which Muslims were becoming equal partners. Traditional Christian occupations—peasantry, soldiery, priesthood, politics, and the administration of a centralized empire—were marginalized. Muslims’ traditional occupations—trade, commerce, small industry, foreign trade, finance, and urban entrepreneurship—became the pillars of the new market economy. Shaikh Muhammad al-‘Amudi, son of a Saudi father and an Ethiopian mother, is the pivotal figure in Ethiopia’s emerging, still poor, capitalism. Addis Ababa’s huge market, the Mercato, more vibrant than ever, resembles markets in any Muslim country. The various Islamic communities throughout Ethiopia have built their own new institutions, headed by the Supreme Council of Ethiopian Islamic Affairs in the capital. Thousands of mosques have been constructed throughout Ethiopia, often with government help (in Addis Ababa, in 2000, there were some thirty mosques, while in 2004, their number was estimated at well over a hundred). The presence of Muslims in all branches of the federal government (four ministers in 2004), in the governments and administrations of the regional states, in bureaucracy, academia, etc., seems to be rapidly approaching a fair proportion.2 Clearly, Muslims still do not enjoy full equality, but in some aspects, they even have an advantage. Islamic culture is booming. Copies of the Quran are sold everywhere, as well as Amharic translations of Arabic literature of all kinds. Printing houses owned by Muslims publish books, journals, and newspapers in local languages and on Islamic subjects. The young generation is learning Arabic, a language of deeper religiosity and of intra-Islamic all-Ethiopian connections, and having stronger ties with the greater Islamic and Middle Eastern worlds. The process of Arabization of Ethiopian Islam, though not necessarily rapid, seems to be steady and inevitable. It would not be an exaggeration to observe that the general Islamic momentum in Ethiopia, unprecedented

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and comprehensive, is—combined with ethnic pluralization—the most meaningful and far-reaching revolution in Ethiopia’s long history. But in which direction? Clearly there are two options: participating in and contributing to a redefined Ethiopia, or a victory in Ethiopia in the name of political Islam. In more abstract, conceptual terms, the dilemma is often addressed in dichotomous interpretations of the historical figure of the najashi. As we already mentioned, those who support participation in an open Ethiopia prefer to mention the najashi as the righteous king who saved the early Muslims and demonstrated the human affinity among all believers in one God. They also reiterate that Ethiopia was the first meeting place between Muslims and Christians, and has remained a model of religious coexistence. Those who strive for Islamic victory in Ethiopia refer to the story of the first hegira as leading to the najashi recognizing the Prophet as God’s messenger and therefore to Ethiopia being the first state outside Arabia to become part of the land of Islam. It seems that most Muslims in Ethiopia’s capital and in the north have remained loyal to their own apolitical traditions and are willing to be part of Ethiopia as a sphere of religious equality. The center and the north were the core regions of historical Ethiopia in which Islamic communities were an integral part of the country’s life from medieval times. Closer to our days, the influence of Middle Eastern and the global Islamic political momentum on northern Ethiopia was relatively indirect. In nearby Eritrea, first Arabism and then political Islam were defeated by the national authoritarianism of the EPLF and the regime of Isayas Afaworki after 1991. Isayas managed to smash the Eritrean Islamic Jihad movement, which, until 1996, was supported by al-Turabi and bin Laden. Isayas’s war with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000 had no religious aspect, apart from his support of Somali Islamic radicals in Ethiopia’s south. As we mentioned, Sudanese religious influence on Ethiopia’s north was negligible. It was mainly in southern Ethiopia that the real struggle for the future of Islam in Ethiopia was and is being conducted. The development of Islam in southern Ethiopia remained integrally connected to that of Somalia and the Somalis, and with them to the momentum of political Islam in the greater world. That linkage, we saw, was at work in the SALF-WSLF Mogadishu connection, serving as the background to the Ogaden war. After both Mangistu and Siyad Barre were ousted in 1991, the Islamic Ethiopian-Somali connection was reenergized and became central to the history of the entire region. We referred to it briefly, when we discussed the work of bin Laden and al-Turabi in Khartoum during 1992–1996 and their cooperation with Al-

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Ittihad al-Islami of the Somalis. We shall refer below to the Somali dimension of this intra-Islamic radicalization in the southern theater of Ethiopia and the Horn. In Ethiopia proper, it was among the Oromos, some 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population, as well as in the town of Harar, that the politicization of Islam during the early 1990s began to challenge the new regime.3 Earlier, during Mangistu’s regime, the Oromos’ struggle for self-determination had been spearheaded by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), whose leadership was mostly Christian. However, some of the Oromos opted for reviving and boosting their Islamic identity, adopted in the nineteenth century, as we saw in the case of the SALF and its cooperation with the WSLF. In 1982, Hajj ‘Abd al-Karim Ibrahim Hamid, known as Shaikh Jarra Abba Gada, a native of the Harar region and a veteran of the Oromo rebellion in Bale of the 1960s, established the Islamic Oromo Liberation Front (IOLF), which had little impact until the fall of Mangistu. In 1988, he unified other Islamic factions, including the SALF, under the United Command of Oromo Jihad. However, the IOLF’s name persisted and gained significance after 1991. While the OLF flirted with the EPRDF government (1991–1992), the IOLF accused it of betraying the Oromos’ cause. The Islamic jihadi organization was now boosted from all sides. The Saudi religious establishment targeted the Oromos as a main vehicle for the Islamization, and indeed for the Arabization, of Ethiopia. Saudi literature began to develop the argument that the Oromos were Arabs by origin, and in the early 1990s, the Muslim World League, claiming that Oromos constituted 70 percent of Ethiopia’s population, and that 80 percent of the Oromos were Muslims, tried to promote a campaign for the adoption of Arabic script for Orominya. Hundreds of young Oromos who had escaped Mangistu’s regime and obtained scholarships to Saudi universities were now encouraged to return to Ethiopia. With the help of the Saudi nongovernmental organizations, as preachers, teachers, social workers, and imams, they worked to spread Wahhabi Islam. They denounced Sufi customs and destroyed old-style Oromo tombstones, replacing them with Orthodox, Arabic-engraved ones.4 Many Ethiopian graduates of the Saudi educational system became agents of Wahhabism. In Ethiopia of the 1990s, Wahhabiyya became a term that described observers of strict Islamic orthodoxy who were activists for its political victory. It acquired a negative connotation among Muslims who insisted on retaining their Ethiopian identities. The declared aim of the IOLF was the establishment of an Islamic Oromo state. In practice, it seems to have put Islam before the Oromo

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identity. After 1992, it engaged in clashes with Ethiopian authorities, coordinating its actions with the Somali Al-Ittihad al-Islami, as well as with the Ogaden National Liberation Front (established in 1984 by veterans of the WSLF and which, by 1993, had returned to fighting the EPRDF regime). In fact, like in the days of the Ogaden war and of the WSLF and the SALF, the common jihad seems to have diminished ethnic differences. The IOLF made a special, symbolic effort to unify and politicize Islam in Harar. After the Ogaden war, it was contended, Mangistu had seen to the changing of Harar’s social structure by settling foreigners in the town. The Ethiopian EPRDF regime helped to introduce a representative system through parties and bodies reflecting Harar’s new status as an administrative entity. However, the real internal struggle over the capital of Islam became religious in the 1990s. Local Oromo Wahhabi activists, mostly associated with the IOLF, now launched an extensive campaign against Harar’s popular Islam and declared Sufi-inspired Harari customs heretical. Their message appealed to many Oromo natives who had socioeconomic grievances against Harar’s elite. Though some of the Adaris, as we have seen, were themselves Wahhabi-inclined, most of them felt threatened and exposed to takfir, being charged as heretics. Combined with the rise of radical Islam among the Somalis and in the Ogaden, boosted by bin Laden and alTurabi on one hand and by the Saudi fundamental establishment on the other, the momentum of supra-ethnic jihadism in southern Ethiopia in the mid-1990s grew steadily.

The Somalis from the Islamic Union to the Islamic Courts Union

The final ousting of Siyad Barre in January 1991 by a coalition of warlords ended his authoritarian regime, which had lasted twenty-two years. Somali society began to fall apart, fragmented by clannish rivalries and warring militias.5 Somalia now became an ideal environment for international terrorist networks and foreign interference, as well as for local centrifugal tendencies that soon led, de facto, to the creation of an additional three Somali entities: Somaliland (the former British colony) in May 1991, Puntland as an autonomy in 1998, and Jubaland as an autonomy in 2002. In Somalia proper, against the background of the inherent weakness of sociopolitical institutions, Islam was readdressed as a source of potential cohesion.6 Like in the past, politicization of Islam among the Somalis also went through an external, jihadi campaign. Like in the days of Ahmad Gragn in the sixteenth century, the sayyid of

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1899–1920, and the Ogaden war of 1977–1978, the effort to reunite the Somalis through religious militancy had to center on the areas disputed with the Ethiopians. As inter-militia warfare continued to dominate the scene, governments formed in Mogadishu and other places were in no position to stabilize their authority. US, UN, and Ethiopian interventions proved incapable of preventing chaos. Movements aimed at re-enlivening political Islam were now given another try at providing cohesion. They too were hardly successful. The conduct of the Islamist groups differed little from that of the more secular factions: they barely cooperated, entered into opportunistic and short-lived alliances, quarreled and split, often along clan lines. Mapping all of them is beyond our scope.7 The reopening of Ethiopia and then its interference in Somalia gave the revived Somali Islamicism a new chance and added energy. In the 1990s, the leading relevant Somali movement was Al-Ittihad al-Islami.8 Al-Ittihad al-Islami was a product of deepening orthodoxy in Somalia and its Wahhabization, as imported from Saudi Arabia. After the 1978 Ogaden defeat, a group called Al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya emerged in Mogadishu, headed by scholars who established contact with Somali students in Saudi universities and with a group of teachers and students in northern Somalia, already mentioned as Wahdat al-Shabab al-Islamiyya. The leaders of these groups adopted a Somali-Wahhabi platform and called for the establishment of a greater Somali state and a caliphate that would implement strict fundamentalism. As their ranks swelled with graduates of Saudi and other Arab universities, they came under the strong influence of the Muslim Brothers, and in the early 1980s were involved in sending a few hundred Somali youngsters to join the mujahidin in Afghanistan. Sometime between 1982 and 1984, they united as Al-Ittihad al-Islami. After Siyad Barre was ousted in 1991, Al-Ittihad surfaced (in September) and officially declared its existence and aims. In the internal Somali game of the 1990s, the emerging movement represented the religious-political option, but was just one component in a most complex game. The clannish dimension of Somali political culture and its mosaic of armed militias were no weaker, and it is impossible even to summarize the intricacy of the internal power struggles among all factions and amid foreign interferences. Al-Ittihad, in any case, was trying to build political leverage in two ways. One was an effort to establish a territorial base. Just after the fall of Siyad, the movement captured a coastal area in (the future) Puntland and declared it an Islamic emirate. However, by June 1992, it was defeated by local factions (headed by ‘Abdallah Yusuf, the future president of the transitional federal govern-

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ment, which, as we shall see below, would fight the Islamists again in 2006). Under the leadership of Shaikh Dahir Aweis, Al-Ittihad now shifted its territorial focus to the region of Gedo and the town of Luuq, adjacent to the Ethiopian and Kenyan borders. Here it managed to build a substantial military force estimated at some one thousand fighters. Al-Ittihad’s other attempt at political leverage was the establishment of a network of Islamic judicial courts in Mogadishu and many other places across the country. These courts, led by local scholars and supported by their own local militias, provided some order in the midst of the comprehensive chaos, and could spread the fundamental Islamic word of the movement. Through its judicial-military system, Al-Ittihad launched a campaign against Sufi customs and traditions. It forbade smoking, chewing qat, and performing various ceremonies. Beards for men and full Islamic dress for women were enforced. Using Saudi money, Al-Ittihad built mosques, schools, and orphanages, and worked to spread Arabic. The sharia courts enforced strict Hanbali-Wahhabi law, inflicting severe punishments: stoning for adultery, mutilation for theft. Where Siyad’s state had failed and local, traditional, clannish law, revolving around blood revenge, had never been able to enhance unity, the Al-Ittihad effort to replace popular Islam with puritan legalism aimed at a comprehensive religious and national revolution. In 1993, Al-Ittihad began its threefold campaign in Ethiopia. First, it waged war on the newly established Somali Regional State of Ethiopia. Cooperating with the local underground, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), Al-Ittihad managed to perpetrate some spectacular terrorist strikes, including an attempt in July 1996 on the life of the Ethiopian-Somali leader, ‘Abd al-Majid Husayn. Second, Al-Ittihad cooperated with the radical Muslims of the Oromos, the IOLF, mentioned above. Third, they carried out terrorist actions in Ethiopia’s center, culminating in the 1995–1996 explosions in Dire Dawa and in Addis Ababa. All these actions were said to be supported by bin Laden and alTurabi, from Khartoum. In an effort to stem Al-Ittihad and its allies, in August 1996, Ethiopia moved the action to Somalia. Its army scored a victory in the province of Gedo and went on to destroy several Al-Ittihad bases. Coordinated with the United States, intensive Ethiopian intervention continued until January 1997 to influence Somali internal affairs. With Ethiopian forces taking the action into Somali territory and bin Laden ousted from Sudan, the radical Islam of the Oromos began losing its military sting as well as its battle for the character of Oromo nationalism. The IOLF attempt to mobilize Oromo nationalism for the cause of

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political Islam seemed to reach a dead end. (In 1999, in any case, it was practically routed by Ethiopian forces,9 and in September 2000, it accepted the hegemony of the OLF, joining a new United Front for the Liberation of Oromiya, with the aging Shaikh Jarra agreeing to serve as deputy chairman.10) The combined effect of this intervention and of Ethiopia’s efficiency in stemming Al-Ittihad’s allies in Ethiopia, as well as the loss of the proximity of bin Laden’s Khartoum headquarters in 1996, weakened it militarily. In 1997, Al-Ittihad declared its transformation into a political Islamic party, but some of its members continued to perpetrate subversion in Ethiopia; they retained connections with Al-Qaida,11 and were involved in terrorist activities in East Africa (notably the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). In 2000, a coordinating committee of sixty-three members of Al-Ittihad and their militias was established, chaired by Dahir Aweis. The chairman and his close associates continued to pursue their terrorist ways and in 2001 the United States listed Al-Ittihad as a terrorist organization. However, many other AlIttihad affiliates diverted more energy to the solidification of their hold on Somali society, focusing mainly on increasing social and economic activities and gaining popular support for their court system. The more militant wing in the movement was strengthened in 2003 with the surfacing of an organization called Hizb al-Shabab, the Youth Party, known as al-Shabab. It was headed by Aweis’s protégé Adan Hashi Farah Ayro, who had been trained in Afghanistan. Al-Shabab began assassinating rivals, kidnapping and murdering foreigners in Somalia, and serving as an active link with Al-Qaida. In July 2005, Ayro was appointed over the armed militias of Aweis’s courts network in Mogadishu. The revival of Islam among Somalis was not confined only to radicalism.12 A movement called Harakat al-Islah, the Reform Movement, had been established in 1978 and worked to promote modernization of religion and cultural pluralism. Led mostly by urban intellectuals, it has remained politically marginal. Meanwhile, however, a stronger movement representing moderate, popular Islam emerged and joined the political game. Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama‘a was a movement of traditional Somali Sufi leaders established in 1991 to counter the influence of the radical Islamist trends. The movement brought together shaikhs from the three main Sufi orders, the Qadiriyyah, the Idrisiyyah, and the Salihiyyah, who sought to unite Somalis through a traditionalist interpretation of Islam and politics. The organization remained little known until 2002, when it resurfaced preaching a message of unity through peace rather than militancy. However, their young emerging leader, Shaikh

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Sharif Ahmad, sought to unite all Islamic forces in Somalia. He established good, personal contact with Dahir Aweis and, in 2004, they cooperated in establishing a Supreme Council of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Shaikh Sharif Ahmad was appointed chairman of the new movment, and, though the ICU was mostly composed of militants from the Al-Ittihad, he continued to try to give the whole Islamic movement a less radical orientation. The efforts to rebuild a political alternative to Islam proved scarcely effective. After long years of anarchy, intra-clannish rivalries, and militia violence, in October 2004 a Transitional Federal Government (TFG) was formed by various warlords, who were supported now by Western and Ethiopian services and internationally recognized. It was presided over by ‘Abdallah Yusuf Ahmad, the president of Puntland, and moved its seat of parliament to Baidoa, 155 miles northwest of the capital, halfway to the Ethiopian border. In Mogadishu, the TFG managed to unite a group of local militias called the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. As other TFG forces were organized with Ethiopian and other support, the Eritrean government, supportive since 1998 of the Somali Islamists for their anti-Ethiopian subversion, intensified its arming of the ICU as well as of the ONLF in the Ogaden.13 Following clashes that intensified in early 2006, on 5 June the forces of the ICU obtained control of Mogadishu. During the second half of 2006, the struggle over Somalia, the whole region, and much beyond, reached a climax. The government of the ICU, or rather its more radical wing, went on enforcing imported religious rigidity, further connecting with Al-Qaida and global radicalism, and strove to defeat the TFG and its Ethiopian backers as a step toward the liberation of the Ogaden with the cooperation of other Islamic militants and with Eritrea. As Ethiopian forces were arriving at Baidoa to help protect the TFG on 1 July 2006, a Web-posted message written by bin Laden urged Somalis to build an Islamic state in the country and backed the ICU in its fight against the TFG. The leader of global Islamic militancy further urged them to oppose the arrival of military forces in Somalia from any country, specifically Ethiopia, calling their intervention “a continuation of the Crusade against the Islamic world.” For a while, however, the ICU confined itself to deploying suicide bombers in the Baidoa area; but in September, it occupied Jubaland and worked to assert its control elsewhere in Somalia, declaring on 29 September that all the armed forces in the country were unified under their authority. The growing conflict, naturally, helped the radicals within the ICU. Though initially it seemed

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that Shaikh Sharif Ahmad would be able to lead a less fanatic approach, by October–November, the ICU had earned the reputation of a Talibanlike regime. Movie theaters in the capital were closed, sport was declared satanic, and children playing football were arrested. Members of bands who dared to perform at weddings were flogged, and on 17 November, the chewing of qat was forbidden; in the town of Kismayu, even the smoking of cigarettes was banned. One Islamic court outside Mogadishu issued a warning on 6 December that anyone who did not pray five times a day would be executed. Other courts staged public executions of thieves and adulterers, inflicted public humiliation for lesser offenses, forced men to grow beards, women to cover their faces, and outlawed almost everything connected to Somali popular Islam. On 10 December, Shaikh Sharif Ahmad declared that ICU forces were preparing to capture Baidoa, the seat of the TFG.

