The Oromo and The Historical Process of
The Oromo and The Historical Process of
The Oromo and The Historical Process of
223
Figure 12.1 Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, showing the main regions
discussed.
titles described them as the ‘kings of kings of Ethiopia’, their territories bordered a
countless number of small multiethnic emirates under Muslim control. It is reported
by al-ʿUmari that Muslim colonies had even established themselves in the Christian
part of the Highlands at the beginning of the thirteenth century, although all of them
were required to pay a tax of three afiqaḥīs (ingots of iron), which was the Abyssinian
currency.32
The struggle with Islam was further embittered by the fact that the Coptic Church
sometimes colluded with the Egyptian rulers by appointing abunas (bishops), who
worked for the promotion of Islamic economic interests in the Ethiopian Highlands.
Abunas from Egypt were not able to establish themselves by assuming anti-Islamic
positions. While the Zagwe dynasty strove to maintain a positive relationship with
the main Muslim rulers of the Horn of Africa, it also sought to convert to Christian-
ity largely pagan areas such as Gojjam and Shoa. The Muslim–Christian relationship
during the century of Zagwe leadership encouraged peaceful economic interactions
that on the one hand allowed Islam to build bridgeheads towards the Ethiopian
Highlands, but on the other maintained the status quo, keeping the entire region
free from violent quarrels. Even if the Zagwe dynasty stimulated the building of
monasteries and the monastic presence in areas previously not yet Christianised,
it was overshadowed by the general belief that, as a non-Aksumite line, its power
was acquired through an illegitimate act of usurpation. To paraphrase Taddesse
Tamrat, the Late Antique Aksumite Christian tradition was saved and preserved by
the Zagwe dynasty before the return of a Solomonic line.33
The situation changed drastically with the restoration of the Solomonic
dynasty. Yikunno Amlak (1270–85), renamed Tesfa Iyesus, ‘Hope of Jesus’, ended
the Zagwe dynasty and claimed to be an heir to the rulers of Aksum. Donald M.
Levine believes that this re-establishment was related to the advent of the Amhara,
an Agaw people who developed a distinct southern Ethiopian-Semitic tongue
through a process of pigeonisation and creolisation. The predominance of Tigray,
which has been the most important area of the Christian empire since the early
Aksumite kingdom of late antiquity, was definitively ended. The Amharaland was
more mountainous than the rest of the Ethiopian Highlands, but with fertile hills
and valleys: barley, wheat and millet were as abundant as honey and horned cattle.
The independent kingdoms led by local Muslim or Falasha (Jewish) dynasties in
Lasta as in Damot and in Gojjam as in Bale, which the Zagwe had permitted, were
not endorsed by the Solomonic rulers. Under the kings of Amhara, such as Yikunno
Amlak and his successors, the Christian sphere of influence expanded considerably.
The great breakthrough in military expansion occurred during the reign of Amde
Siyon (1314–44), the founder of the Ethiopian state. In his thirty-year career, he
conquered Damot, Hadiyya and Gojjam, subdued the hostile Muslim emirates of
Ifat and Fatigar and those of the south, Dewaro and Bale, and finally defeated
the Falasha troops in the north which had been mobilised to support the Muslim
cause. The Arab writers of the 1340s described him as the ruler of more than
99 kings.34 It was in this period that interreligious conflict in the Horn of Africa
began to assume an international dimension: the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muham-
mad, began a persecution of the Copts of Egypt and demolished many churches
(even if many mosques were burned by the local Christian community as well); in
response, Amde Siyon increased the military campaigns against the emirates of the
Horn, leading to the intervention of the Muslims of Ifat who, between 1332 and
1338, sent an embassy to Cairo to ask the sultan to mediate with the Abyssinians
on their behalf. Al-ʿUmari relates:
The Muslim kingdoms of Abyssinia were seven in number: Awfat, Dewaro,
ʿArababni, Hadya, Sharka, Bale and Dara. These kingdoms, which belonged to
seven kings, are weak and poor, because the cohesion between the inhabitants
is weak, the produce of the country is not abundant and the king of Amhara
imposes his authority on the other kings of Abyssinia, not to mention the reli-
gious antipathy which exists between them and the disputes which separate
Christians and Muslims.35
However, if the political relationship between the Mamluk and the Solomonic dynas-
