Adal Sultanate

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The trade wind that crosses the Gulf of Aden does not distinguish believers from unbelievers; it carries dhows from Aden and Mocha onto the sandbar at Zeila in season and draws them back when the season turns, and for the better part of three centuries the wealth of the eastern Horn turned on that rhythm. Behind the port the land rose — scrub, then the high cool plateau of Harar with its terraced gardens of sorghum and qat and coffee — and along the caravan tracks between the two moved gold dust and ivory and slaves and the hides of cattle, outward to Arabia and India, while textiles and beads and Chinese celadon came back the other way. The Adal Sultanate was the polity that organized this exchange and gave it a creed. It was a Muslim state of the Somali, Afar, and Harari peoples, and at its height in the 16th century it nearly extinguished the Christian kingdom that had ruled the highlands since the days of Aksum.

The Adal Sultanate at the height of its 16th-century expansion, with Zeila on the coast and Harar inland on the plateau — محرر البوق, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Ifat to Adal

The Islam of the Horn was old. It had arrived not by conquest but by the sea-lanes, carried by traders and refugees from Arabia within the first century of the faith, and by the medieval centuries a tier of Muslim sultanates ran along the southeastern marches of the Christian highlands — the so-called seven sultanates of medieval Shewa named by the Arab geographers al-Umari and al-Maqrizi. The greatest of these was Ifat, ruled by the Walashma dynasty, whose Sultan Umar founded the line in the late 13th century after overthrowing the older Makhzumi rulers. Ifat stretched from the inland district of that name down the escarpment to the coast at Zeila, and it lived in permanent friction with the highland emperors, who claimed suzerainty over it.

That friction broke Ifat. The Solomonic emperors of Christian Ethiopia — the dynasty that traced itself to Solomon and the queen of Sheba — pressed the Walashma hard through the 14th century, and a schism opened in the family between those who would acknowledge the emperor as overlord and those who would not. The war went badly for the refusers. Around 1410 the last sultan of Ifat, Sa’ad ad-Din II, was run to ground and killed at Zeila by the emperor’s forces; his sons fled across the water to Yemen. They returned about 1415, and his eldest son, Sabr ad-Din III, proclaimed himself king not of Ifat but of Adal, and built a new seat at Dakkar in the Harar highlands. The shift was more than a change of address. Adal was farther from the highland armies, harder to reach, anchored in country its own people knew. The Walashma had been driven uphill and inland, and in the move they were reborn as a sultanate that could fight back.

For a century they did. The 15th-century sultans — Sabr ad-Din and after him Mansur, Jamal ad-Din, and above all Badlay ibn Sa’ad ad-Din — turned Adal from a beaten remnant into an aggressor. Badlay carried the war into the highlands and, at his peak, claimed authority over a sweep of the Horn that reached, in the ambitions of the chroniclers, from Cape Guardafui in the east to the Red Sea port of Suakin in the north. He fell in battle against the Christians around 1445, and the wars settled into a long grinding stalemate of raid and counter-raid along the frontier — a frontier that the highland kingdom recorded in its royal chronicles as the country of the infidel and that Adal recorded as the dar al-Islam pressed by the cross. The sovereigns who died on that frontier acquired, in the Muslim Horn, the standing of martyrs and saints.

Two seats: the port and the walled town

Adal was a polity of two centers, and its life cannot be read from either alone. Zeila on the coast was the lung — a Red Sea entrepot of long pedigree, where the monsoon trade of the Indian Ocean met the caravan roads of the interior. Through it passed the export staples of the eastern Horn: ivory and gold carried up from the highlands and the Juba country, slaves taken in the wars and the raids, ostrich feathers, civet and incense, hides and ghee; in return came cloth, glassware, iron, weapons, and the manufactured goods of Arabia, Gujarat, and farther east. This was the same monsoon economy that fed the coral towns of the Swahili coast farther south and made the gold-port of Kilwa rich — Adal was the northern, Red Sea reach of one connected Indian Ocean world, not an isolated kingdom. Zeila gave Adal money and arms and a window onto the wider Muslim world — onto the merchants and scholars and, when it mattered most, the gunsmiths of the Red Sea.

Harar was the heart. Set on its plateau behind the coastal lowlands, it became the sultanate’s capital in 1520 under Sultan Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad, who moved the court there from Dakkar, and it has been a town of consequence ever since. More than a fortress and a market, Harar grew into one of the great centers of Islamic learning in the Horn — a city of mosques and Quranic schools and, increasingly, of the shrines of holy men, the awliya, whose tombs drew pilgrims and whose blessing, baraka, was held to bind the diverse peoples of the region into a single devotional world. The mystical orders, the Qadiriyya foremost among them, gave that piety its inward form, and the veneration of saints at their shrines made the town a neutral ground where Somali, Harari, Argobba, and Oromo could meet under one sanctity. The Islam of Adal was not the austere reforming creed of later centuries; it was a Sufism of saints and brotherhoods, woven into the older devotional fabric of the Islamic Golden Age whose learning reached the Horn through Yemen and the Hejaz. Harar’s reputation as a holy city — Madinat al-Awliya, the City of Saints — was built in exactly this period and survives in the living sacred town of Harar Jugol today.

