Harar Jugol

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The wall comes first. A circuit of mortared stone, low and unhurried, runs for something under four kilometers around a crown of the eastern Ethiopian highlands at roughly 9.31° north, 42.13° east, nearly nineteen hundred meters above the sea. It is called the Jugol, and the word does double work: it names the rampart and, by the rampart, the thing the rampart contains — the dense warren of lanes, courtyards, mosques, and tombs that the people of the place simply call Gey, the City. To pass through one of its gates is to cross from the plateau’s open savannah into a sacred enclosure, a held interior of whitewashed walls and recessed shrines where, by a reckoning the city has kept for centuries, the holy is never more than a street away.

The walled old town of Harar Jugol on its highland plateau in eastern Ethiopia — Soman, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Harar is a node of Islam lodged deep in the Horn of Africa, far from the religion’s Arabian heartland and ringed on every side by other faiths and tongues — Christian Ethiopia to the west and north, pastoral peoples speaking Cushitic languages all around. Within the wall, a Semitic island holds: the Hararis, who number only some tens of thousands, speak a South Ethiosemitic language they call Gēy Sinan, the language of the City, written for generations in Arabic letters. The city’s own account of itself is that here, on this plateau, a way of being Muslim took root and elaborated itself into an entire civic and devotional order — a small, walled cosmos of learning and sainthood that has outlasted the empires that besieged it.

The Wall and Its Gates

The fortification is not the oldest thing in Harar, but it is the most defining. The circuit standing today was raised in the middle of the sixteenth century under the emir Nur ibn Mujahid, who ruled from 1551 to 1567 and, in the wake of the great wars that had convulsed the Horn, set himself to make the city defensible. He reorganized his forces and rebuilt the rampart that still encloses the town, pierced by five gates that quartered the enclosure into its historic districts — Asum, Argob, Suqutat, Badro, and Asmadiri — each gate a threshold with its own name and its own shrine. The emir is remembered in the city’s hagiographic memory as Sahib al-Fath al-Thani, master of a second conquest, and his green domed tomb stands inside the wall as one of Harar’s most venerated. A man who built a wall against the world was folded, in death, into the company of saints the wall was built to keep.

A gate in the Jugol, the sixteenth-century rampart that quartered the city into its historic districts — Soman, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Jugol gives the old town its shape and its psychology. Inside, the streets run narrow and crooked, climbing and turning between high blank house-fronts; the famous Harari townhouse, the gegar, turns its back to the lane and opens inward onto a raised, niched reception room, so that the whole city is a sequence of guarded interiors. Later builders added a hybrid form, the so-called Indian townhouse, brought by merchants of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, its wooden verandas and carved fronts mingling with the older coral-and-mortar idiom. The interplay of African and Islamic building traditions in this urban fabric — the inward houses, the small mosques folded into the residential grain, the shrines at corners and gates — was the central reason the old walled town was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2006, the fortified historic town of Harar Jugol.

The raised, niched reception room of a traditional Harari townhouse, the inward-facing form that gives the old city its sequence of guarded interiors — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

A City of Mosques

The most repeated figure for Harar is its eighty-two mosques, three of them held by local tradition to reach back to the tenth century. The number is less a census than a creed: it states that this is a town saturated with prayer, where the call goes up from scores of minarets at once and no quarter is without its place of prostration. Most of these are small neighborhood mosques, single rooms worked into the residential weave, serving a handful of families. Above them all stands the Jami, the great congregational mosque, whose white-tiled twin minarets are visible from anywhere in the city and serve as its compass. The present building is of the sixteenth century, though Harari memory insists a mosque has stood on the site since the twelfth; its second minaret was raised, by the most likely account, during the campaigns of the early sixteenth century. The Jami is the one mosque inside the wall large enough to gather both men and women, and on Fridays the lanes empty toward it.

For Muslims, the orientation of every one of these mosques is fixed by a single distant point: the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine toward which the whole world of prayer is turned, and the focus of the pilgrimage that draws the faithful out of Harar across the sea to Arabia and back. The city’s devotional life is anchored, finally, to the recited word — to the Qur’an, copied, glossed, memorized, and chanted within these walls in a manuscript culture of its own that ranks among the city’s chief glories. Harar belongs to the long arc of Islamic civilization that flowered in the Islamic Golden Age, a far western outpost of the Islamicate world’s learning, carried down the Red Sea and across the Gulf of Aden into the African interior.