ties was increasingly difficult, the diplomatic titles used in official correspondence from
the Mamluks addressed to the Ethiopian court highlight the importance of the Abys-
sinian kingdom for Cairo. The Christian Ethiopian ruler is addressed as al-jalīl (the
Sublime), al-ḍirjām (the Brave), rukn al-umma al-ʿīsawiyya (the supporter of the com-
munity of Jesus) and muʿaẓẓim kanīsat ṣahyūn (one who makes magnificent the church
of Zion). Al-Qalqashandi, referring to the term al-jalīl, voiced some doubts about the
use of a divine epithet for a Christian king, which highlights how the Mamluk chan-
cellery was little concerned about the religious appropriateness of the titles and more
interested in the diplomatic niceties.36
The first two centuries of the new Solomonic dynasty also played a crucial role in
forging a Christian religious identity through the creation of a vast field of mission-
ary activity for the Ethiopian Church. Its evangelists were the spiritual counterparts
of military heroes: holy men like St Takla Haymanot (d. 1313), who created pioneer
monasteries in non-Christian areas, practised extreme self-mortification, waged epic
struggles against indigenous primitive religions and attracted the people to Christi-
anity by their power, sanctity, miracles and the services they could perform in the
new Christian order, in a way not so dissimilar from the early Sufi orders that would
reach the Horn of Africa from Iran and India. The pre-eminent Ifat sultanate, which
was responsible in the thirteenth century for the annexation of the former sultanate
of Shoa in the Ethiopian Highlands, rapidly increased commerce with the port of
Zailaʿ, which it controlled and which was one of the main ports on the Gulf of Aden.
Tensions with the Christian Solomonic dynasty increased, erupting in conflict in the
following century and leading to partial occupation of Ifat and the establishment of
a Christian garrison at a number of important sites. The lack of unity among the
Muslims and the military superiority of the Christian army were the main reasons
for the submission of Ifat, Dewaro, Sharka and Bale. Al-ʿUmari describes how every
time a local Muslim chief died, his sons and heirs would come to the Christian
emperor’s court with presents to obtain a sort of official confirmation of their title as
new chief of the Muslim provinces, emphasising de facto Christian control over the
entire area. The failed Muslim insurrection of 1332 against the Ethiopian ruler, led
by the part of the Ifat sultanate that did not submit to the Christians, destroyed the
sultanate’s independence for many decades. In its place arose the sultanate of ʿAdal
in the same region.37
occupy the ports of Suakin and Zailaʿ and to establish relations with the Muslims
in Portuguese-occupied Masawwaʿ. At the same time, in Zailaʿ, Catalan merchants,
rivals of the Portuguese, were initially supplying the Muslim forces with arms. In
1531, Ahmad b. Ibrahim launched a well-planned attack that brought three quar-
ters of Highland Ethiopia under his sway. The former Muslim kingdoms of Bale and
Hadya and the Sidamo and Gurage realms were taken quite easily. The conquest was
devastating in its destruction, irresistible in its ferocity and appalling in its cruelties:44
churches and monasteries were burned and many Christians forced to convert.45 Con-
fronted with the stone churches of Lalibela, Ahmad b. Ibrahim looted objects made
of precious metals, burnt manuscripts and everything of wood, but did little damage
to the churches themselves. In 1535, Ahmad, in control of the south and centre of
Highland Ethiopia, for the first time invaded Tigray, where he encountered strong
opposition from the hardy mountain tribes and suffered some reverses; however, his
advance was not stopped.46 Lebna Dengel became a hunted fugitive, harried from one
mountain fastness to another. The havoc and destruction continued for more than
fourteen years, during which virtually the whole of Highland Ethiopia was conquered
and a great many centres of Ethiopian Christian civilisation destroyed, shaping the
Christian perception of Muslims as the enemy within. The jihad was finally ended by
Christian guerrilla resistance and with the help of a contingent of Portuguese soldiers,
sent upon the request of the Ethiopian king, who arrived in 1541.47 Lebna Dengel died
in battle in 1540 and was succeeded on the throne by eighteen-year-old Emperor Gala-
wdewos (r. 1540–59), who received military support from the Portuguese and was able
to retake large amounts of territory.48 Finally, Sarta Dengel (r. 1563–97), in a brilliant
series of campaigns, decisively put an end to Harar as an Islamic military power, to
the Ottoman expansion into Eritrea and to the independence of the Falasha kingdoms.
