The Oromo and The Historical Process of

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THE OROMO AND THE HISTORICAL


PROCESS OF ISLAMISATION IN ETHIOPIA
Marco Demichelis

T he historical interaction between Islam and Christianity in the Horn of


Africa is profoundly connected with the region’s specific historical, linguistic and
cultural characteristics. While the western coast of Africa faces the vastness of the
Atlantic Ocean, since antiquity the northern part of Africa’s eastern coast as far as
the Bab al-Mandab has interacted with the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula. The
Arab geographers called all the various populations living on the western coast of the
Bab al-Mandab ‘Habash’, while Abyssinia is the ancient name of the northern parts of
modern Ethiopia, corresponding to modern Tigray and Eritrea. In recent scholarship,
the term ‘Greater Ethiopia’ has been used to refer to Ethiopia in its twentieth-century
borders before the independence of Eritrea in 1993.1
To understand the historical evolution of the relationship between the Islamic
world and Ethiopia, we must outline the main characteristics of this area:
1. A geography that is intercontinental: the south of Arabia, the south of Egypt,
the Eritrean coast and the Ethiopian Highlands formed a single cultural region.
Relations between the ancient Yemeni kingdoms (such as Qataban, Saba – the
biblical Sheba – Himyar and Hadramawt) and their contemporaries in Ethiopia,
Aksum and the Aksumite rulers, as well as Meroe in the Sudan, are attested
by archaeological evidence. Early Aksumite civilisation, before conversion to
Christianity, also reflected the deep influence of south Nilotic culture, as an
expression of southern Nubian and Meroitic civilisation. 2 Aksum was therefore
able to intermingle with southern Arabia, but also with southern Nubia in late
antiquity.3
2. The presence of a long-established written language tradition that stimulated the
production of historical documents for at least two thousand years. The earliest
of these inscriptions, the Ezana stele (AD 330), was written in three languages,
Greek, Ge‘ez and Sabaean, and mentions the king of Ezana, the first Aksumite
ruler to convert to Christianity.4
3. A myth that traces the roots of the Aksumite kingdom to Old Testament biblical
tradition. The only Ethiopian represented in the Old Testament is portrayed as a

223

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224 islamisation

man of high moral character (Ebed-Melech, an officer of the court of Zedekiah,


king of Judah),5 while the biblical relationship between King Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba is reported in the Old Testament too (Kings 10: 1–13). How-
ever, it is in the Ethiopic text the Kebra Negast, the most important written
source concerning the Solomonic line of the emperors of Ethiopia, that these
connections are elaborated in full. The text contains an account of the encoun-
ter between the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba (who is also called Makeda from
mk-kdi, which means ‘female divinity’ in Meroitic) with King Solomon and
how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with Menelik I, the son of their
union. The Kebra Negast (datable in its current form to the fourteenth century,
although elements date back to a period between the fourth and sixth centuries
AD) has been described by the famous Ethiopian studies expert Edward Ullen-
dorf as ‘not merely a literary work, but a repository of Ethiopian national and
religious feelings’.6
These features characterised Ethiopia during its long interaction with Islam and
a vigorous process of Islamisation that, if we exclude religiously motivated clashes
in the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was mainly peaceful. From the sixteenth
century, the Oromo ethnic group played a prominent role in these interactions. This
originally pastoralist, nomadic Cushitic tribe took a conciliatory religious approach,
alleviating the Islamic–Christian military conflict. Some of the Oromo converted to
Christianity, while the majority embraced Islam, and their defence of their new reli-
gious identity permitted a form of integration that was sometimes violent and some-
times peaceful. Yet both Muslim and Christian Oromo continued to intermarry, while
maintaining their own religious identities. The Oromo, then, played an important
role in the religious environment of the region and it is on them that this essay will
focus to explore the spread of Islam in Ethiopia from the sixteenth century onwards.
First, however, it is necessary to outline the earlier spread of Islam in the region in the
medieval period.
Christianity had reached the Ethiopian Highlands via Nubia, and Islam also
came on the same route (see Figure 12.1). After embracing Christianity during the
third to fifth century, Nubia’s Islamisation was finally achieved under the Mamluks
in the thirteenth to fifteenth century.7 Nonetheless, the fierce resistance of Christian
Nubia to Arab-Muslim penetration from the seventh century onwards is attested by
different Arabic sources. The Muslim historian of the expansion of Islam, al-Balad-
huri (d. 892), describes the early Arab attacks on Nubia,8 while al-Tabari (d. 923)
portrayed fighting between the Arabs and the Beja, the inhabitants of the territory
to the east of the Nile as far as the Red Sea.9 A further costly invasion ten years later
deterred the Arabs from again attacking ‘those people whose booty is meagre, and
whose spite is great’.10 Instead, in 652 they made a truce, known as the baqt, with
the kingdom of Makuria, which undertook to deliver 360 slaves a year in return
for Egyptian products and an agreement to respect each other’s traders.11 For the
next 500 years, slaves, doubtless acquired from the south or west, were exported to
Egypt, while Arabs settled in the Christian kingdom as traders and miners of gold
and precious stones. Egypt’s Fatimid rulers (969–1170) relied on black slave sol-
diers and their rule coincided with the apogee of Christian Nubia.12 However, crisis
arrived when in 1268 a local Nubian usurper appealed for recognition from the

