Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Religion, Language, and Nat i o n a l i s m 2 3 1of thousands of Ethiopians were forced against their wills to relocate to otherparts of the country, military conscription was implemented, and tens of thousandswere assassinated by state military and police forces. In order to claimthe corpses of the victims, family members had to pay for each bullet that hadbeen fired to kill their loved one. Although many Muslims were initially happyto see a change in government, the Derg’s brutality soon disillusioned them.Therefore, huge numbers of young Harari fled not only their hometown butalso their country, seeking new and better lives abroad. The national andglobal dispersal of Harari people over the last half century and the present-dayEthiopian government’s political emphasis on ethnicity as an administrativec a t e g o ry add layers of complexity to any attempt to understand the effects ofc o n t e m p o r a ry policies on group identity among Ethiopians, including theMuslim Harari.Islamic Revivalism in the 1990sIt is important to situate recent events in Harar within larger nationalprocesses, one of which is Islamic revivalism. Unfortunately, Islamic revivalismin Ethiopia has been little researched, even though Ethiopian magazines,newsletters, Internet sites, and even scholarship have averred that it will helpsplit the country. Hussein Ahmed is one of the few scholars to study the phenomenonseriously. He found that Ethiopian Muslims’ historical grievancesagainst Christian-dominated governments began to wane in the early 1990s,when Islam made considerable gains in various spheres of Ethiopian life (Hussein1994). Hussein also argued, based on his reading of books, newspapers,magazines, and pamphlets published by Islamic presses in Ethiopia, thatthroughout the 1990s Islam in Ethiopia was not fundamentalist but, rather,resurgent. That is, rather than espousing a return to strict literal interpretationsof the Qur’an and s u n n a as the basis of life, Ethiopian Muslims derivedinspiration from Islamic movements in other countries and sought to reinvigorateEthiopian Islamic practice along lines they deemed more “religiously correct.”Toward this end, Ethiopians went to study in the Middle East, establishednew schools and organizations, and hosted conferences (Hussein 1998,1 0 6 – 1 0 7 ) .My own research in Harar and in travels throughout the country supportH u s s e i n ’s conclusions to the effect that although there may be scatteredEthiopian Muslims who could be classified as fundamentalist, they are few andfar between. Though, like in other countries, their public visibility in terms ofpress coverage may be quite high, they actually command little respect fromthe vast majority of Ethiopian Muslims, and in Harar, where they are referredto as a k r a r i (fanatical, extremist) or Wahhabi, they are actually looked down