Ethiopian Concepts and the Capture of Mogadishu

The Ethiopian leadership, the general public, and many in the international community of academic Ethiopianists seemed surprised at the new situation. The victory of such a militant, rigid, aggressive Islam in Somalia, its affiliation and close links with international circles of fundamental radicalism, and its connections to Muslims in Ethiopia went against what seemed to be the course of local history. For many in Ethiopia, Christians and Muslims, the idea that Islam could become so political and so connected to global circles was relevant to other worlds, not to theirs. That Ethiopian statehood could be undermined by political Islam, inspired and helped from beyond the Red Sea, was a notion dreaded from the days of Ahmad Gragn, but history showed that the Ethiopian identity was far stronger, and that local Islam would remain apolitical. Indeed this was the lesson that could be learned from the earlier chapters of this book as well. External forces from the Sudanese Mahdiyya and the Somali sayyid to al-Turabi and Al-Ittihad al-Islami had never been able to shake Ethiopia’s regimes or redefine internal Christian-Islamic relations. The issue of religiosity, many Ethiopians seemed to believe, has long been a matter of ethnic culture, individual morality, and social identity, and that intrareligious relations in Ethiopia belonged to a sphere of little political relevance. The sphere of politics—ever vibrant in Ethiopia—was still occupied with other urgent agendas. The issue of ethnicity had been leading the field since 1991, followed by democratization, economy, corruption, and the conflict with Eritrea, which fed intensive debates in all forums.

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Searching in the Ethiopian press in the 1990s for discussions of the rise of political Islam in Ethiopia and its neighbors would yield little. Relations with Sudan, as we saw, were discussed mostly in strategic and diplomatic terms. The siege culture that Mangistu had cultivated was replaced by the language of neighborliness, even efforts at understanding neighbors’ problems. Editorials and articles in the Ethiopian Herald on Somalia after the ousting of Siyad Barre related to Somali intra-clannish struggles, the general chaos in Somalia, and US and international involvement. In the Herald of the 1990s, one can only find indirect mentions of the rise of militant Islam in Somalia, nothing meaningful on Al-Ittihad al-Islami or on its contacts with bin Laden in Khartoum and with the jihadists among the Oromos or among the Somalis in the Ogaden. Even the 1996 Ethiopian military campaigns inside Somali territory and the routing of Al-Ittihad bases were not discussed in the context of their Islamic-political significance. The same was generally true of the academic community, Ethiopian and international. Ethiopia attracts scholarly attention in many fields and since 1959 a triannual International Conference of Ethiopian Studies has been routinely attended by hundreds of scholars. The historical and political sessions have always been electrifying, but significantly, the issue of Islam and its various dimensions has remained marginal. Of the few relevant papers presented on Islam at the conferences during the 1990s (Michigan 1994, Kyoto 1997, Addis Ababa 2000), the majority dealt with anthropological and cultural aspects. Most international Ethiopianists, trained to study Ethiopia as an African country, were not inclined to follow the new Middle Eastern context or its implications for Ethiopia’s redefinition. In the 2000s, with their new perspectives, a new generation of Ethiopianists began shedding much needed light on this field and on its historical roots. Ethiopian scholars, generally speaking, also preferred to avoid discussing Ethiopia’s Islam in political terms. In 2002, for example, the Goethe Institute in Addis Ababa held a conference on Islam in Ethiopia. It was widely attended and most papers were presented with the intention of emphasizing the Ethiopian tradition of religious coexistence. “The issue of Islam as a political religion and its potential politicization in Ethiopia,” a leading Ethiopian historian told me on that occasion, “is still a taboo.” He asked to remain anonymous. There were exceptions, of course. Some Ethiopian scholars, particularly those closer to the government, began studying Somalia as the home of rising Islamic fundamentalism. Medhane Tadese, for example, in the Ethiopian Herald of 10 October 2001, published an informative article titled “Fundamentalism in Somalia: Its Nature and Implications” and followed it in 2002 with a book entitled Al-Ittihad, Political Islam

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and Black Economy in Somalia, which contains essential information and insightful analysis. Kinfe Abraham, president of the Ethiopian International Institute for Peace and Development, a think-tank for the foreign ministry, followed the rise of radical Islam systematically, but published his findings only in late 2006.14 Ethiopian readers could derive little more information from the translation of an article in the AlHayat newspaper (London), which appeared in the Ethiopian Herald on 28 and 29 December 2001: “Islamic Movements in Somalia: Their Origin, Configuration and Role in the Civil War,” or from an article by a Somali, H. Haji Omar, “Political Islam, the War on Terrorism in Somalia,” in the Ethiopian Herald, 7 February 2002. However, from then until the outbreak of the active conflict in 2006, there were only rare mentions in the Ethiopian press of Islamic radicalization in Somalia and its penetration into Ethiopia. The capture of Mogadishu by the ICU on 5 June 2006 changed everything. The establishment of a government committed to Islamic radicalism, to the conquest of the Ogaden, to the politicization of Islam in the entire region, and to its linking to organizations of international Islamic militancy was now conceived by many Ethiopians as an existential threat. To the old, well-engraved Gragn trauma was added the fact that Eritrea, the modern foe, had intensified its support for the new Islamic regime in Mogadishu. While preparing his military response, Meles Zenawi clarified that the coming to power of the ICU was by no means an internal Somali issue. He told the readers of the Ethiopian Herald on 30 June: We are aware of course that the Union of Islamic Courts is a union of desperate forces. There are those Somalis who have supported the establishment of such courts because of the desperation that came as a result of the absolute chaos and lawlessness in Mogadishu. So, in a sense, for many of the supporters of these courts, the issue is one of order and stability. We understand their desire and we have nothing against that desire. . . . As regards the implications of the resurgence of terrorist groups within Somalia, on the security and stability of Ethiopia, naturally, like any country, we reserve the right to defend ourselves against all attempts to destabilize our security and stability.

It seems that from that juncture in June 2006, the issue of Islam as a political factor, not only as a cultural aspect of Ethiopia’s diversity, began to penetrate the very core of the Ethiopian discourse. Avoidance and ignoring the issue would no longer do. “The Talibanization of Somalia,” signed by “Abdi” (Ethiopian Herald, 14, 15 July), analyzed the nature of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Somali Islamists’ link with Al-

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Qaida, and their implications for Ethiopia. “Outside View: Somalia Islamic Courts” (by Gregory Alfonso and Hrach Gregorian, Ethiopian Herald, 1 August 2006) stated: With large Muslim and Christian populations, a multi-cultural Ethiopia can ill-afford to have an aggressive Islamist state on its border . . . to reduce the Somali threat to its sovereignty and stability, Ethiopia has built up an alliance of Somali militia leaders as a counterforce to the Islamists, and in the past intervened militarily to crush jihadists. Do not be surprised if Ethiopia takes pre-emptive military actions to hobble what it perceives as the jihadist threat along its borders.

Many more articles now brought readers the voices of moderate Muslims in Ethiopia, among them Somali-speakers who warned against the kind of Islam radiating from Mogadishu.15 “The Somalia Extremists: War on Ethiopia Is Outrageous,” by Dawit G. (Ethiopian Herald, 13 August 2006), explained the inevitability of a frontal collision: Another reason why the ICU is envious about Ethiopia relates to the fact that the country has been long a model of religious tolerance where Christians and Muslims live harmoniously. Religion has never been a source of significant problems for the people who have co-existed peacefully to the extent of getting married to each other. This is against the very principle of the ICU, which uses religion as an instrument to fulfill its sinister motives . . . members of the ICU are organized on the basis of advancing Islamic fundamentalism and extreme hatred to other religions. Therefore, this group would do whatever it takes to counter the political system in Ethiopia and foment religious dissension among its people.

On 12 December 2006, the ICU began its advance on Baidoa and issued an ultimatum to the Ethiopian forces to leave the area and return to their border. On 20 December, the battle on the town began and the next day Shaikh Dahir Aweis declared war on Ethiopia. His call for a holy war was relayed to the greater Islamic world by Shaikh Yusuf Muhammad, the ICU defense chief, who stated on 23 December: “The country is open to all Muslim Jihadists worldwide. We call them to come to Somalia and continue their holy war in Somalia. We welcome anyone who can remove the Ethiopian enemy, to enter our country. . . . Let them fight in Somalia and wage Jihad, and God willing, attack Addis Ababa.”16 However, the war went in the other direction. Following Ethiopian air raids and a rapid ground advance, on 27 December the ICU government collapsed and the Ethiopians entered Mogadishu on 29 December. Taking pride in the swiftness of the campaign, the Ethiopian Herald (31 December) de-

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scribed it under the headline “The Six-Day War—Ethiopia’s Successful Military Operation Against Somali Extremists.”

Arab Islamic Middle Eastern Responses: Meles as Abraha

The Ethiopian campaign in Somalia will probably be considered one of the major events in Ethiopian-Islamic relations. The history of these relations includes significant landmarks. Many of these junctures, we saw, were manifestations of mutual aggression. Nothing, however, seems comparable with the new drama surrounding Mogadishu. Though in the past, Ethiopia had been invaded by Sudanese, Egyptians, Somalis, and others, and though the Christian empire had conquered and harassed local Islamic communities, the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion was exceptional. It was the first time since the emergence of modern Islamic transnational radicalism that Ethiopia openly provoked political Islam by invading the capital of a modern Islamic state. From the very birth of Islam, we reiterate, Muslims have had a dual conceptualization of Ethiopia as a Christian-led state. On the one hand, they accepted Ethiopia’s legitimacy; on the other, they aspired to its Islamization, denouncing its Christianity. The most radical expression of the latter, as mentioned, was the ancient tradition that one of the Ethiopians was destined to destroy the Ka‘ba. The invasion and toppling of the Islamic radical government in Mogadishu in December 2006 by Ethiopia placed it again, and most strongly, on the agenda of the Muslim world. Voices from all over, it seems, tended to demonize it by resorting to that tradition. The literature delegitimizing Ethiopia produced over the years by Islamic radicals is as diverse as are the moderate texts. Christian Ethiopians were depicted as barbarous infidels, as enemies and oppressors of Islam and Muslims, and as “the worst of human beings in the eyes of God on the day of insurrection.”17 However, the most extreme demonization of Ethiopia is the story of Abraha and the Ka‘ba. In A.D. 570, we repeat, the Ethiopian ruler of Yemen, Abraha al-Ashram, with a war elephant, led an army in order to destroy the Ka‘ba in Mecca and divert the local pagans to a church he had built in San‘a. The Ka‘ba, as attested to in the Quran (The Sura of the Elephant, no. 105), was miraculously saved by Allah. When we discussed the Islamic radicals among the Sudanese, we mentioned the traditional saying or hadith that a “lean-legged from among the Ethiopians will destroy the Ka‘ba.”18 Historically, this saying, probably because of its extreme message, had

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been quoted mainly by the most militant radicals, and quite rarely. The concept, it can be argued, reflected a hidden fear of the mysterious, black Africans, as well as of the Day of Judgment that the Ethiopians’ disastrous destructiveness would herald. A search of Islamic literature that recycled this tradition indeed reveals a chain of radicals from a book written in Baghdad in 844, Kitab al-Fitan [The Book of Heresies], by Nu‘aym ibn Hammad, to Muhammad Zabiyan’s Muslim Ethiopia, Damascus 1937; and from the Syrian medieval Islamic scholar, Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), the spiritual founder of Sunni fundamentalism and the father figure of today’s radicalism,19 to Egyptian Muhammad Rajab ‘Abd al-Halim, who stated in his 1985 book, The Political Relations Between the Muslims of Zayla and the Christians of Ethiopia in the Middle Ages,20 that, in this saying, the Prophet was warning the Muslims against Ethiopia and its anti-Muslim fanaticism (pp. 31–38). The semimythical story was repeated in Saudi school textbooks and recycled by various journalists. For example, on 20 July 1998, Al ‘Alam al-Islami, the weekly of the Muslim World League, the international, Mecca-based Saudi organization tasked with spreading and defending Islam, published a long article under the headline: “The Biggest Campaign of Christianizing Muslims in East Africa: Camps for the Liquidation of Muslims’ Faith in Ethiopia.” It opened with the narrative of the Ethiopians’ aborted sixthcentury attempt to destroy the Ka‘ba and their ensuing betrayal of the Muslim najashi.21 The polarized, intra-Islamic discussion of Ethiopia has always been ignited by concrete international issues. From the Ahmad Gragn conquest of Ethiopia to the modern conflicts with khedival Egypt, from the Sudanese Mahdiyya to the conquest of Mussolini, through the challenges of Nasserism, the Eritrean problem, and the Ogaden war, time and again, the initial dichotomy, first molded during the formative period of the Prophet, was readdressed. While pragmatists and moderates advocated remembering the initial Ethiopian rescue of Islam, the militants preferred to remember the betrayal. However, only the most extremely radical mentioned the ultimate demonization, the tradition that an Ethiopian was destined to destroy the Ka‘ba. Closer to our time, this hadith was sometimes referred to by radical Islamists in their campaigns against the moderates. In October 2001, for example, an article on a jihadi website argued that the moderate Muslims, namely those who were betraying the true Islam by following the infidels, would eventually try to destroy the Ka‘ba. Their effort will herald the appearance of a “lean-legged from among the Ethiopians” who

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will complete the destruction, “will leave no stone on the other, and will steal all that is in the Ka‘ba until not even one believer is left and the Ka‘ba will remain destroyed forever, as we were told in AlBukhari.” 22 “All the infidels are one nation,” reasserted the Saudi, Muhammad al-Shidawi, in October 2002, “from Abraha al-Ashram to [US president] Bush and [Israeli prime minister] Sharon.”23 In April 2004, on another website, a Saudi writer warned against the Shi’ite Iranian threat. “The Zionists,” he stated, “are not the worst of enemies; those are the Iranians who, like the Ethiopians, will eventually destroy the Ka‘ba. For we know that the Prophet told us that the Ka‘ba will be destroyed by a lean-legged, and that those Ethiopians, who are destroyers and terrorists, will do so systematically, leaving no stone on the other. And indeed, all enemies of Islam are united—Ethiopians, Iranians, Zionists.”24 Following the Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, Islamic radicals all over the world responded harshly. Their actual involvement in fighting the Ethiopians on Somali soil remained insignificant: helping Africans had never been their top priority. But in words, their responses have already contributed to a conceptual escalation by resorting, now nearly routinely, to the demonization of Ethiopia, namely by recycling the story of Abraha and the Ka‘ba. The Islamic militants’ publications and websites since early 2007 have been replete with such sentences as: “God, do defeat the aggressors like you destroyed . . . Abraha . . . like you destroyed Pharaoh.”25 Ibn al-Islam, a Saudi, wrote: The Arabs should beware and pay attention to the danger exposed by this invasion. The Prophet told us that the Ka‘ba would be destroyed by a lean-legged from among the Ethiopians, and I think that Ethiopia’s war against the freedom fighters and the lions of Mogadishu is only the beginning of an Ethiopian threat that will be dangerous, especially to Saudi Arabia. Though the Saudis are focusing on the danger from Iran, the greatest danger, as God told us, is from Ethiopia.26

Another contributor to an Islamist forum wrote: The picture is clear . . . the cursed triangle of infidels, crusaders, and Jews continues to threaten our nation at all times and everywhere. In the past, the crusader Abraha al-Ashram threatened the Ka‘ba. Later the Jews and the crusaders conquered Jerusalem, today the USA occupies Afghanistan and Iraq and the Zionists occupy the Holy Land. The grandchildren of Abraha invaded Somalia after having been given a green light by the Americans. They aimed at liquidating the Islamic Courts that were about to unite the hitherto divided Somalis.27