The packed rooftops of Harar’s walled old town, the capital of Adal from 1520, seen from above in 1966 — Touring Club Italiano archive, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The two seats also carried the sultanate’s social tension. Real power did not always sit with the Walashma sultan in his palace. By the late 15th century an emir — a military commander drawn from the warrior nobility — could overshadow the throne, and the most formidable of these, Mahfuz, governor of Zeila and emir under Sultan Muhammad, made himself the engine of the holy war against the highlands. Mahfuz raided the Christian provinces almost yearly during the fasts, when the highlanders were weakened, and his death in 1517 in an ambush by the forces of Emperor Lebna Dengel was mourned across Muslim Adal. Into the vacuum his death and the dynastic quarrels that followed it created, there rose the man who would make Adal briefly the master of the Horn.

The Imam’s war

Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi was not a sultan and never claimed to be. He was a soldier and a religious leader from the warrior class of the Harar country, married to Mahfuz’s daughter, Bati del Wambara, and he took for himself the title of imam — leader of the community in war and prayer. The Christian highlanders called him Gragn and the Somalis called him Gurey — both names mean the left-handed. Around 1527 he seized effective control of Adal, set aside the puppet sultans, and bound the fractious peoples of the sultanate — Somali clans, Harari townsmen, Afar and others — into a single instrument of conquest under the banner of jihad against the Christian kingdom that had harried the Muslim Horn for two centuries.

What turned the long frontier stalemate into a war of annihilation was firepower. The Imam’s army carried matchlock muskets and, decisively, cannon, supplied through the Red Sea by the Ottomans — who had absorbed the Mamluk lands of Egypt and Arabia in 1517 and now contested the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese — and manned in part by Turkish and Arab gunners. Against the highland levies, who fought as their ancestors had with spear and shield and bow, the effect was catastrophic. On 9 March 1529, at Shimbra Kure on the Shewan plateau, the Imam shattered the imperial army of Lebna Dengel. The victory was not final, but it broke the spell of highland invincibility, and over the next decade the war of conquest — recorded by the Imam’s own chronicler in the Arabic Futuh al-Habasha, the “Conquest of Abyssinia” — rolled across the Christian kingdom province by province.

Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi — called Gragn, “the left-handed” — depicted leading the conquest of the Christian highlands — via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The campaigns were systematic and they were devastating. From 1531, after a second crushing victory at Amba Sel, the Imam’s forces overran the heartland: Dawaro, Shewa, Amhara, Lasta, Tigray, the lake country of the south and the marches toward the southwestern divine-kingship of Kaffa. The emperor became a fugitive in his own realm, hunted through the mountains, his court scattered, his sons captured or killed. The great churches and monasteries that were the memory of Christian Ethiopia — the island sanctuaries of Lake Tana, the rich foundation of Atronsa Maryam where the emperors lay buried, the houses of Lalibela and the lands the Zagwe dynasty had hallowed before the Solomonic restoration — were stripped of their gold and their manuscripts and many of them burned. Whole districts were brought into Islam, some by conviction, some at the edge of the sword; the chronicles of both sides agree that for a decade the highland kingdom that had stood since the conversion of Aksum looked as though it might cease to exist altogether. Lebna Dengel died still a fugitive in 1540, and his son Gelawdewos inherited a throne with almost no kingdom under it.

Portuguese guns and the turning

The reversal came by sea, and it came because the war of the Horn had become a front in a larger contest. The Christian emperors had appealed for years to the only Christian power with a fleet in the Indian Ocean — Portugal, whose ships rounded Africa and whose captains dreamed of the priest-king Prester John, with whom Ethiopia had long been identified in European minds. In 1541 a Portuguese force of some four hundred musketeers landed at Massawa under Cristovao da Gama, a son of the navigator Vasco da Gama, and marched into the highlands to join the broken Ethiopian cause. For a season they answered the Imam’s firearms with their own. They won engagements through 1542 and wounded the Imam himself in battle, until he secured fresh musketeers and gunners from the Ottoman governor of Zabid in Yemen and turned on them. At Wofla, in August 1542, the reinforced Adal army destroyed the Portuguese column; da Gama was taken, and executed.

