Saudization Of Somalia
"We have become a People without Fashion, without Culture and without Identity "
PAPERS Qoraa lagu magacaabo Bashiir Good oo kamid ah
qorayaasha wax ku qora bariga dhexe , aadna uga xumaaday dilkii
labadii macalin ee loogu geystay magaalada sheikh ayaa qoray
qoraal uu ugu magacdaray AGAINST SAUDIZATION OF SOMALILAND,
qoraalkaa oo ku qoran afka Ingiriisigu waa kan:
Against the Saudization of Somaliland
By Bashir Goth, a journalist in the Middle East
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.
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 prayers,
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 Muslim. 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’s
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”. 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’s 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 Muslim 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 in 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 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 righeousness...”). 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: to their heart, and not to 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 Muslim 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 one’s faith; one was simply a Muslim
and never ceased to be one.
(The Current Situation
Nowadays, it is sad to see that perfect co-habitation; that ideal harmony
between Islam and Somali culture swept aside by a new brand of Islam that
is being pushed down the throat of our people. Wahhabism. Anywhere one
looks; one finds that alien, perverted version of Islam that depends on
punctilious manners more than it depends on deep-rooted faith. A strange
uniformity, only known in the desert and uncreative cultures of Arabia,
has crept into the social manners of our people. The unique fashion and
identity of our people has changed forever. We have become a people
without fashion, without culture and without identity. Our women, whose
beauty has allured the eyes of every traveler, have been brainwashed by
the prophets of Wahhabism into adorning the black cloak of ignorance.
Instead of being native, Islam has become alien and instead of being a
faith well guarded in the heart, it has become an outside façade that had
to be advertised through strange attire and physical looks; black
overflowing cloaks for women and white, ankle-length Arabian gowns and
long unkempt beards for men.
It happened that I was reading a report about the opening of an exhibition
on African hairstyles over the centuries in Paris, called “Parures de Tjte
(literally, head costumes). The report said that at the Musie Dapper
headdresses, masks, statutes and hair accessories, some 100 pieces from
tribal groups hailing from approximately 20 countries, show the primordial
role of the hair in ancient African societies. It continued to say that
given that black people have been perfecting the art of hair since long
before Africa wore the political boundaries that it does today, it was
probably a natural outcome that their tresses now have an impact on
hairstylists the world over. I asked myself, yeah. How much contribution
do my people have in this? May be some pictures from the good old days,
before modern fanatics reduced Islam into a jealous guardian of Harem’s
(women) hair, cheeks, arms, shins, feet, voice and smile.
It is a pity and anachronistic of sorts to see that at a time when Saudi
Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, is reassessing the damage that Wahhabism
and extremism had done to their country’s name and to the reputation of
Islam all over the world, at a time when “scales fell from the eyes of the
Saudis” according to one American official, at a time when the events of
Sept. 11 and terrorist explosions in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Morocco,
East Africa and other parts of the world have made many Moslems revisit
their history and re-read their doctrinal beliefs; that Wahhabism has to
find a save-haven in our country.
Anyone who followed recent press reports from Somaliland would have read
that a group of Saudi-oriented clerics, calling themselves the “Authority
for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” an offshoot of its
Saudi counterpart, has been demanding the enforcement of a draconian rules
on what the Somalilanders wear, say and do in their private lives.
Before we proceed further it may be helpful to have a quick look at
Wahhabism and how it is so alien to our culture.
WAHHABISM
Wahhabism is an austere and closed school of thought promulgated by
Mohammed Inb Abul Wahhab Najdi in the 18th century. Discarding Islam’s all
four legal schools as corrupted versions, Ibn Abdul Wahhab demanded his
followers a confession of faith a second time to Wahhabism. In his attempt
to eradicate other schools of thought, Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab conspired
with the British for the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate, which he
saw pursuing a decadent and an unethical Sunni Islam as mentioned by one
of the British spies in a book titled “Confessions of a British Spy.”