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The Al-Qaida website had many articles and responses in this spirit. Ethiopia was portrayed as a vengeful, crusading state that had collaborated with European imperialism against Islam from the days of Menelik. On 5 January 2007, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy in Al-Qaida, issued a videotape entitled “Help Your Brothers in Somalia!,” urging the mujahidin “to respond to the call of Jihad in Somalia . . . and rush aid to their Muslim brothers in Somalia by means of fighters, money, opinion and expertise.”28 Another Al-Qaida leader, writing under the name of the “Lion of the Sons of Islam,” added, on the same website: “Oh Muslims, the road to Somalia to face little Abraha is open for you. . . . Know that Meles Zenawi is a descendant of Abraha, for he comes from Tigre, from the same tribe.” Al-Qaida’s campaign to fly the volunteers to Somalia was accordingly called “The road of the birds in flocks (ababil),” the birds which were sent by Allah and killed Abraha’s elephant.29 The voice of the radicals in the Muslim world is far from dominant. Most governments and political establishments in the Middle East are primarily worried about Islamic militancy. They are not at all sorry about the fall of the ICU regime in Somalia. Most leaders of Sunni communities view Iran and its Shi’ite allies as the ultimate danger, and would not be tempted to divert their attention to Ethiopia. For many Arab and Islamic pragmatists, Ethiopia is more a partner than an enemy, whose significant contribution to the fight against radicalism may well solidify the already momentous process of Ethiopia’s rejoining the Middle East. Public opinion in the Islamic world is apparently split on Ethiopia. The discussion (by no means central in today’s Middle East) runs between the two polarized ancient concepts, that of the descendants of the righteous najashi, the savior of Islam, and that of the descendants of Abraha, its would-be destroyer. However, the precedent of Ethiopia’s virtually invading and destroying an Islamic government, the magnitude of the event silhouetted against embedded traditions, seems bound to have a lasting impact. It is not difficult to discern a modicum of offense and anger among many shapers of public opinion, including those who cannot be said to be Islamic radicals. Moderate Muslims, to reiterate, followed the spirit of the more famous hadith, “Leave the Ethiopians alone as long as they leave you alone.” This hadith was indeed the key formula for the majority of scholars and statesmen throughout history, namely, be tolerant toward Ethiopia in spite of its Christianity, provided Ethiopia is not aggressive toward Muslims. From Ahmad Gragn, to the Sudanese khalifa, through Mussolini’s admirer Shakib Arslan, the waging of war against Ethiopia

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had to be legitimized by accusing it of anti-Islamic policy, actual or alleged. The invasion of Somalia, whatever its reason, depicted Ethiopia in the eyes of many as an active enemy of Islam. For example, the established journalist, Muwaffaq Muhadin, a columnist for one of Jordan’s leading newspapers, a writer considered a liberal with some Marxist tendencies, wrote the following, entitled “From Abraha to Zenawi,” on what is by no means an Islamist website: Who does not remember the year of the elephant, Abraha, the Ethiopian storming of Mecca and his failure. . . . The same story repeats itself as the new Abraha, namely Zenawi, invaded Somalia armed with hundreds of iron elephants and supported by a traitorous collaborating local government. Abraha the first was an agent of the Romans and the present Abraha is an agent of the Americans, who are the modern Romans. In both cases, the two Abrahas fight against Arabs and their religious culture. The first time, against the Ka‘ba; now against the Union of the Islamic Courts. . . . I am a person of socialist and secular convictions. I believe in the saying “Religion is to God and the motherland is for all.” But I see this [Ethiopian] aggression against the [Islamic] nation as part of the Christian-Jewish war waged directly in Iraq and Afghanistan and indirectly through agents in Lebanon and Somalia. I never identified with the Taliban when they destroyed the statues of Buddha, nor with the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia when they confiscated musical instruments. . . . I knew they would not last. But the American invasion of Iraq and that of their agents of Somalia are not for music and liberty. They will end like the war elephants of Abraha who came only to sow fear and destruction.29

Perhaps the article that best reflects the moderate Islamic conceptualization of the Ethiopian conquest of Mogadishu was published in the Egyptian Al-Jumhuriyya newspaper on 14 January 2007. Under the title, “Abraha in Somalia,” the author, Kamal Isma‘il, summarized the historical roles of both the would-be destroyer Abraha al-Ashram and the righteous al-najashi and asked, “Where is the place of Zenawi between the two rulers at the time when he encircled Somalia and conquered the Capital Mogadishu in the midst of the conflict between its inhabitants? And if he is not the najashi, then who is he?” A surfer by the name of Ibn Balaban answered the question: The country of Ethiopia was the country of the two Hijras, where the Muslims in their belief escaped to in order to find a shelter under the Najashi, who converted to Islam and became one of the greatest Muslim rulers throughout history, a ruler who oppressed no one. This conversion to Islam made the Najashi, king of Ethiopia, closer to the Muslims’ hearts than other Muslim rulers throughout history. This

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uniqueness and this appreciation for the position of Ethiopia was what prevented the Muslims from invading it at the time when the surrounding countries were conquered by them. In spite of this Islamic appreciation, the new ox of Ethiopia [Meles Zenawi] plays the role of Abraha al-Habashi instead of playing the role of al-Najashi.31

The whole issue of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is still fresh and far from finished. One aspect, however, is already quite visible. It touched a very sensitive chord in Islamic publics. In the spheres of concepts and images, what used to be a rather marginal symbol of extreme demonization has begun penetrating the very center. This is a process liable to acquire a momentum of its own. It is not improbable that the whole episode will be canonized through the imagined, analogical symbolism of a Ka‘ba in Mogadishu demolished by an Abraha Zenawi. Nor is it improbable that, for many, that episode will acquire a different meaning: that Ethiopia, by combating the fanatics, again helped Islam.

Somalis and Ethiopians: Which Islam?

The Ethiopian military presence in Somalia lasted two years. On 26 January 2009, Ethiopia ended its occupation of central and southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu. Though it is too early to grasp the full significance of this chapter, we can dare to observe that it was also an important lesson in which Ethiopians of Christian background learned more about the complexity of Islam; and that they are more aware now of the danger of ignoring Islamic radicalism, and are perhaps better prepared to meet with moderate Muslims on equal terms. Ethiopia has been experimenting with diversity and religious equality since 1991, but paradoxically, it was from this new approach that it found itself invading a Muslim country. We saw that for a while in the 1940s, Haile Selassie dreamed of annexing Somalia through a cooptation of its emerging nationalism, but soon had to relinquish the illusion. Mangistu was on the defensive in the Ogaden war, and then, in victory, avoided invading Somalia, not even allowing himself a retaliatory campaign. Somalia of the parliamentarian SYL and later of the authoritarian Siyad Barre challenged Ethiopia’s security, but not as sharply and directly as did the radical Islam of the ICU. Its religious militancy, connected with global terrorism on the one hand and with Muslim radicals in Ethiopia on the other, presented a threat at a time that Ethiopia was opening up to its own diversity. Meles Zenawi, the architect of Ethiopia’s pluralization, was the first Ethiopian head of state since

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Menelik II to invade an Islamic neighbor. That the invasion was at the invitation of the TFG, and with the consent and encouragement of Western states, is irrelevant. For radical Muslims and for many others in the greater Muslim world, it was the ultimate provocation. In spite of al-Zawahiri’s declaration of jihad of 5 January 2007 and the call to Islamic militants to come to Somalia and defeat the Ethiopians, very few arrived from abroad. But the Ethiopian invasion did kindle active local Somali resistance. President ‘Abdallah Yusuf entered Mogadishu on 8 January 2007 but the TFG, identified with the foreign invaders, proved unable to bring stability. The moderates among the ICU, headed by Shaikh Sharif Ahmad, fled abroad, and fighting soon resumed, spearheaded by the militants. Chaos prevailed amid escalating violence perpetrated by all: clannish militias, Ethiopian soldiers, criminal gangs.32 In March 2007, the Shabab al-Mujahidin movement (hereafter, the Shabab) resurfaced, led by Aden Hashi Ayro. He was killed from a US gunship in May 2008,33 but his removal did not reduce the fire.34 Recording the events of the two years of Ethiopian occupation would be too complicated, and it is outside our scope. From the outset, Meles declared that the invasion was a preventive operation and that Ethiopia wanted it to be short. The African Union moved to send a peace force to Somalia, and Ugandan troops began arriving in March 2007. For Ethiopia, the entire enterprise was increasingly costly and dangerous. A heavy financial burden was added to growing insecurity in the Ogaden, but far more significant was the process of rapid radicalization among Ethiopia’s Muslims, evident throughout the country and in the diasporas. Here again we can do little justice to a multifaceted issue, and we will briefly confine ourselves to the conceptual dimension only, and to one example of many. In May 2007, Meles received a nine-man delegation of the Badr International Ethiopian Muslims Federation, headed by Najib Muhammad, president of the First Hegira Foundation in Washington, DC. The other members were Ethiopian Muslims from the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and Saudi Arabia. They presented the prime minister with a document of seventeen pages on various issues that were of prime concern to the Muslim communities of Ethiopia.35 The delegation represented those Ethiopian Islamic publics that were ready to participate in a redefined Ethiopia, and the opinions of Najib Muhammad perhaps reflected the general mood of many in Ethiopia and abroad. They are therefore worth discussing. In 1997, Najib Muhammad wrote an article entitled “Ethiopia: The Haven of the First Hegira,” which, returning to Ethiopia’s dual images

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in the eyes of its own Muslims, actually presented the dichotomous options for the future. The first image and option was that of Ethiopia as a land of religious coexistence: In Islamic history and tradition, Ethiopia is known as the “Haven of the First Migration or Hijra.” For Muslims, Ethiopia is synonymous with freedom from persecution and emancipation from fear. Ethiopia was a land where its king, Negus or Al-Najashi, was a person renowned for justice and in whose land human rights were cherished. . . . The first migration of the Companions and relatives of the Prophet Muhammad to Ethiopia celebrates the birth of freedom of expression and beliefs, whereas, the second migration of the Prophet Muhammad to the Madinah celebrates the end of oppression. History has shown that the first migration to Ethiopia and the second migration to Madinah have indeed laid down the foundation on which Islam, as a universal religion, was built. . . . With this spirit in mind, Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian slave living in Makkah, became a leading companion of the Prophet Muhammad. It was not a coincidence that his native land, Ethiopia, was the country chosen by the Prophet when his followers needed protection and freedom from oppression. Muhammad Haykal, author of the “Life of Muhammad” said that the Prophet Muhammad trusted that his followers and relatives would be better off if they migrated to a country whose religion was Christianity, a scriptural religion whose Prophet was Jesus son of Mary. . . . He was convinced that Islam would be more protected in its infancy in a fertile and prosperous land ruled by the Scripture than among the ignominious pagans of Arabia.

Having discussed Ethiopia as a model of Christian-Islamic affinity, the author went on to repeat the old Islamic version of the Christians’ betrayal of that image. The najashi, he recycled the known narrative, later accepted Islam but was consequently isolated and destroyed by the Christians. Though Ethiopia’s Muslims went on growing to become a clear majority, he claimed, the Christian establishments have oppressed them and their religion: The Ethiopian rulers, from the time right after Ahmed Al-Najashi all the way down to the present regime, have developed a deep-rooted hatred for Islam. Religious persecution and cultural domination, characterized by the destruction of mosques and Islamic schools, detention and even execution of local Imams, religious leaders, Sheikhs, and the burning of the copies of the Quran and other religious books was rampant under the Christian rulers of Ethiopia.

Muslims, he concluded, are obligated to help fight for the cause of their religion in Ethiopia: “It is time for Muslims around the world to open

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their eyes and see what is happening to their brothers and sisters in Ethiopia. The land of the first Hijra is being groomed once again by the enemies of equality, justice and human rights to be the bastion of Christianity in East Africa. God willing, they will fail miserably.”36 The meeting of the delegation with Meles in May 2007 must have been one of many moments of truth for him that year. Meles Zenawi, even his many Ethiopian rivals admit, is a keen reader of historical literature and situations. The anti-Ethiopian wave threatening to sweep the greater Muslim world, his own image as the demonized Abraha spreading as long as the occupation of Mogadishu continued, and the direct implications for Ethiopia’s Muslims could hardly escape him. In February 2009, having pulled out of Somalia, he said that he had had to invade in order to defeat the Islamic radicals, but the real solution was working with Islamic moderates. Here indeed was a point of historical significance. The process of Islamic politicization in Ethiopia and its neighbors left as the only relevant choice that between political radicals and moderates. Ignoring the political dimension altogether, conceiving religiosity as a spiritual, social matter, had proven to be an illusion. The situation created by the invasion of Somalia seemed to have changed the prism of the Ethiopian establishment’s conceptual choices. A clear indication of the change was Meles’s agreement, in March 2008, to officially invite Shaikh ‘Abadalla al-Harari to return to Ethiopia. Shaikh ‘Abdallah al-Harari was the central figure in the plot of the Club mentioned above: the 1947 story of Harar, the Somalis, and Haile Selassie’s regime. At the time, though he represented the more moderate wing of Muslim activists in Harar, the shaikh was forced to leave Ethiopia. Settling in Beirut in 1950, Shaikh ‘Abdallah developed into one of global Islam’s best-known scholars, and also became the leader of an international movement preaching Islamic-Christian coexistence. The movement, popularly known as Al-Ahbash, has become one of the main opponents of Islamic militancy the world over.37 However, apparently because of his political-Islamic weight, the charismatic shaikh was never officially invited to return to Ethiopia. After the fall of Mangistu, he privately visited his native Harar on a few occasions and helped the local rivals of the Wahhabiyya there. Now, in 2008, Meles was considering, finally, inviting the shaikh, the living symbol of Ethiopian identity as embodying Islamic-Christian political cooperation, to return, in order to energize his kind of Islam throughout Ethiopia. The idea ended as a missed opportunity, for the old shaikh well into his nineties, died in September 2008, but the notion that moderate Islam needs to be cultivated has become widespread. In February 2009, for example, Ethiopia’s Min-

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istry of Culture and Tourism launched activities to make the burial place of the najashi a tourist destination and have it declared a world heritage site by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Al-Najashi mosque in Negash, Tigre, an Islamic pilgrimage site, which had been developed with Ethiopian and Saudi subsidies, was now to officially symbolize Ethiopia’s recognition of Islam as an essential, constructive part of its past and future.38 Ethiopia’s Christian publics are becoming increasingly aware of the Islamic momentum and not all are ready to watch it passively. Many are deeply concerned. For example, a book published in 2008 by a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Ephrem Eshete, titled Radical Islam in Ethiopia (in Amharic),39 is widely read and has already stirred up discussions in the country and in Ethiopian diasporas. Focusing first on the story of the najashi and Muhammad (pp. 20–24), then on Ahmad Gragn’s holy war against Ethiopia (pp. 33–84), and finally on the modern rise of Wahhabism in Ethiopia (pre–World War II, pp. 87–99; various contemporary themes, pp. 112–183), the author did not mince words when warning of the threat of Islamic radicalism, as one reviewer noted: The book exposed the various techniques employed by fundamentalists to get the upper hand, i.e. Islamize all through genocide. Some of the methods employed by the fundamentalists include falsifying census reports, Islamizing history through intellectual jihad, conducting raids through armed terrorist groups, exploiting democratic principles for penetrating countries, looting historical and material heritages of the Ethiopian Church, introducing Arab culture and the employment of dubious Islamic NGOs for reaching their aims.40

Some of Ethiopia’s Muslims, the book asserts, did betray the country and collaborated throughout the ages with historical enemies of Ethiopia, but the majority proved to be loyal Ethiopians. Ethiopian Muslims have at different testing times demonstrated their firm love for their country and their people, irrespective of creed. They have borrowed many cultural practices from us the orthodox, and they have fully embraced it in an unidentifiable depth. Therefore, fundamentalism is only a deadly religious and political ideology of colonization, emanating from myopic Arabs and from our historical enemies who want to see the end of Christianity in the country. . . .41 Ethiopians who speak as if they were in a dream, say all is fine in our country. But the radical Muslims in Ethiopia are inspired by the memory of Ahmad Gragn and they do strive to reconstruct its history. Let it be known that today’s Christians, as well as the moderate Muslims who wish our country well, will never accept it. They will never

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stand by watching churches burned and our heritage destroyed like in Gragn’s days. Anyone who is not concerned with the rise of radical Islam simply ignores reality. We need the Church and the government to be alert and the moderate Muslims to be aware of what jihadi Islam is contemplating. This is the message of our book.42

