Muslim Ethiopia

The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics, and Islamic Reformism

Terje Østebø, P. Desplat

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137322098
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on international and multidisciplinary expertise, this pioneering edited collection analyzing Islam in contemporary Ethiopia challenges the popular notion of a 'Christian Ethiopia' imagined as the century-old, never colonized Abyssinia, isolated in the highlands and dominated by Orthodox Christianity.

PART I

CAPACITIES, CONSTRAINTS, NEW WAYS OF LIVING

CHAPTER 1

MUSLIMS STRUGGLING FOR RECOGNITION IN CONTEMPORARY ETHIOPIA

Dereje Feyissa

INTRODUCTION

According to the 2007 census, Muslims constitute around 34 percent of Ethiopia’s 74 million people, making them the second largest religious group in Ethiopia after the country’s dominant religious group, Orthodox Christians (43 percent). Islam in Ethiopia had an auspicious beginning, thanks to the hospitality the companions of the Prophet Muhammad got from a benevolent Christian king in the seventh century A.D. during their migration to Axum, also referred to as the first hijra. The geographical proximity of Ethiopia to Arabia and the flourishing long-distance trade between the two as well as the disavowal of trade as a dignified vocation by the Christians had also provided a commercial inlet for Islam to Ethiopia’s hinterland. As early as the ninth century, an Islamic Sultanate was established in central Ethiopia—the Makzumite dynasty—followed by the wide variety of other Islamic principalities in the medieval period in present-day south-eastern Ethiopia (Taddesse Tamrat 1972; Trimingham 1952).

From early on, however, Islam in Ethiopia had to deal with a politically entrenched (Orthodox) Christianity that flourished under and helped flourish the Ethiopian state, a political intimacy that lasted over millennia. Ethiopia’s secular turn during the popular revolution of 1974, the 1991 regime change and the modest liberal opening, Muslims’ enhanced access to education, and improved communication technology and means of transportation have, on the other hand, created new fields of possibility for Islam in Ethiopia and its global articulation. Notwithstanding these enabling structures, Islam in contemporary Ethiopia still faces enduring constraints particularly the caveats put on its organizational and public expressions as well as its securitization in a geo-political context, that is, Ethiopia’s role as one of the “anchor states” in the so-called global war on terror.

This chapter examines how Ethiopian Muslims strive to build agency to overcome the aforementioned enduring constraints. In addition to the identity politics of Ethiopian Muslims in the homeland, the chapter also discusses the active involvement of the Ethiopian Muslims diaspora in Europe and North America, particularly the transnational politics of the two well-established diaspora organizations, the US-based Badr-Ethiopia and the Network of Ethiopian Muslims in Europe (NEME). Besides the various media outlets the Muslim diaspora use to reach out to their members in the diaspora and in the homeland, they have also sent delegations to Ethiopia to dialog with the political leadership of the country. The chapter particularly refers to the 2007 delegation of the Muslim diaspora to Ethiopia and the 17-page document it produced entitled Questions Raised by the Ethiopian Muslims Diaspora to Prime Minster Meles Zenawi, which outlined and articulated the prominent Ethiopian Muslims’ rights issues.¹

Throughout the chapter, Ethiopian Muslims are not portrayed merely as subjects enabled and constrained by changing socio-political structures but as agents of history actively engaged in making use of and expanding the new possibilities, surmounting the constraints, and contesting the country’s public space through creative narratives of entitlement. The discussion is divided into four sections. Section I describes and analyzes the narrative strategy of Muslims’ struggle for recognition with a special reference to how the first hijra is signified to build legitimacy for current citizenship rights claims. Section II discusses how Ethiopian Muslims have reframed their historical marginality in the globally recognized legitimizing discourse of the human right language. Section III analyzes how Muslims have contested the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) variety of assertive secularism by referring to alternative models of secularism that recognize public manifestations of faith and complimentary exchanges between state and religion. Section IV discusses the incipient forms of political mobilization on the basis of religious identity within a political structure that is otherwise built on an ethnic edifice.

