The United States, fearing a new Taliban had come to power in Somalia, recently did what many expected it would do: invade Somalia. Not directly though. In the final weeks of 2006, Ethiopian forces that were trained, financed and outfitted by the US pounded Somalia’s capital and port cities with air attacks, routing the poorly equipped militias of the Islamic leadership. This has been followed by US airstrikes in several areas of the country over the past week.
Since the early 1990s, Somalia has lacked any semblance of a strong government. After the government collapsed in 1991, Shariah-oriented Islamic courts emerged, managing the judiciary system, acting as local police by preventing robberies and drug-dealing, and offering other services such as education and healthcare. These regionally dispersed Islamic courts enjoyed wide public support and, in 1999, began to assert their authority. In mid-2006, the regional system of Islamic courts banded together to form a rival government — the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) — to compete with the US- and UN-aligned Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
For the past seven months, political Islam was the primary governing structure for most of Somalia. The only area that remained explicitly secular was the west, where the weak TFG controlled the town of Baidoa. This was too much for Ethiopia and the US. In early December, Somalia’s surge toward theocracy inspired a weakly justified commissioning of UN peacekeeping forces. Now, as a result of the US-sponsored invasion and aided heavily by armed Ethiopian troops, the TFG is regaining control of the Islamic leadership’s previous strongholds in Mogadishu, Kismayo and outlying cities and towns.
Islam’s popularity as a mechanism for governance in the country derives not simply from the fact that Somalia is the only country in the African continent whose population is virtually all Muslim. Nor can the country’s proclivity for theocracy be understood as the result of a growing Taliban or al-Qaeda regime, as some in the West would prefer to think. The Taliban adhered to a stricter school of Islam, frequently used executions and killings to enforce Shariah law, prohibited women and girls from employment, barred women from access to healthcare and required women to wear the full burqa in public. The ICU exhibited none of these characteristics.
Instead, political Islam met the needs of a substantial portion of the Somali population. And political Islam is far from dead in Somalia today.
Replete with clans and nomads, Somalia has found it difficult to unite under one political umbrella. All attempts to institute a clan government have failed miserably, with devastating consequences for all who tried.
Inter-clan and intra-clan alignment did occur, however. The old Bedouin adage ”I against my brothers; my brothers and I against our cousins; brothers, cousins and I against the world” came into play when threats arose. It comes as little surprise, then, that Somalis formed a wide network of brothers and cousins to face external threats such as neighboring Ethiopia and the omnipresent US. The Ethiopian-armed TFG, the US-armed Ethiopian troops and the US-backed warlords all contributed to a growing fear of a possible attack on the Somali people. This network united on the basis not of clan, but of religion. Somalis perceived Ethiopian and US threats, because of the explicit Christian orientation of both nations, as a threat to Somalia’s Muslim population.
Political Islam, as the shield behind which disparate clans find refuge, thrived in the culture of ”brothers, cousins, and I”. The shield offered by Islam is Asghar jihad, the lesser of the two jihads. Asghar jihad allows Muslims to protect themselves from external threats.
Until the perceived threat significantly diminishes — for instance, if and when Ethiopia withdraws its troops — political Islam will remain fuelled by the jihadist desire to protect Somali’s Muslim majority. Moreover, as long as anti-Islamic sentiment is expressed and felt globally, political Islam will remain the unifying mechanism for previously disparate clans and sub-clans within Somalia.
Prior to the national amalgamation effort by the ICU to consolidate power, Somali citizens considered as legitimate neither the local warlords in Mogadishu nor the TFG leadership. Most Somalis regarded the local warlords, ruling quasi officially, as unmistakably corrupt. It was widely known that the warlords received US funds — theoretically intended for community security and welfare — and that this money consistently remained in warlord coffers. Moreover, the TFG, established in 2000 by the UN following nearly a decade of warlord rule and civil war, was painfully inept and corrupt. Situated in Baidoa, inconveniently distant from Mogadishu, the TFG was unable to bring order to the chaos of the capital city.
Consequently, and not surprisingly, political Islam emerged as an answer to corrupt local and inept federal governance.
When the ICU took control, in 2006, of Mogadishu and the southern and northern parts of Somalia, the principles of Akbar jihad remained at the fore of their political messaging and manoeuvering. Some examples included the banning of entertainment — movie houses, television — perceived as threats to the internal struggle for pious thoughts.
At the same time, the ICU strove to maintain legitimacy as non-corrupt leaders by attending to citizens’ needs, something the warlords and the brutal dictators never managed. The airport opened after 11 years of closure, shipping ports and seaports were secured to ensure safe transport of food and products, law and order returned to Mogadishu, education and healthcare remained a top priority, environmental regulations were instituted (for example, bans on deforestation, charcoal burning, killing rare animals and plants, et cetera) and crime diminished significantly.
As long as political Islam outperforms secular regimes in meeting the needs of ordinary people, as was the case in Somalia, political Islam will remain popular.
Michael Shank is in the PhD programme at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. This edited version of his article first appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org)