Despite continued harassment and attempted invasions from foreign Muslim centres
in subsequent centuries, the Solomonic kingdom re-established sufficient security to
contain external Muslim threats thereafter.
This new relationship between Islam and Christianity could be observed over the
next century, in the Amhara Gondarine era, under the reigns of Fasilidas (r. 1632–67)
and his son Yohannes I (r. 1667–82). This period was particularly important for the
role the Amhara played on the Ethiopian Highlands in the evolution of the Orthodox
Church as a national institution in opposition to the increasing interference of the
Jesuits, who had been established in Ethiopia as a result of the Portuguese alliance
since the mid sixteenth century.49 However, Fasilidas’s policy also increased Ethiopian
isolationism towards any foreign political or economic entity. He signed various alli-
ances with the Muslim rulers of the coast, sending an envoy to the Imam al-Muʾayyad
bi’llah of Yemen in 1642 asking him to banish or kill any Portuguese he came across.
A few years later, he asked for a Muslim alim to be sent to his court. The alim arrived
in Gondar in 1648, but was greeted with such opprobrium by the population that the
king advised him, for his safety, to depart and sent him away loaded with costly gifts.
The defence of true faith against heresy assumed with the Jesuit presence a very dif-
ferent character from the same discourse in the pre-Jesuit era. The Muslim–Christian
divide was replaced with an Orthodox–Catholic/heretic one, shaping Ethiopia’s iden-
tity.50 Although Fasilidas’s Gondar castle, as well as the churches of Lalibela, remain
symbolic of the complexity and cultural richness of Ethiopia, the isolationist policy (to
which the Jesuits’ definitive expulsion in the 1630s was an important contribution)
reached new heights under Emperor Johannes I (r. 1667–82). In 1668, the royal coun-
cil promulgated an edict of religious discrimination, which decreed that the Franks (the
descendants of the Portuguese) must leave the country unless they joined the National
Church, while Muslims, who could not be expelled because they played a significant
role in the economic life of the country, were forbidden to live with Christians and had
to inhabit separate villages and separate quarters in the towns. Amharic nationalism
was emerging, but not within a modern historical context; on the contrary, a process
of feudalisation overran Ethiopia. The kingdom became completely isolated, while
the surrounding local Islamic emirates dominated the trade routes and all commercial
activities.51 Muslim traders supplied the population of the Plateau with manufactures
and complex goods, but also slaves and agricultural products from the broad basin of
the Red Sea, and from the Indian subcontinent and the Mediterranean.
to favour interethnic marriages with Somali and Oromo women to assure tribal sup-
port. As Mohammed Hassen argues:
The Oromo appear to have wanted to counter Christian unity and strength by
making Islam a major unifying factor, part of their cultural life, and a mark of
their independence. Trimingham’s observation is accurate when he writes that
the Oromo in Wollo reinforced their independence by the adoption of Islam.
He goes on to argue that the Oromo in Wollo accepted Islam as a bulwark
against being swamped by Abyssinian nationalism. Indeed, Islam appears to
have served as a powerful symbol of Oromo identity and a reliable fortress
against the domination of their Christian neighbours.62
In the seventeenth century, the Ethiopian Emperor Susenyos (r. 1606–32) took a keen
interest in the Oromo. He had come to power with Oromo support,63 learnt their
language, married an Oromo woman and integrated them into Ethiopian politics.