While traditional Somali religious scholars read all four schools of
thought (madahib) with equal respect and an open mind, Wahhabis view the
cannons of Islamic jurisprudence and the colossal work of scholarship
left by generations after generations of the Muslim Umma as an apocrypha.
Hence, the schools of Shafi’i, Hanbali, Hanafi, and HhMaliliki should go
with the wind, while the masterpieces of Sufism scholars such as Al
Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum ad-Din (The Revival of the Religious science), the
most referred book of Islam after the Quran and the Hadith, al-Munqid min
ad-Dalal (“the savior from Error”), the Mishkat al-Anwar (“The Niche of
Lights”) and Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi’s Alam al-Mithali (Ideal world) are
counted by Wahhabism as nothing more than infatuations of demented men.
“The Wahhabis consider, or previously considered, many of the practices of
the generations which succeeded the Companions as bid’ah (“objectionable
innovation”),” writes the Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam, Stacy
International Cyril Glasse, Second Edition, 1991, not even giving the
least thought to Shafi’i’s ingenious classification of Bid’ah into Bid’ah
hasanah (“good innovation”) and bid’ah siya’ah (“bad innovation”).
With tolerance being the norm for all other Madhabs, Wahhabism, is the
only school that compels its followers strictly to observe Islamic
rituals, such as the five prayers, under pain of flogging, and for the
enforcement of public morals to a degree unprecedented in the history of
Islam.
Sufism, however, which was the Somali way of Islam and which Wahhabism
condemns as a heresy, reaches out to the heart and good sense of all
mankind without distinction. Instead of shunning all other faiths and
branding them as bogus religions, Sufism sees all faiths as equally valid,
following directly God’s words “wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of
God.” Where Wahhabism sows hatred and rancor even among Moslems, Sufism
preaches sulh-e kull (universal peace) and Mahabbat e-kull (universal
love).
The most conspicuous foot soldiers of Wahhabism are the moral police known
as Mutawi’un, who roam in the streets like riot police and force people to
perform rituals or adhere to Wahhabism’s code of decency in dressing and
other mannerisms.
Waking up to the monster that Wahhabism had become, the Saudi Authorities
had started cracking down on the religious police. Too little too late,
one may say. But at least they are acting at last. Thousands of Mutawi’un
have been fired, while other thousands have been sent to re-orientation
centers. The curriculum of schools has been revised and Saudi students
have started the 2003/2004 academic years with new curriculum that takes
the new world that emerged after Sept.11 into account. Saudi children are
being re-educated to see human beings as human beings and not as infidels
and Wahhabis.
A Saudi Journalist Turki al-Hamed wrote in the Asharq al-Awsat “Saudi
culture belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of
globalization. People’s minds were stuffed with bad concepts.”
A more blunt criticism came from former Bosnian Interior Minister Mohammed
Basic who accused the Saudis of “poisoning our youth” with their teachings
(read Wahhabism).
Wahhabisim’s best example of humanism is “the harsh religious police that
forced a group of school girls to their deaths by forcing them to go back
to an inferno that had been their school. Their crime? Forgetting the head
coverings in their haste to save themselves.” (Time Magazine, 15 Sept.
2003).
This is the Wahhabism that the Saudi-oriented clerics want to impose on
Somaliland. This is the sect that produced 15 of the 19 suicide bombers of
Sept. 11. This is the mentality that the Saudis are today taking pains to
change.
It is a closed mind sect that turned Islam into a fragile creed that lives
in constant fear of children’s toys and games such as Barbie dolls and
Pokemon. It is a school of misinformation and ignorance that rebuked an
Egyptian doctor for publishing an article on epilepsy because it
challenged against the prophet’s statement that epilepsy was caused by
Jinn (look at the September 15, 2003 edition of the Time Magazine).
It is heart warming though to mention that as I was writing this article,
300 people including 51 women, have submitted a petition to the Saudi
Royals, calling on them for a radical reform to tackle the growing
extremist Islamic influence.
