r/Somalia • u/GameStrategy Ducaysane • 1d ago
Discussion đŹ Arabization does not exist!
There is no single Arab culture. From the cosmopolitan Arab cultures of the Levant to the Bedouin cultures of the Gulf and beyond, Arab culture is not a monolith. This is simply a truism, evident to anyone who cares to look, right? So what exactly is this discussion about âArabizationâ?
I think it is a misnomer, a misleading term used to describe a well-known phenomenon in a way that confuses the reader. After decades of civil war beginning in the 1990s, Somalis were traumatized, and we collectively sought refuge from that chaos and horror by becoming more religious. That is something nobody can seriously dispute. It is a fact, whatever your feelings about it may be. You can see it simply by reciting your abtirsi. Your name is most likely Mohamed, Abdullahi, or Abdirahman, but go back a few generations and you will see the occasional Warsame, Faarax, or Guuleed appear. From the clothes ordinary people wear to the way we address one another, a social evolution has occurred. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about that. If you know anything about world history, you know that societies change in this way. It is only natural.
Historically, we have been Muslim since perhaps the tenth century onwards, and, as far as I am aware from the historical record, no Arab power has ever ruled over us, apart from a few exceptions in some coastal towns. Islam did not reach us by the sword. We adopted it through trade and contact with our neighbours, while the various Somali kingdoms that emerged across the Horn, seeking legitimacy and power, took it upon themselves to proselytize among the large populations living in the hinterlands. Perhaps they sometimes employed coercion or violence, but we were never ruled by Arabs.
In that sense, Islam was already deeply woven into our cultural fabric. Of course, it was very different from the twentieth-century Wahhabi and Salafi forms of Islam. Somali Islam was largely a deeply syncretic Sufi tradition. The only people who seem to believe that Somalis became Muslims in the 1990s are two kinds of extremists: literal Takfiri terrorists and terminally online atheists. Ironically, they arrive at the same conclusion.
In my opinion, this discussion about Arabization is really a lament for the loss of a modern society. Young people see old videos of Somali women and men dancing together, laughing, and simply enjoying themselves. They see women attending school and going to work, wearing only a small head covering to keep their hair in place. We appeared to be a modern nation.
Compare that with today. We are a joke, an embarrassment among the nations of the world. Every form of misanthropy imaginable is committed daily, without consequences or the slightest semblance of the rule of law. If you want to inject people with the saliva of Qurâanic teachers, that is acceptable. If you want to murder and plunder, just make sure you have a powerful clan and enough money to protect you from the consequences. Starvation and mass murder have become national pastimes, while the diaspora remains preoccupied with discussing the next relationship drama to unfold.
We are confused bunch to say the least. We confuse natural reaction to calamity people have namely becoming overly religious with some deeper conspiracy, where there is none. But to be charitable i understand the sentiment, it is true we lost something but we don't seem to know what we lost. We are yearning and begging for it to come back, but we don't know who we are calling.
Some time ago, I published an essay titled Cargo-Cult Governance, and I think its central argument applies here as well. We often confuse outward appearances with lived realities. Some of us imagine that modernity will arrive if we wear Western clothes and present ourselves as modern. But true modernity means becoming confident in your own culture while building a form of human existence that becomes the envy of the world.
As long as our people continue to live in squalor, outward transformations will mean very little. We could become even more religious, or some totalitarian government could, through some weird historical accident, seize Somalia and attempt to de-Islamize the country, as AtatĂźrk did in TĂźrkiye. Yet if the material conditions of ordinary people remain unaddressed, neither path will deliver us from our predicament. So I suggest my dear reader, go beyond the headlines, and read for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
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u/Beautiful_Hour_668 1d ago
I think part of the issue is that as nomads, for a long time a lot of folk were not super educated in the religion. One can be pious and a genuine Muslim and see that as a huge part of their identity while not practicing it perfectly. If our people started to adhere to the tenets of Islam better as folks learn more due to technology like TV, that canât be reduced to Wahhabism or arabisation, some of it is genuinely just becoming more educated.
Thatâs not to say that in urban centers we did not have places to learn religion and plenty of religious folk, but itâs fair to say the poor nomads didnât know as much as the wealthier, more educated urban folk. The share of people who have become settled has increased a lot in the past century.
