Dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts by research in Political Science
Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences
University of the Witwatersrand
March 2019 / Somalia has been described as a “state without a state” or a “nation in search of state” since
the end of colonial rule and the subsequent total collapse of the postcolonial state in 1991
(Samatar and Laitin, 1989, Newman, 2009, Menkhaus, 2003). Scholars have been attempting
to locate the source of the conflict and ways of reconstructing the Somali state, describing the
Horn of Africa nation not only as an archetype of a failed state, but also a threat to regional
and global security. Since the arrival of European invaders, Somalia’s inhabitants have
routinely been referred to as the most “difficult race to pacify” (Beech, 1996:5). The
repetition of these colonial tropes which are consistently reported in the contemporary
literature on Somalia is not surprising because of two consistent elements in the Somali
conflict which ought to be probably understood. First, the population’s strong attachment to
Islam has resulted in the country’s historical transformation into indigenous political Islam, a
phenomenon that is “downplayed and understudied,” in the historiographic accounts of
Somalia (Abdullahi, 2011:16). In this vein, I argue that the forced secularisation of Somalia,
from the colonial era to the current attempts to create a secular state, has been at loggerheads
with popular indigenous Islam in this Horn of Africa nation. This popular Islam attracts the
presence of a global force that has been attempting to steer Somalia away from its indigenous
identity to a more secular notion of the state. Arising from these hypotheses, the dissertation
aims to establish the continuities between Somalia’s current political instability, its past and
political loyalty, by exploring Islam as both an ethnicised identity and defence mechanism.
While investigating the role of Islam in shaping the social and political Somali identity, I
historicise Ahmad Gurey’s war with Abyssinia and the Portuguese empire in 1500s, and
Sayid Maxamad’s confrontations with colonial powers: Britain, France, Italy and Abyssinia
in 1900. Finally, I explore the tension between the formation of the secular postcolonial state
and indigenous Islam. The research attempts to trace the present turmoil and investigate the
role of popular Islam in “inviting” foreign powers to the Somali peninsula, thus arresting the
process of domestic state reconstruction / M T 2019
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/28380 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Muhumed, Abdirizak Aden |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (165 leaves), application/pdf, application/pdf |
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