Muslims Struggling for Recognition in Contemporary Ethiopia

Abstract

According to the 2007 census, Muslims constitute around 34 percent of Ethiopia’s 74 million people, making them the second largest religious group in Ethiopia after the country’s dominant religious group, Orthodox Christians (43 percent). Islam in Ethiopia had an auspicious beginning, thanks to the hospitality the companions of the Prophet Muhammad got from a benevolent Christian king in the seventh century A.D. during their migration to Axum, also referred to as the first hijra. The geographical proximity of Ethiopia to Arabia and the flourishing long-distance trade between the two as well as the disavowal of trade as a dignified vocation by the Christians had also provided a commercial inlet for Islam to Ethiopia’s hinterland. As early as the ninth century, an Islamic Sultanate was established in central Ethiopia—the Makzumite dynasty—followed by the wide variety of other Islamic principalities in the medieval period in present-day south-eastern Ethiopia (Taddesse Tamrat 1972; Trimingham 1952).KeywordsReligious IdentityMuslim CommunityPolitical MobilizationMuslim StudentMuslim ScholarThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.