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 225

Mamluks. Dynastic wars and Egyptian intervention followed: in 1317, a Muslim


ruler (Shekanda) gained control of the remnants of the Nubian realm of Makuria
and, during the following centuries, the Christian presence slowly but steadily dis-
appeared. The end of Christian Nubia was described by the Mamluk historians
al-Maqrizi (d. 1442)13 and al-Nuwayri (d. 1332).14
The presence of churches and buildings in Nubia was not enough to secure the sur-
vival of Christianity within a region where ‘no vestige of royal authority has remained
in their country’, as reported by Ibn Khaldun.15 Arab pastoralism and clan nomadism
brought utter disorder and unceasing warfare.16 Sovereignty in the region passed to
the Funj, an ethnic group whose origin is still unknown today, who conquered the
area and rapidly adopted Islam. The main reasons for the disappearance of the Chris-
tian identity in Nubia are probably the abandonment in the first half of the thirteenth
century of the old Greek-Nubian liturgical language for Coptic on the one hand and
for Arabic on the other, in parallel with the annihilation of the Christian kingdoms.
In contrast, in Ethiopia an independent Christian identity was maintained through
the Fetha Negast (a legal code compiled around 1240), the role of monasticism in
symbiosis with the political role of the dynasty, as well as the historic connection with
the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria, which, in conjunction with the Solomonic leg-
end of origins expressed by the Kebra Negast, helped give birth to a proto-national
tradition.

Islam in Ethiopia, from the Muslim Occupation of the


Coasts to Restoration of the Solomonic Dynasty
(Seventh to Fourteenth Century)
Islam penetrated the Ethiopian Highlands from an early date and one of Ethiopia’s
communities associated with this event is the Argobba. According to Christian tra-
dition, the Argobba were an indigenous population which needed a putative Arab
ancestral origin to legitimise their conversion to Islam. Questions about the Argobba’s
cultural origins have puzzled scholars and laymen alike and, despite the uncertainties
and obscurities, a plethora of hypotheses have been proposed.17 According to Aklilu
Asfaw,18 this term referred to the entrance of the Arabs into the Horn of Africa: Arab
geba, ‘the Arabs have entered’. Although the Argobba today consists of a largely Mus-
lim (96 per cent) population that lives in the ‘Afar, an Islamic region of the country,
4 per cent are affiliated with the Christian Orthodox Church, indicating that, as in
the past, a part of this tribe was linked to the predominantly Christian group of the
Amhara. However, according to local sources in eastern Hararghe, the name Argobba
could also come from the Arabic term al-rujba/rajagib beher, ‘the tutor family’ (rujba
means ‘tutor’ or ‘joints of the fingers’, rawajib), and then historically designated those
who held the ‘right’ knowledge of Islam, the urban elites and the early missionaries
who played a key role in the spread of Islam in the hinterland of the Horn of Africa
from the eleventh century. In any event, the first interpretation does not completely
contradict the second one; both terms confirm that the ‘Afar and Hararghe regions
were among the first to undergo a process of Islamisation. Identifying the precise
geographical area in which the Argobba lived during the early centuries of the Mus-
lim presence in the region is complicated. While Ahmed Hassan Omar argued that,