However, after an initial period of peace between the Amhara and the Oromo, the
emperor tried to Christianise those who were not geographically close to the Amhara
territories, reigniting conflicts and bringing the war back to areas that had been com-
paratively peaceful since the arrival of the Oromo.64 Oromo warriors flooded into
Susenyos’ domain and within a short time outnumbered his Amhara followers. During
the reign of Iyasu I (1682–1706), the Amhara army of the north penetrated the Shoa
region with the intention of attacking the Oromo of the south, but the unenthusiastic
response of the local Amhara rulers to attacking their neighbours, who were partly
‘Amharised’ and with whom they maintained relatively friendly relations, convinced
the emperor to maintain the status quo. The Oromo interaction with the previously
subdued populations of the Ethiopian Highlands, such as the Sidamo, Mecha or the
peoples of Innarya, Gibe and Damot, promoted an increasing number of coalitions in
which a cultural mixture during the Zemene Mesafint (the Era of Princes) consolidated
the leading role of the Oromo in parallel with an Islamic revival in the second half of
the eighteenth century, partially due to the great development of caravan trade on the
Plateau. This factor combined with Islam to become a unifying factor which helped the
Oromo chiefs to consolidate their authority.
During the eighteenth century, Iyasu II (r. 1730–55) was the last Negus who had
any semblance of authority; nevertheless, the unity of the Ethiopian kingdom already
depended on Oromo military support and Islamic trade. When a rebellion broke out
in the Damot region shortly after the coronation of Iyasu II, the Oromo chief Waranna
became local governor and his troops allowed the capital at Gondar to be supplied
with basic necessities. The Oromo’s militarisation permitted lower-ranking warriors
of many clans to rise to prominence and, with the increasing importance of the Shoa
region (where the next capital, Addis Ababa, would be founded), the Oromo who
converted to Christianity acquired a greater standing, emerging as new rulers of the
area. Gondar was unable to control the Ethiopian Highlands while those who benefit-
ted from the situation were the ‘Amharised’ Oromo who obtained important positions
within the administration, the army and the Ethiopian court. The Christian Oromo
partly ‘Amharised’ to reach a higher level within the Solomonic hierarchies and the
majority of the emperors of Ethiopia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had
Oromo blood. However, despite sharing the same religion with the Abyssinians, they
did not share the political-ideological orientation of the Ethiopian Church, whose
main interest was to preserve a structural inequality rooted in fascinating myths and
legends, putting religious power in the service of the empire.65 Muslim-born local
Oromo chiefs had to become nominal members of the Church for political reasons,
but did not change their sympathies. As reported by Ferret and Galinier, but also by
the Capuchin monk G. Massaia:
A fundamental law of the Ethiopian state was that princes had to be Christians,
therefore Muslims who aspired to the status of nobility had to change their
religion. Such conversions were only nominal and when made governors of
provinces they did all they could to favour Islam.66
The result was the increasing discontent of the Abyssinian clergy with Oromo suprem-
acy and it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that the morale of the Church
was at its lowest ebb because conversion to Islam in the Highlands had reached its
apex. The social and economic activism of Muslim communities in the Highlands was
clearly superior to the still feudal way of living of the Christian communities, while all
commercial activities at the coastal ports were univocally in Muslim hands.
In the Wollo region, the Oromo converted in large numbers to Islam during the
eighteenth century, or at least this was the perception of the Amhara and Tigray elite
in Gondar. The Yajju state and an anti-Oromo prejudice increased the interethnic
conflict, de facto favouring the emergence of the Yajju Oromo, nobility whose conver-
sion to Christianity from Islam was never accepted as genuine. The Islamic presence
in Wollo was rooted in the prevalence of different Sufi confraternities, in particular
the Qadiri and Shadhili, quite probably as early as the sixteenth century.67 The appeal
of Sufi orders was their emphasis on common religious performances through dhikr
(invocations), piety and solidarity, but also their interaction with non-Muslim commu-
nities. The Islamic mystical presence fostered a rich spiritual tradition interconnected
with local non-Muslim folk practices which did not impose Arabic as the main iden-
tifying religious idiom, but developed an intermingled hybrid religious culture, albeit
maintaining stronger links with centres of Islamic learning in the wider Horn of Africa
and the Arabian Peninsula. In the Ethiopian countryside, mostly populated by farmers,
local traders and craftsmen, there developed zāwiyas (local monasteries not so dissimi-
lar to those of the Christian Ethiopian tradition) and Islamic education. Around these
zāwiyas, there grew up places for local pilgrimages, usually connected with saints’
graves and mosques.68 The local male and female zāwiyas were viewed entirely as
places of retreat and religious study where Muslims were committed to the pious life,
prayer and the study of the Quran and fiqh. The Christian monastic influence was
evident in the Horn of Africa too and even if the Quran (57: 27) expressed an Islamic
opposition to cenobitism, religious seclusion for spiritual reasons became particularly
popular in the Wollo region with the expansion of Sufi holy places that transformed
the saints’ shrines into pilgrimage sites where students and common people prayed and
encouraged spiritual experience.69 The subsequent emergence, in the nineteenth cen-
tury, of women’s convents linked to the Qadiriyya, but clearly influenced by Christian
nuns’ orders, in the Amhara, ʿAfar, Argobba and Oromo territories is symptomatic of
the existence of a cultural–religious melting pot able to introduce innovations. These
sacred areas of pilgrimage allowed for conversion and for religious-conflict mediation
between the various local ethnic groups. This was a prominent characteristic, quite
Notes
1. Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, 2nd edn
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000).