MUSLIMS RENEGOTIATING MARGINALITY IN CONTEMPORARY ETHIOPIA

Islam in Ethiopia is as old as Islam itself, tracing its origin back to the coming of the sahaba, Muhammad’s first followers, in 615 A.D. Despite the historical depth of Islam in Ethiopia, Muslims have been marginalized by the Christian political elites in social and political terms within the Ethiopian polity. Political reforms since the 1970s have significantly redressed the issue of religious inequality in Ethiopia (Hussein Ahmed 2006). The secularist turn since the revolution in 1974 brought an end to a state-religion in the history of the country. Islam also attained greater visibility in the public sphere in post-1991 Ethiopia, evident in the recognition of Muslim holidays as national holidays, the construction of many mosques, recognition of the Islamic heritage of the country, as well as greater articulation of Ethiopian Muslims with the wider Islamic world, thanks to the lifting of the ban on imported religious texts and the new freedom of movement (Carmichael 1996; Desplat 2005; Dereje Feyissa 2011a).

Nevertheless, there are still enduring constraints that Muslims face as a community in “post-imperial” and “post-socialist” Ethiopia. One of these enduring constraints is the securitization of Islam in Ethiopia in the context of regional and global geopolitics. The political rise of Islamists in the Horn of Africa—Somalia and the Sudan—as well as Ethiopia’s participation in the so-called global war on terror have prompted the government and members of the Christian population to view Islamic revivalism primarily through a “national security” lens. According to David Shinn (2002: 1), “Prime Minister Meles Zenawi commented in the mid-1990s that the most significant long-term threat to Ethiopia’s security is Islamic fundamentalism.” Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia to oust the Islamic Courts Union (IUC) in 2006 and the political alliance between Somalia’s Islamists and Eritrea since then have also heightened the government’s preoccupation with security (Barnes and Hassan 2007). This concern has been translated into a tighter control over the Islamic leadership of the country and an assertive secularism that limits manifestations of faith in public institutions—such as the controversy surrounding women’s veiling and communal prayer in educational institutions. In the following sections, I discuss the various strategies Muslims have used in their struggle for recognition as Ethiopian citizens and their religious identity as Muslims.

THE SEARCH FOR INCLUSIVE NARRATIVES

Narratives play a crucial role in building legitimacy for a cause. As Robert Rotberg (2006: 4) noted, “at the heart of narratives of struggle and response is collective memory” and “such memory need not reflect truth; instead, it portrays a truth that is functional for a group’s ongoing existence …. The social reality of the present explains the past.” One of the strategies Muslims use in their struggle for recognition as Ethiopian citizens is to signify the al-Najashi narrative—the story of the coming of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad to Ethiopia in 615 A.D., and their protection by King al-Najashi and the belief in his ultimate conversion into Islam—as a means to renegotiate the presentation of Muslims by the Christians as “foreigners.” This is a political discourse that was intimately connected to Muslims’ experience as second-class citizens, and related to the ownership claims of the Ethiopian nation by the dominant Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox Church has claimed the “soul” of the Ethiopian nation on the basis of its intimacy with the Ethiopian state until the revolutionary rift between church and state in 1974 (Abbink 1998; Taddesse Tamrat 1972). Nearly four decades later, however, the semantic of the Ethiopian nation is still contested by the various religious groups through competing narratives of entitlement. For the followers of the Orthodox Church, Ethiopia is a “chosen nation.” According to this narrative, God has transferred His grace from Israel to Ethiopia since the tenth century B.C., evident in the belief in the transfer of the Ark of the Covenant from Zion to Axum and the establishment of the Ethiopian monarchy by Menelik I, the son of Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheba and Israel’s King Solomon (Brooks 1996). Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church also produce evidence for their being “chosen” by referring to the fact that Ethiopia is mentioned more than 40 times in the bible (Ullendorff 1968). As John Markakis has noted,

The official myth presented Ethiopia as a purely Christian state. In a speech before the United States Congress, Haile Selassie described his country as an island of Christianity in a sea of Islam. This myth was widely accepted abroad, and was propagated by the first generation of foreign scholars who studied this country.