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226 islamisation

Figure 12.1 Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, showing the main regions
discussed.

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 227

according to local Arabic manuscripts, ‘Argobba’ would designate the inhabitants of


one ancient Muslim city (Goba) in Ifat (which must not be confused with the still
existent city of Goba in the Bale region) and the specific language that they spoke,
eventual confirmation of this would not, however, modify the historical–mythological
origin of this term.19
However, according to Muslim legend, the Muslims of Argobba are to be identified
with the descendants of forty members of the Islamic community who emigrated from
Mecca in 614 to the protection of the Emperor of Aksum. According to Ibn Hisham’s
Sirat Rasul Allah, the biography of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad advised his
followers who were being persecuted by the Quraysh in Mecca that, ‘If you go to
Abyssinia, you will find a king under whom none are persecuted. It is a land of righ-
teousness where God will give you relief from what you are suffering.’20 Muslim leg-
ends praise the piety of the Ethiopian king, who is said to have secretly converted to
Islam.21 Legendary though such accounts are, they serve to emphasise the similarities
between the pre-Islamic and Aksumite civilisations, as is also shown by their proto-
urban societies, their extensive commercial activities and their original plurality of reli-
gions, which culminated in the adoption of a monotheistic faith officially supported by
the political leadership. Just as the Quran is indebted to the Old and New Testament
tradition (apocryphal and not), the Kebra Negast – even if not comparable to Islamic
revelation because it is not considered to represent the divine word – is a product of
the same cultural–religious melting pot that proclaims continuity between the Jewish
tradition of the kings and the new one established in Ethiopia by divine right and certi-
fied by the Ark of the Covenant. If Muhammad was the ‘Seal of Prophecy’ (Q. 33: 40),
Menelik I was the ‘Seal of divine kingship’.
The beginning of the relationship between Islam and the empire of Aksum was
thus peaceful, and Ethiopia was considered a pious country to be exempted from
early Islamic expansionism. It was only with the caliphate of the Umayyad ʿAbd al-
Malik (r. 685–705) that some strategic harbours on the Red Sea began to play a more
important commercial and strategic role. Al-Tabari reports that the Dahlak Islands in
the Red Sea off the Eritrean coast were occupied in the seventh century to transform
them into a penal colony;22 important Qadarite theologians were deported there under
the Umayyad caliph Hisham (r. 724–43).23 The first Arab historian to give us more
precise information about the Aksumite kingdom and its affiliation with the early
Muslim converts in the Horn of Africa is al-Yaʿqubi. In his Kitab al-Buldan (AD 872),
he describes the political situation in the north of the region at the time when the
Beja, a Nilotic–Cushitic population, took advantage of Aksumite decline to create five
kingdoms in the north of Eritrea.24 The Beja were not yet Islamised, but the new faith
began to spread gradually due to the presence of settlements inhabited by Muslims
who worked in the gold mines of the region.25 With the tenth century, a peaceful rela-
tionship based on trade was established between the Aksumite capital Kuʿbar and the
local Yemeni chief Ibrahim Ibn Ziyad (902–4), a Zaydite ruler.26 In the ports of Zailaʿ,
Dahlak and Badiʿ, Muslim traders were tributaries (dhimmī) to the Christian rulers.
After the year 1000, Muslim traders played a significant role in linking the dif-
ferent reaches of ‘Greater Ethiopia’ in a period in which the political rulers of the
region were changing. It was because of this role that Muslim traders were toler-
ated, but they were actively persecuted whenever they attempted to proselytise.
Islamic communities were established in the Benadir, Brava and Merca areas. The