The author argues that the EPRDF government is not doing enough to protect Ethiopia’s Christianity, the church, and the authentic culture of the country; that by flirting with Islam and not cooperating closely with the church, it is playing a dangerous game. The book implies that many Christians are willing to defend Ethiopia’s Christian identity and end their tolerance should Muslims cross the line between religious coexistence and politics aimed at victory. Meles’s readiness to work with Islam in Ethiopia in its moderate version is still to be tested. The consequences are yet to be seen. However, the readiness to work with moderate Islam in neighboring Somalia has already become an applied policy. Ethiopia did finally pull back from Mogadishu and from the rest of the country after supporting Shaikh Sharif Ahmad and his campaign to lead Somalia as its new president. The two years of Ethiopian military presence in Somalia did not help the cause of Somali unity. The TFG, headed by President ‘Abdallah Yusuf, made hopeless efforts to reduce violence and gain legitimacy. Between 15 July and 30 August 2007, it held a national reconciliation congress in Mogadishu, attended by three thousand representatives of various factions, militias, ideologies, and diasporas. But the attempt to inject cohesion by a leadership identified with the Ethiopian occupation produced little. It was rather the Islamic groups, which led the fight against foreigners, that gained momentum. The meetings of the Mogadishu Congress led nowhere and were regularly interrupted by mortar fire from the Shabab warriors, who were increasing their control of southern and central Somalia. The leaders of the ICU and their men in Somalia refused to participate in the TFG-led congress, and organized an alternative one, held in Asmara, Eritrea, between 6 and 12 September 2007. Various groups and individuals rival to those that had gathered in Mogadishu attended the Congress for Liberation and Reconstitution. They were all in agreement about expelling the Ethiopians, but differed in their visions of a future Somalia. The Islamists—the Shabab was not represented—were dominant, and the congress ended with the establishment of an Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, with Shaikh Sharif Ahmad as chairman of its executive committee and Dahir Aweis as chairman of the central committee. The events of 2008 were too numerous to record here.43 The secular,

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nationalist option of the TFG was losing power and President ‘Abdallah Yusuf finally resigned on 29 December. The Shabab continued its guerrilla attacks and the imposing of a Taliban-like government in territories under its control. Terrorizing the population with rigid interpretations of the sharia—including the public stoning of a young girl for claiming she had been raped, desecrating graves of Islamist scholars, and banning celebrations marking the birth of the Prophet—the Shabab continued to strengthen its links with Al-Qaida and other worldwide Islamic militant groups. When the TFG government collapsed, the Shabab took over their headquarters in Baidoa. The Shabab’s kind of imported radicalism also met with local resistance. In December 2008, the Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama‘a (which had been led by Shaikh Sharif Ahmad) regrouped to uphold militarily the preservation of local customs and the spirit of religious flexibility typical of Somali Sufism. As the Shabab had assassinated several Sufi leaders who celebrated the birth of the Prophet, Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama‘a declared a holy war on the radicals. In early 2009, the two movements were in serious conflict over areas in the center and the south, with the Shabab accusing its rivals of being agents of Ethiopia. Meanwhile, the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, headquartered in Asmara, experienced a split that had major consequences. In June 2008, Shaikh Sharif, ignoring the opposition of Dahir Aweis, agreed to begin a dialogue with the TFG. Moreover, he began negotiating an arrangement with the Ethiopians. A man of moderate Islamic background, who as a young man had been affiliated with the Ahmadiyya fraternity, he again proved ready to become a man of compromise. He left Eritrea, the sponsor of Islamic radicals in Somalia, and moved his headquarters to Djibouti. Following intensive negotiations with the TFG prime minister, Nur Hasan, involving international and UN brokering, the Somali parliament fled from the Shabab in Baidoa, gathered in Djibouti, and on 31 January 2009 elected Shaikh Sharif the new president of Somalia. By that time, Sharif and Meles Zenawi had developed a workable understanding.44 The first thing that Shaikh Sharif did as the new president of Somalia was to go to Ethiopia. The meeting of African Unity on 1–4 February 2009 was hosted by Meles Zenawi, and Sharif, addressing the summit, was received by the continent’s leaders with a standing ovation. He and Meles demonstrated mutual good will. The shaikh, who had led the 2006 ICU government, now declared that he and the Ethiopian prime minister had agreed to work together for a better Horn of Africa and for an end to conflict in the region. He said that his priorities included “de-

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veloping peaceful and friendly relations with the neighboring countries based on international law and AU principles.”45 For his part, Meles said he had no objection to Shaikh Sharif forming an Islamist government if that was what Somalis wanted. “Whatever a people choose by way of political system, whether it is democratic or nondemocratic is not our business,” he said. “We are not evangelists of democracy. So if they want to govern themselves by means other than democracy, we have no problem.”46 President Sharif returned to Mogadishu on 7 February 2009 to continue his efforts to stabilize a new regime. A few days earlier, the Islamic militant camp, led by the Shabab, had been strengthened when Shaikh Dahir Aweis managed to establish another movement from Asmara. Called the Party of Islam, it was an amalgamation of four movements, notably Aweis’s loyalists in the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia and Harakat Ras Kamboni, a southern Somali Islamist group affiliated with the radical military leader Hasan Turki, a descendant of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan.47 Mustering considerable fighting forces in the field, it has remained separate from the Shabab at this writing. In the section above, we discussed responses in the Arab, Middle Eastern world to the two-year Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu. The more fundamentalists, we saw, striving to restore Mogadishu as a center of global Islamic militancy, worked to demonize Ethiopia as the eternal enemy of Islam. They continued in this vein after the Ethiopian evacuation. For example, on 15 January 2009, a member of an Islamic forum called New Arabia wrote a piece entitled, “The Abraha Forces Withdrew from Somalia . . . and What Is Next?” in which he stated that the problem still remained: The real problem is who rules: the Satan or Allah. The Islamic society will be born only after long pains and after the Jahili [pre-Islamic, pagan] elements within this society will be eradicated . . . the fact that the Christians rule, in the image of Abraha, over some outposts in the Arab and Muslim world is not the real problem. The real problem can be found in the Muslims themselves, who still live in the Jahiliyyah and are having troubles in creating the “true Islamic society.” The real solution is the implementation of the Shari‘a in Somalia.48

In mid-March 2009, Osama bin Laden called on the Somalis to continue their holy war and topple the new president: “The war which has been taking place on your soil these past years is a war between Islam and the international crusade. . . . These sorts of presidents are the surrogates of our enemies and their authority is null and void in the first place, and as Sheikh Sharif is one of them, he must be dethroned and fought.”49

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In our discussion of contemporary Sudan, we followed the distinction in the eyes of Sudanese between African Islam and Arab Islam. The same distinction, it seems, exists when we follow the discourse among Somalis. In fact, the closer contact with Arabia on the one hand, and the rather permissive nature of Somali popular Islam on the other, has long made this distinction valid and operative. In the days of the sayyid, we saw, the tension between his Salihiyya ideas imported from Mecca and the rather local, flexible Islamic ways of the Qadiriyya and others influenced much of the period’s history, including the relations and struggle with the Ethiopians. The sayyid himself was not really a captive of his own imported fundamentalism. As the father of modern Somali selfawareness, we saw, he often resorted to various concepts and options pragmatically, while struggling to lead his nation to freedom and unity. He has remained a father figure for all ensuing generations and his legacy has been interpreted and reinterpreted accordingly. The sayyid has been seen variably as a “poor man of good,” namely a leader of popular emerging local Somali-African nationalism, as a tha’ir, a revolutionary Arab, and as a Mahdi, a messianic, jihadi Islamic leader. Today’s discourse and tensions among Somalis on the future of their “self” and on their relations with the Ethiopian “other” often turns to the legacy of the sayyid. It also turns to Ahmad Gragn on the one hand and to the najashi on the other. The forces among Somalis, like the Shabab, which strive for the victory of puritanical, rigid fundamentalism combined with a religious war on Ethiopia, are connected to the Arab-Islam of Al-Qaida and other intranational militants. (The term Arab-Islam that we borrow from the terminology of the Sudanese discourse applies in our context to all Islamic fundamentalists, including Afghanis and Iranians.) In their call to implement a Taliban-like government in Mogadishu again, the Shabab combines Gragn’s anti-Ethiopian historical jihad, their interpretation of the sayyid, and the demonizing metaphor of Abraha as forefather of Meles Zenawi. On 2 June 2008, for example, the head of the Shabab movement, Abu al-Zubayr, issued a video speech, in which he said that jihad was the only way to liberate Somalia. He said that “the Horn of Africa region was a theater of Crusaders’ wars against Islamic emirates, such as Harar and Zayla,” and added that the “Somali people began to liberate themselves from these chains. . . . The Sayyid Ahmad Gurey [Gragn] fought the Ethiopians and the Portuguese hundreds of years ago and Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan fought the British until he liberated the country from the British occupation.” Now, he wrote, the Somali people are facing “those Orthodox enemies who attacked the Ka‘ba in the year of the elephant.”50

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In the eyes of the Islamic radicals of the Shabab, Ethiopia, even after ending its military presence, is the eternal enemy and the embodiment of heresy. The sayyid, in their understanding, was a jihadi purist, and Islam is ever assured of victory. “Somalia shall always overcome its enemies,” wrote one of their supporters in an article entitled “In Memory of the Dervishes,” “whether they be the ancient Colonial empire of United Kingdom, which bombed the Mad Mullah and his Dervishes or the Tigrean monster in Addis Ababa [Meles], ever looking at Mogadishu.”51 The fact that Shaikh Sharif Ahmad, former leader of the ICU, chose to resort to moderate Islam and mended fences with Ethiopia was for the radicals the ultimate betrayal and sin. In early February 2009, Shaikh Hayakala, who heads an Islamic court in the Shabab-held port of Kismayu, wrote: He [Shaikh Sharif] is now with our number one enemy, Ethiopia, and calling for more support from non-believers. Imagine how Sharif, who was once our leader, deceived us and Islam. . . . He must be—if I am right—the first so-called Islamic Movement leader in modern Islamic history that crossed over to the enemy. In the past, Islamic movements’ leaders were either captured in battle and imprisoned, executed, or fled, but never compromised their ethos and values even though they were under extreme duress. Needless to say they never sold out and joined the enemy. Sayyid Muhammad and Ahmad Gurey are such examples.52

Sharif, he added, was the first to succumb to the machinations of the enemy and become content with the role of a servant, “all in the hope of getting recognition and acceptance from the infidels.” The shaikh, admittedly, was not sure that he had the facts right. In fact, Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Abdallah Hasan did try to make an alliance with Ethiopia, first with Menelik, then with Lij Iyasu, then finally with Ras Tafari. The sayyid did go to Ethiopia to seek salvation and cooperation against Western imperialism. For the sayyid, it was never at the expense of his being a Muslim, for Islam in its more moderate dimensions does allow such pragmatism. Indeed, when Shaikh Sharif went to Ethiopia to seek neighborly cooperation, he was not betraying the legacy of the sayyid. Depicting Sharif as a traitor, implying indeed that he was a murtad, a Muslim who crossed the lines and joined the infidels, reflects the radicals’ concepts of what Islam is, and what should be the policy toward those who do not follow their ways. While the Shabab supporters follow Islamic militancy imported from or influenced by international radicalism, others prefer to be inspired by local heritages and forces. Shaikh Dahir Aweis and his groups represent this line. Though he himself had long been linked to Al-Qaida, he grew to despair of the possibility of getting “Arab” help (beyond

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words) and in 2008, denied he had been connected with bin Laden.53 Aweis and his men opted rather for Eritrean help: support from the Christian Isayas Afaworki and his anti-Ethiopian strategy. On 24 January 2009, following the beginning of the Ethiopian forces’ withdrawal from Somalia, Shaikh Aweis was asked: “You are now in the Eritrean capital of Asmara; what kind of help does the Eritrean government give you?” He answered that “they are for us like the Najashi was for the first Muslims, and we are grateful to them since they hosted us, what all the people, even our Arab and Muslim brothers, refused to do. We will never forget to be grateful for [what they did for us].”54 Repeating the oft-recycled argument that the najashi was Eritrean, not Ethiopian, Shaikh Aweis could justify his war on Ethiopia, but also implied that he was ready to be cooperative with non-Muslims. He may well follow the footsteps of the Sudanese al-Turabi on the way to some moderation. He may also continue his religious militancy and join up with the Shabab. A third wing in the militant Somali camp is perhaps more nationalist than religious, but its historical inspiration is clearly Islamic. The ONLF, wrote Mohammed Mealin Seid, does not make it a secret, at least when addressing its supporters, that this conflict is nothing but the continuation of Ahmed Guray and Sayid Mohammed’s wars against highland Ethiopia. The following lyrics are drawn from one of the most famous songs ONLF cadres recite to instigate supporters during public gatherings. . . . “Ahmed Guray has never died, The Dervish has never lost, and The Horse is not retired.” . . . Despite portraying itself as secular when communicating with the international community, buzzwords such as jihad and fighting for the Muslim nation against invader “infidels” characterize ONLF’s strategies for mobilizing supporters.55

All Somalis are Muslims and their modern nationalism is based also on the heritage of the Islamic-Christian history of relations with Ethiopia. Those who are ready to give Islam a flexible interpretation, in line with the traditions of local Somali African Islam, do conceive it as one dimension of their modern identity. They seem to be more suspicious of the Islamic radicals than of Ethiopia. In resorting to history, they often see the sayyid as a complex figure, a man who knew how to become pragmatic when reality so dictated. For example, in late 2008, the al-Ashraf website hosted a discussion on the significance of the sayyid. One surfer contended that he was influenced by the fundamentalist Shaikh Salih in Mecca, but also by the revolt of Ahmad ‘Urabi in Egypt of the early 1880s, an event heralding the emergence of Egypt’s modern nationalism. Another surfer, who called himself Al-Jabarti II

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(‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti was a famous Egyptian historian of remote Ethiopian background), praised the pragmatism and intelligence of the sayyid. Though the sayyid was fascinated by the personality of the Sudanese Mahdi, he never pretended to be guided by God’s revelations, nor did he pretend to be a theological authority. He was well aware of the greater world, wrote Al-Jabarti II, made his compromises with the British and the Italians, and allied himself with the Ottomans on one hand and with Ethiopia of Lij Iyasu on the other. He was far from being a “Mad Mullah,” as the British depicted him. He knew how to bring Somalis together in peaceful ways.56 The pretension of the Shabab to be the successors of the sayyid is denounced by their opponents. The Shabab’s leader in their stronghold of Kismayu, as we mentioned, Shaikh Hasan Hersi Turki, is one of the sayyid’s grandsons and claims to be the bearer of his legacy. In mocking this, the journalist Abdulaziz al-Mutairi, a native of northern Somaliland and defender of its independence, went as far as depicting the sayyid as an oppressor of Somalis. In an essay entitled, “The Return of the Mad Mullah,” he wrote, “The grandson and Mad Mullah Jr. [Shaikh Turki] describes himself as liberator of Kismayu and future warrior, who will drive the infidels out of Somaliland. . . . Today, Mad Mullah Jr. wants to reprint the black pages of his grandfather’s history, as he applies the same ideology of using religion to achieve his personal and tribal achievements.” To stem the Islamic radicals, al-Mutairi was ready to ask the Ethiopians to stay. He wrote in December 2008: Possible return of Islamists like Al-Shabab to power in lawless Somalia can be dangerous to all Somalis, neighboring states and the international community. Any withdrawal of current African Union and Ethiopian Forces will leave a vacuum, and enable Al-Shabab to grip the control over the country. . . . Somali Islamists like Al-Shabab are part of Al-Qaeda terrorist organizations, and even consider Osama Bin Laden as their spiritual leader. . . . The danger of Al-Shabab will spread across Ethiopia, Kenya and peaceful parts of former Somalia in addition to independent Somaliland.57

Somali liberals also present their interpretation of Islam by resorting to the historical figure of the Ethiopian najashi as a Christian friend and savior of Islam. One prominent Somali intellectual, the historian Said Samatar, a professor at Rutgers University, participated in a conference on “Ethiopia: The Three Faiths” held in New York in June 2008. Even though Ethiopian forces were still on Somali soil, Samatar described Ethiopia’s historic role in providing sanctuary for the first Muslims. He elaborated on the najashi’s decision to grant refuge to the pioneer fol-

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lowers of the Prophet, and his refusal to betray them to the pagans of Mecca. “Mohammad didn’t forget the generosity of the Najashi,” Samatar said, “and in the hadith of the Prophet that have been recorded and passed on for generations, it is noted that ‘Ethiopia is a land of justice in which no one is oppressed.’ . . . That meant that no jihad could be waged against the Kingdom of Ethiopia.”58 One of the clearest voices for a liberal future for Somalia is that of Bashir Goth, a Somali poet residing in the UAE, a journalist, professional translator, author of numerous cultural, religious, and political articles, and a staunch supporter of women’s rights. On 26 December 2006, on the eve of the Ethiopian conquest of Mogadishu, he published the following in the Washington Post: Somalia for Somalis! Let them run their country as they please. Easy words to say but difficult to accept when it means beheading people for not praying five times a day, chopping hands of those who steal to stay alive in a country where mere survival is a lifelong ambition. Difficult to accept when women are shrouding and denied to breathe fresh air or go about their daily business to feed their children. Difficult to accept when the country’s musical heritage is expunged as Satan’s work, the cinema is banned and the watching of world sports is forbidden, thus depriving the youth of the only source of cultural interaction they have with the outside world. . . . This is why the Somali Islamists’ calling for Jihad against Ethiopia and the United States cannot be ignored. Ethiopia is the only country that has correctly seen the danger coming from the rise of Islamism in Somalia. Some may explain Ethiopia’s position as muscle flexing aimed at controlling its small neighbor’s ports, the only strategic resources that Somalia owns; but Ethiopia’s fear of the Islamist movement in Somalia has a historical precedent. The call for Jihad against Christendom, rekindles Ethiopia’s old memories of the 16th century when Imam Ahmed Gran launched a jihad against Christian Ethiopia with the help of the Ottoman Empire. . . . It is against this background that the Ethiopians quake when they hear the call for Jihad. The radicals of the Islamic Courts have also made no secret of their agenda to export their brand of Islam to Ethiopia; reviving an old dream of the Somalis and neighboring Arab countries to remove what they see as a Christian bastion from the Muslim region while forgetting that Islam owes its existence to Ethiopia. It was Ethiopia where the first Muslim exiles took refuge and found home and justice. The walled town of Harar, with its 99 mosques, thrived for generations under the Ethiopian rule as the most important seat of Islamic learning in the Horn of Africa.59

