Ethiopia

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ETHIOPIA

Ethiopia was the third political entity to embrace Christianity after the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Armenia, in 334 c.e. It remained a Christian state, never separating the church from the crown, up to the 1974 revolution. Her long, multifaceted relations with Islam and Muslims can generally be analyzed along two themes. One is the concept of Christian Ethiopia as it has been conceived throughout the ages by Muslim scholars and politicians of the "land of Islam." The other is the role played by Islamic minorities in Ethiopian history. The two aspects, naturally, have developed with dialectical mutuality.

In a way, Ethiopia was the state most affected by Islamic foreign relations. Muhammad's sending of the sahaba (Companions) in 615 and 616 to seek asylum with the Christian king of Ethiopia, al-Najashi Ashama, was also known as the first hijra. The sahaba were saved from Meccan persecutors by the Ethiopian king, and this gesture gave birth to a legacy of eternal gratitude. This history was reflected in the hadith whose essential message was "leave the Ethiopians alone as long as they leave you alone." Most orthodox Muslim jurists, scholars, and moderate politicians interpreted this admonition as a declaration that Christian Ethiopia would be a land of neutrality, dar al-hiyyad. On the other hand, the same sahaba-najashi episode was said to have ended with the najashi (king), in 628 c.e., embracing Islam. This assumption of Ethiopian neutrality in religious matters was interpreted differently by more radical Muslims—pointing to Christian Ethiopia's illegitimacy. This principal argument among Muslims over the legitimacy of historical Ethiopia resurfaced whenever Ethiopia became a subject of the radical Muslim agenda, and it remains an active issue today.

Islamic thought concerning Ethiopia was shaped by dynamic cultural, economic, and strategic relations between the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. It has been also influenced by the presence of Islamic communities within Ethiopia. Muslims lived in Ethiopia from the very beginning of Islam, and tradition has it that members of the sahaba established the first community there, which was tolerated by the Christians. In time Muslims speaking the Semitic Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Tigrinya, etc.) and living in the core regions were called Jabarties. As Ethiopian Christians looked down upon traders and Muslims were often deprived of landowning, there developed a functional economic coexistence, mixed with some cultural segregation, in the country's central areas. Most Muslims during Ethiopia's history were members of various ethnic-linguistic groups surrounding the Ethiopian core. Peoples like the Oromo, Afar, Sidama, Somali, the various tribal groups of today's Eritrea, and various other groups adopted elements of Islamic culture partly due to the long processes of their confrontations with Ethiopia. In medieval times fourteen Islamic emirates, notably Ifat and Adal, centered on the town of Harar, emerged in what is today southern Ethiopia. Their Islamic history culminated in 1529 when, under the leadership of the imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim (nicknamed Gran), they united and conquered Christian Ethiopia for a short period lasting to 1543.

Ahmad Gran's short-lived Islamic unification was inspired by the rise of the Ottomans in the Red Sea area and by simultaneous Islamic scholarly revival in the Arab peninsula. Ulema from Arabia helped the process of Islamic unification by spreading Arabic and the teaching of Islamic law. However, after the demise of Gran the various Islamic groups of the whole region failed to reunite. They remain to this day divided along linguistic, ethnic, and regional criteria. Centers of Islamic learning remained in Harar and in some other towns, but most communities followed popular versions of Sufism and adopted just the basic elements of religious education and law. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Islam flourished again when the Oromo clans began abandoning their sociopolitical system to develop a chain of emirates, and when Egypt captured the Sudan and the Red Sea coast and sent learned men to spread Islam from Harar to its surrounding Oromo-inhabited areas and from the Sudan to western Eritrea. However, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Christian Ethiopian empire expanded and conquered nearly all Ethiopian territories and the people who lived there.The process of assimilation into the Ethiopian state and society in modern times has been multidimensional. Coercive measures and forced Christianization were applied, for example, by Emperor Yohannes IV (1872–1889). In general, however, Muslims, who numbered about one half of the population during this period, remained free to pursue their ways as long as they accepted Christian political hegemony. Where Islam was politicized, or when Muslims adopted Arab identity—like in Eritrea of the 1960s—the Ethiopian leadership, recalling the history of Ahmad Gran, mobilized to stem it. Under Emperor Haile Selasse (1930–1974) only a few Muslims could be counted among the country's political elite. Yet most Muslims, especially the elite, were integrated into Ethiopian life and culture, used the Amharic Ethiopian language, and went on dominating trade in both the periphery and the center.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century Islam seemed to be experiencing a resurgence in Ethiopia. First, the 1974 revolution and Mangistu Haile-Mariam's communist-inspired regime separated the church from the state. By eroding Christianity, and by recognizing major Islamic holidays as national ones, the new regime helped to grant the two religions more equal national recognition. Then the 1991 revolution reshaped Ethiopia along a decentralized cultural and administrative line, meanwhile fostering a free market economy. The end result was a visible strengthening of Islam in practically all aspects. As more Muslims make their way to the core of Ethiopian life, the new phenomenon underlines an old question—is their advent a contribution to cultural pluralization and economic progress, and is it therefore a major aspect of Ethiopia's modernization? Or, is Islamic revival turning political, gradually reviving those old radical ideas about the need to Islamize Ethiopia?