Zeila (Zaila) Woqooyi Galbeed Somalia
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The expansion into the peninsula as far as the Red Sea and Indian Ocean puts the Somalis in sustained contact with Persian and Arab immigrants who have established a series of settlements along the coast.
From the eighth to the tenth centuries, Persian and Arab traders are already engaged in lucrative commerce from enclaves along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean as far south as the coast of present-day Kenya.
The most significant enclave is the renowned medieval emporium of Zeila on the Gulf of Aden.
The most important of these in medieval times is Adal, whose influence at the height of its power and prosperity in the sixteenth century extends from Zeila, the capital, through the fertile valleys of the Jijiga and the Harer plateau to the Ethiopian highlands.
Adal's fame derives not only from the prosperity and cosmopolitanism of its people, its architectural sophistication, graceful mosques, and high learning, but also from its conflicts with the expansionist Ethiopians.
For hundreds of years before the fifteenth century, goodwill had existed between the dominant new civilization of Islam and the Christian neguses of Ethiopia.
One tradition holds that Muhammad blessed Ethiopia and enjoined his disciples from ever conducting jihad (holy war) against the Christian kingdom in gratitude for the protection early Muslims had received from the Ethiopian negus.
Whereas Muslim armies rapidly overran the more powerful Persian empire and much of Byzantium soon after the birth of Islam, there would be no jihad against Christian Ethiopia for centuries.
The forbidding Ethiopian terrain of deep gorges, sharp escarpments, and perpendicular massifs that rise more than fort-five hundred meters also discourages the Muslims from attempting a campaign of conquest against so inaccessible a kingdom.
Early in the Prophet's ministry, a band of persecuted Muslims had fled, with the Prophet's encouragement, across the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa, where the Muslims were afforded protection by the Ethiopian negus, or king.
Thus, Islam may have been introduced into the Horn of Africa well before the faith took root in its Arabian native soil.
The large-scale conversion of the Somalis had to await the arrival in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries of Muslim patriarchs, in particular, the renowned Shaykh Daarood Jabarti and Shaykh Isahaaq, or Isaaq.
Daarood married Doombira Dir, the daughter of a local patriarch.
Their issue gave rise to the confederacy that forms the largest clan-family in Somalia, the Daarood.
For his part, Shaykh Isaaq founds the numerous Isaaq clan-family in northern Somalia.
Along with the clan system of lineages, the Arabian shaykhs probably introduced into Somalia the patriarchal ethos and patrilineal genealogy typical of Semitic societies, and gradually replaced the indigenous Somali social organization, which, like that of many other African societies, may have been matrilineal.
Islam's penetration of the Somali coast, along with the immigration of Arabian elements, inspired a second great population movement reversing the flow of migration from northward to southward.
This massive movement, which will ultimately takw the Somalis to the banks of the Tana River and to the fertile plains of Harer in Ethiopia, had commenced in the thirteenth century and continues to the nineteenth century.
At this point, European interlopers appear on the East African scene, ending Somali migration onto the East African plateau.
Islam had been introduced to the Horn of Africa early on from the Arabian peninsula, shortly after the hijra.
In the late ninth century, Al-Yaqubi wrote that Muslims were living along the northern Somali seaboard.
He also mentioned that the Adal kingdom had its capital in the city, suggesting that the Adal Sultanate with Zeila as its headquarters dates back to at least the ninth or tenth centuries.
According to I.M. Lewis, the polity was governed by local dynasties consisting of Somalized Arabs or Arabized Somalis, who also ruled over the similarly established Sultanate of Mogadishu in the Benadir region to the south.
Adal's history from this founding period forth will be characterized by a succession of battles with neighboring Abyssinia.
The town of Zeila, identified in antiquity with the commercial port of Avalites described in the first century-Greco-Roman travelogue the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an area situated in the historic northern Barbara region of present Somlaia, had evolved into an early Islamic center with the arrival of Muslims shortly after the hijra.
By the ninth century, Zeila is described as the capital of an already-established Adal kingdom, and had attained its height of prosperity in the fourteenth century.
Travelers' reports, such as the memoirs of the Italian Ludovico di Varthema, indicate that Zeila continued to be an important marketplace during the sixteenth century, despite being sacked by the Portuguese in 1517.
The Ottoman Turks, consolidating their position at the entrance to the Red Sea, garrison Zeila in 1520.
Led by the charismatic Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (1506-43), the Muslims pour into Ethiopia, using scorched-earth tactics that decimated the population of the country.
A Portuguese expedition led by Cristóvão da Gama, a son of Vasco da Gama who is looking for the Prester John of medieval European folklore—a Christian, African monarch of vast dominions—arrives from the sea and saves Ethiopia.
The joint Portuguese-Ethiopian force uses cannon to rout the Muslims, whose imam dies on the battlefield.
Zeila in the sixteenth century becomes the principal outlet for trade in coffee, gold, ostrich feathers, civet, and enslaved Ethiopians for the Middle East, China, and India.
The city emerges over time as the center of Muslim culture and learning, famed for its schools and mosques.
Eventually it becomes the capital of the medieval state of Adal, which in the sixteenth century fights off Christian Ethiopian domination of the highlands.
Between 1560 and 1660, Ethiopian expeditions repeatedly harried Zeila, which sinks into decay.
Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi, also known as Ahmad Gragn, had conquered Adal in the mid-1520s and launched a holy war against Christian Ethiopia, also known as Abyssinia, which was then under the leadership of Lebna Dengel, enthroned as Dawit II.
Supplied by the Ottoman Empire with firearms, Ahmad had been able to defeat the Ethiopians at the Battle of Shimbra Kure in 1529 and seize control of the wealthy Ethiopian highlands.
The Abyssinians, under continuous assault by the Sultanate of Adal, whose forces the Ottoman Turks at Zeila have armed with modern weaponry, continue to resist from the Christian highland areas.
The royal compound at Amba Geshen is captured in January 1540, the royal prisoners interred there slaughtered with their guards, and the royal treasury looted.
The Muslims establish their presence throughout the highland zone as they hunt the Ethiopian king, chasing him from one mountain retreat to the next.
Later in this year,
Lieutenant Richard Burton of the British India navy, when frequenting the northern Somali coast in 1854-55, finds a Somali governor, Haaji Shermaarke Ali Saalih of the Habar Yoonis clan of the Isaaq clan-family, exercising real power over Saylac and adjacent regions.
By the time of Burton's arrival, once-mighty Saylac has only a tenuous influence over its environs.
The city itself has degenerated into a rubble of mud and wattle huts, its water storage no longer working, its once-formidable walls decayed beyond recognition, and its citizenry insulted and oppressed at will by tribesmen who periodically infest the city.