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228 islamisation

geographer al-Idrisi (1100–62) gives a fairly accurate description of their locations


in his geographical treatise written in about 1150, but it is not until the thirteenth
century that we have a depiction of the coastal town of Mogadishu in which Arab,
Persian and perhaps Indian traders lived.27 However, it was probably from the tenth
and eleventh centuries that Arab Muslims left a permanent imprint on the south-
eastern coast of the Horn of Africa through the creation of clans such as the Darod
and Ishaq (still represented today in the region), which were the forerunners of
Somali identity.28
The eleventh and twelfth centuries remain particularly obscure and even the
leading experts in Ethiopian studies have few theories about them. The figure of
Judith or Gudit, who attacked Aksum at the end of the tenth century, was prob-
ably a female ruler of Jewish origin related to the Agaw tribe, according to Edward
Ullendorff,29 or the Queen of the Damot kingdom, led by the Sidamo tribe, for O. G.
Crawford.30 This is significant because, during this period in which Christianity was
in retreat, trade passed increasingly into the hands of Muslim families and clans.
Muslim Amhara and Tigreans known as Jabarti braved the severe hardship of cara-
van life in Ethiopia – attacks by bandits, oppressive tariffs, swollen rivers, steep pla-
teaux and wild beasts – to carry their goods, and in the process ideas and news, from
one region to another. Muslims controlled this trade and the peoples along the route
gradually adopted Islam: first the Cushitic-speaking Somali peoples of the eastern
lowlands, then Semitic speakers on the south-eastern highland fringes, where small
Islamic emirates had existed since the thirteenth century in eastern Shoa and Ifat. As
masters of Egypt, the Fatimids could exert considerable influence on Christian Ethio-
pia, as it was the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria who appointed the Bishop of the
Ethiopian Church. There are some indications that the ruling dynasty of Cairo put
pressure on the Patriarch to ensure that the interests of Islam and Muslim merchants
were safeguarded in Ethiopia. They even interfered in the selection of the metro-
politans sent to the Christian kingdom. However, it seems that there were also often
internal problems between the two churches.31
In 1137, an Agaw prince seized the throne and created the Zagwe dynasty, which
until 1270 ruled a large part of the northern Ethiopian Plateau, seeking legitimacy
through constructing impressive rock-hewn Christian churches in Lalibela, the city of
Zion, or the ‘black Jerusalem’, as it was subsequently described by the first Western
travellers. Christian settlements extended southwards through the eastern lowlands to
the coast at Zailaʿ, in search of higher rainfall and the lure of trade, exchanging slaves,
gold and ivory for salt from the lowlands and imported Islamic luxuries. As Christian
kingdoms retreated further and further onto the Plateau, Muslim traders took control
of the coasts of the Horn, developing their commercial interests and creating local
emirates. However, after Salah al-Din’s reconquest of Jerusalem (1187), in 1189 he
fulfilled a long-standing request of the Zagwe dynasty by reserving the Chapel of the
Finding of the Cross in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and an altar in the Church
of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem for the Abyssinians, an act that would have been
much appreciated. The arrangement has survived till today, confirmed by the presence
of Ethiopian monks at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the thirteenth century,
the Zagwe still controlled a limited part of what had formerly been the Aksumite
kingdom: Tigray, Lasta, Angot and part of the Begamder, and, even if their royal