The City of Saints

If the mosques make Harar a city of prayer, the shrines make it something rarer — a city of saints. Its second name, worn with pride, is Madinat al-Awliya, the City of Saints, and the title is meant almost literally. Scattered through the lanes, set into walls, raised at the gates, and ranged across the countryside beyond the Jugol are the tombs of the awliya, the friends of God: saintly scholars and ascetics whose nearness to the divine is believed to persist in the ground that holds them. UNESCO counts a hundred and two such shrines within and about the wall; local reckonings run higher, to a hundred and more inside the circuit and several hundred when the surrounding hills are counted. They are known by a Harari word, the awach, and they are the architecture of a living devotional landscape — small whitewashed structures, often no more than a low domed chamber or a marked grave under a sacred tree, tended by custodians and visited by the faithful in search of baraka, the blessing-power that flows from holiness.

These tombs are not relics of a finished past. They are working places of devotion, and through much of Harar’s history they functioned as something the walled, factional, ethnically plural town badly needed: neutral ground. A saint’s shrine belonged to no clan and no quarter; at it, people of different descent and sometimes different faith could gather to seek intercession and to settle what the ordinary order of the city could not. The cult of the saints is thus woven into the civic body and not merely the religious one — the friends of God hold the city together as surely as the wall does. At the center of the whole constellation stands the figure local memory names as Harar’s founder and patron, the sheikh Abadir, around whose arrival the city’s foundation narrative is built; his shrine is the spiritual hearth from which the others radiate.

The Orders and the Path

The devotional intensity of Harar is, in large part, the work of Sufism — the inward and mystical current of Islam, the discipline of polishing the heart by remembrance until it reflects the divine without distortion. What gave Harar its saints and shaped its piety was the arrival of the Sufi brotherhoods, and above all of the Qadiriyya, the order that looks back to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad. The Qadiriyya was carried into the Horn from southern Arabia across the sixteenth century, and Harar became one of its great African seedbeds; from the city the order spread outward through the Somali lands and along the Gulf coast, the spine of Islam’s deepening hold across the whole region. A Harari sub-lineage of the order is traced to a master out of Hadramawt who settled and taught in the city, and the brotherhood became the custodian of Harar’s distinctive devotional life.

This is the architecture of a Sufi order at work as a tariqa institution: the chain of masters reaching back link by link toward the Prophet, the bond of teacher and aspirant, the lodge as a house of remembrance standing beside the mosque. In Harar the order’s signature practice is the zikri — a Harari form of the dhikr, the rhythmic remembrance of God, sustained through the night by the chanting of the divine names and of devotional poetry composed in the Harari tongue. Held in the saints’ shrines and the houses of the faithful, these night gatherings of recitation are the beating pulse of the city’s piety, the practice through which its sainthood is renewed in each generation. Harar’s relation to the wider mystical poetry of Islam — the listening that became, in the Indian lineages, samāʿ and qawwali — is one of family resemblance across a shared inheritance: the same conviction that the recited and sung name is a door of the heart.

The metaphysical horizon of all this is the one the Sufi tradition reached at its summit — the teaching gathered under the name waḥdat al-wujūd, the unity of being, in which nothing possesses existence of its own and whatever is shines as a self-disclosure of the one Real. A scholarly Islamic city steeped in the texts of the path lived under that sky. And Harar’s learning reached as well into the sciences the Islamicate world ranged around its scripture — the lettered and numerical arts of Islamicate occultism, the science of letters and the secrets of jafr that read divine power in the shapes of the Arabic alphabet — currents that traveled wherever Arabic manuscripts and the men who copied them traveled, and they traveled to Harar.

Learning and the Manuscript City

Harar’s standing as a holy city rests as much on its books as on its tombs. Since at least the thirteenth century it has been among the foremost centers of Islamic learning in the Horn of Africa, and during the long generations of its emirate — roughly the mid-seventeenth century to 1887 — its scriptoria produced manuscripts by the hundred and the thousand. Scholars copied the Qur’an, books of law, theology, prayer, and hagiography, and composed an original literature in two registers at once: Arabic, the language of scripture and the wider learned world, and Harari written in Arabic letters, the ajami script by which the city’s own tongue was made to carry doctrine and devotion. An early prose summary of the faith’s doctrinal and moral precepts, the Kitab al-faraid, survives among the oldest of these Harari texts; much of the surviving poetry is liturgical, the zikri verse meant to be chanted through the night under the brotherhood’s guidance.

