Here, Shire quickly attained complete knowledge of the Qur'an, which consists of 30 chapters of roughly equal number of verses or volume.
Jama Ahmed, Shire's father, then decided to move his family to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
Shire Jama Ahmed graduated from Jamal Abdinasir Secondary School in downtown Mogadishu.
Teachers and administrators at Jamal Abdinasir Secondary School, a fixture in Mogadishu for more than six decades up until the late 1980s, helped secure for Shire and several dozen other highly motivated students trips to Egypt for further studies in advanced Arabic.
In addition, he was one of the main organizers and administrators of the Somali Youth League (SYL), a nationalist and youth-oriented political movement that existed in the 1930s through to the late 1960s.
Among those proposed was the Osmanya script, an orthography invented in the early twentieth century by the Majeerteen poet and ruler, Osman Yusuf Kenadid, which had enjoyed a strong following.
Shire's competing orthography, for its part, was derived from Latin characters, and it omitted a few letters (p, v and z) to accommodate the unique sounds of the Somali language.
Within a year, the new administration elected to use Shire's refined Latin script as the official writing method for transcribing the Somali language.
[6] By 1972, Barre's government began printing more books in Af Soomaali using the new script for primary and high schools alike.
After the Somali national script was introduced, the government undertook a massive literacy campaign in villages and rural settlements across the country from 1974 to 1975.
[7] Many consider the initial introduction of Shire's Somali orthography and the subsequent literacy campaign to be one of the most significant achievements in Somalia's post-colonial administration.
Because of this vital decision, decades later, Somali immigrants around the globe are having better luck in learning new languages compared to people coming from countries which use non-Latin writing scripts.