A Modern History of the Somali. I. M. Lewis
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managed to infiltrate through the main mass of the Galla. In this way, by as early as the thirteenth century, some sections of the Hawiye had established themselves close to the Arab settlement of Merca. The occupation of this region by the Hawiye at this time is recorded by the geographer Ibn Sa‘id, and this is the earliest known mention of any Somali group.3 Local tradition throws further light on the position and suggests that these Hawiye intruders had already been preceded by other Somali groups including several sections of the Digil. These earlier pioneers had apparently settled for a time on the Shebelle River, and had then crossed the river to move towards the coast. Thus, in the thirteenth century, the position apparently was that the coastal region between Itala and Merca was occupied by the Hawiye Somali: farther south and towards the interior lay the Digil; and finally to the west the Oromo were still dominant.
In this general area local tradition has most to say of the Ajuran, a clan tracing descent from a noble Arabian patriarch on the same pattern as the Darod and Isaq, but related maternally to the Hawiye. Under a hereditary dynasty, the Ajuran consolidated their position as the masters of the fertile reaches of the lower Shebelle basin and established a commercial connexion with the port of Mogadishu where some of their own clansmen were also settled. The fortunes of this Ajuran Sultanate thus appear to have been closely linked with those of Mogadishu, and the Ajuran reached the summit of their power in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century when Mogadishu was ruled by the Muzaffar dynasty,4 an aristocracy related to the Ajuran if not actually of Ajuran stock. Later, the two centres declined about the same time; but this is again to anticipate.
The holy wars against Abyssinia
Before pursuing these Somali migrations, we must refer briefly to the prolonged struggle further inland between the expanding Abyssinian Kingdom and the loose congeries of Islamic states including Ifat, Dawaro, Bale and Hadiya, lying to the south-east of the Christian Amhara Highlands. Here our reconstruction of events from oral tradition is supplemented by written records from both Christian and Muslim sources. These show that by the thirteenth century the Muslim state of Ifat which included Adal and the port of Zeila was ruled by the Walashma’, a dynasty then claiming Arab origins. Early in the fourteenth century, Haq ad-Din, Sultan of Ifat, turned the sporadic and disjointed forays of his predecessors into a full-scale war of aggression, and apparently for the first time, couched his call to arms in the form of a religious war against the Abyssinian ‘infidels’. At first the Muslims were successful. Christian territory was invaded, churches razed, and Christians forced to apostasize at the point of the sword. In 1415, however, the Muslims were routed and the ruler of Ifat, Sa‘d ad-Din, pursued and eventually killed in his last stronghold on the island off the coast of Zeila which to this day bears his name. From this period the Arab chroniclers refer to Adal as the ‘Land of Sa‘d ad-Din’. This crushing defeat, and Sa‘d ad-Din’s martyrdom, for his death soon came to be regarded in this light, took place in the reign of the Abyssinian Negus Yeshaq (1414–29) and it is in the songs celebrating his victories over the Muslims that the name ‘Somali’ is first recorded.
The Abyssinian victories and the temporary occupation of Zeila itself dealt a severe blow to the Muslim cause: Sa‘d ad-Din’s sons fled to Arabia where they found refuge with the King of Yemen. Yet they were able to return after a few years; and the Walashma’ dynasty then assumed the title of Kings of Adal, and moved their capital to Dakkar, to the east of Harar, farther from the threat of Abyssinian attack. After almost a hundred years of tranquillity Adal had recovered sufficiently for a new onslaught against the Christians, and in Imam Ahmad Ibrahim al-Ghazi (or ‘Gran’) (1506–43), the Muslims had at last found the charismatic leadership they sought. The origins of Ahmad Gran, ‘the left-handed’ as he was known to Muslims and Christians alike, are appropriately obscure.5 But under his leadership resounding victories were won. Equipped with cannons imported through Zeila, his armies penetrated eventually into the heart of Abyssinia after a series of savage battles which are still vividly recalled today.
