Le Jadwal ash-Shāsh wa ash-Shāmī et la compilation des listes d’émirs de Harar : premiers résultats d’enquête

Abstract

This field note presents initial research findings on the Jadwal ash-Shāsh wa ash-Shāmī (“ Shāsh wa ash-Shāmī List”), an Arabic text written around the mid-twentieth century by a scholar from Harar (eastern Ethiopia) named Ahmed Shamie. I was able to see the manuscript in which this text is found in Addis Ababa, in the spring of 2021, thanks in part to financial support from the CFEE. This article, drawing on ongoing research, shows that the Jadwal ash-Shāsh wa ash-Shāmī is a late historiographical construction that compiled numerous sources from different historiographical regimes. There is a great deal of continuity between this text and lists of emirs, the historiographical genre that dominated in Harar during the 17th to early 20th centuries. However, the writing of this text marked a turning point in the historiography of Harar : whereas previous lists only began in the seventeenth century, the Jadwal enforced a “ metanarrative” that gave the city a linear, exhaustive, and over-ten-centuries-long past.