Islam in Ethiopia
[5][6] Bilal ibn Ribah, the first Muezzin, the person chosen to call the faithful to prayer, and one of the foremost companions of Muhammad, was born in Mecca to an Abyssinian (Ethiopian) mother.
They were received by the Christian ruler of Axum, whom Arabic tradition has named Ashama ibn Abjar (King Armah in Ge'Ez and Amharic), and he settled them in Negash.
Emperor Yohannis (r. 1667–1682) created a council of Muslims to establish their own quarters in Addis Alem, far from the Christians in the political commercial capital, Gondar town.
[8] Some Muslims converted due to coercion; non-converts moved to the western parts of the Gojjam, near Sudan, where they continued practicing Islam.
[8] Tewodros' successor, Emperor Yohannes IV (r. 1872–1889) continued to coerce Muslims into converting to achieve religious uniformity by ordering them to be baptized within three years.
However the north and northeastern expansion of the Oromo, who practiced mainstream traditional Waaqa, affected the growth of Islam in its early days.
Historian Ulrich Braukamper says, "the expansion of the non-Muslim Oromo people during subsequent centuries mostly eliminated Islam in those areas."
[citation needed] Under the former Emperor Haile Selassie, Muslim communities could bring matters of personal and family law and inheritance before Islamic courts; many did so and probably continued to do so under the revolutionary regime.
Abdullah ibn Masud was a new convert and participated in a Muslim group where a member suggested reciting the Qur’an in Masjid al-Haram because the people of the Quraysh never heard it before.
[16] Harar is contained by a djugel, a wall built of local Hashi stone bonded together by mud and wood and it was able to protect the city from the invasion of the non-Muslim Oromo in 1567.
[22] Many Ethiopians were making their way to hajj when they were subsidized by the Italians and introducing Salafi teachings to the town of Harar, before spreading to other parts of the country.
[22] The Wahhabism movement began to spread in the 1990s due to the political transition in 1991 and the arrival of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).
[22] The EPRDF promised a change within Ethiopia's religious groups through decentralizing the structure of ethnic federalism to enable Salafi's to raise their activities.
[23] The youth became involved in the movement and began to call people to align with the obligatory practices of Islam with strict Salafi teachings.
Within the regime, local, and international observers are claiming that Wahhabism “extremists” are wanting to gain political power to turn Ethiopia into an Islamic State.
[22] Due to the expansion of the Wahhabism movement it has brought up intense debates over religious symbols and rituals, intrinsic to Ethiopian Islam.
[17] The Khadis and Naiba councils decide on any questions surrounding marriage such as divorce and guardianship of children all that must be related to Mohammedans law or all the parties are Muslim.
[citation needed] In Ethiopia's Muslim communities, as in neighboring Sudan and Somalia, many of the faithful are associated with, but not necessarily members of any specific Sufi order.
The emphasis seems less on the contemplative and disciplined mysticism, and more on the concentration of the spiritual powers possessed by certain founders of the orders and the leaders of local branches.
[26] Muslims in contemporary Ethiopia have become actively engaged in challenging their political marginalization through the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.
[27] They are persistent in wanting to engage with the EPRDF's basis of political legitimacy and challenging their forceful secularism that limits religion to the private domain.
Their demands include expanding into Western financial institutions, consolidation with other parts of the Islamic world and the right to religious expression freely.