But the survivors and the matchlocks they carried fused with the regrouped army of Gelawdewos, and the balance of fire was now even. On 21 February 1543, near Wayna Daga on the country east of Lake Tana, the two armies met for the last time, and Imam Ahmad was killed — by a Portuguese musket-ball, the accounts agree, his army breaking when its leader fell. The Futuh al-Habasha, which had narrated the conquest with the confidence of the winning side, ends before the catastrophe. With the Imam’s death the conquest collapsed almost as fast as it had been won. Gelawdewos recovered province after province; the forced conversions fell away; the Christian kingdom rose again from the edge of extinction. The war had lasted some fourteen years and it remade the Horn — depopulating its center, exhausting both kingdoms, and clearing the ground for a third force that neither had reckoned with.

After the Imam

Adal did not fall with Ahmad, but it never recovered his momentum. The leadership passed to his nephew and a kinsman of his cause, the emir Nur ibn Mujahid, who married the Imam’s widow Bati del Wambara and took up the war with the old fervor. Against the renewed Christian kingdom he won a last great victory: on 23 March 1559, at the Battle of Fatagar, his forces killed Emperor Gelawdewos in the field, and Nur returned to Harar bearing the emperor’s head, hailed as the master of a second conquest. It was the high-water mark and the end. For while the two kingdoms had bled each other white across the highlands, the Oromo — pastoralist clans pressing north and east from the southern grasslands — had begun a great migration into the emptied lands of both. They overran Adal’s frontiers and broke its armies; the carnage, the chronicler Bahrey wrote, surpassed anything since the migrations began. Harar, exposed, could no longer be held in the open.

It was against this third enemy, not the Christians, that Harar received the walls it still wears. Between roughly 1552 and 1559 Emir Nur enclosed the town in the Jugol — a stone rampart some four meters high, ringed with watchtowers and pierced by five gates — turning the City of Saints into a fortress against the Oromo tide.

The Jugol — the stone rampart Emir Nur raised around Harar in the 1550s — still standing in this 1956 photograph — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The walls held the town; they could not hold the sultanate. By 1577 the Walashma court abandoned Harar altogether and withdrew to the oasis of Aussa in the Afar lowlands, where the dynasty guttered out as a minor imamate. Harar went its own way as an independent city-state and emirate, a jewel of learning and trade detached from the polity that had raised it, until Egyptian and then Ethiopian conquest in the 19th century. The Adal Sultanate, as a power that could field armies and threaten empires, was finished.

The record and its readers

The single indispensable witness to Adal’s great age is the Futuh al-Habasha, composed in Arabic by Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Abd al-Qadir — known as Arab Faqih — a man who rode with the Imam’s army and wrote of what he saw. It is a participant’s narrative of the conquest, vivid and detailed and unfinished, breaking off before the disaster at Wayna Daga, and for the Muslim side of the war there is nothing else of its kind. The complete English translation by Paul Lester Stenhouse (2003) made it available to readers beyond Arabists for the first time. Set against it are the royal chronicles of the Solomonic emperors, the highland account of the same catastrophe, which record the burning of the churches and the recovery under Gelawdewos from the other vantage entirely; an even-handed reading of the war requires holding both.

Modern scholarship on Adal grew out of the Italian and British engagement with the Horn. Enrico Cerulli, the Italian Africanist, assembled much of the documentary foundation for the medieval Muslim sultanates and the Somali, work surveyed in his biographical record. J. Spencer Trimingham’s Islam in Ethiopia (1952) remains the classic synthesis of the faith’s history in the region, and the wider context of the highland kingdoms it fought belongs to Taddesse Tamrat’s Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527. The Oromo movement that broke the exhausted kingdoms has its own historian in Mohammed Hassen, while the economic life of the ports and caravans — Zeila, Berbera, the ruined stone towns of the interior — has been opened up by the archaeology of medieval Somaliland and by Richard Pankhurst’s studies of Ethiopian trade. The recovery of Adal’s material past is recent and ongoing, and each excavated town adds a line to a history long known mainly from the words of two enemies.

What Adal was

The decade of conquest is the part the world remembers, and it is the smaller part. Behind the Imam stands the longer thing he commanded: a Muslim order of the Horn that for three centuries bound the high cool gardens of the Harar plateau to the dhow-trade of the Red Sea, that took a dynasty beaten uphill from Zeila and made it a state again, and that raised on the watershed a town of mosques and Quranic schools and the tombs of its holy men. When the Walashma court packed up for Aussa in 1577, what it left behind on the plateau was not a ruin but a city that had already become more durable than the polity — Harar going on as its own emirate of scholars and pilgrims, its saints’ shrines the meeting-ground of the Somali, the Harari, the Afar, and the very Oromo whose coming had emptied the kingdom’s frontiers. The sultanate had carried the faith of the eastern Horn as a sword for one terrible generation; it had carried it as a city for ten, and it is the city, walled in the gray stone Emir Nur set against the grasslands, that kept the name.

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