2. J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c. 500 bc to ad 1050 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 252.
3. Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1991), p. 87; Francis E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 88.
4. Richard K. P. Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Royal Chronicles (London: Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 2ff; George Hatke, Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce and Political
Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
5. Jeremiah 38: 7–13.
6. Edward Ullendorf, Ethiopia and the Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 75.
7. Michael Brett, ‘The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa’, in J. D. Fage
(ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c. 500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 584; J. Cuoq, Islamisation de la Nubie chretienne,
VII-XVI siècle (Paris. L. Orientaliste Geuthner, 1986).
8. Al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State, Being the Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān, trans.
Philip Khuri Hitti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), p. 379ff.
9. Yusuf Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan: From the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth
Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. 182–202. Ibn Hawqal
(d. 988), in G. Vanini (ed.), Oriental Sources concerning Nubia (Heidelberg: Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1975), p. 162.
10. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005), p. 55.
11. A. J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 325, 338, 427ff; P. Forand, ‘Early Muslim Relations
with Nubia’, Der Islam 48 (1971), pp. 111–21; Jay Spaulding, ‘Medieval Christian Nubia
and the Islamic World: A Reconsideration of the Baqt Treaty’, International Journal of Afri-
can Historical Studies 28, no. 3 (1995), pp. 577–94.
12. Fage, Cambridge History of Africa, p. 569.
13. Al-Maqrizi, al-Kitab al-Mawaʿiz wa’l-Iʿtibar fi Dhikr al-Khitat wa’l-Athar, ed. by G. Wiet
(Cairo: IFAO, 1911), vol. 1, p. 323; al-Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de l’Égypte,
trans. M. Quatremère (Paris: Institut de France, 1840), vol. 1, pp. 106, 113, 127–40, 150.
14. Al-Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de l’Égypte, vol. 1, p. 16.
15. Ibn Hawqal in Vanini (ed.), Oriental Sources concerning Nubia, p. 563.
16. Ibid.
17. Abbebe Kifleyesus, Tradition and Transformation: The Argobba of Ethiopia, Aethiopist-
ische Forschungen (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2006) p. 43.
18. Aklilu Asfaw, ‘A Short History of the Argobba’, Annales d’Éthiopie 16 (2000), pp. 173–83.
19. Abbebe Kifleyesus, Tradition and Transformation, pp. 41ff., 48ff.
20. Ibn Hisham, Sirat Rasul Allah, ed. F. Wustenfeld (Gottingen: n.p., 1858–60), p. 208; J.
Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1965), p. 44.
21. Levine, Greater Ethiopia, p. 5.
22. Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Taʾrikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje
(Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901), vol. 2, p. 1777.
23. J. van Ess, ‘Les Qadarites et la Ġailānīya de Yazīd III’, Studia Islamica 31 (1970), p. 272.
24. Al-Yaʿqubi, Kitab al-Buldan, ed. M. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1892), vol. 2, p. 336; Triming-
ham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 49.
