The Shari'a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond "African Islam" and "Islamic Law"
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2018 The Shari'a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond "African Islam" and "Islamic Law" Ahmed Ibrahim The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2520 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Ahmed Ibrahim THE SHARI‘A COURTS OF MOGADISHU: BEYOND “AFRICAN ISLAM” AND “ISLAMIC LAW” BY AHMED IBRAHIM A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 Page | i Ahmed Ibrahim © 2018 AHMED IBRAHIM All Rights Reserved Page | ii Ahmed Ibrahim The Shari‘a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and “Islamic Law” By Ahmed Ibrahim This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy _____________ _________________________ Date Vincent Crapanzano Chair of the Examining Committee _____________ _________________________ Date Jeff Maskovsky Executive Office Supervisory Committee: Donald Robotham Mandana Limbert Gary Wilder Page | iii Ahmed Ibrahim ABSTRACT The Shari‘a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and “Islamic Law” By Ahmed Ibrahim Advisor: Vincent Crapanzano This dissertation, based on a year and eight months of fieldwork, is a historical ethnography of a Shari‘a-based movement which appeared in Mogadishu, Somalia within a year after the complete disintegration of the central government in 1991. The movement originated when religious authorities and “traditional” elders established centers in various neighborhoods in Mogadishu to deal with the vacuum of power after the fall of the state. Since Shari‘a structures of authority and discourse were integral to the formation and functioning of the centers, they became known as Shari‘a courts. My work on the Shari‘a courts intervenes in the literature on contemporary Islamic movements in two ways: a) I argue that the practices, norms, and discourses referred to as Shari‘a which informed the Shari‘a court movement in Mogadishu cannot simply be equated with the concept of “law.” Rather, Shari‘a was an overarching ethical framework that set the standards of right and wrong in the conduct of life, including the legal; b) Contrary to much of the literature on “African Islam,” which holds that political Islamic movements in sub-Saharan Africa are inspired by ideologies that are foreign to the countries and regions of the continent, I argue that such movements should be understood within the deeply rooted historical legacies and traditions of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. Key words: Religion, Islam, Shari‘a, Africa, Horn of Africa, Somalia, and political Islam. Page | iv Ahmed Ibrahim TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Shari‘a courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and “Islamic Law” 31 Chapter II: Governing through Shari‘a: Religious authority in pre-colonial Somalia 65 Chapter III: Religious authority and political power in pre-colonial Somalia 117 Chapter IV: The founding of a community through the Shari‘a 151 Chapter V: The Islamic tradition and the Shari‘a courts of Mogadishu 191 Chapter VI: The rise of “modern”-educated elites and the bureaucratization of Shari‘a practice in the formation of the UICs 221 Epilogue 264 List of Figures 1. Map of Somalia page 90 Page | v Ahmed Ibrahim For Tashu and Asha Page | vi Ahmed Ibrahim Introduction I receive a call in the middle of the day from a friend, Awiye, who has been helping me with the research. He informs me that he located a man, Mooge1, whom I have been trying to talk to regarding his involvement in the establishment of one of the Shari‘a courts of Mogadishu. Mooge not only lived in the neighborhood where the Shari‘a Court of Sissi2 was formed but was himself intimately involved in the events that led to the formation of the court. His name frequently came up in conversations about this court. Luckily for me, Awiye knew Mooge because they were distant relatives. Awiye told me that Mooge was going to wait for us after midday prayer (duhur) at his local mosque. Awiye and I were to meet at a well-known intersection near the mosque from where we would together go to the mosque where Mooge awaited us. I hurriedly dressed and rushed to the nearest street to hail a rickshaw. As with many of Mogadishu’s residents, I relied on rickshaws to get around the city. In the pot-hole ridden, wreckage strewn, meandering streets and alleys that make-up the city’s transportation network, the rickshaw, commonly known as bajaj, is the most efficient means of transportation, much to the discontent of taxi drivers. For $2 and a ten minute ride later the rickshaw dropped me off at the intersection where Awiye was waiting for me with his car. Slightly built and smartly dressed, Awiye is in his early 30s and is doing alright for himself given the dire economic conditions in Mogadishu. He juggles three different jobs to make ends meet: he is a government employee, works for a local NGO, and has his own business. Because of his connection to the government Awiye is very careful about his 1 Most of the names I use are not real so as to protect the identity of the interviewees. 2 The courts of Sissii was established in 2003 in one of the most insecure areas of Mogadishu Page | 1 Ahmed Ibrahim movements in the city. Anyone who works for the UN-sponsored and supported government is considered by al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group, to be an apostate and, therefore, a legitimate target. I asked Awiye, why we couldn’t meet Mooge at one of the local restaurants? That way I could at least buy him lunch. Awiye replied that Mooge insisted on meeting in the mosque, and he suspected that Mooge was doing that as a security precaution. He most likely didn’t want to be seen in the company of a stranger in the eyes of the locals. Such is the pervasiveness of suspicion and fear in Mogadishu where al-Shabaab is waging a deadly campaign of bombings and assassinations against the weak government and anyone associated with it or with the international effort at state-building. On our way to the mosque, Awiye and I stopped at various locations that were places of significance in the emergence of the Shari‘a Court of Sissi, such as the garage where hostages3 were kept and the tree under which Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed4 and other religious figures used to give speeches. After about half an hour of driving with my curious eyes wandering, careful not to provoke the suspicion of neighborhood residents, we drove towards the mosque where Mooge awaited us. After driving through winding streets which snaked through and around small stone houses we finally came to a stop at the end of a road. Awiye pointed to a small structure distinguishable from the others only by its minaret. We walked into Mosque Rahiim’s first and only floor. Three men slept on a green rug in the far left corner, while an older man and a teenage boy sat on the opposite side. The old man waved his hand and Awiye and I walked up and greeted him. He stood up and warmly 3 Beginning in the early 2000s, kidnapping for ransom became widespread throughout Mogadishu. 4 Sh. Sharif Sh. Ahmed was at that time a well-respected local teacher who was chosen to lead the newly established Shari‘a court of Sissi. Later, after the various courts of Mogadishu unified, he became the chairman of the Union of Islamic Courts (UICs). After the UICs was overrun by an Ethiopian invasion, he reconciled with “the international community,” after a brief exile, and became the president of the UN-backed government in Mogadishu. Page | 2 Ahmed Ibrahim greeted us. Mooge is a heavyset man, probably in his 60s, with a henna-dyed beard and small but lively eyes. After brief introductions, I asked Mooge to tell me about the day when he led a congregation from this very mosque to a garage a few blocks away that served as the center for a city-wide criminal network. The event that took place at this mosque that day was part of a general uprising throughout Mogadishu against petty thieves, militias, and warlords. An uprising which took the form of and led to the formation of Shari‘a courts throughout the city. Mooge described what happened on that Friday at Mosque Rahiim as follows: It was sometime in 2003 maybe 2002, I am not sure. You know Mogadishu was divided between the Abgal and Habar Gidir.5 Each area had its own terrible place where there was a lot of crime, but the worst was here in Sissii. I used to live in Madina (a district on the other side of the city) but I fled here after two militias began to fight over Madina. Sissi wasn’t so bad then, but it became really bad later on. For example, there was a girl who came back from Sweden. She came to visit her family but soon as she came back her father was kidnapped. 5 The two dominant lineage groups in Mogadishu. They are both members of the larger lineage known as Hawiya.