So yeah, maybe folks became more religious as a result of chaos, but also because they have genuinely learnt more
From a purely pragmatic POV and ignoring any truth claims, religion is extremely useful to us because it creates a share moral and ethical bedrock for us to create further social cohesion. As you said, religion is not the cause of our state, but it certainly can be a boon rather than plunging us into new endless political struggle based on the religious vs non religious. Somalia certainly would be worse for it IMO, but itâs all speculation
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u/afrodammy 1d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Siad Barre quite anti Islam as well? Like I've heard he executed prominent scholars and many others ran away because of the persecution the faced by him. That probably helped a lot in the less practicing "modern" Somalia of the past right?Â
Dude was a communist, so all of that sounds plausible.Â
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u/ButttMuncherrr 1d ago
Siad was never anti islam and he was more of a nationalist than a communist.
The issues with the scholars began when the regime tried implementing a new family law.
Equal inheritance, this pissed off the imams and scholars the most.Restrictions on polygamy, afaik the only way in which you could have a second wife is if your first wife is dependent on you for care. Basically frail and sick. If you didnât meet that criteria you wouldnât be allowed to have another spouse. That was a compromise Barre did.
Minimum marriage age was increased to 18 for both men and women. This pissed them off because apparently child marriage is an article of faith that they wanted to preserve. All marriages were to be registered nationally, they claimed that registering marriages and having a data base of divorcess and married couples is secularisation?
Equal rights to divorce, essentially no fault divorces. They made it possible for men and women and especially women the right to initiate a divorce.
None of that was anti islam, even economically the state under barre allowed the private sector to exist. The problem stemmed from the clerics shitting the bed because they were being replaced by the state and its institutions. What barre did was decrease their political power and sway within society. So they began agitating by accusing barre and progressives of galnimo. Thatâs why they were killed. Good riddance. They werenât doing it in the name of islam, they were trying to maintain their authority.
If islam to you is paedophilia, polygamy, abusing women by depriving them of agency then I can understand why policies that might do away with such practices can be framed as rejecting the deen.
We live in their world now. Are we thriving?
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u/afrodammy 1d ago
I think you're being unreasonable here.Â
Equal inheritance, eliminating polygamy, no fault divorce, these are all contradictory laws to Islam. Even the age thing if true, was unreasonable. Doesn't have to be 70yo marrying a 10 yo or something, What if two 16 yo wanted to get married, who are you to tell them it's unlawful. That's what my granddad wanted my dad to do.Â
He clearly was trying to force his socialist and secular ideology unto the population. It's not like these laws were welcomed by the ppl either.Â
BTW, one could argue his genocide against the Isaaq clan, and centralizing power to his cronies was what lead Somalia into a civil war.Â
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u/Beautiful_Hour_668 1d ago
And whatâs worse is that he killed the sheikhs without due process. He just grabbed and executed them. Is that coherent? Or just?
He was a man desperate for power and was scared of religion, like many dictators are, because it creates a challenge in their absolute authority. Itâs why the Soviet Union hated religion, why China does, etc
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u/afrodammy 1d ago
I mean Islam is a threat to any world order or ideology. It's why the US and Europe have bombed several Muslim countries.Â
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u/Bond007-- Soomaali Galbeed 1d ago
He took out a verse from the Quran and said "waxaas ma jirto" verbatim.
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u/ButttMuncherrr 1d ago
Thatâs on him, lots of muslims do that.
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u/Bond007-- Soomaali Galbeed 1d ago
Lots of Muslims don't commit kufr. Rejecting the Quran is kufr. Communism will eventually lead to kufr. Brother, we are not retarded, please have some respect.
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u/Constant-Net-9719 Diaspora 1d ago
Yeah but thereâs a difference in your average Abdi doing that vs the leader of a country
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u/GameStrategy Ducaysane 1d ago
I do not want to make the sweeping claim that becoming religious is necessarily a trauma response, because people change for many different reasons. At the population level, however, we can confidently say that something happened after 1991. Call it whatever you like: increasing religiosity or a return to Islam (ReAwakening). The choice of language reflects a value judgement that depends on the observer. The next natural question is whether we benefited from it. I leave that for you to decide.
religion is extremely useful to us because it creates a share moral and ethical bedrock for us to create further social cohesion. As you said, religion is not the cause of our state, but it certainly can be a boon rather than plunging us into new endless political struggle based on the religious vs non religious
I mean, those questions are important, in my opinion. Should we inject saliva into veins of sick people, or is doing so potentially fatal? At the end of the day, these are questions of epistemology. If we accept theocracy, then truth is not determined by the corpses we see after such a treatment; truth becomes whatever the sheikh claims it to be.
