Muslim Ethiopia
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Muslim Ethiopia The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics, and Islamic Reformism Edited by Patrick Desplat and Terje Østebø
MUSLIM ETHIOPIA Copyright Patrick Desplat and Terje Østebø, 2013. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-32529-7 All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-45931-5 DOI 10.1057/9781137322098 ISBN 978-1-137-32209-8 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Muslim Ethiopia : the Christian legacy, identity politics and Islamic reformism / Patrick Desplat and Terje Østebø. p. cm. 1. Islam Ethiopia. 2. Muslims Ethiopia. 3. Ethiopia Religion. I. Desplat, Patrick. II. Østebø, Terje. BP64.E8M87 2013 297.0963 dc23 2012042660 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: April 2013 10987654321
Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Foreword Benjamin F. Soares vii ix xi Muslims in Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics, and Islamic Reformism 1 Patrick Desplat and Terje Østebø Part I Capacities, Constraints, New Ways of Living 1 Muslims Struggling for Recognition in Contemporary Ethiopia 25 Dereje Feyissa 2 Being Young, Being Muslim in Bale 47 Terje Østebø 3 Religious Change and the Remaking of Boundaries among Muslim Afar Pastoralists 71 Simone Rettberg Part II Islam, Identity, and Reform 4 The Formation of Trans-Religious Pilgrimage Centers in Southeast Ethiopia: Sitti Mumina and the Faraqasa Connection 91 Minako Ishihara 5 The Gendering Discourse in the Debates of Religious Orthodoxy 115 Meron Zeleke 6 Wali Venerating Practices, Identity Politics, and Islamic Reformism among the Siltie 139 Zerihun A. Woldeselassie
vi Contents 7 Against Wahhabism? Islamic Reform, Ambivalence, and Sentiments of Loss in Harar 163 Patrick Desplat Part III Ethiopian Muslims and the Horn of Africa 8 Islam, War, and Peace in the Horn of Africa 187 Haggai Erlich 9 Transborder Islamic Activism in the Horn of Africa, the Case of Tadamun the Ethiopian Muslim Brotherhood? 201 Stig Jarle Hansen 10 Ahlu Sunna wa l-jama a in Somalia 215 Roland Marchal and Zakaria M. Sheikh Postscript 241 Terje Østebø List of Contributors 259 Index 261
List of Figures 3.1 The case study area within Ethiopia 73 3.2 The new mosque in Leas (2009) (Photo: Simone Rettberg) 79 4.1 Pilgrimage centers of the Faraqasa connection 93 4.2 Gubba Qoricha residence of Sitti Mumina (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 96 4.3 The rock where Sitti Mumina was converted (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 96 4.4 Hadra bet built at Zaliba (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 98 4.5 The Qubba of Shaykh Ali Jami (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 98 4.6 The hadra bet of Gubba Guutu (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 99 4.7 The hadra bet at Araya (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 100 4.8 The Qubba and the Segennet 101 4.9 The Qubba of Sitti Mumina (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 101 4.10 The Segennet (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 102 4.11 Layout of the buildings in the compound of Segennet 102 4.12 The collective possession ceremony (Photo: Minako Ishihara) 106
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Acknowledgments The thematic focus of this book grew out of a series of scholarly discussions over the past decade between Terje Østebø and Patrick Desplat. Several chapters of the book were initially presented at the workshop Transforming Identities and New Representations of Muslims in Contemporary Ethiopia, organized by the editors at the University of Bergen in September 2010. We gratefully acknowledge the many ways in which colleagues who participated in the workshop contributed to its success. To broaden the regional and thematic scope of the volume, we invited additional contributions (Meron Zeleke, Roland Marchal, and Zakaria M. Sheekh). We are grateful to the University of Bergen, Christian Michelsen Institute (Bergen), NLA University College (Bergen), and Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) for generously funding the workshop. Thanks go also to the discussants, Lovise Aalen, Johan Helland, and Benjamin F. Soares, for providing important scholarly inputs. We thank Integra Software Services for their editorial work. Any edited volume that brings together essays covering historically and ethnographically diverse Muslim societies and languages poses considerable challenges with regard to uniform transliteration of the different dialects of Arabic and other languages spoken in these societies (Amharic, Oromo, Gurage, and Ge Sinan). To ensure consistency in transliteration, we adopted simplified Arabic transliteration, leaving out diacritics. The plural of words has been formed by the addition of an s to the singular, except in such cases as ulama and awlia in which the transliterated plural form has become standard. During the initial organization of the workshop, our colleague and friend Prof. Hussein Ahmed from the History Department of the Addis Ababa University (AAU) in Ethiopia passed away all of a sudden. He was an internationally renowned scholar on Islam in Ethiopia and would have contributed to the success of this book in many ways. We would like to dedicate this volume to him and his tireless efforts to study Islam in Ethiopia. We also would like to thank Burke Gerstenschlager, Lani Oshima, Devon Wolfkiel at Palgrave Macmillan, and Flora Kenson at Integra Software Services for terrific assistance in the publication process. Patrick Desplat, Cologne (Germany), and Terje Østebø, Gainesville (the USA), May 2012
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Foreword Benjamin F. Soares This volume provides a series of very rich studies of Islam and Muslims in Ethiopia, and its publication marks a major turning point in the academic study of Islam in Ethiopia and in the Horn of Africa more generally. It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, Muslims and their religion have come under heightened scrutiny. As Mahmood Mamdani so perspicaciously noted, many commentators, scholars, policy makers, and governments have eagerly sought to identify the good and the bad Muslims throughout the world. Ethiopia, with its long and deep Christian legacy famously called a Christian island in a sea of Muslims where more than one-third of the population (according to recent Ethiopian government statistics, though possibly even more) is Muslim, has provided a particularly revealing case of how such simplistic thinking about Islam has been reproduced, even by some scholars. Local Ethiopian Muslims have been assumed in the present to be peaceful and tolerant, mutually coexisting with their non-muslim neighbors. After September 11, 2001, various commentators have warned about possible nefarious outside influences usually from Saudi, Iranian, or Arab Gulf states upsetting such presumed harmonious relations in the country and the broader region more generally. Of course, the longstanding anarchy and strife in Somalia since the early 1990s have also fueled such concerns and fostered the creation of many instant experts on Islam in the Horn of Africa. In contrast to such facile analyses of Islam in the Horn, this collection brings together a stellar group of scholars working in the humanities and social sciences who go beyond the bland platitudes about Ethiopia s allegedly timeless religious tolerance, recycled narratives about Muslim marginalization and victimization, and recent media hype about imminent religious conflict to explore ways of being Muslim, the visibility of Islam and Muslims in public space since the early 1990s, and the shifting politics of identification and belonging in Ethiopia. They interrogate the long, complex Christian Muslim legacy and explore in considerable detail the diversity of contemporary Muslim reform movements and
xii Foreword those Muslims opposed to such reform movements in various places in Ethiopia. The volume also helpfully sets the case of Ethiopia within the broader regional context in the Horn of Africa. It is a most welcome addition to the study of Islam in Ethiopia and in Africa more generally. Indeed, it takes up some of the issues raised in my and René Otayek s edited collection, Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Desplat and Østebø s collection about Ethiopia and the Horn will most certainly engender discussion and debate about Islam and Muslim politics and also help to encourage others to follow their example of such careful and valuable research.