Wahhabi encroachments into Somaliland
This is the brand of distorted Islam that the neo-Muslim clerics want to
enforce on our people. They want to tell us that over the LAST 14
CENTURIES, our people have been practicing the wrong religion; that since
the dawn of Islam, Somali people had lived in vain, worshipped in vain and
died in vain. God help them, they all will be burned in hell because they
did not follow the correct path - Wahhabism.
These people are out to eradicate our culture, our traditions, our songs,
our poetry and our folklore dances. They brand our traditional children
stories of Diin iyo Dacawo (dawaco), arrawelo and dheg-dheer as bawdy
literature that has no place in the puritanical society that they aspire
to build. Forget about Ina Xagaa Dheere’s satirical anecdotes, which the
fanatics want to discard from our people’s memory. For these fanatics, the
breast of the countryside mother who suckles her baby while selling milk
in the streets of Hargeisa is a sin, not motherhood as many of our
ordinary souls would see it. It is this obsession with sex, this concept
of viewing women only as an object of sex, created for man’s libido
relief, that turned women’s body into a thing of shame. The concept is
that just like one cannot display sex organs in public, women as objects
of sex, not human beings with intelligence and rights, should always
remain under cover. Hence, we shall never have models and beauty queens to
publicize the beauty of our women down the catwalks of Paris, New York and
London. It may be worth to mention here that on the several occasions that
the name Somali caught international media, other than civil wars and
Black Hawk down, were associated with women. It was Iman, that Somali
model, who made the name Somali synonymous with such exotic, unique and
Cushitic beauty. Weris Deiria is now making headlines despite the daily
curses and ridicule she receives from die-hard fundamentalists. It is also
since that astute and clear-headed lady, Edna Adan Ismail, has become
Somaliland’s Foreign Minister, that the international community is lending
an ear to Somaliland’s case.
If we let them have their way, these prophets of “purity” would soon be on
a mission to destroy what has remained of our culture. The melodious
voices of Zahra Ahmed, Khadra Dahir, Hibo Mohammed, Amina Abdillahi, Sada
Ali, Magool, Maandeeq, Farhiya Ali, Zainab Egeh and many others of our
women singers we will be history. The cassettes of their songs will be
burned in the streets. Just remember Taliban. They want to edit, re-write
and censor the treasures of Somali oral literature. Future generations
will not be able to enjoy our beautiful folk dances, particularly women’s
heelo yar-yar. Even traditional religious gatherings of our people such as
siyaaradii Aw Barkhadle, Ramadan hymn chanting sessions in teashops and
the dhikr/xadro circles of sufi tariqas, will be brandished as devil
worshiping rituals of the infidels. It has been a strange déjà vu that
while I was working on this article, I came across a news item that Saudi
Arabia’s moral police had arrested expatriate workers practicing Sufism in
their private house in the town of Sakaka, capital of the north Al Jouf
region. Sufism in may parts of the Moslem world is a healthy spiritual
communion with God, a combination of enchanting hymns and ritual dances
that allows the individual to let out pent up stresses of life.
These fanatics are on a mission to eliminate co-education schools, shroud
young girls and deprive them of their healthy childhood social interaction
with boys. They want to bury them alive and teach them from an early age
that the female body is an eyesore to public decency. A girl should either
be in the grave or under a man’s custody. I have to mention here that when
I step out into the street in the morning I see groups of girls waiting
for school buses; all of them Arabs except for two Somali girls. All the
Arab girls of all nationalities look bubbly, tossing their beautiful
uncovered hairs and showing off their latest hairstyles. Even those with
head covers threw it lightly on the shoulders or barely on the back of the
head. They even sometime waved hello for me or for my son. The two Somali
girls, however, were fully shrouded with black from head to toe. One could
barely see their eyes and they even wore black heavy socks on their feet.