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 229

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

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230 islamisation

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

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 231

Peace and War, Victory and Defeat: Ethiopian Resistance to


Muslim Encroachment (Fifteenth to Sixteenth Century)
In the reign of Zara Yacob (1434–68), as reported by the Ethiopian Royal Chronicles,
the struggle between the neo-Solomonic dynasty and the emirates of the coast con-
tinued.38 The diplomatic interaction between Zara Yacob’s successors and the ʿAdal
emirate, the main local Islamic sultanate, was characterised by fluctuating policies:
under Baeda Maryam I (1468–78), relations with Badlay b. Saʿd al-Din were peaceful
until his death, while under Iskinder (1478–94), Baeda Maryam’s son who reached
the throne at six years old, regency was granted to his mother, Queen Eleni, who
was a convert to Christianity and daughter of the Muslim king of Hadiya. From her
childhood, Eleni retained awareness of the wider Muslim world and sought to reach a
reconciliation with ʿAdal, not least to promote commercial relations.39
Two new developments arose at the turn of the sixteenth century, making the con-
flict assume a more international aspect: the arrival of the Portuguese and the unifica-
tion of the Muslim emirates of the coast around a local leader, Imam Ahmad b. Ibrahim
al-Ghazi (r. 1506–43).40 After the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa, Vasco da
Gama bombarded the port of Mogadishu and in 1507 established a settlement on the
island of Socotra. The Mamluks were unprepared for the Portuguese naval incursions
and in the first decades of the sixteenth century the Europeans bombed and sacked the
main harbours of Zailaʿ and Berbera. However, after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt
in 1517, which united most of the Islamic Mediterranean world politically, Istanbul
sought to exert control over the Red Sea and the maritime trade routes to the Indian
subcontinent. The struggle between the Portuguese and the Turks for mastery of the
Arabian Sea was destined to have a profound effect upon the Christian kingdom of
Ethiopia and Muslim emirates of the coast.
The Somali and ʿAfar campaigns within the Islamic emirates of the coast, in par-
ticular those of ʿAdal, Ifat and Harar, would cause a hardening in relations with the
inhabitants of the Ethiopian Highlands, but also within the Muslim emirates them-
selves. The emirs first recruited their forces from the ʿAfar tribes, who were lured by
the promise of plunder, but afterwards were soon joined also by Somalis, Banu Jirri,
Zerba, Habr Maqadi and many others. These leaders, of whom the most famous were
Mahfuz and Ahmad b. Ibrahim (both Somali and related to each other), replaced the
title of emir after their first successes with that of imam, transforming the raiding
and pillaging of the inhabitants of the Plateau into a holy war against the Christian
enemy.41 However, without Ottoman supply of firearms to the ʿAfar and Somalis,
they would not have met with such military success: Mahfuz, the Imam of Harar, had
already been killed by Lebna Dengel in the 1517 campaign against his territories.42
However, the early defeat of Mahfuz gave the Christians an exaggerated false sense
of security. None of the first armed conflicts between the two states before 1516 was
sufficiently disastrous to dispel the false notion of military superiority which Lebna
Dengel and his officials continued to presume in their relations with ʿAdal.43
Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Ghazi, nicknamed the Gragn, the ‘left-handed’, by the Ethi-
opians, was able to rebuild Muslim political power in south-eastern Ethiopia. His
marriage to the daughter of Mahfuz assured him the loyalty of his supporters while
the Ottoman–Portuguese conflict for control of the sea routes prompted Istanbul to

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232 islamisation

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)

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 233

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.