Bashir Goth’s succinct denouncement of Islamic radicalism and its importing of values alien to Somali culture is integrally combined with his

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call to better understand Ethiopia. Militant Islam he argues, blocks progress at home and ignites the Ethiopians’ Gragn trauma, with disastrous consequences for Somalis. Ethiopia, he underlines, was the savior of Islam in the days of the najashi, and has remained tolerant toward Muslims. Moderation, he implies, is the key to a better future. It seems that Shaikh Ahmad Sharif’s presidency since early 2009 carries the promise of such moderation. Going to Addis Ababa in February and mending fences with Meles Zenawi is a clear sign that Sharif has adopted the Islamic tradition of Ethiopia as a land of justice toward Islam. Conceiving the Ethiopian “other” in such terms is conceiving the Somali-Islamic “self” more openly. However, Sharif has only begun his effort to stabilize his country. Though he declared that the sharia will be the law of the land,60 it is still too early to see whither Somalia. What kind of leadership and ideology can reunite the country and restore authority in such a divided society? In the short history of modern Somalia, we saw, experiments in parliamentarian nationalism, authoritarian military socialism, clannish warlords, and Islamic radicalism all failed. Is Shaikh Sharif’s formula of moderate Islam workable? Can religious moderation unite Somalis hitherto only temporarily united mostly through anti-Ethiopian holy wars? Can the sharia be implemented to bring progress and good neighborliness? At least one loud voice doubting this has been heard lately. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, Infidel, published in 2006, has become an international bestseller and enabled millions across the world to learn about contemporary Somalia from the perspective of a courageous woman.61 It is a most pessimistic account. Siyad Barre is presented in the book as a corrupt dictator. The clannish system is, according to Hirsi Ali, a dominant factor that is ever efficient in preventing unity and eternalizing backwardness. The re-emergence of Islam as of the early 1990s—her story stops well before the rise of the ICU to power in mid2006—only aggravated social oppression and applied it more harshly. Seen from her feminist angle, and from the perspective of a sworn admirer of Western liberalism, Islam cannot be progressive. Islam, once political, she argues, cannot be moderate. Our study of history makes us less pessimistic. Religions, we have seen, are rich reservoirs of concepts, ready to inspire and legitimize many options. The peoples in the Horn of Africa are integrally connected to Islam or to Christianity in their histories and identities. Religions will continue to shape all developments, even those couched in secular terminology. The Horn was the first meeting place of Islam and Christianity and in all probability will remain so for generations to

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come. What we learned from the previous chapters was that religious cultures are never one-dimensional: that Ethiopian Christianity contained both suspicion and fear of Islam as well as the urge to have constructive contacts with Muslims and with the Islamic world; that Islam contained gratitude toward Ethiopia and viewed it as a legitimate nonIslamic neighbor on one hand, and contained the message of a holy war in order to restore Islam as its only religion on the other. In Jewish tradition, there is a famous saying, a quotation from the Mishna on the essence of the Torah: “Turn it and turn it again, for all is in it.”62 Indeed, it is up to the history makers. They can choose from the religious legacies of hatred and enmity, or they can choose from the Islamic or the Christian options of tolerance and progress.

Notes 1. See more on Ethiopia, “International Religious Freedom Report 2008,” www.eastafricaforum.net, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2008/108368.htm. 2. See more and bibliographic references in Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, pp. 176–183. 3. On the passage below, see more in Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, pp. 207–210. 4. See Henze, “Arsi Oromo Tomb Art.” 5. For a detailed analysis of internal developments in Somalia during the 1990s and 2000s, including the clannish aspects, various organizations, and Islamic factors, see Terdman, “Somalia at War.” 6. See also Jhazbhay, “Islam and Stability.” 7. For more, see Terdman, “Islamism in Somalia.” 8. The passages below are also based on Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, pp. 201–208. 9. The Indian Ocean Newsletter, 31 July 1999. 10. The Indian Ocean Newsletter, 7 October 2000. 11. For Al-Qaida and Somalia, see also de Waal, “The Politics of Destabilization”; Shay, The Red Sea Islamic Terror Triangle; Shinn, “Al-Qaeda in East Africa and the Horn.” 12. For more analyses of Islam in Somalia during the discussed period, see Abbink, “The Islamic Courts Union”; Marchal, “Islamic Political Dynamics”; Menkhaus, “Political Islam in Somalia”; Nzwili, “Leadership Profile”; Shank, “Understanding Political Islam”; Terdman, “Somalia Following the Defeat.” 13. The Eritrean policy of supporting Islamic militants in Somalia is an important dimension of the Horn’s complicated affairs and the role of religions in their development. The issue deserves much more than a mere mention here in our Somali, Ethiopian, Sudanese story. 14. See his articles in the Ethiopian Herald, 11 August, 26 October 2006. 15. Ethiopian Herald, 8 August 2006, “Somali Nationalists in Addis Ababa: UIC Is a Threat to Both Somalia and the Region”; 10 August 2006,

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Mekonnen Teshome, interviews, “Muslims Are Unhappy to See Terrorism in the Name of Islam.” 16. Terdman, “Somalia at War,” p. 75. 17. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharh al-‘umda, vol. 4, p. 427. See also in Kabha and Erlich, “Al-Ahbash and Wahhabiyya.” 18. See al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 2, pp. 577–599; Muslim, Sahih, vol. 4, p. 2232. 19. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharh al-‘umda, vol. 4, p. 494, Kutub warasa`il, vol. 27, pp. 355–356. 20. See discussion of this in Erlich, Ethiopia and the Middle East, pp. 17, 18, 26, 29. 21. See Erlich, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, pp. 193, 200–201. 22. www.almawa.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&idItemid=0. 23. www.alsakher.com/vb2/showthread.php?t=47106. 24. www.alqumaa.net/vb/showthread.php?t=197024. 25. http://vb.vip600.com/archive/index.php/t-112646.html. 26. www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/12/25/30216.htm. 27. www.yahosein.com/vb/showthread.php?p=689106. 28. Terdman, “Somalia at War,” p. 75. 29. www.tajdeed.org.uk/forums/showthread.php?s=7e396d0e95885aa1d 39565ddb. 30. www.alkader.net/jan/mahdeen_070107.htm. 31. “The Ethiopian Ox and the Somali Cloth,” at www.asharqalawsat.com (28 December 2006). 32. See Amnesty International, “Somalia: Routinely Targeted.” See also http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL23812754.html (23 April 2008), Andrew Cawthorne, “Ethiopia Army Slit Throats in Somali Mosque—Amnesty.” 33. http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2008/05/02/world/ africa/02somalia.html&tntemail0=y&_r=1&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all (2 May 2008). 34. For an analysis of Al-Shabab’s Islamic militancy and jihadi concepts based on the movement’s publications, see Paz, “The Youth Are Older.” 35. www.ethiopianmuslimfederation.com/index. 36. Najib Mohammed, “The Haven of the First Hijra (Migration): An African Nation Is the Muslims’ First Refuge,” http://www.soundvision.com/ Info/history/bkhabasha.asp (this article was originally published in The Message magazine’s June/July 1997 issue). 37. See Kabha and Erlich, “Al-Ahbash and Wahhabiyya.” 38. http://www.ethiopianreview.com/news/2009/02/negash-mosque-inethiopia-proposed-as-unescos-world-heritage-site/. 39. Eshete, Akrari Eslamna Baityopya. 40. See also reviews and comments in his blog: “Radical Islam in Ethiopia.” The quotation here is from a review by Hiruy Simie, March 2009. 41. Ibid. 42. Quotations from the back cover. 43. For summaries, see Terdman, “Somalia at War”; Healy, Lost Opportunities. 44. See “Meles, Close-up and Personal,” in Fortune (22 February 2009), at http://www.addisfortune.com/Vol%209%20No%20459%20Archive/Meles-% 20Close-up%20and%20Personal.htm.

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45. AFP, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h0 KSXt0YM13IFu-LW6ah1X1BC89w (2 February 2009). 46. http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-02-14-voa29.cfm (14 February 2009). 47. VOA, at www.eastafricaforum.net (9 February 2009). 48. https://newarabia.org/vb/showthread.php?t=11164. 49. Reuters, at http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE52I0GV 20090319 (19 March 2009). 50. http://alsomal.com/home/content/view/420/27/. 51. Moallin, “The Memory of Dervishes.” 52. http://www.hiiraan.com/comments2-news-2009-Feb-new_somali_ leader_feted_in_capital_of_former_enemy.aspx. 53. The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/22/ somalia.ethiopia (22 May 2008). 54. http://www.grenc.com/show_article_main.cfm?id=14609. 55. Seid, “The Role of Religion.” See also an interview with the head of the ONLF, al-Sayyed Ibrahim Muhammad Hussein, at http://www. ikhwanonline.com/Article.asp?ArtID=33147&SecID=341 (14 November 2007). 56. www.al-ashraf.ws (October 2008). 57. http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/74452 and http:// www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/84512. 58. http://nazret.com/blog/index.php?title=ethiopia_the_king_who_ granted_asylum_to_ &more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. 59. Washington Post, 26 December 2006. See also http://fdama. wordpress.com/2006/12/24/somalia-islamists-should-be-stopped/. 60. http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?page=show_article_eng&id_ article=88199. 61. Hirsi Ali, Infidel. 62. Mishna, Masechet Avot, ch. 5.

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CHAPTER

8

Religion and Politics in the Horn: Options and Choices

SINCE THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER, Islam and Christianity have shaped

identities and histories in the Horn of Africa. Closer to our time, movements of modern nationalism and ideas of social revolution have attempted to replace religiosity as new and comprehensive ideologies for Ethiopians, Sudanese, and Somalis. From today’s perspective, it seems that they have failed; the secularist and materialist approaches barely proved helpful. Parliamentarian liberalism in Sudan and Somalia were short-lived; revolutionary pan-Arabism fared no better. Marxist experiments similarly failed in Sudan and in Somalia, and were a total disaster in Ethiopia, where they proved to be worse than the medieval absolutism of the last emperor. The return, since the 1990s, of religious concepts as active factors in the dynamisms of politics, culture, and self-identification of the peoples involved is perhaps more compatible with local histories. It is reasonable to assume that in the coming years, Ethiopians, Sudanese, and Somalis will continue to be inspired by their Christianity and their Islam; that they will meet and address their agendas, guided, among others, by the conceptual reservoirs of their religious heritages. Ethiopian Christianity is again relevant today after years of growing weakness. Haile Selassie detached the church from its Egyptian roots, and turned it into a fully dependent branch of his imperial government. In the 1960s, Ethiopian orthodoxy became identified with the backwardness of the imperial regime in the eyes of an entire new generation. Mangistu, throughout his 1974–1991 dictatorship, deprived the church of its economic infrastructure, systematically humiliated its leaders, and considered the Christian belief system to be “opium for the masses.” Since 1991, the new regime, by opening up to the country’s diversity as 193

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well as to the world, has helped Ethiopia’s Christianity begin to recuperate. Today Ethiopians are again better connected to their histories and exposed to external, energizing religious challenges. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its set of norms and beliefs are now being re-examined and readdressed due to intensive interaction with other churches in Ethiopia and in Ethiopian diasporas. A whole new generation, it seems, is re-identifying with Christian Ethiopian-ness, working to give it new meanings. Moreover, Ethiopian Christianity today is widely reconceived as the guardian of Ethiopian identity in the face of what many view as an Islamic assault. If Haile Selassie in the 1950s worked to detach Ethiopia from the Nasserite, Arab revolutionary Middle East and cut off church relations with Cairo, in the 1990s the Middle East came back to Ethiopia, this time not with secular, revolutionary ideas, but with political Islamic ones. It is only natural for Christian Ethiopians to continue to cultivate their religious roots and work to combine them with their liberal nationalist, Marxist, or other ideologies. It only remains to be seen which messages of historical Christian culture will be more influential. Will it be those molded by a long tradition of coexistence with local Muslims, by the modern influence of African solidarity, and by centuries of pragmatic ties with core Islamic countries of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa in the ancient spirit of the Egyptian abuna? Or will the Gragn syndrome be more effective in recycling and deepening the medieval siege mentality, the traditional suspicion of Ethiopia’s Muslims, and the old enmity with its Islamic neighbors? Ethiopian Christianity, to be sure, was never monolithic. Existing in a state torn between a centralizing ethos and a decentralized environment, and a product of local cultures and imported dogmas, church and Christianity in Ethiopia often revolved around inner tensions. In this volume, we have only discussed developments related to Ethiopian Christianity’s dialogues with Islam, but here we may mention an inner Christian aspect that may be of future relevance. After 1941, but mainly under Mangistu and more so as of 1991, there emerged and developed a new dimension of Evangelical Christianity in Ethiopia, like the Makane Yesus Church and others. This was spearheaded by Pentecostalism, which stresses a strict Bible-centered life in a way quite different from mainstream traditional Ethiopian culture. Relations between the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Pentecostals have been marred by conflicts, which in themselves are outside our scope.1 However, it seems that the Pentecostals, driven by their more fundamental Western-inspired approach, are far less tolerant of the resurgence of Islam than the Orthodox, whose rather “African” flexible set of beliefs coexisted with

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local Islam for centuries. Ethiopian Pentecostals seem to perceive Islam as a foreign religion detrimental to Ethiopia’s identity and they work to evangelize Muslims. The opening of Christianity in Ethiopia and of Ethiopians in diasporas to contacts with Western churches may well strengthen fundamentalism, just as local, popular Islam in Somalia and in Sudan as well as in Ethiopia itself has evolved through its connection with Middle Eastern, Arab Islam. That Islam in our time is back as din wa-dawla, state and religion, and is a dominant factor in the politics of the world and of the Horn of Africa, needs no reminder. In studying the cases of Sudan and Somalia, we observed the momentum of today’s return of Islam in societies in which early modern nationalism was shaped by movements such as the Mahdiyya and that of the sayyid. It seems that the political impact of Islam today is even more forceful than in those formative periods. In both Sudan and Somalia, it is better connected to the global momentum of Islamic revival, and is led by the young and the educated, with their expectations and abilities, their confidence in their cause and power, and their tendency to see the world in more confrontational terms than did earlier Islamic activists. Islamic militancy of today is also fed by despair stemming from the twentieth century’s experiments with secular formulas and by the renewed image of the West as a domination-seeking aggressor. We can assume that political Islam will continue to shape the lives of Sudanese and Somalis in the foreseeable future, and shape international relations in the Horn of Africa. Here again we are left with the same question: Which Islam? Will the more open version prevail in Sudan, in Somalia, and among Ethiopia’s Muslims? Namely, the kind of African Islam we saw expressed in the traditions of accepting Christians in Ethiopia and Sudan as legitimate neighbors? An Islam that recognizes a Christian najashi as a model of universal humanity, which believes that Muslims can coexist with non-Muslims, and even prosper under a non-Islamic government? Or will it be the ever-recycled radical version that we saw here focused on the concept of Ethiopia’s illegitimacy because of its Christianity? Or a militant Islam that strives for victory in Ethiopia, perceiving that land as its first, and now its last, historical defeat, where redemption for Islam is but a step toward victory throughout the world? We cannot tell which Islam and which Christianity will influence future developments. Human affairs are never predictable. However, we can point to what is at stake. For Ethiopia, the main issue is the redefinition of Christian-Muslim relations, a process that is already taking place. Though most Ethiopians focus their attention on the ever sensi-

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tive ethnic dimension and on the flaws in their democratization process, no less important for them is how Muslims are being integrated into the redefined Ethiopia. Will they participate in the process as equal partners or aspire to win Ethiopia for Islam? The first option implies that Ethiopia will be able to inject vital energies into its economy, open more widely to the rich Middle East, and speed up progress in other fields as well. For this to materialize, Christians also need to be open and tolerant. The second option may work not only toward missing these opportunities but may lead to internal conflict of the worst kind. For the Sudanese, the question of which Islam is relevant not only to their relations with Ethiopia. We followed that aspect of their history and observed Islam’s conceptual diversity from that perspective only. We could not pay appropriate attention to relevant internal Sudanese issues, in the south and elsewhere. But Islamic-Christian relations are of great importance for Sudan. By most accounts, the number of Christians in Sudan is rising, especially Evangelicals and Pentecostals. Christians are not only in the south; they are playing a growing role in the north because of their numbers in Khartoum and other major cities. As in Ethiopia, a similar dynamic can be discerned between the older mainline Christian sects and the more activist, radical Evangelicals with external sources of funding. The latter, in particular, play a major political and diplomatic role. Flexible Islam can pave the way to mutual compromise; radical Islam, insensitive to others’ self-identification, will make these problems worse. For Somalis, the question of which Islam is even more critical. More tolerant Islam can develop together with local traditions and provide a new chance for the still fruitless efforts to build a viable state with modern institutions for Somalis. Radical Islam would not only alienate the popular Islam of most Somalis, but will inevitably promote another holy war with Ethiopia, a war that, as in the past, will not help Somalis. Somalia is indeed the arena where these options clash today, as moderate Somali Muslims fight the radicals. The latter are directly supported and trained by militant Muslims from the core countries of Asian Islam. The moderates are directly supported by a military mission from the African Union. It is indeed a collision between the traditional and therefore more flexible, local versions of popular Islam prevalent in Africa, and what we saw here as doctrinarian rigidity imported from and supported by Middle Eastern militants. The Middle Eastern connections of the Horn of Africa always existed and will remain and strengthen in the future. What the Middle East offers the Horn is much more than importing radicalism. Here again, the

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choice is up to the leaders. They can benefit from Middle Eastern resources and gain support from those seeking stability and development, or they can ally themselves with fanatic fundamentalists from across the sea and push Somalis, Ethiopians, and Sudanese toward endless confrontations. In our narrative, we followed the growing demonization of “others” among the radicals, as reflected, for example, in the transformation of Ethiopia’s image from the land of the najashi to the country of “Abraha’s grandchildren.” We also saw how many options exist in the world of religious concepts, and how even those characterized as militants can become pragmatic. From the Sudanese Mahdi and the khalifa, to Numayri and Hasan al-Turabi; from the Ethiopians Yohannes and Menelik, to Mangistu and Meles; from the Somali sayyid to Shaikh Sharif Ahmad, as well as most of those discussed and quoted throughout our analysis, all wavered between militancy and compromise, and all were inspired by the variety of conceptual choices offered by history. In the final analysis, in this part of the world, religion and politics cannot be separated. But religion, we hope, can be separated from narrowmindedness and enmity.

