Review By:- Libah Lencoo/ሊባህ ሌንጮ
Part One
The History of Islam in Ethiopia was extensively written by foreign scholars. The Arabs like Ibn Fadulullah Al-Umari and Muhammad Taqi’uddin Al-Maqrizi have taken the lead to record the lifes and states of Ethiopian Muslims as early as fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Modern European scholars like Enrico Cerulli, John Spencer Trimingham, Ewald Wagner, Alessandro Gori, Ulrich Braukemper and others have investigated the rich culture and history of Ethiopian Muslims and turned them into many scholarly books and journal articles. But Modern Ethiopian Muslim scholars themselves have exerted low effort in studying and writing their own history. Although some distinguished personalities like Prof. Hussein Ahmed and Prof Ahmad Zakaria of Addis Ababa University and Professor Muhammad Hassan of Georgia State University were doing their best throughout their scholarly careers, most of their works have been in inaccessible to ordinary readers in Ethiopia; the reason behind this is that the works of these scholars were usually published abroad which makes their availability in local markets very difficult.
On the local front, the Ethiopian Muslim scholars remained silent for a long time on writing the history of their people. But in post 2000 era, some beautiful works started to appear. The first of these happened in 2002-2003 where ”Al-Futuhul Habasha”, the chronicle of Imam Ahmad Gragn was translated into Amharic by the Harari National Council. In 2005, we have read “ጥሮነ፡ የኢትዮጵያ ቀደምትና ታላላቅ ዑለማ ታሪክ”, a translation of a hagiographic work by Haji Umar Bashir of Walane in 19th century. In June 2008, ተሾመ ብርሃኑ ከማል (Teshome Birhanu Kemal), published the history of Imam Ahmad Ibrahim (a.k.a. Ahmad Grgan) in Amharic and tried to show us the personality of the Ethiopian Muslim hero from different angles. However, all of these works dealt only with a small fraction of the largest subject; most of them are biographical works while the history of Ethiopian Muslims is very extensive.
But in February 2011, a new and widely acclaimed book came to be a reality. This was “ኢትዮጵያን ሙስሊሞች፡ የጭቆናና የትግል ታሪክ” which was written by አሕመዲን ጀበል (Ahmedin Jebele). The book was the first of its kind on two grounds. First, it was the first one dealing with a 1000 years (615-1700 A.C.) history of Ethiopian Muslims at large in local language (Amharic). Second, it was the first book to be written in the same language and on the same subject in scholarly manner.
In “ኢትዮጵያን ሙስሊሞች፡ የጭቆናና የትግል ታሪክ”, Ahmedin Jebel narrated the history of Ethiopian Muslims from the time of Nagashi (705 A.C.) up to the time of the disappearance of Awsa Sultanate in Afar Desert (1700 A.C.). To write the book, he not only studied the printed works of the European and Arabian writers on Islam in Ethiopia but also made an extensive use of primary data. As a reader and writer of classical Arabic, he investigated the hagiographic works of many Ethiopian “ulama” that lived in different regions of the country among different Muslim communities (most of these works were written in Arabic). He traveled in many parts of the country in search of the ruined centers of ancient Islamic civilization. It was after all these steps that he started to turn his findings into a book.
“ኢትዮጵያን ሙስሊሞች፡ የጭቆናና የትግል ታሪክ” is written in a way that fits both enlightened and ordinary readers. In technical views, the style used by the author lays in between “formal essay writing mode” and “non-formal essay writing mode”. That is, although he kept the formal writing mode which became a unique feature of history books in Ethiopia, Ahmedin Jebel doesn’t show any conservatism in his word usage and sentence construction. Every reader can joyfully reads the 250 pages of the book even without getting bored for a minute. This is very clear when we compare this book with some recently published works on similar subjects which are handicap of the style of writing history for the wide public. Such books were marked by “hard languages” (in Amharic called “ድርቅ ያለ ቋንቋ”). In my thought, the style followed by Ahmedin Jebel is one of the reasons for which the book has gotten such a wide acceptance in Ethiopia and abroad. I heard that the total sale of the book exceeded 12,000 copies only in six months. As far as I know, only few history book written in Amharic were welcomed by the readers so fastly. Is that only because of the subject of the book? Not at all. Although the subject matter of the book could be taken as one contributing factor, the style used by the writer is the main determinant factor which attracted readers from different corners. In this regards, Ahmedin Jebel not only attained his goal of teaching the history of Ethiopian Muslims, but also addressed remarkable lesson to other authors on the way they should follow when they write on historical topics.