The Oromo’s Role in Shaping Ethiopian Interreligious Identity


The other factor that prevented Abyssinia – and indeed ‘Greater Ethiopia’ as a whole
– from returning to a pre-jihad status quo was a series of invasions by an east Cushitic
people from the south, who attenuated the Muslim–Christian antagonism by weaken-
ing the position of both parties.52 These were the Galla, or Oromo. The Oromo pres-
ence, as Donald N. Levine has argued, would moderate Muslim–Christian antagonism
and, over the following centuries, gave rise to a peaceful interreligious interaction that
has survived until modern times (that is, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). It is
therefore important to emphasise that, if a sort of ‘clash of civilisations’ started with
the restoration of the Solomonic dynasty and erupted more violently when the ʿAfar
and Somalis started to receive Ottoman support, it failed to destroy the Tigrinya and
Amhara of Highland Ethiopia and developed increasingly as an interethnic conflict
which assumed religious dimensions.
The first Oromo emigration (the term Galla is today considered particularly offen-
sive) for which there are any documents occurred during the 1520s when they invaded
Bale, although there is evidence for an Oromo presence in the southern part of Ethio-
pia from at least the thirteenth to the fourteenth century.53 During the 1530s, they
crossed the Webi Shabeelle, one of the ever-flowing rivers of the southern Ethiopian–
Somali area, and invaded the Arsi–Bale–Dewaro regions.54 At the height of Ahmad b.
Ibrahim’s expansion, the Oromo had already made significant inroads into Muslim
territory in south-east Ethiopia and, after the amir’s death, it was the Muslims of
Harar who suffered most from the beginning of the Oromo’s geographical reloca-
tion.55 In the 1540s and 1550s, the Oromo penetrated northwards to invade Fatigar
and Shoa, while other groups devastated the Harar region; not until the late sixteenth
or early seventeenth century had they reached Gojjam, Amhara, Wollo and Damot.
By invading parts of the recently Islamised areas of southern Ethiopia from the south,
the Oromo were favouring the Christian resistance in the north. However, they main-
tained an effective equidistance from the religious conflict.
The Oromo’s monotheistic religion, expressed through a belief in the sky god
Waqaa (who acquired different names in different areas), is an expression of a
Cushitic religiosity that dates back to an obscure historical period, probably prior
to the sixteenth century.56 Today, approximately 47 per cent of the Oromo are Sunni
Muslim, 30 per cent are Orthodox Christian and 17 per cent Protestants, while a

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234 islamisation

limited minority remain bound to an indigenous Oromo religious tradition.57 They


had a more markedly egalitarian culture (in comparison with the Somali clan system
and the Amhara hierarchical regal structure) with a complex age-based class system,
through which all men rotated in their lifetime. These branches were organised into a
family clan structure and socially stratified in accordance with the male Gadaa, or age
grade system, which remains in use among the Borana tribe. The classes of Gadaa,
called Luba, are related to the members’ age. A man’s Luba was strictly associated
with that of his father. There were eleven grades of Luba; a man belonged to each
grade for a cycle of eight years and each grade was characterised by a particular set of
rights and responsibilities; members of different Luba had the opportunity to reach
a higher Luba level. Finally, the Oromo popular assembly, called the Gumi Gayo,
established laws that were in force for each eight-year period until the next Gumi
Gayo was held with a new elected leader.58
The Oromo adapted to the new geographical region into which they had
migrated, some of them increasing their skills as pasture tenders and learning to
use horses, others becoming stable farmers. However, their expansion was not cal-
culated to extend political dominion over others, because the aforesaid internal
structure did not at the beginning seek to gain recognition for a central author-
ity to collect tribute or impose a national religious culture. Instead, being Oromo
was probably linked to socio-political projects promoting the political-economic
autonomy and legitimacy of rural civitates, in contrast to the more structured soci-
eties already established within the different areas they reached.59 Oromo leaders in
direct contact with Christian or Muslim areas in the sixteenth to seventeenth cen-
tury began a long process of integration that increased their importance.60 After they
had settled and became Christian or Muslim, the Oromo often intermarried with
the Amhara or the ʿAfar and Somalis. In the southern part of the country, especially
in Bale and Arsi, the Oromo remained the dominant element of the population and
maintained the awama, their traditional folk religion. There they created several
kingdoms, gaining dominance over the indigenous Sidamo or Omotic people of the
area and remaining essentially independent from Ethiopian imperial authority until
the nineteenth century.61 The Oromo, geographically closer to Amharaland than to
Harar, from the sixteenth century onwards absorbed many Abyssinian social and
political institutions, losing their former structure and becoming powerful warrior
tribes independent and antagonistic to each other, whilst many were recruited into
the armies of the Negus.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of the Horn underwent a
process of Islamisation, not as a result of military force, as older scholarship argued,
but with the increasing and predominant role of trade, and this also affected the
Oromo. The Oromo’s integration into Ethiopian society and their partial transfor-
mation into a praetorian guard did not prevent them from converting to Islam; on
the contrary, the Muslim faith became significant as symptomatic of Oromo identity
in regions geographically remote from the Abyssinian capital. The majority of the
Oromo population living in the Islamic southern areas of the Horn – Harar and Arsi–
Bale – gradually adopted Islam from the sixteenth century on, accepting the Imam of
Harar as their nominal master while preserving some aspects of their original culture
and socio-political organisation. Also in these regions, local Islamic authorities started