Note 1. See Tibebe Eshete, “Growing Through the Storms.”

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‘Abbud, Ibrahim, 102–105 ‘Abdallah, Amir (Islamic ruler of Harar), 46 ‘Abdallah al-Ta‘aishi, Khalifa: and Abu ‘Anja’s invasion of Gondar, 20; attitudes toward Menelik’s Ethiopia, 34–35; attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 15–21; letters of warning to neighboring rulers, 19; letters to Menelik, 30–31; letters to Yohannes, 18–20; Menelik’s overtures to, 30– 36; prophetic visions encouraging war with Ethiopia, 19–21; reaction to death of Yohannes, 29; Yohannes’s overtures to, 25–29 ‘Abd al-Halim, Muhammad Rajab, 171 ‘Abd al-Hamid II, Ottoman sultan, 36, 47, 62, 70 ‘Abd al-Rahim, Mudaththir, 134 Abraha al-Ashram, 7, 55, 129, 131; Meles Zenawi equated with, 7, 135, 170–175, 178, 183; and Somali debate about Ethiopia and Muslim self-identification, 142; as Sudanese African, 136 Abu ‘Anja, Hamdan, 19–21, 25–29, 38(n34) Abu Bakr, caliph, 130, 134 Abu Bakr, Shaikh ‘Ali, 46, 85(n6) Abuna, 3 Abu ‘Ubayda ‘Amir ibn Jarah, 134–135 Adar, Ras. See Takla-Haimanot, Negus, king of Gojjam Addis Zaman (newspaper), 146–147

Adwa, Italian defeat at (1896), 32, 44, 48 Afaworki, Isayas, 126, 159, 185 African-Arab combination Islam in Sudan, 129–135, 137 African Islam in Sudan, 128–129, 136, 138 African Union, 196 Al-Ahbash movement, 178 Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama‘a movement, 164–165, 181 Ahmad, ‘Abdallah Yusuf, 165 Ahmad Gragn syndrome: defined/described, 3, 45; and Ethiopian views of Somalis, 7, 141, 142; and ICU capture of Mogadishu, 168; and Iyasu’s actions in Harar, 81–82; and Mangistu regime, 157; and Menelik, 31, 45; and sayyid’s jihad against Ethiopian and European occupiers, 51; and Yohannes, 21–26, 28. See also Gragn, Ahmad Ahmad, Hajj Khalid, 100 Ahmad, Shaikh Sharif, 8, 165, 166, 180–182, 184, 188 Ahmed, Hussein, 23, 122–123 Ahmed, Salim, 124–125 Alamayhu, Haddis, 97 ‘Ali, Ahmad, 32 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 188 Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, 180, 181, 182 Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and

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Counter-Terrorism (Somalia), 165 Alula, Ras, 15, 17, 23–25 al-‘Amudi, Shaikh Muhammad, 158 Andom, Aman, 108, 151 Ansar, 13 Anya-Nya movement, 103–104, 106 Arab-African integrity concept, 134– 135 Arab Islam, 135–136; in Ethiopia, 122, 127; and future of the Horn of Africa, 196–197; Middle Eastern responses to end of Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 182–183; Middle Eastern responses to Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 170–175; in Somalia, 142, 183; in Sudan, 119–120, 135–137 Arab Revolt (1916), 70, 79, 81 Aregay, Merid Walda, 115 Argoleh, Amir, 68 Aswan High Dam, 102, 103 Atikam, Ras Bitwadad Mangasha, 33 Aweis, Shaikh Dahir, 163, 164, 165, 169, 181, 182, 184–185 Ayro, Adan Hashi Farah, 164, 176 al-Azhari, Ismail, 105 al-‘Azm, Sadiq, 24, 47, 64, 72, 86(n9) Badr International Ethiopian Muslims Federation, 176 Baidoa, 165–166, 169, 181 Bakir, Ibrahim, 64–65 Balcha, Dajazmach, 68 Banti, Grazmach, 59 Baselyos, Abuna, 94 al-Bashir, ‘Umar: break with al-Turabi, 126; initial support for EPRDF regime in Ethiopia, 120; response to September 11 terrorist attacks, 126; rise to power (1989), 115, 123; and terrorism, 125, 126 Baykedagne, Gebre-Hiwot, 96–97 Berbers, 127 Bevin, Ernest, 145 Bilal (journal), 122 Bilal ibn Rabbah (Bilal the Ethiopian), 129–135, 177 bin Laden, Osama: calls for continued holy war in Somalia, 182; ideology of, 124; and Al-Ittihad al-Islami, 163; move to Afghanistan, 123;

move to Sudan, 123, 124; ousted from Sudan, 125, 164; and radical Islam in southern Ethiopia, 161; alTurabi on, 133 Carmichael, Tim, 122 Cattle, 49–50 Caulk, Richard, 28, 40(n97) Christianity (Eritrea), 144 Christianity (Ethiopia), 2–3; current status of, 193–195; EPRDF policies toward, 180; Ethiopian Christians’ sense of connection to Middle East, 3; and Ethiopian identity, 8, 27, 94, 119, 122; nationalization of the church under Haile Selassie, 8, 94– 95, 193; religious rhetoric avoided by Ethiopia and Sudan 1956-1974, 101–107. See also Ahmad Gragn syndrome; Christianity, Islamic views of; Najashi concept Christianity (Sudan): Christian southern Sudan’s struggle for independence, 101, 103–104 Christianity, Islamic views of: al-‘Azm’s portrayal of Ethiopia as legitimate land of Christian justice, 47–48; and contention that Najashi Ashama converted to Islam, 2, 48, 122, 177; distinction between Ethiopian and European Christians, 58; hadith on eventual destruction of Ka‘ba by Ethiopians, 55, 79, 129, 135, 136, 170–172; hadith on leaving Ethiopians alone, 16, 17–18, 38(n34), 53; hadith on Muslims living among infidels, 54; Islamic views of Ethiopian invasion of Mogadishu, 142, 170–175; AlQaida’s conception of Ethiopia, 124; and radical Arab Islam in modern Sudan, 135–137; sayyid’s ideology, 53–55; sayyid’s shift to British as main Christian enemies, 57–58; and Somali parliamentarian government, 146; summary of Islamic literature on, 171; “year of the elephant” story about Abraha al-Ashram’s plot to destroy the Ka‘ba, 7, 55, 129, 135, 142, 170–172, 183. See also Jihad; Najashi concept

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Index Communism. See Mangistu Haile Mariam; Siyad Barre, Muhammad “Dervish” nickname, 22–23 al-Dikyam, Amir Yunis, 19 Dodds, Major, 69 EDU. See Ethiopian Democratic Union Egypt: alliance with Numayri, 114; assassination attempt on Mubarak, 124–125; Aswan High Dam, 102; conflict with Ethiopia (late 1800s), 12, 22; influence on the Horn during 1950s and 1960s, 145; and Mahdiyya movement, 12, 141; and Nile water issues, 126; penetration into Sudan (1896), 32 Egyptian abuna concept, 3 ELF. See Eritrean Liberation Front EPLF. See Eritrean People’s Liberation Front EPRDF. See Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Forces Eritrea: and assassination of Aman Andom, 108; as common threat to Sudan and Ethiopia in the late 1990s, 120, 126; and Ethiopia-Sudan relations during Haile Selassie regime, 101–107; failure of Mahdiyya movement to gain followers in, 38(n46); and Haile Selassie, 144; and Isayas Afaworki, 159; Italian conquest of, 29; and Mahdiyya movement, 23; and Mangistu regime, 107, 111–112, 114–115, 152; Sudanese support for, 101, 103–105, 108, 114; support for militant groups in Somalia, 168, 185, 189(n13); termination of Sudanese aid, 106; Unionist Party, 144; war with Ethiopia (1998), 126 Eritrean Jihad movement, 124 Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), 104– 106 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 159 Eshete, Aleme, 34, 40(n97), 58, 88(n75) Eshete, Ephrem, 179–180 Ethiopia, 1–9; and Aman Andom, 108, 151; and capitalism, 158; cessation of aid for SPLA, 120–121, 126; and

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communism, 109–110; constitution of 1955, 95; employment in, 158; EPRDF regime, 120, 126, 161, 180; fall of Mangistu (1991), 119, 157; famine, 48, 114; future of, 195–197; as host for SPLA training centers, 124–125; intrareligious relations less relevant than other issues, 166; Italian conquest of Eritrea, 29; Italian conquest of Ethiopia, 96–97; lack of attention to rise of militant Islam in Somalia, 166–168; liberation from the Fascists, 97–98; Lij Iyasu government, 71–83; Oromo demographics, 160; Al-Qaida’s conception of, 124; redefinition as federal state based on ethnic diversity, 119, 157–161; revolution of 1974, 107–111, 151; shift of imperial power to Shoa, 29; struggle over Eritrean autonomy, 101–107, 126; support for southern Sudanese Christians, 101, 103, 105–106, 114. See also Christianity (Ethiopia); Christianity, Islamic views of; Eritrea; Haile Selassie I; Islam (Ethiopia); Mangistu Haile Mariam; Meles Zenawi; Menelik II; Najashi concept; Ogaden; Oromos; Yohannes IV Ethiopian Democratic Union (EDU), 107–108 Ethiopian Herald: and assassination attempt on Mubarak, 124–125; and communism, 109–111; and Ethiopian-Sudanese affinity, 99; and ICU capture of Mogadishu, 168–169; and improved relations with Sudan, 111–115, 121, 126; and irrelevance of religion to politics in Ogaden issue, 147; lack of attention to rise of militant Islam in Somalia, 167–168; and Nile water issues, 126; and revolution of 1974, 151; and Siyad Barre regime, 153–154; verbal restraint on sensitive issues, 103– 104, 114–115 Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 94–95, 194 Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Forces (EPRDF), 120,

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126, 161, 180. See also Meles Zenawi Ethiopia-Somalia relations (1899– 1920), 4, 7, 43–91; “Amhara” term for Ethiopians, 58; and Arab Revolt (1916), 70, 79, 81; asylum in Ethiopia sought by sayyid, 84–85; and battle of Jijiga, 56–57, 59–61; British and Italian recognition of Ethiopia as regional empire, 48–49; Ethiopian annexation of Ogaden, 43; Ethiopian conquest of Harar, 17, 31, 45–50; Ethiopian hatred for Somalis, 49–50; Ethiopian policies in Somalia outside of Harar, 50–51; Ethiopian raids, taxes, and colonization attempts in the Ogaden, 48–51, 66; and famine, 48; Haile Selassie I crowned emperor of Ethiopia, 82; and Italians, 66–68; Iyasu as Ethiopian head of state, 71–81; Iyasu deposed, 81–82; and lack of social cohesion in Somalia, 50, 56, 61; Menelik’s policies toward sayyid, 60–61; and Ottoman Empire, 69–85; rapprochement between sayyid and Menelik, 61–69; and sayyid’s jihad against Ethiopian and European occupiers, 51–59; sayyid’s loss of power and death, 82–85; sayyid’s switch to emphasis on the British as main enemies, 57, 61, 63; and World War I, 69–85 Ethiopia-Somalia relations (1943– 1991), 7, 141–155; and assassination of Aman Andom, 151; conflicts over Ogaden, 145–148; “Greater Somalia” concept, 145, 148; and Mangistu regime, 151–155; and Six Day War of 1967, 147; and Siyad Barre regime, 147–155; Somali invasion (Ogaden War 1977–1978), 109, 111–112, 145, 152–154; and Somali parliamentarian government (1964–1969), 143–148; and Soviet Union, 148–149, 152 Ethiopia-Somalia relations (1991– 2009), 157–191; end of Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 175, 180, 182; Eritrean aid for militant Somali groups, 185; Ethiopian invasion/

occupation of Mogadishu (December 2006), 142, 169–175; ICU capture of Mogadishu (June 2006), 168–170; and Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government in Somalia, 165–170; and Islamic options in redefinition of Ethiopia, 157–161; and Al-Ittihad alIslami, 162–164; radicalization of Ethiopia’s Muslims following invasion of Somalia, 176–179; Somalia and the development of Islam in southern Ethiopia, 159–161; understanding between Shaikh Sharif Ahmad and Meles Zenawi, 180–182, 188 Ethiopia-Sudan relations (1884–1898), 3–4, 11–41; Abu ‘Anja’s invasion of Gondar, 20, 22, 24; and AngloEgyptians, 11, 34–35; battle of Kufit, 16, 23; battle of Matamma, 29; border issues, 11, 16–17, 32, 40(n97); and conquest of Harar, 17, 32; and Egyptian conflict, 11, 12, 22; end of Mahdiyya movement’s attempts to expand beyond Sudan, 30; and Italian threat, 11, 19; khalifa’s attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 15–21; Mahdi’s attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 13–15; Mahdists’ acceptance of Menelik’s Ethiopia as neighbor, 30–36; and Mahdiyya movement, 11–36; Menelik’s pragmatic relations with khalifa, 30–36; Muslim uprisings in Wallo, 24; and personal rivalries, 11, 19, 25; and southern Sudan’s struggle for independence, 114; Takla-Haimanot’s raid on Qallabat and Qadarif, 16–17; Yohannes’s pragmatic overtures to Abu ‘Anja, and consequences of mistranslation, 25–29; Yohannes’s strategic dilemmas, 21–25 Ethiopia-Sudan relations (1899–1956): Ethiopia’s relations with British rulers, 95 Ethiopia-Sudan relations (1930–1991), 6, 93–117; agreement on not helping subversive movements (1972), 106; agreement on territorial integrity (1980), 112; al-Bashir regime in

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Index Sudan, 115, 120, 123, 125, 126; border issues, 95, 106; closer relations following Italian conquest of Ethiopia (1936–1941), 96–98, 137; deterioration of relations during Mangistu regime in Ethiopia, 107– 111; deterioration of relations in the 1980s, 114–115; end of Numayri regime and rise of Sadiq al-Mahdi, 114; and Eritrean autonomy, 101– 107; and Ethiopian revolution (1974), 107–111; Ethiopians educated in Sudan, 96; improved relations 1977–1981, 111–114; Jews of Ethiopia smuggled to Israel with Sudanese aid, 114; and liberation of Ethiopia from the Fascists, 97, 99, 112; marginalization of religion and enhanced solidarity during Halie Selassie’s regime, 94–101; and Mussolini, 96; al-Mustafa’s song about affinity, 99–100; and Ogaden War (1977–1978), 111; and pan-Arab vs. pan-African nationalisms, 99, 101–107; rapprochement between Haile Selassie and Numayri, 106; and Six Day War of 1967, 104–105; and southern Sudan’s struggle for independence, 101, 103–104; and Soviet Union, 108–109; and Sudanese independence, 94, 99; verbal restraint/silence on sensitive issues, 101–107, 114–115; water issues, 95–96, 102 Ethiopia-Sudan relations (1991–2009), 119–139; and current Islamic momentum in Ethiopia, 119, 123– 124; and debate on Muslim selfidentification in Sudan, 127–138; deterioration of relations following Mubarak assassination attempt (1995), 124–125; Eritrea as common threat, 120, 126; Ethiopian support for SPLA, 124–125; impact of Sudan on radicalization of Islam in Ethiopia, 124–125; improved relations 1998– 2009, 126; improved relations following Mangistu’s fall, 120–121; influence of Sudan on Islam in Ethiopia, 137–138; influence of Sudan on religious

