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Against The Saudization Of Somaliland
By: Bashir Goth.
The following article is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Annalena Tonelli 60, humanitarian worker and founder of hospital and school for the deaf in Borama, Richard Eyeington, 62, headmaster of the Sheikh Secondary School, and his wife Enid, 61, who were all slain in cold blood in Somaliland.
When I started writing this article, I knew that I was stepping into a territory familiar for its hostility to common sense and rational thinking. I knew knives would be out and angry voices would rise louder than good reason, calling me all kinds of names. I knew I was not only provoking the fanatics, but inviting the wrath of close friends as well. However, I thought, it was now or never. I wrote this out of my love for my country and my people. This is my battle cry against oppression, particularly against women, in the name of religion and I would never have forgiven myself for not writing it.
And I will be here for the long haul as the situation demands.
Recently, I came across news reports on the activities of a group of clerics calling themselves “the Authority for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” trying to impose draconian moral codes on Somaliland citizens in general and residents of the Capital Hargeisa, in particular. The following article is therefore, a reaction to this issue. I can ignore, though grudgingly, when such clerics impose dress codes and other punctilious rituals on Somali men and women in the West because these are in the free world where they can express their opinion and seek legal protection against such abuse, but to import this demented thinking to my homeland and the heart of the capital city is quite unbearable to me. I cannot sit back and watch these people humiliate our women, destroy our beautiful culture, hijack our religion and denigrate the reputation of our country worldwide.
I cannot find a better start than to relate an incident that occurred in my home village, Dilla, 60 miles west of Hargeisa, in the early 1990s. It was Friday and the residents of the little farming village of Dilla, western Somaliland, were looking forward to a normal weekend day. The only worry that the villagers had in mind on such days was the crowds of farmers and nomads that descended on the village to attend Friday sermon, thus swelling population to a breaking point.
Fridays, however, were bustling days for business. Teashops and shopkeepers sold more than they could sell for the whole week and mothers had the luxury of abundant choice for milk and ghee from the hordes of countryside men and women coming to sell dairy products to buy weeklong provisions instead. Children also looked forward to special lunches with meat, rice or spaghetti instead of the bland, single menu local hadhuudh (millet).
The whole village carried an aura of sweetness as the shopkeepers, teashops and mothers all burned frankincense to greet the Islamic weekend, perfumed themselves and adorned the best of their clothes for the Friday sermon.
No one had the slightest expectation of how this particular Friday would be any different from the thousands of Fridays that they had lived through. But it was and the people were in the offing of a strange phenomenon that would put the wisdom and patience of villagers, particularly the Ulema (clerics), to unprecedented test.
After Friday sermon, a man stood up in the mosque to address the worshippers. Everybody knew him. He was the headmaster of the school, a respected man, a dedicated teacher and a devoted Moslem. A man of no vices; he never smoked, never chewed Qat and led an ascetic life away from women and other worldly luxuries. The general guess was that he was going to lecture about the needs of the school or complain about children behavior.
“You all know me,” he said “but what I am going to tell you today is something that you have never expected to hear from me. I am a new prophet,” he said. The people were frozen. The teacher said that he was told by God to reform the Islamic religion and that anyone who believed that Mohammed (PUH) was the last prophet should read the Quran again.
“It is here,” he emphasized, raising the Quran book that was in hand, “I am not fabricating a new thing. My name is mentioned here in the Quran and all you have to do is to read it carefully.”
The worshippers left the mosque dumfounded, but the Ulema decided to have a word with the teacher. They had two things in mind, to assess his mental condition and to judge how adamant he was on his claim of prophethood. Founding that he was mentally sound after a few hours of discussions, the Ulema asked him to promise two things only if they had to leave him in peace. First he should not preach his new gospel in the village two mosques and second that he should not try to spoil the faith of school children. If he accepted to fulfill these two conditions he was free to do whatever he wanted with his “message”. He accepted the terms. Two years later, the teacher was spotted praying in the mosque and when the Ulema questioned him, his answer was that he returned to his faith and had given up his infatuations.
This is not an imaginary tale. It is a true story that all the people in the area know very well. My point in bringing it up, however, is to raise a question: Imagine this taking place in Saudi Arabia or any other place where Wahhabism or religious extremism prevailed! What the fate of this teacher would have been is anyone’s guess. He would have been hanged mercilessly. However, it is amazing to see how the Ulema of the little farming village of Dilla, had dealt with the issue with the sagacity and tolerance that are the long lost faculties of Islam.
By simply patronizing the teacher’s claim, they had proven that Islam was too strong and too entrenched in the hearts of people to be shaken by bogus prophets. They also set an excellent example for tolerance and compassion in giving the poor teacher the grace to come back without any fear of reprisal.