Their unique Somali features wrapped into a shapeless form, their shy and
modest smiles buried and a kind of heavy footed, reptile shuffling
replacing their elegant, Somali-only, rolling hip-walk. The black veil and
the black skin also make a very sad and unwelcome combination, while the
contrast between a black veil and a fair skin at least mitigates the
gloomy impact for Arab women. I wonder: when did my people become more
Arab than Arabs? When I met some of the Arab girls later in life, we often
recognized each other and exchanged smiles, hellos, how-are-yous and
pleasant good byes.
What about the Somali girls? Well, would I even recognize them? Did they
have a face? Even if they recognize me through their shrouds and dare to
say hello to me, how would I know who they were. I could only pass them
without glancing at them lest they accuse me of blasphemy, silently
remembering Abdillahi Abdi Shube’s
“Shaydaan aanad arkayn,
oo shaambinaaya agtaada,
waa naag shaadhir hagoogan.”
May God give him peace in his abode, because had he lived until today,
Abdi Shube would have probably been stoned to death.
The question is how far can we allow these fanatics to use OUR religion
for THEIR own political goals? How long can we tolerate our identity to be
ripped into pieces in the name of alien ideas? How much of our culture,
our heritage and the reputation of our country and our religion are we
ready to sacrifice before we act?
These people love to live in the dark. They thrive on the silence of the
unwilling intellectuals and the gullibility of the ignorant majority. They
hide under the cloak of religion and scare people with their
indiscriminate use of terms such as blasphemous, infidels, apostates,
sacrilegious, atheists, westernized minds and many others. They use the
available democratic atmosphere to herd us towards the abyss. One
pertinent question that begs for an answer all the time is why is it that
it is always those who fail in school or in life who turn to such
religious extremism? One may wonder if the problem is one of lost self-
esteem, an internal urge for revenge and a desire for power and
domination. No wonder that women bear the brunt of their onslaught for
enslavement, for what better way to regain their lost self-esteem than
suppressing women and denying them the success that they themselves had
failed to achieve. In this way they could exercise power not only on their
women but on the women of the whole community, thus bringing those
successful guys who despised them for their failure under their mercy-
hitting them at their Achilles heel, while hiding under the cloak of
religious sainthood.
It is time to tell these sick men that the bare breast of the woman
suckling her child is not about pornography, but about motherhood. The
girls and boys sitting next to each other in class are not indulging in a
sex orgy, you demented paranoiacs, but enjoying a healthy educational
environment. The girl walking in the street without a headcover and
wearing a big smile is not about flirting; it is about beauty of life. The
woman holding a lively conversation with a male friend in a coffee house
or a shopping mall is not about illicit affairs; it is about a much-needed
human relationship and a healthy exchange of intellectual ideas. The woman
wearing the traditional diric and hagoog and regally strolling in the
street is not about indecency but about culture. The nightingale voices of
our female singers are not about eroticism, you philistines, but about
art, music and enjoyment of one of God’s marvelous gifts. The Awra
(private parts) and indecency are not about what you tell us, you sex
maniacs, but about deep-rooted manners handed down through the centuries.
Sufism is not about heresy but about breaking the monotony and adding
passion and music to religion. Visiting graves is not about idolatry, but
about remembering and giving due respect to the dead whose souls live
among us. The foreign humanitarian workers in our country are not infidels
whose killing guarantees one to go directly to heaven but angels of mercy
and enlightenment without whom we would be doomed to hell and darkness. We
know right from wrong and proper from improper. We don’t need or want you
to teach us YOUR way of Islam.
It is time we have to speak out. If we don’t do it today, we won’t be able
to do it tomorrow. Because there will be no tomorrow as our country
descends into 7th century Arabia.
Qoraalkaan oo lagu daabacay luqado kala duwan oo caalamka ah waxaa
puntlandtimes ay kasoo xigatay jaraa'id la yiraahdo MEMRI
Xigasho: Mareegta Puntlandtimes
|