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scholarship of Ethiopians, 123; and Nile water issues, 125–126; politicization of Islam in Ethiopia in the early 1990s, 160–161; rapprochement following outbreak of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, 126; Sudan as host for terrorist groups, 124–125; Sudanese aid for Ethiopian opposition groups, 125; and al-Turabi’s changing stance on Islam and African unity, 132–134 Ethnic pluralism in Ethiopia, 157–158 Evangelical Christianity, 194–196 The Family of Bilal: The Historical Roots of Islam in Ethiopia (Ibrahim), 130–131 Famine, 32, 48, 114 al-Fasi, Ahmad ibn Idris, 52 Feleke, Belay, 113 Gabre-Sellassie, Zewde, 16 Gabru Dasta, Kantiba, 34 Gada, Shaikh Jarra Abba, 160 Garang, John, 114 Gondar, Abu ‘Anja’s invasion of, 20, 22, 24 Gorfu, Solomon, 109–110 Gori, Alessandro, 87(n33) Goth, Bashir, 187–188 Gragn, Ahmad: accomplishments of, 51; and African-Arab Islam in Sudan, 131; Eshete on, 179; Harar as Islamic capital of, 45; Ibrahim’s interpretation, 131; and Ogaden Liberation Front, 145; and Ogaden National Liberation Front, 185; and Ogaden War (1977–1978), 154; sayyid perceived as successor to, 51; and Somali self-identification, 183. See also Ahmad Gragn syndrome Great Britain: and Arab Revolt (1916), 70, 79, 81; campaigns against sayyid, 60, 83; conquest of Mahdist state (1898), 34; and Ethiopia-Sudan relations in the late 1800s, 11, 32; Mazhar’s anti-British propaganda, 78; and Ottoman Empire, 70, 76; penetration into Sudan (1896), 32; recognition of Ethiopia as regional empire, 48–49; sayyid’s jihad

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against, 44; Sudan under British rule, 95–99; tripartite treaty on division of Ethiopia, 62; and water issues, 95–96 “Greater Somalia” concept, 145, 148 Guto, Wako, 152 ‘Haabiil, ‘Ali Jaama, 57 Hadith on eventual destruction of Ka‘ba by Ethiopians, 55, 79, 129, 170–172; and Barack Obama, 136; and Ethiopian invasion of Mogadishu, 135 Hadith on leaving Ethiopians alone, 2, 16, 17–18, 38(n34), 53 Hadith on Muslims living among infidels, 54 Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia, 5, 94–107; crowned as emperor, 82; desire to annex Somalia, 144, 175; and liberation of Ethiopia from the Fascists, 97–98; marginalization of religion and enhanced solidarity with Sudan, 94–101; modernization enterprises, 95; nationalization of the church, 8, 94–95, 193; and Numayri, 106; and Ogaden, 145–148; policies toward Muslims, 95; response to pan-Arabism, 102; and sayyid’s loss of power and death, 84; and Siyad Barre regime, 151; and Somali parliamentarian government, 143– 148; and struggle over Eritrean autonomy, 101–107, 144; Tana dam policy, 95–96; visits to Sudan, 102– 103, 105, 106. See also Najashi concept; Tafari, Dajazmach al-Hajj, ‘Ali, 124 Haji, Farah, 76 Hamid, Hajj ‘Abd al-Karim Ibrahim, 160 al-Hamur, ‘Abdallah ‘Adwa, 132 Harakat al-Islah, 164 Harakat Ras Kamboni, 182 Harar: Balcha as governor, 68; as base of Ethiopian expansion into Somali lands, 48; and battle of Jijiga, 56–57, 59; Ethiopian conquest of, 17, 31, 45– 50; history of, 45–46; as hub of connections between Iyasu, Mazhar, al-Sadiq, and sayyid, 72; Iyasu’s transformation of, 79, 81; Makonnen

as governor, 45–49, 61; Mazhar’s move to, 72; and Oromo Wahhabi activists, 161; “plot of the club,” 145; politicization of Islam in the early 1990s, 160–161; redefined as autonomous regional state under Meles Zenawi government, 157; alSadiq as head of Islamic community, 46, 61; al-Sadiq’s “reign of intrigue,” 75; and sayyid’s declaration of jihad, 59; Somali seige of, 153–154; and Somali Youth League, 144–145; Tafari as governor, 68–69, 72; tolerant Christian governance of, 45–50 al-Harari, Shaikh ‘Abdallah, 178 Hasan, Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah. See Sayyid, Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan (the Somali mawla) Hayakala, Shaikh, 184 Haykal, Muhammad, 177 Hayla-Giorgis, 45, 46, 48–49, 59–60 Hegira, first, 1–2; and African-Arab Islam in Sudan, 130–135; and African Islam in Sudan, 138; and al‘Azm’s portrayal of Ethiopia as legitimate land of Christian justice, 47–48; and debate on Muslim selfidentification on the periphery of the Arab world, 127; Ibrahim’s interpretation, 130–131; and Islamic options in redefinition of Ethiopia, 159; and Mahdiyya movement, 13; Najib Muhammad on, 176–177; and sayyid’s refutation of hadith on leaving Ethiopians alone, 54; and sayyid’s ultimate endorsement of first hegira legacy, 85; al-Tayyib’s interpretation, 132 Hess, Robert, 83 Hidaru, Heiwot, 97 Hizb al-Shabab, 164. See also al-Shabab Holt, Peter M., 19, 30, 34 Hudaybiyya agreement, 67 Husayn, ‘Abd al-Majid, 163 Hussein, Saddam, 123 Ibn Taymiyya, Taqi al-Din Ahmad, 52, 55, 84, 135, 171 Ibrahim, ‘Abdallah ‘Ali, 137 Ibrahim, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘Abd al-Ghani, 130–131

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Index ICU. See Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government Idrisiyyah Sufi fraternity, 164 Indharat, 19 Infidel (Ali), 188 Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 115 Internet, online discussions, 128, 137, 172–175, 185–186 IOLF. See Islamic Oromo Liberation Front Iran, 173 Iraq, 127 Islam, 1–3; Al-Ahbash movement, 178; and debate in countries on the periphery of the Arab world, 127; Eshete on radical Islam, 179; hadith on Muslims living among infidels, 54; Harar as historic Islamic capital in the Horn of Africa, 45; moderate Islam of Wallo, 71; need to cultivate moderate Islam, 178–179; online discussions, 128, 135–136; and Oromos, 160; religious rhetoric avoided by Ethiopia and Sudan 1956–1974, 101–107; and teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, 52. See also Ahmad Gragn syndrome; Christianity, Islamic views of; Gragn, Ahmad; Hegira, first; Islam (Ethiopia); Islam (Somalia); Islam (Sudan); Islam al-najashi concept; Jihad; Najashi concept; Sharia; Sufism; Wahhabi Islam Islam (Ethiopia): African-Arab and Arab-African Islam, 138; African Islam, 122, 138; Arab Islam, 122, 127; Bilal the Ethiopian as third person to adopt Islam, 130, 134–135; current Islamic momentum, 119, 123–124, 158–161, 179; dual conceptions of identity among Ethiopian Muslims since the early 1990s, 121–122, 195–196; EPRDF policies toward, 180; influence of Sudan on religious scholarship of Ethiopians, 123; Lij Iyasu’s transformation into political Muslim, 71–72, 78–79, 82; and Meles Zenawi, 178, 180; Muslim demographics, 122; politicization of Islam in the early 1990s, 160–161;

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popular Islam, 127; post-1991 openness toward Islam, 158–161; radicalization of Ethiopia’s Muslims following invasion of Somalia, 176– 180; Yohanness’s anti-Muslim policies, 12, 21–25 Islam (Somalia), 196; Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama‘a movement, 164–165, 181; Arab Islam, 142, 183; and Eritrea, 185; Goth on, 187; Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government, 135, 161–170, 187; Al-Ittihad alIslami movement, 124, 162–164; lack of Ethiopian attention to rise of militant Islam in Somalia, 167–168; moderate/popular Islam, 50–51, 53, 142, 164–165, 183; online discussions on Muslim selfidentification, 185–186; popular Islam in Somalia not conducive to unity, 51; Qadiriyya fraternity, 50– 51, 53; reasons for Ethiopian invasion of Mogadishu (2006), 142; sayyid’s ideology, 52–57; al-Shabab organization, 164, 181, 183–184; and Shaikh Sharif Ahmad’s turn toward moderate Islam, 184; and Siyad Barre regime, 154; tariqas (small religious settlements), 50–51, 142; tawassul, 53, 63. See also Sayyid, Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan Islam (Sudan): African-Arab combination Islam, 119–120, 137; African Islam, 128–129, 138; Arab Islam, 119–120, 135–137; al-Bashir and al-Turabi regime, 123, 132–133; debate on Muslim self-identification, 119–120, 127–138; Mahdiyya movement, 11–36, 98–99; Mirghaniyya Sufi fraternity, 98–99; popular Islam under British rule, 98– 99; prophecy about Abyssinians coming to Khartoum, 17–18; alTurabi’s shift toward moderate Islam, 132–133. See also ‘Abdallah alTa‘aishi, Khalifa; Mahdiyya movement; Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad Islam, Christian views of: and Christian conquest and governance of Harar, 45–49; and Iyasu’s actions in Harar,

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81–82; Menelik’s views, 45; Pentecostals’ views, 195 Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government, 135, 161–166, 187; attack on Baidoa, 169; capture of Mogadishu, 168–170; collapse upon Ethiopian capture of Mogadishu, 169–170; establishment of, 165; as Taliban-like regime, 166 Islamic Oromo Liberation Front (IOLF), 124, 160–161, 163–164 Islamic Union. See Al-Ittihad al-Islami movement Islam al-najashi concept, 2, 3, 4, 12, 28, 30, 35 Isma‘il, Kamal, 174 Isma‘il, Khedive, 12, 22 Israel, 114. See also Six Day War of 1967 Italy, Italians: conquest of Eritrea, 29; conquest of Ethiopia, 96–97; defeat at Adwa, 32, 44, 48; and EthiopiaSudan relations, 11, 16, 19, 24–27, 32, 96–98; and Menelik, 31, 32, 44, 66; recognition of Ethiopia as regional empire, 48–49; al-Shihri as double agent for, 63, 66, 67; tripartite treaty on division of Ethiopia, 62; and Yohannes, 19, 24–27 Al-Ittihad al-Islami movement, 124, 162–164 Al-Ittihad, Political Islam and Black Economy in Somalia (Tadese), 167– 168 Iyasu, Lij, 71–83 al-Jabarti, Hajj Ahmad, 33 Al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya, 162 Jami‘, Hajj, 65 Jennings, J. Willes, 47, 49–50 Jibril, Muhammad, 24 Jihad: and contention about Najashi’s possible conversion to Islam, 48; end of Mahdiyya movement’s attempts to expand beyond Sudan, 30; and Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 173, 176; and Islamic Courts Union (ICU) regime in Somalia, 169–170; and Al-Ittihad al-Islami, 162–164; khalifa’s dilemma over leaving the Ethiopians alone vs. jihad, 15–21;

khalifa’s prophetic visions encouraging war with Ethiopia, 19– 21; Mazhar’s visions for, 73–74; and Ogaden War (1977-1978), 153–154; and Ottoman Empire, 70–74; and radical Islam in southern Ethiopia, 160–161; sayyid’s jihad against Europeans and Ethiopian occupiers, 51–59, 151; Shaikh Talha bin Ja‘far’s leadership of anti-Yohannes jihad, 23–24 Jijiga, battle of (1900), 56–57, 59–60 Jubaland, 161, 165 Ka‘ba: hadith on eventual destruction by Ethiopians, 55, 79, 129, 135, 136, 170–172; “year of the elephant” story about Abraha al-Ashram’s plot to destroy the Ka‘ba, 7, 55, 129, 135, 142, 170–172, 183 Kasa, Todros, 21 Kebira, 59 Khalid, Hajj Muhammad ‘Uthman, 33, 35, 100 Kirsch, Emil, 80, 81 Kitab al-Fitan (ibn Hammad), 171 al-Kordofani, Isma‘il bin ‘Abd al-Qadir, 17, 25 Kufit, battle of (1885), 16, 23 Kurds, 127 Kuwait, 123 Lewis, I. M., 51 “Mad Mullah” epithet, 57, 87(n45) Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, 3–4; attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 13–15; death of, 15; letter to Yohannes (June 1885), 14–15; and najashi concept, 13–15; self-image, 13; teachings of, 13 al-Mahdi, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 95 al-Mahdi, Sadiq, 105, 114 Mahdiyya movement, 3–4, 11–36; and battle of Matamma, 29; collapse of Mahdist state, 34; death of Mahdi, 15; and death of Yohannes, 29; defeat at battle of Tushki, 30; and demonization of Egyptians, 12; “dervish” (darbush) nickname, 22– 23; as double threat to Christian

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Index Ethiopia, 22; early confrontation with Yohannes, 12–13; end of attempts to expand beyond Sudan, 30; ideology of, 13, 15; influence on sayyid, 52; khalifa’s attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 15–21; Mahdi’s attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 13–15; Menelik’s pragmatic relations with khalifa, 30–36; and najashi concept, 13–15, 35, 36; as response to Egyptian government in Sudan, 141; and Sudanese identity, 11; transformation under ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, 98–99; and Yohannes’s anti-Muslim policies, 23–24 Makki, Hasan, 134 Makonnen, Ras, 17, 45–49, 60–62 Mangasha, Ras, 32 Mangistu Haile Mariam, 6, 9, 107–111, 151–155; and assassination of Aman Andom, 151; and Christianity, 193; defeat of invading Somalis, 111–112, 154; and deteriorating relations with Sudan in the 1980s, 114–115; and Eritrean hostilities, 107, 114–115; Eritrea recaptured, 111–112; and improved relations with Sudan 1977–1981, 111–114; loss of power, 119–120, 157; and Nile water issues, 126; and Numayri, 107–108; policies toward religion, 9, 157; and Somali invasion (Ogaden War 1977–1978), 109, 111–112; and Soviet Union, 108–109, 111, 114, 148–149; tripartite treaty with South Yemen and Libya, 114; verbal restraint on sensitive issues, 114–115 Martin, B. G., 52–53, 54 Mashasha Warqe, Dajazmach, 31 Matamma, battle of (1889), 29 Matamma-Qallabat area, 16, 19, 32 Matewos, Abuna, 60, 81, 82 Matiba, Muhammad, 75, 76 Mazhar, Ahmed, 72–78, 80 Meles Zenawi: equated with Abraha, 7, 135, 170–175, 178, 183; and Ethiopian campaign in Somalia, 170–176, 178; and ICU capture of Mogadishu, 168; invitation to Shaikh ‘Abdallah al-Harari to return to Ethiopia, 178; meeting with Badr

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International Ethiopian Muslims Federation, 176, 178; and moderate Islam, 180; and rapprochement with Sudan, 126; redefinition of Ethiopia under, 157–158; and Shaikh Sharif Ahmad, 180–182, 188 Menelik II, emperor of Ethiopia, 4, 11, 64; and Ahmad Gragn syndrome, 31, 45; calls to convert to Islam, 30; Christian identity of, 44–45; conquest and governance of Harar, 45–50; crowned as emperor, 29; death of, 71; defiance of Yohannes’s authority, 19, 29; expansionist policies, 44–51; ideology of, 44–45; illness, 68; improved border relations, 32; improved relations with Mahdiyya, 32–36; and Italians, 66–68; Italian threat as top priority, 31; negotiations with the British, 48– 49; official annexation of Ogaden, 43; opposition to European imperialism, 44; perceptions of Somalis as the cattle-keepers of the Ethiopians, 49; perceptions of the Mahdiyya, 31; personal characteristics, 4; policies toward Muslims, 30, 46–50; pragmatic approach to sayyid, 60; pragmatic relations with khalifa, 30–36; preference for Mahdists over European colonialism, 33; rapprochement between sayyid and Menelik, 61–69; self-image, 44–45; treaty with British, 48–49; victory over Italians at Adwa, 32, 44, 48; and World War I, 71. See also Najashi concept Middle East: Ethiopian Christian’s sense of connection to, 3; responses to end of Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 182–183; responses to Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 170–175. See also Arab Islam; Saudi Arabia Mirghaniyya fraternity, 98–99, 105 Mogadishu: end of Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 175, 180, 182; Ethiopian invasion of (2006), 7, 135; Ethiopian occupation of (2006), 169– 175; and Al-Ittihad judicial courts,