The Ulema of Dilla represented a generation and a time when Islam and the Somali culture lived together in perfect harmony. When Islam was natural and neatly interwoven into our people’s social fabric. When being Somali and a Moslem was an indivisible whole. Islam back then was like a crystal glass that takes on the color of any liquid that was poured into it. The crystal was so clear that one could see the inside liquid with unmistakable clarity. It was a time when the message of tolerance and peace prevailed, when Islam meant Islam to the true meaning of the word – submission to God and living in a state of mental and physical peace with others. Islam was a bond between the worshipper and the worshipped; an internal harmony whose radiance reflected on one’s face and was felt in one’s humility and generosity towards his fellow (fallible) human beings.
Depending on your view of history, since Somalis embraced Islam at the time of the Prophet or a shortly after his death, it never clashed with the local culture in terms of clothing, eating and going about their ordinary life. Once it settled in the heart, it made there its home and never bothered about how a person looked on the outside. The guiding principle in worshipping God was measured on one’s purity of heart as the Qur’an says “Qalbun Salim” (soundness of heart) or wa libaasu Ataqwa (“The raiment of righteousness...”). Consequently a Somali woman would travel with a single man or even a group of men on long trips, spending nights and days in their company with neither the men nor the woman having any sinister thoughts about their togetherness. The heart was clean and nothing else had mattered much. These Somalis were unknowingly abiding with the prophet’s hadith, which says:
“Verily in the body there is a piece of flesh. If it is sound, the body is all sound. If it is corrupt, the body is all-corrupt. Verily, it is the heart.”
Somali people continued to wear the qaydar, the dhuug, the Maro Somali, the dhacle and darayamuus, the guntino and Islam was always there where it should belong; their heart, and not on their clothes. Somali girls had traditionally braided their hair with such style that made foreigners sing their proverbial beauty and Islam lived in perfect amenity with it. Somalis recognized unmarried girls by their uncovered hair “guudley” and married women by their hair cover “gambooley”. This was the time that our traditions and heritage were the identity of the Somali people as expressed so eloquently by one of our lyrics:
“Reer guurayiyo
Gabadh tima tidcani,
Waa waxa dhulkeena u gaar ahee
La inagu gartaa… “
One of the aspects to discover the cultural history of any people is to trace the change of fashion in clothing and jewelry in addition to folklore dances and other traditions. Adult Somalis may relish remembering the journey that the Somali attire went through. Islam found Somali men wearing the dhuug and later qaydaar. For the longest time the Somali man was well known for his acacia like hair style, his naked torso, and his gunti, covering the private parts of his body up to the knees, his stick tooth brush (cadday), his barkin, and his three piece weapon, bullaawe (dagger), waran (spear) iyo gaashaan (shield), in addition to his gudin iyo hangool. Then came the time when the Somali man adorned himself with laba-go’ (two sheets, one wrapped around the waist and the other thrown on shoulders) before he learned the macawis and garbagale (longie and shirt) and kabo carabi or kabo faranji (Arab and European shoes). It was the colonial powers that introduced the daba-xumeeye (shorts), the surwaal (trousers) and koodh (coat).
Women’s clothes also went through similar or even more vivid metamorphosis. It went through the maro with the dacle and daraya-muus, the toob-shanan ah (short blouse) and googorad dheer (long skirt) and the daba-gaab (mini skirt), remember “ninkaan daba-gaabi, daadihinayn, ama aan dibitaati daaya lahayn…” during the colonial time to the Diric and hagoog of modern times. The head cover and the hairstyles also went through similar changes along the lines of other costumes. I remember when Somali girls had fooshad (frontal hair collected together in a ball shape) and were called Fooshadley in late sixties and early seventies, and later when Somali women styled their hair like mountains on their heads. The general belief was that many of them used to place a glass cup on the head and built the hair around it to give them the mountain-like shape that was conspicuous in every major town in the seventies.
This was however in the past when Islam lived in ideal co-habitation with the local culture, when fashion changed according to time and age. This was the time when one could pray occasionally, or never prayed at all, fasted in the month of Ramadan or never fasted at all, made pilgrimage to Mecca or never did at all; but would forever consider oneself a true follower of Islam, knowing that to be a Moslem is a bond between man and God and that one’s faith is not answerable to anyone else. Just mentioning the name of the prophet or singing a religious hymn would bring one to emotional ecstasy; no one ever doubted the truth of their faith, simply because Islam was synonymous with being a Somali. It was not something to show off but something entrenched deep in one’s heart. One didn’t need to advertise the color of his faith; one was simply a Moslem and never ceased to be one.
To be continued
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