(2003: 2)

As such, throughout the imperial period, Muslims were not referred to as Ethiopian Muslims but “Muslims in Ethiopia,” although Islam in Ethiopia spread primarily through the works of indigenous missionaries, and except for a small trickling of Arab missionaries and traders, the bulk majority of the Muslims are indigenous people (Hussein Ahmed 2006). In fact, with the exception of some groups of the western Nilotes and in some parts of southern Ethiopia, Muslims are represented nearly in all ethnic groups. The Orthodox Church’s claim over the historical “ownership” of the Ethiopian nation is currently justified by its neo-conservative wing largely represented by the educated youth known as Mahabere Qidusan (Association in the Name of Saints). The following is an excerpt from the interview with two prominent members of the Mahabere Qidusan leadership:

We wonder why we [Orthodox Christians] are singled out in the discourse of identification of a nation with a certain faith. Look everywhere and you see the same. Even the largest democracy, the U.S., is identified with the Protestant Church. Isn’t it the case that all American Presidents swear on the bible upon assuming the office? Isn’t it the case that Saudi Arabia will remain a Muslim country no matter how multicultural it becomes? With us it is even different. We have accommodated religious minorities much more than any other country. It is an Axumite [Orthodox] king who protected Muslims when they were persecuted in their own country by their own people, though this is not duly acknowledged by radical Muslims in contemporary Ethiopia who claim otherwise; as if the king who they call al-Najashi became a Muslim. Who would deny that the Orthodox Church is the major contributor in the making of the Ethiopian nation and a repository of its history and values?²

The various religious groups currently contest Orthodox Christians’ “ownership” claim of the Ethiopian nation.³ Muslims have also been actively engaged in contesting the parameters of Ethiopian national identity and in renegotiating their “foreignness” as presented by the Christians and implicit in the thinking of the various Ethiopian governments. Many Muslims in the homeland and in the diaspora have focused in their writing on deconstructing the image of Ethiopia as a Christian island. They have reasoned that such a representation not only is historically unfounded but also seriously undermines the process of state reconstruction and democratization of the Ethiopian polity. In one of its commentaries, for instance, the diaspora organization NEME has contested the Orthodox Christians’ claim of indignity while asserting Islam’s long presence in Ethiopia in the following manner:

It is to be noted that the Ethiopian state preceded all the Abrahamic religions. Well before the introduction of Christianity to Ethiopia in the 4^th [sic] A.D. the Axumite had already built a sophisticated non-Christian civilization. Like Christianity, Islam was also introduced to Ethiopia from the Middle East at the same time when it was being established in Saudi Arabia. Any ownership claim of the Ethiopian state and its history is thus not only a-historical but also poses danger to the peace and security of the country. Instead of engaging in the fruitless debate on first-comer/late-comer we should combat all forms of religious extremism and build our common nation.⁴

Ahmadin Jebel, an activist and a leading Muslim intellectual in Ethiopia, has forcefully argued in his recent book along the same line in deconstructing the EOC’s nativist claim by highlighting its origin and expansion to Arab missionaries in the following way:

The Arabs had played an important role not only for the expansion of Islam in Ethiopia but also for Christianity as well. To cite just two evidences: the person who converted the first Ethiopian king to Orthodox Christianity in the 4th century A.D. was the Syrian Bishop Frumentius. Similarly, the nine saints who introduced Christianity to the masses in the 5th century were also Syrians.

(Ahmadin Jebel 2011: 87, author’s translation from Amharic)

Avidly, the discursive practice of Muslims—deconstructing the official Ethiopian history in order to make national reconstruction on an inclusive basis attainable—is focalized on the al-Najashi narrative, which they prestigiously refer to as “the first hijra.” The coming of the sahaba to Ethiopia (Axum) and the hospitality they received from the Christian king is well established by many scholars (Erlich 1994; Hussein Ahmed 1996; Trimingham 1952). What is contested is whether the Axumite king embraced Islam or not. Ethiopian Muslims call this Axumite king al-Najashi, and they believe that he was converted to Islam and became the first Muslim king outside of Arabia. In fact, he is considered as a Muslim saint (Hussein Ahmed 1996: 59). In the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tradition he is recognized as King Armha, who gave protection to the persecuted Muslims but who remained Christian. To the extent the Orthodox Church evokes the al-Najashi narrative, which it rarely does, it is in the sense of claiming a higher moral ground, that is, to signify its “tolerant” attitude toward religious minorities. Otherwise, the Orthodox Church vehemently rejects Muslims’ claim that it considers as a “scramble over Ethiopian history” (EOC 2008), or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Muslims in Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics, and Islamic Reformism
• Part I: Capacities, Constraints, New Ways of Living
• Part II: Islam, Identity, and Reform
• Part III: Ethiopian Muslims and the Horn of Africa
• Postscript
• List of Contributors
• Index