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 235

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

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236 islamisation

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

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 237

unusual, but paradigmatically connected with the growing interreligious identity of


the Plateau.

Conclusion: The Islamisation of the Ethiopian Highlands and


Ethiopia’s National Identity
The rising power of the Oromo defused the Muslim–Christian clash of civilisations
that characterised the sixteenth century with Ahmad b. Ibrahim’s attempt to annihi-
late the Christian presence from the Ethiopian Highlands (although the Solomonic
dynasty, despite fighting fiercely against the Islamic emirates of the coast, never tried
to extirpate the Muslim presence in the region due to the usefulness of their role as
traders). The rising Oromo role in the Horn of Africa on both sides, the Christian as
well as the Islamic, is due to their great pliability and to the fundamental aspect that
emphasised the roots of a national identity outside a religious dimension. Muslim,
Christian and traditional folk praxis in any case fully shared a clear Oromo iden-
tity, which increased their importance in the Horn regardless of their religious beliefs.
Oromo society today is still multireligious, through a village system in which church
and mosque are not so distant.
We can therefore problematise the process of Islamisation in the Ethiopian High-
lands as follows. First, forced conversion remained rare, especially outside the vio-
lent clashes of the sixteenth century, which nonetheless did not lead to a concrete
transformation of the religious geography of the Plateau. Second, the arrival of the
Oromo preserved the status quo in the south-eastern part of the Ethiopian High-
lands, de facto freezing the interreligious conflict. Third, the process of feudalisation
in Ethiopia, as a response to the internationalisation of the Muslim–Christian con-
flict, helped to defuse the religious clashes of the sixteenth century in an attempt to
preserve its Christian identity. Fourth, the ‘isolationist’ policy of the Ethiopians dur-
ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries resulted in the increasing importance of
Muslim trade activities between the coast of the Horn and the main urban areas of
the Highlands.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the paradigmatic figure of Ligg Yasu, the
son of Ras Mika’el, the chief of the Wollo-Galla region (to whom Menelik had mar-
ried his favourite daughter) who tried to secure his son’s the succession to the throne
with the support of the Wallo tribes, an intermixed, predominantly Muslim, Oromo
people,70 clarified the level that the process of Islamisation in the Ethiopian High-
lands had reached.71 Ligg Yasu’s pro-Islamic orientation, following his accession to the
throne, was the main cause of his defenestration: Christian Ethiopian society could not
approve the existence of an emperor whose Christianity was just a facade. However, it
is important that, after this ‘incident’, Ethiopian society, both Christian and Muslim,
preserved its unity, making it ready for the Italian invasion of the 1930s. The Oromo
ethnic element of Ethiopia can be considered the cornerstone on which the unitarian
national identity of the country has been reshaped in the last centuries. Their interreli-
gious and long-standing assimilation contributed to the end of the Muslim–Christian
clash of the sixteenth century, weakening ʿAfar and Somali attempts to restructure
the internal equilibrium of the Highlands, and keeping them on the geographical and
social margins of contemporary Ethiopian society.