Somali contingents played a notable part in the Imam’s victories and Shihab ad-Din, the Muslim chronicler of the period writing between 1540 and 1560, mentions them frequently.6 Most prominent were the Darod clans of the Harti faction who were now in possession of the ancient port of Mait in the east, and expanding westwards and southwards from this centre. This Darod support was reinforced by ties of marriage, for the Imam was related by marriage to one of the Darod leaders. The Isaq Somali are not mentioned by name, but one branch of them appear to have participated in the Imam’s campaigns; and some Dir groups were also involved. Yet the bulk of Gran’s Somali forces were drawn from the Darod clansmen, one of whose leaders was his namesake and often confused with the Imam himself. It was probably about this period too, that the Majerteyn Darod clan developed their sultanate which came to control much of the coast of north-east Somalia and whose later history consequently belongs to that of the coastal settlements generally.
The effective participation of these pastoral Somali nomads, renowned ‘cutters of roads’ in the words of the Muslim chronicler, indicates the greatness of the powers of leadership – spiritual as well as temporal – of the Imam. For the northern Somali have never had strongly developed hierarchical government and were certainly not accustomed to joining together in common cause on so wide a front. Few indeed are the occasions in Somali history when so many disparate and mutually hostile clans have combined together with such great effect, however ephemeral their unity.
As might readily have been anticipated, this extraordinary outburst of Muslim enterprise was not long sustained. Both sides invoked foreign aid; the Abyssinians turning to the Portuguese now at the height of their power in the Red Sea, while the Muslims sought support from the Turks. After some further successes, Imam Ahmad unwisely dismissed his Turkish contingents and in 1542 was routed near Lake Tana by Galawdewos, the reigning Emperor of Abyssinia. The Imam was killed and Galawdewos’s victory marked the turning point in the fortunes of Abyssinia. Although the Muslims, with Harar as their new headquarters, continued the struggle, they were unsuccessful, and the glorious victories of the Imam were never repeated. Both sides had now to contend with a new menace in the form of the massive Oromo invasion from the south-west. In these circumstances Adal declined rapidly, and from Harar the capital was transferred in 1577 to the oasis of Aussa in the scorching Danakil deserts where it was hoped to be secure from further Abyssinian attack. Here, however, it was regularly harried by the Galla invaders who by this time had swept through Abyssinia; and it was ultimately overthrown by the local nomadic Danakil (‘Afar), its ancient dynasty disappearing towards the end of the seventeenth century.
Adal’s confines have thus a shifting and fluid history, and although Somali played so striking a part in the sixteenth-century conquest of Abyssinia, it is not yet clear to what extent they formed part of this Muslim state at other periods. Since, however, in addition to Zeila, Berbera, and Mait, at least twenty other Muslim towns flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Somali hinterland, it seems that at this time at any rate the Muslim state must have exerted some influence on the Somali of these regions.7
The aftermath of the holy wars with Abyssinia
Ahmad Gran’s campaigns had at least two major effects on the history of Abyssinia and the Horn. First, Ahmad’s appeal to the Turks led to the Turkish occupation in 1557 of Massawa and Arkikio in what is now Eritrea. And although the initial Turkish attempt to extend their authority into Abyssinia was defeated to the extent that in 1633 the Turkish garrison was withdrawn from Massawa, and a local Beja chieftain installed as Ottoman representative, Turkish pretensions to the coast lingered on to become extremely important again in the nineteenth century. Secondly, and more immediately, Ahmad’s campaigns seem to some extent to have prepared the ground for the great Galla invasion from the south-west which followed his death. The Oromo in conquering hordes thrust far up into northern Abyssinia where they became an equal scourge to Muslims and Christians alike. This new factor, the subsequent recovery of Abyssinia, and the decline of Adal appear to have effectively closed the gateway to further Somali expansion in the west, thus causing the Somali to press increasingly upon their southern Galla neighbours and hence sustaining, and even reinforcing the latter’s massive invasion of Abyssinia.
By this time some Darod and Dir