Joseph L. Venosa.Paths toward the Nation: Islam, Community, and Early Nationalist Mobilization in Eritrea, 1941–1961.

Abstract

Eritrea has had an unusually difficult recent past, and one of the lesser-acknowledged outcomes of the country’s travails is that its historical trajectory has been neglected by scholars in favor of presentist concerns with the incumbent regime. Joseph L. Venosa’s Paths toward the Nation: Islam, Community, and Early Nationalist Mobilization in Eritrea, 1941–1961 is a refreshing and innovative exception to that trend, a powerful exemplar of the insights which can be provided by sustained, cogent, and indeed courageous historical research into the most complex and shadowed of places. In Eritrea, the historical horizon has been dominated for a generation by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and its vision of the evolution of the nation, with a particular—if understandable—fixation with the era of the armed struggle against Ethiopia (1961–1991). The prevailing narrative describes how the EPLF, whose leadership was drawn mostly from the Christian highlands, fulfils Eritrea’s national destiny through its reorganization of the armed struggle and its achievement of independence. The EPLF’s victory sanctioned its right to govern the new nation, apparently in perpetuity. Other actors have been written out of the script. Venosa reassesses—and forcefully rehabilitates—the role of Islam in the nationalist movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and the social and political mobilization achieved by the Muslim League as a vanguard nationalist party against a backdrop of Ethiopian aggression and annexation. He argues, compellingly, that Muslim activists were pioneers of the nationalist movement, and in so doing, he has made a hugely important contribution to the history of Eritrea, and that of the wider Horn of Africa.