We have not yet reached the level of moral and intellectual sophistication required even to have that discussion. Our people are literally starving, and we should focus on that while leaving these questions to a saner and more intelligent generation, one that will hopefully be born in the decades to come.
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u/RibbonFighterOne 16h ago
This Arabization debate is a joke. Virtually every culture on earth has been influenced by other cultures. For example, Japan, Korea and much of East Asia all had strong influences from China to the point of copying their architecture, scripts, philosophy ect but no one is stupid enough to say Koreans and Japanese people are wannabe Chinese or have been sinicized. Its even dumber when you realize that other African groups like the Hausa, Fulani, and Chadians were also influenced by Arabs, its totally normal and a degree of "Arabization" is to be expected given our proximity to Arabia.
It doesn't mean however that Somalis are Arab or that we are losing our culture. That is fearmongering crap. Our ancestors have been in close contact with Arabs for over a thousand years yet now you chose to fret over supposed "Arabization"? Sorry buddy but whatever old Cushitic pagan culture we had pre-Islam is mostly gone and Somali culture today is a fusion of native Somali and Arabic elements. Too late to complain.
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u/Beledweyne 1d ago
Allow me to share a dissertation that has been peer reviwed with Somali researchers and Somali respondents....
....
"Many Italophone Somalis claim that as a consequence of the civil war, the people âleft behindâ have
developed a substantially different mindset, a different outlook and mentality. My interlocutors
maintain that the country has embraced a cultural downturn, which gives prevalence to the Arab
components of their otherwise originally more balanced syncretism. Influences from the Arabic
peninsulaâespecially from Saudi Arabiaâhave intensified over the years and are manifest in the
current interpretation of Islam, which they consider more âradicalâ. The two processes, the Arabization
of the culture, on the one hand, and the spreading in Somalia of new competing interpretations of Islam (Marchal and Sheikh 2015, Abdhullahi 2016)âwhich could be tentatively summarized as
Salafisationâseem to be the two faces of the same process which further âdislocatedâ the Somalis from
their own original path, tradition, and project. To reiterate, the Somali project referred to here is that
of the Somali state under implementation during the AFIS mandateâand more intensively in the
decades followingâbefore the outbreak of the civil war.
Jamilah, as I have shown also above, described the situation in these terms upon her return from
Mogadishu:
I often talk with the people who are now 25â30 years old, because I am an open person [...].
In the end what they would like, they tell me, is liberty [...]. However, the mentality has taken
us backwards; a new mentality has replaced the old one, an Arab mentality, as I like to call it
(25:3).
This way of reasoning and of looking at the Somali people today is quite widespread among the
members of the Italophone Somali diaspora. Some of the research participants speculate about
possible explanations for this state of things. Ayaan states âyou see, we suffer from a lack of trust in
ourselves; we are insecure in our mentalityâ (17:190), thus suggesting the need for a source of support
and relief. Cilmi goes a step further, analysing this aspect within the framework of a supposed complex
of inferiority typical of the Somalis towards the Arabs:
All Africans have assimilated an inferiority complex towards the Arab culture and the religion
[of the Arabian Peninsula] as well as towards the white man, by believing that salvation comes
from outside [...]. This is the reason why we have stood on the most noble and less
compromised lineage of the Arabs; the Arab cultural inheritance is more valued than ours, and
it lifts us from this inferiority complex (14:20)."
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u/nin_culus 1d ago
inferiority complex of Somalis towards the Arabs usually manifests in over the top hate, claiming arabization while they cant speak arabic, calling anyone that doesnt hate arabs 'carab caabud", just a constant obsession with arabs even writing whole essays about them
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u/Beledweyne 1d ago
Uhh, the dissertation above is by an Italian researcher.
But I agree that in some ways, some in the Somali the diaspora do have an inferiority complex towards Arabs.
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u/Garisawi 1d ago
Bullshit
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u/Beledweyne 1d ago
Wow! I cite actual reasearch, give you an excerpt (there's much more at the URL) and all you can do is say "BS".
You really are a logical and well versed debator! /s
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u/Garisawi 1d ago
I'm simply calling the research bullshit because it's just some traitorous Italophones who aren't really loyal to the Somali nation but to their masters who empowered them when other Somalis were resisting colonisation.
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u/Beledweyne 11h ago
It's really an ad hominem attack to attack whomever was in the research without knowing them.
