Ethiopia is one of the oldest countries in the world, preserved until now. It is this state that helped to establish Islam by adopting its territory and providing protection to the first Muslims who resettled there because of the oppression of the pagans of Mecca. How is Islam in Ethiopia today?
Its story reflected tensions between the institution of imperial power and various power structures, on the one hand, and between the diversity of ethnic, linguistic and regional identities, on the other. This tension, between the tendencies towards centralization and decentralization, has been and remains the main axis of the history of Ethiopia.
“Thus, briefly reviewing the history of Ethiopian Islam,” Edward Ullendorf, one of the leading and well-known Ethiopians, wrote in 1960, “this is possible because Islam was no more than an element of secondary importance in understanding the essence of Ethiopia”
However, since then science has reached a deeper understanding of the problem, and historians have gained a wider angle of view. He who tries to study the history of Ethiopia only in the aspect of leading Christian culture is content with an incomplete picture.
“Islam and Ethiopia,” should deepen and balance our understanding of the problems of Ethiopian history. Islam and its carriers - Muslims played a full and sometimes even decisive role in the history of Ethiopia. Their share in it is constantly increasing.
Islam in the Middle East, from the beginning of its appearance in the early medieval era to the present day, was for Ethiopia more than a neighbor, a powerful religion and a great empire, constantly challenging it. In the Middle Ages, Muslims turned into Ethiopia into an internal factor, part of the country's life.
Since the beginning of the New Age, the number of Muslims in Ethiopia has steadily increased, and at the beginning of the 20th century, it was equal to the number of Christians.
For many generations, the Muslim communities of Ethiopia did not seek to shake the hegemony of Christianity as the state religion and the basis of the official culture of the country, but they achieved great success in the struggle for their own survival in the Christian environment, for incorporating into important areas of Ethiopian life and made an invaluable contribution to the economic development of the country.
Islam in Ethiopia seems to have reached unprecedented prosperity and perhaps even rises for the first time to a level that allows it to compete with the claim of Christianity to be exceptional as a culture of the Ethiopian elite. The Ethiopian Muslim historian of our time, Professor Hussein Ahmed, responded to the above statement.
In any case, for centuries, the history of Ethiopian Islam revolved around the axis of dialogue between an organized state and the dominant culture and diversity of communities representing Ethiopian minorities. Christianity, beginning with its first steps in antiquity and until the revolution of 1974, consistently realized itself as a religion of the state imperial order, a religion representing a culture based on the ownership of land, agricultural and military spheres.
Islam was adopted in the Horn of Africa by those who wanted, as far as possible, not to be absorbed by a system based on the aforementioned values, and to take them as the basis of their existence. By accepting Islam in this corner of the world, various tribes, representatives of certain language groups, nomads, traders, shepherds, certain ethnic groups, etc.
The members of these groups or their part defined themselves as Muslims in order to consolidate their own identity, and sometimes even build their own political structures based on the value system of Islam. As a result, Islamic communities were separated not only from Christian culture but also from each other.
The Muslim communities of the Horn of Africa were distinguished by a variety of languages, lifestyles, occupations and geographic conditions, and only occasionally overcome the differences and unite. Islam, born in the neighboring Middle East as a religion that harmoniously united religious and political spheres, did not realize itself in this form in the Horn of Africa.
Islam in the East flourished as a victorious ideology of a single state, organized urban culture, a system of worship, education and the rule of law, using the Arabic language and writing. In the Middle East, it has become a “religion and state”, a system of imperial institutions and values.
In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopian Christianity took over this function, creating the imperial political system, and Islam spread mainly as an auxiliary tool for preserving, and even for political conservation, such phenomena as tribalism, fragmentation, and ethnolinguistic isolation.
In the political sense, the Muslims of the Horn of Africa defined themselves according to the ethnic-lingual criterion - as Somalis, Sidama, Oromo, Afar, etc., that is, in separate groups. Usually, it was only in such small groups — in which, by the way, not all members became Muslims — did Islam help create a local government, dynasty, or princely authority.
Muslims among them carried out their religious life, for the most part, in the absence of Arabic-speaking institutions of education that are classical for a Muslim society, as well as a political expression for the concept of the “nation of Islam” (Ummah ), as a structure uniting all "faithful".
Islam existed mainly as a spiritual framework of disparate communities, as a form of organizing local groups grouped around mosques and structures of the Islamic court, as the basis of primary education, social institutions, local government and religious hierarchy operating in the languages mentioned.
And among the native speakers of the Amharic language and the Tigrinya - as can be seen, quite noticeable quantitatively Muslim communities appeared already in the first century of the existence of Islam. Most of these Muslims were engaged in trade and craft, and this, as it were, filled a niche in the functioning of a Christian society engaged in agriculture and military affairs.
If we were to headline this section “Islam in Ethiopia,” we would have to concentrate on the history of a private phenomenon, the history of the Christian state, and Muslims as one of its constituent parts. However, such a picture would be incomplete.
The history of Ethiopian Islam did not take place on a distant island, on which two religions have retired (and also, by the way, others). It took place in close proximity to the countries that formed the core of the Islamic world, the Middle East of our days, the region of birth and development for many generations of Islam, as a victorious symbiosis of religion and politics.
In order to try to cover the entire complexity of this historical phenomenon, both in its internal relations and its strong orientation to the Islamic world around, and “Islam and Ethiopia," in the period of unprecedented flourishing of Islam, an onslaught that heralds the beginning of revolutionary changes in relations between the two main religions of Ethiopia.