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238 islamisation

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.

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the oromo and islamisation in ethiopia 239

25. Al-Yaʿqubi, Kitab al-Buldan, vol. 2, p. 319.


26. Al-Masʿudi, Muruj al-Dhahab, ed. B. de Meynard and P. de Courteille (Paris: Imprimerie
Imperiale, 1863), vol. 3, p. 34; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 51.
27. Ibn Hawqal, Opus Geographicum auctore Ibn Hawkal, ed. J. H. Kramer (Leiden: Brill,
1938), vol. 1, pp. 50–6.
28. Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, in Roland Olivier (ed.), The Cam-
bridge History of Africa, vol. 3: From c. 1050 to c. 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), p. 138ff.
29. Edward Ullendorff, The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (London:
Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 6ff.
30. O. G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries, circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society,
1958), p. 81ff.
31. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 56.
32. Al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al- Amsar, ed. M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris:
Geuthner, 1927).
33. Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Processes of Ethnic Interaction and Integration in Ethiopian History:
The Case of the Agaw’, The Journal of African History 29, no. 1, special issue in honour of
Roland Olivier (1988), pp. 5–18.
34. Pankhurst, Ethiopian Royal Chronicles, pp. 13–28; al-Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mam-
louks de l’Égypte, vol. 4, p. 183; Levine, Greater Ethiopia, p. 72; Trimingham, Islam in
Ethiopia, p. 70.
35. al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar, pp. 1–2.
36. Alessandro Gori, ‘Sugli Incipit delle missive inviate dalla cancelleria mamelucca ai sovrano
d’Etiopia nel XIV-XV secolo’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, n.s., 1 (2002), pp. 29–44.
37. Tamrat, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, p. 148ff.
38. Pankhurst, Ethiopian Royal Chronicles, pp. 29–40; J. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zara
Ya‘eqob et de Ba’eda Maryam (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1893), p. 88.
39. Šihab ad-Din Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Qader, Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia,
trans. Paul Lester Stenhouse (Los Angeles: Tsehai Publishing, 2003), pp. 7–9.
40. Ibid., pp. 20–1, 45, 54, 57.
41. Ibid., pp. 27–33.
42. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 81ff; Pankhurst, Ethiopian Royal Chronicles,
pp. 49–69.
43. Carlo Conti Rossini, ‘La storia di Lebna Dangel re d’Etiopia’, Rendiconti della Reale Acca-
demia dei Lincei 3 (1894), pp. 624, 635.
44. Šihāb ad-Din, Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, pp. 88, 152, 167, 181, 192.
45. Ibid., pp. 210, 242–52.
46. Ibid., p. 352ff.; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 87.
47. Jon Abbink, ‘An Historical-Anthropological Approach to Islam in Ethiopia: Issues of Identity
and Politics’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 11–12 (1998), p. 114.
48. Özbaran, Salih, The Ottoman Response to European Expansion: Studies on Ottoman-
Portuguese Relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Administration in the Arab Lands
During the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1994).
49. Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300-1700
(Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2015), p. 341.
50. Matteo Salvadore, ‘The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (1555-1634) and the Death of the Pre-
ster John’, in Allison B. Kavey (ed.), World Building and the Early Modern Imagination
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 141–72.
51. Ibid., p. 103.
52. Levine, Greater Ethiopia, pp. 77–8.

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240 islamisation

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
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68. Hussein Ahmad, Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, Ethiopia: Revival, Reform, Reaction
(Brill: Leiden, 2001), p. 71; Abbink, ‘Muslim Monasteries?’, p. 121ff.
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70. Éloi Ficquet and Wolbert G. C. Smidt, The Life and Times of Ligg Yasu of Ethiopia: New
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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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