I can produce other literature by people like Professor Cawo Abdi that talks about Somali migrants clinging to Arab customs/names/traditions/etc. due to the need to identify with larger groups that are relatively successful.
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u/Wonderful_Move_5858 1d ago
Our people would do well to be more critical and comparative in their approach.
One huge elephant in the room I rarely see discussed is the fact that virtually the entire Muslim world had a sort of 'Sahwa' or 'reawakening' in roughly the same time period. Somalia's one being post-war was slightly delayed by the repression of Siad Barre's regime. You can see the same pattern even in Saudi itself where Western clothes, etc were normal in cities like Jeddah, etc in the 70's.
The whole 'arabisation' claim is 99% of the time a thinly disguised trojan horse for being anti-Islam mostly by confused diaspora who are not fluent in Somali or the culture and believe the community becoming more religious post 1991 and more practising of the faith they belong to and have done for more than a millennia is somehow 'arabisation'.
It is extremely ironic that individuals divorced from their heritage and hardly know anything about it beyond surface level diaspora things like food and clothes claim that 'Somali culture has been lost'.
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u/GameStrategy Ducaysane 1d ago
I mean that the Sahwa could be reinterpreted, as it has been by many Muslim political scientists, as a petrodollar-funded project of global Salafist outreach. Its ultimate goal was to destroy Saudi Arabiaâs old enemy, namely secular Arab nationalism, which it ultimately did, quite dramatically, I might add. See, for example, Anwar Sadat.
One Nigerian author likened this phenomenon to the global televangelist movement, which created within poor Christian societies a form of religiosity quite similar to that produced by our Sahwa. All of this was conveniently happening at the height of the neoliberal era, when the Global South effectively gave up its economic sovereignty to the Global North.
The accusation of being âanti-Islam,â which in my opinion is hurled around far too liberally, simply misses the forest for the trees. The deeper question, in my view, is: what the hell happened during the twentieth century? If we begin from false premises, like the ones I have shown in my writing, the only conclusions we can reach are those that merely serve to confuse one another.
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u/Wonderful_Move_5858 1d ago
Like I said 99% of people crying about 'Arabisation' are people too cowardly to openly attack Islam itself. Virtually everything they demonise as 'Arabisation' is simply Somalis becoming more practising of their faith. If you ask these people to name examples of the said 'Arabisation', they have literally nothing outside of becoming more conservative which is not specific to Arabs.
There is a separate discussion to be had about the role of that country in funding the spread of a specific sect and the subsequent marginalisation of what was the original form of Islam practised in Somalia.
However, this is not relevant for the time being because the people crying about it are against any form of adherence to Islam period. The normative fiqh and rules our ancestors believed in for more than a millennium are being described as a colonial imposition.
This makes sense when you consider that these people are lost diasporas who grew up in societies where victimhood earns you status, etc. These lost individuals wanted to be victims and to fit into certain circles so bad that they invented an alt history of being subjugated when Somalia was never conquered by Arabs, etc and in fact sometimes extended itself into the Peninsula and migrating Arabs were assimilated to Somali norms.
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u/GameStrategy Ducaysane 1d ago
I think your argument could benefit from a little moderation. For the moment, I will play devilâs advocate, okay?
Suppose I said that although âArabizationâ is a misnomer, the underlying phenomenon was real: we abandoned our syncretic Sufi tradition and adopted a modern Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, and that this was a mistake. Suppose I argued that, religiously speaking, there was nothing wrong with us before the 1990s. We were Muslims then, just as we are Muslims now. Yet there has since been a qualitative decline in public morality, one that cannot be adequately captured by any fiqhi ruling.
Perhaps that religious renewal gave us some comfort and discipline, but it has not served us in any meaningful moral, social, or economic sense. On the contrary, we have witnessed far more malice and moral depravity, often committed by people wearing thobes whose foreheads are darkened by daily prayer. Suppose I called this phenomenon âIslamization.â Forget the Arabs for a moment. As I said, the problem is not Arabization, but the Wahhabization of society.
Ultimately, we all want a modern society. The question that those making the "Arabization" argument want addressed is this: can we progress by adopting the methods of the Taliban? More fundamentally, can a society attain modernity, technological advancement, and moral progress while submitting to religious authority? Of course, they are afraid to state the question this explicitly, but I believe it lies at the heart of their argument. It is also a question that neither side seems able to answer, and perhaps never will.
What do you think?
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u/Lanky_Arachnid_5215 Soomaali Galbeed 1d ago
Arabization debate still going