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162; and Al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya group, 162; Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in, 165 Mogadishu Congress on reconciliation, 180 Mubarak, Husni, 124–125 Muhadin, Muwaffaq, 174 Muhammad Ahmad, Mahdi. See Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad Muhammad ‘Ali, Imam (Ras Michael), 71, 82, 85 Muhammad, Najib, 176–177 Muhammad, Shaikh Yusuf, 169 Muhammad the Prophet: and Bilal the Ethiopian as third person to adopt Islam, 130, 134–135; first hegira of followers in Ethiopia, 47; Hudaybiyya agreement, 67; and Khalifa ‘Abdallah’s prophetic visions encouraging war with Ethiopia, 19– 21; and Mahdiyya movement, 13; and Najashi Ashama, 13–14. See also Hadith Muslim Brothers, 141, 162 Muslim Ethiopia (Zabiyan), 171 Mussolini, Benito, 95, 96, 137 al-Mustafa, Ahmad, 99–100, 103 al-Mutairi, Abdulaziz, 186 Najashi Ashama, 1–2, 13–14, 48 Najashi concept, 3; and African-Arab Islam in Sudan, 129–135; and dual conceptions of identity among Ethiopian Muslims, 122; and Eritrean aid for militant groups in Somalia, 185; Eshete on, 179; and Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 174–175; and Islamic options in redefinition of Ethiopia, 159; and Islam al-najashi slogan, 2, 3, 4, 12, 28, 35; and Mahdi’s attitudes toward Yohannes’s Ethiopia, 13–15; and Mahdists’ attitude toward Menelik’s Ethiopia, 35, 36, 43; and Menelik, 64; najashi as Eritrean, not Ethiopian, 185; Najib Muhammad on, 177; and need to cultivate moderate Islam, 179; possible conversion of Najashi and implications for Ethiopia, 2, 48, 122, 177; and sayyid’s changing attitude

toward Ethiopia, 64–65, 85; and Somali liberals, 186–187; alTayyib’s interpretation, 132. See also Hegira, first Al-Najashi mosque, 179 National Islamic Front (NIF; Sudan), 115, 123–125 NIF. See National Islamic Front Nile River, 95–96, 102, 103, 125–126 Nu‘aym ibn Hammad, 171 Nubians, 127 al-Numayri, Ja‘far, 105–106; coup attempts against, 106, 108; and deteriorating relations with Ethiopia in the 1980s, 114–115; dislike of Mangistu, 107–108; and Haile Selassie, 106; and improved relations with Ethiopia 1977–1981, 111–114; leanings toward political Islam, 114– 115; loss of power, 114; and Red Sea regional front against the Soviets, 108 Obama, Barack, 136 Ogaden, 5, 7, 141; conflict over in the 1960s, 145–146; Ethiopian annexation of, 48–51, 144–145; Ethiopian raids, taxes, and colonization attempts, 43, 66; Ethiopian rule in, 141, 142; and Haile Selassie, 145–148; Ogaden War (1977–1978), 109, 145, 152– 154, 159; redefined as regional state under Meles Zenawi government, 157; al-Sadiq as subgovernor, 72; sayyid’s move to, 55; tariqas (small religious settlements), 50; WSLF established in, 151, 152 Ogaden Liberation Front, 145 Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), 161, 163, 185 Ogaden War (1977–1978), 109, 145, 152–154, 159 Ohrwalder, Joseph, 17, 21 Ommar, H. Haji, 168 ONLF. See Ogaden National Liberation Front Organization of African Unity, 146 Orhonlu, Cengiz, 74 Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), 160, 164

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Index Oromos, 107, 152, 160–161, 163 Ottoman Empire, 69–85 Pan-African nationalism, 99, 101–107 Pan-Arab nationalism, 99, 101–107, 119 Parliamentarian system in Somalia, 143–148, 175 Party of Islam (Somalia), 182 Pentecostal Christianity, 194–196 Poetry of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan, 53, 57–58, 68–69 The Political Relations between the Muslims of Zayla and the Christians of Ethiopia in the Middle Ages (’Abd al-Halim), 171 Popular Arab and Islamic Conference, 123 Puntland, 161 Qaddafi, Muammar, 106, 114 al-Qaddal, Muhammad Sa‘id, 137 Qadiriyya Sufi fraternity, 50–51, 53, 164 Al-Qaida: conception of Ethiopia, 124; and Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government in Somalia, 165; response to Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 173; and al-Shabab, 164, 183; and Shaikh Dahir Aweis, 184 Qallabat, 13, 16–17, 34 Radical Islam in Ethiopia (Eshete), 179–180 Red Sea, 108 Religions, as reservoirs of concepts, 1– 3, 5, 188–189, 193. See also Ahmad Gragn syndrome; Bilal ibn Rabbah; Gragn, Ahmad; Hadith on leaving Ethiopians alone; Hadith on Muslims living among infidels; Hegira, first; Islam al-najashi concept; Ka‘ba; Najashi concept Ridda, Rashid, 36 Rihlat al-habasha (al-‘Azm), 47, 86(n9) Rodd, Rennell, 49 al-Sadat, Anwar, 114 al-Sadiq, ‘Abdallah: and al-‘Azm’s impressions of Harar, 47; fate of, 85(n5); as head of Islamic community in Harar, 46, 61; as

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intermediary between Menelik and sayyid, 62, 64–67; and Iyasu, 74; and Mazhar, 72; and al-Shihri, 67; transformation into agent of jihad, 73, 75 Sadler, J. Hayes, 55 Sahaba, 1–2, 13, 130, 133, 134. See also Hegira, first SALF. See Somali Abbo Liberation Front Salihiyya Sufi fraternity, 52, 142, 150, 164 al-Salih, Muhammad, 63 Salih, Shaikh Muhammad, 52 Samatar, Said, 52, 55–56, 186 Sanderson, George, 34–35, 40(n97) Sanussiyya movement, 52 Sarur, ‘Abdi, 76 Saudi Arabia: and Al-Ittihad al-Islami, 162; and radical Islam in southern Ethiopia, 160, 161; Somalis educated in, 150; and story about eventual destruction of the Ka‘ba by an Ethiopian, 171; support for Siyad Barre, 153. See also Arab Islam; Wahhabi Islam Sayyid, Muhammad ‘Abdullah Hasan (the Somali mawla), 4, 43–44, 52, 62, 142, 143, 184; attempts to befriend Tafari, 68–69; and battle of Jijiga, 56–57, 59; British campaigns against, 60, 83; call for all-Somali unity, 43, 51, 55–56; claims to be Ethiopian by birth, 64, 68; and deposition of Iyasu, 82–83; distinction between Ethiopian and European Christians, 58; education and influence of previous Islamic movements, 52–53, 150–151; failure to unite all Somalis, 56, 61, 81; as father of modern Somali identity, 143, 183; and Harar, 55–56, 66, 69; ideology of, 52–57; and Iyasu, 72– 77, 80; jihad against Europeans and Ethiopian occupiers, 51–59, 151; “Letter to Bimal,” 54–55; loss of power and death, 82–85; “Mad Mullah” epithet, 57, 87(n45); Menelik’s initial response to jihad, 60; origin of sayyid title, 52; and Ottoman jihad, 70–72, 77; perceived as successor of Ahmad Gragn, 51;

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perceived as successor of the Mahdi, 51; personality of, 63; poetry of, 53, 57–58, 68–69; protection from/asylum in Ethiopia sought, 68, 84–85; rapprochement between sayyid and Menelik, 61–69; Shabab interpretation of, 183–184; and alShihri, 61–63, 67; and Somali selfidentification, 185–186; switch to emphasis on the Europeans as main enemies, 57, 61, 63, 68; and Treaty of Ilig, 61; views on Menelik, 36; views on Muslims who cooperated with Ethiopians or emigrated to nonMuslim lands, 53–55, 66, 69; and World War I, 70–72, 84 Seid, Mohammed Mealin, 185 September 11, 2001, 126 Shabab al-Mujahidin movement, 176 al-Shabab organization, 164, 181, 183– 184, 186 Sharia: and Muslims living among infidels, 54; and sayyid’s ideology, 53; and Shaikh Sharif Ahmad’s presidency, 188; sharia courts in Somalia, 163–170 al-Shihri, ‘Abdallah, 61–63, 66, 67 Shoa, shift of imperial power to, 29 Six Day War of 1967, 104–105, 147 Siyad Barre, Muhammad: anti-Islamic policies, 149–150; Ayaan Hirsi Ali on, 188; end of regime, 161; and establishment of WSLF, 151; ideology and goals, 148–150; Islamic opposition to, 150, 154; Marxist ideology abandoned, 152, 153; military coup (1969), 143, 147; and Ogaden War (1977–1978), 109, 152– 154 Somalia, 4–9; Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, 180, 181, 182; Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, 165; armed militias/warlords, 161, 162; clan system, 50–51, 142, 161, 162, 188; constitution of 1961, 143, 145; creation of Somaliland, Puntland, and Jubaland, 161; end of Ethiopian occupation of Mogadishu, 175; Eritrean aid for militant Somali groups, 185, 189(n13); Ethiopian

hatred for Somalis, 49–50; Ethiopian invasion of Mogadishu (2006), 7, 135, 169–175; future of, 188, 195– 197; Haile Selassie’s desire to annex, 144, 175; ICU capture of Mogadishu (June 2006), 168–170; independence (1960), 5, 142, 143; and international terrorist networks, 161; Islamic Courts Union (ICU) government, 135, 161–170, 187; Al-Ittihad alIslami movement, 124, 162–164; lack of social cohesion, 4, 50, 56, 61, 161–162; liberal future for, 186–188; Menelik’s concept of Somalis as cattle-keepers of the Ethiopians, 49; military coup of Siyad Barre (1969), 143; Ogaden War (1977–1978), 109, 111–112, 145, 152–154; parliamentarian system (1964–1969), 143–148; Party of Islam, 182; alShabab organization, 164, 181, 183– 184; Shaikh Sharif Ahmad presidency, 181–182, 188; Siyad Barre’s Marxist regime (1969–1991), 147–155, 161; Somali Youth League as first modern nationalist movement, 143–144; and terrorism, 163, 164; Transitional Federal Government (TFG), 165, 180–182. See also Islam (Somalia); Ogaden Somali Abbo Liberation Front (SALF), 152, 159–161 Somaliland, 161 Somali Youth League (SYL), 143–144, 175 Soviet Union: and agenda in Horn of Africa, 154–155(n7); and Mangistu regime in Ethiopia, 108–109, 114, 148–149, 152; and Ogaden War (1977–1978), 109; and Red Sea regional front, 108; and Siyad Barre regime, 148 SPLA. See Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement Army SPLM. See Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement Sudan, 3–9, 102–105; ‘Abbud regime, 102–105; “Arab Islam” vs. “African Islam” vs. “African-Arab Islam” in current state, 119–120, 127–138; as base for bin Laden, 123, 124; al-

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Index Bashir regime, 115, 120, 123, 125, 126; British in, 32, 34, 95; call to rename, 128–129; cessation of aid for Ethiopian opposition groups, 126; collapse of Mahdist state, 34; coup of 1958, 102; future of, 195– 197; independence (1956), 94, 99; Mahdiyya movement, 11–36, 98–99; multiparty regime following end of ‘Abbud regime, 105; Numayri’s socialist regime, 105–106; and panAfricanism, 99; and pan-Arabism, 99, 101, 119; Qaddafi’s support for opposition groups, 114; rise of Sadiq al-Mahdi (1986), 114; secular voices, 137; southern Sudan’s struggle for independence (1963–1972), 101, 103–104, 106, 114; support for Eritrea nationalists, 101, 103–105, 108, 114. See also Christianity (Sudan); Islam (Sudan) Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), 114, 126 Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement Army (SPLA), 114, 120– 121, 125, 126 Sufism, 53; Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama‘a movement, 164–165, 181; Idrisiyyah fraternity, 164; Al-Ittihad campaign against, 163; Mirghaniyya Sufi fraternity, 105; Qadiriyya fraternity, 50–51, 53, 164; Salihiyya fraternity, 52, 142, 150, 164; in Sudan, 98 Sugaal, Yusuf Dheere Mohamed, 151 SYL. See Somali Youth League Tadese, Medhane, 167 Tafari, Dajazmach: authority undermined by al-Sadiq, 73, 75; and Coptic Church, 94; crowned as emperor, 82; as governor of Harar, 68–69, 72; removed from government of Harar, 79; sayyid’s attempts to befriend, 69. See also Haile Selassie I Tahir, Maqtil, 144 Takla-Haimanot, Negus, king of Gojjam, 16–17, 19–21, 25, 34 Talha bin Ja‘far, Shaikh, 23–24, 96 Tamal, Zaki, 28–29, 32 Tana dam, 95–96

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Tariqas, 50–51, 142 Tawassul, 53, 63 al-Tayyib, ‘Abdallah, 131–132 al-Tayyib, Muhammad, 32 Tefera, Worqu, 115 Telahoun, Melese, 113 Terrorism: Bashir’s response to September 11 attacks, 126; and deterioration of Ethiopia-Sudan relations following assassination attempt on Mubarak, 124–125; and Islamic Courts Union, 165; and AlIttihad al-Islami campaign against Ethiopia, 163; and al-Shabab campaign in Somalia, 164. See also Al-Qaida TFG. See Transitional Federal Government Thesiger, Wilfred, 75 Tigre, 32, 107 Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), 114, 120, 158. See also Meles Zenawi al-Tini, Sayyid Yusuf Mustafa, 100 Al-Tiraz al-manqush (al-Qaddal), 137 TPLF. See Tigrean People’s Liberation Front Transitional Federal Government (TFG; Somalia), 165, 180–182 Treaty of Ilig, 61, 62, 63 al-Turabi, Shaikh Hasan, 7, 120; and Bashir’s rise to power, 123; break with Bashir, 126; and deterioration of Ethiopia-Sudan relations following assassination attempt on Mubarak, 124–125; establishment of Popular Arab and Islamic Conference, 123; ideology of, 123; Al-Ittihad al-Islami movement, 163; and Nile water issues, 126; shift to African-Arab ideology, 132–134; and terrorism, 124–125 Turabiyya, 123 Turki, Shaikh Hasan Hersi, 182, 186 Tushki, battle of (1889), 30 Umm Durman, British conquest of (1898), 34 United Arab Republic, 102 United States, 126, 153

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‘Urabi, Ahmad, 185 ‘Uthman Diqna, 15, 52 ‘Uthman, Muhammad, 100 Victoria, queen of England, 32, 40(n98) Wad Arbab, Amir, 13, 15–18 Wahba, Ahmad Khalil, 101 Wahhabi Islam, 52–53, 138; and education of Somalis in Saudi Arabia, 150; Eshete on, 179; AlIttihad al-Islami movement, 162– 163; and Ogaden War, 145; and Oromos, 160, 161; and Somali Youth League, 144 Walda-Gabriel, Dajazmach, 45 Walda-Maryam, Mesfin, 115 Walda-Selasse, Heruy, 16, 17, 20, 29 Warburg, Gabriel, 98 Warqe, Mashasha, 61 Water rights, 95–96, 102, 103, 125– 126 Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), 151, 152, 159–161 World War I, 69–85 World War II, 99, 102, 144 WSLF. See Western Somali Liberation Front Yashenfal, Tiglu, 110 Ydliby, Hasib, 73 Yilma, Dajazmach, 62, 66

Yohannes IV, emperor of Ethiopia, 4, 11–29, 120; Abu ‘Anja’s reply to letter of December 1888, 27–28; and Ahmad Gragn syndrome vs. pragmatism, 20–25; anti-Muslim policies, 12, 21–23, 24–25; and battle of Matamma, 29; and border conflicts, 16–17, 40(n97); calls to convert to Islam, 14, 18, 20, 22, 27; death of, 25, 29; and defiance of Takla-Haimanot and Menelik, 19; early provocation of the Mahdiyya, 12–13; and Italian threat, 19, 24–27; khalifa’s letters to, 18–20; letter to khalifa (December 1888), unfortunately translated, 25–29; and Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad, 13–16; Mahdi’s letter to (June 1885), 14–15; and Menelik, 25; and al-najashi title, 18; and Takla-Haimanot, 25 Yohannes, Ras Mangasha, 34, 40(n98) Young Turks, 70, 72 Yusuf, ‘Abdallah, 162, 180, 181 Zabiyan, Muhammad, 171 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 173, 176 Zawde, Ras, 32 Zawditu (empress and daughter of Menelik), 82 Zewde, Bahru, 22 al-Zubayr, Abu, 183

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About the Book

CAN CHRISTIANITY and Islam coexist? Or are Muslims and Christians

destined to delegitimize and even demonize each other? Tracing the modern history of the region where the two religions first met, and where they are engaged now in active confrontation, Haggai Erlich finds legacies of both tolerance and militancy. Erlich’s analysis of political, military, and diplomatic developments in the Horn of Africa since the late nineteenth century is combined with an exploration of the ways in which religious formulations of the nearby “other” influenced policymaking and were also reshaped by it. His work demonstrates in a compelling way how initial Islamic and Christian concepts remain directly relevant in the region today. Haggai Erlich is professor emeritus of Middle East and African history at Tel Aviv University and head of Middle East and African studies at the Open University of Israel. Most recent of his numerous publications are Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia: Islam, Christianity, and Politics Entwined and The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Nile.

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