This was not a provincial backwater of letters but a working port of the wider oceanic culture of Islam. A Qur’an copied in Harar in the closing decades of the eighteenth century traveled across the sea and was endowed as a pious gift in Diu, on the coast of Gujarat — and its calligraphy, its format, and its habits of marginal glossing place Harari book-craft squarely within the Indian Ocean networks of Islamic knowledge, as Sana Mirza has traced in her study of that manuscript’s passage from Harar to Diu. The distinctive look of a Harari Qur’an — its ornament, its hand, its Indian Ocean affinities — is itself now an object of close art-historical study. A scholar of the city’s learning called it a place that becomes the teacher of those who enter it; the manuscripts are the record of that teaching, copied page by page within the Jugol.

The Fourth City

From this density of mosque, shrine, and book comes the claim most often attached to Harar: that it is the fourth holiest city of Islam, reckoned after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem — after, that is, the city of the Kaaba, the city of the Prophet’s tomb, and the city of the farthest mosque and the Night Journey’s ascent. The claim is a local devotional tradition, carried with conviction by the Hararis and their visitors and repeated by the heritage bodies that have honored the town; it is not a ranking settled by any pan-Islamic consensus, and other cities make their own claims to the same place. What the title means, within the city that holds it, is plain enough: that Harar is a sanctified ground, dense beyond ordinary measure with prayer and sainthood, a place where the holy is materially close. The number is a profession of faith in the form of an ordinal.

The Empires at the Wall

Harar did not keep its sanctity in peace. Its foundation narrative gathers around the arrival of holy men on the plateau, but its documented history runs through the politics of the medieval Horn — the Muslim sultanates of the eastern lowlands, in whose orbit the city rose to become, in 1520, a capital of the great Muslim power of the region. The dynastic and military history of that polity, including the campaigns it launched against the Christian highland kingdom in the sixteenth century, belongs to the story of the Adal sultanate; here it is enough that Harar emerged from those upheavals as a walled city-state, an emirate ruled by its own line of emirs, holding its independence against highland Ethiopia, the Christian empire whose own deep roots run back to Aksum, for the better part of two and a half centuries.

The mortared stone circuit of the Jugol, photographed in 1956, decades after Harar was brought within the Ethiopian state — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The independence ended in stages. The city was occupied by Egypt from 1875, during the Khedive’s brief reach into the Horn, and held for a decade. When the Egyptians withdrew, the emirate revived for a moment, only to be conquered in 1887 by Menelik II, then king of Shewa and soon emperor of Ethiopia, who brought Harar permanently within the Ethiopian state. The conquest stripped the city of its political sovereignty and opened it to the wider currents of the modern world — the railway, the empire, the global market for its coffee and its caravans. It did not empty the shrines or silence the night recitations. Within the circuit the emir built, the work of the City goes on as it went on under the emirs: the custodians sweep the awach and receive those who come for blessing, the Jami gathers the quarters on Fridays, and after dark the zikri rises from the houses of the friends of God, the divine names chanted into the small hours as they have been chanted for as long as the wall has stood.

The Scholarship and the Texts

The modern study of Harar moves on several tracks at once. The fortified town’s fabric and significance are set out in the dossier behind its UNESCO World Heritage inscription of 2006, which gives the standard account of the wall, the eighty-two mosques, the hundred and two shrines, and the townhouse architecture; the Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on Harar supplies the documented frame — the highland setting, the city’s role as a capital of Adal, the Egyptian occupation of 1875 to 1885, and Menelik’s conquest of 1887.

The city’s manuscript culture has become a field of its own. Sana Mirza’s study of a Harari Qur’an’s journey from Harar to Diu (Journal18, 2025) reads a single book as evidence of Harar’s place in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world of Islamic learning, and the art-historical analysis of that manuscript’s visual resonances in the journal Afriques anatomizes the distinctive Harari hand. The contemporary life of the saints’ cult — and the pressure on it from reformist currents that reject the veneration of shrines — is examined in an ethnographic study of Islamic reform and the sentiments of loss in Harar, which treats the saintly geography of the Jugol as a contested as well as a living inheritance. For the deeper texts of the tradition the city lived by, the library holds the master-works of the path Harar’s brotherhoods professed — al-Ghazālī’s spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, in which the reconciler of law and mysticism describes a knowledge reachable only by walking the road, and Ibn ʿArabī’s Tarjumán al-Ashwáq, the love-poems of the Greatest Master whose metaphysics gave the whole Sufi world its summit.

→ In the library: Al-Ghazālī — The Confessions (Field, 1909) · Ibn ʿArabī — The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq (Nicholson, 1911)

→ Related: Islam · Sufism · Sufi Tariqa Institution · Qur An · Kaaba · Islamic Golden Age · Islamicate Occultism · Arabic Ilm Al Huruf Jafr Hurufiyya · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Qawwali Sufi Sama · Adal Sultanate · Aksum