53. Dimitri Toubkis, ‘Les Oromo à la conquête du trône du rois des rois (XVI-XVIII siècle)’,
Afriques 1 (2010), http://afriques.revues.org/470 (accessed July 2016); P. T. W. Baxter et
al. (eds), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries (Uppsala:
Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996); G. Schlee, ‘Oromo Expansion and its Impact on Ethno-
genesis in Northern Kenya’, in T. Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International
Conference of Ethiopian Studies: University of Addis Ababa, 1984 (Addis Ababa: Institute
of Ethiopian Studies, 1984), pp. 711–23.
54. Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom, p. 15ff.
55. Éloi Ficquet, ‘ La fabrique des origines Oromo’, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002), p. 56.
56. Thomas Zitelmann, ‘Oromo Religion, Ayyaana and the Possibility of Sufi Legacy’, Journal
of Oromo Studies 12, nos 1–2 (2005), p. 86ff.
57. Éloi Ficquet, ‘Une apologie éthiopienne de l’Islam’, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002), pp. 7–35;
Abbas Haji Gnamo, ‘Islam, the Orthodox Church and Oromo Nationalism (Ethiopia)’, in
Cahiers d’Études Africaines 165 (2002), pp. 99–120.
58. Marco Demichelis, ‘Oromo’, in Steven Danver (ed.), Native People of the World: An Ency-
clopaedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference,
2013), vol. 1, pp. 69–72.
59. Thomas Osmond, ‘Competing Muslim Legacies along City/Countryside Dichotomies: Another
History of Harar Town and its Oromo Rural Neighbours in Eastern Ethiopia’, Journal of
Modern African Studies 52, no. 1 (2014), pp. 1–23; Thomas Osmond, ‘Knowledge, Identity
and Epistemological Choices: An Attempt to Overcome Theoretical Tensions in the Field of
Oromo Studies’, in S. Epple (ed.), Creating and Crossing Boundaries in Ethiopia: Dynamics of
Social Categorization and Differentiation (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), pp. 189–212.
60. Mordechai Abir, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in Richard Gray (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Africa, vol. 4: From c. 1600 to c. 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), p. 550ff.
61. Zitelman, ‘Oromo Religion’, p. 91.
62. Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom, p. 344ff.
63. Ibid., p. 340.
64. Demichelis, ‘Oromo’, p. 71; Abir, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, p. 537ff.
65. Patrick Desplant and Terje Østebø (eds), Muslims of Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Iden-
tity Politics and Islamic Reformism (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
66. M. M. Ferret et Galinier, Voyage en Abyssinie, dans les provinces du Tigrè, du Samen et de
l’Amhara (Paris: Pauline–Libraire Éditeur, 1847), vol. 2, p. 324; G. Massaia, I miei trent-
acinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia (Rome: Tipografia Manuzio, 1922–30), vol. 4,
pp. 78–9.
67. Ficquet, ‘Une apologie éthiopienne de l’Islam’, pp. 7–35; Jon Abbink, ‘Muslim Monas-
teries? Some Aspects of Religious Culture in Northern Ethiopia’, Aethiopica 11 (2008),
pp. 117–33; Jon Abbink, ‘Transformations of Islam and Communal Relations in Wallo,
Ethiopia’, in Benjamin Soares and René Otayek (eds), Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa
(New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 65–84; Ahmed Zekaria, ‘Some Remarks on the Shrines of
Harar’, in Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp (eds), Saints, Biographies and History in
Africa (Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2003), pp. 19–29.
68. Hussein Ahmad, Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, Ethiopia: Revival, Reform, Reaction
(Brill: Leiden, 2001), p. 71; Abbink, ‘Muslim Monasteries?’, p. 121ff.
69. Ahmad, Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, pp. 68–9; Abbink, ‘Muslim Monasteries?’,
p. 123.
70. Éloi Ficquet and Wolbert G. C. Smidt, The Life and Times of Ligg Yasu of Ethiopia: New
Insights (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), pp. 5–29.
71. Paolo Borruso, L’ultimo impero cristiano: politiche e religione nell’Etiopia contemporanea
(1916-1974) (Milan: Guerini e Associati Editore, 2002), p. 45ff.
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