Mohammed Hassen Ali has been one of North America's leading scholars of Oromo studies. Twenty-five years after the publication of The Oromo of Ethiopia: a history, 1570–1850, Hassen's latest book – The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300–1700, reviewed here – brilliantly completes his critical re-reading of the region's medieval history.
From the early royal chronicles of the Christian Habasha kingdoms and the Arabic epic about Imam Ahmed's jihad (1529–43), to the European travellers and Christian missionaries’ accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hassen relies on a rich corpus of written sources. In the first half of his book, he convincingly invalidates the cliché of the brutal apparition of these Oromo ‘alien invaders’ in medieval Ethiopia from the sixteenth century by proving ‘the existence of a long-ignored (economic, political and military) relationship between the Christian Amhara society and the Oromo communities … at least since the fourteenth century’ (p. ix). Revealing the active Oromo involvement in Imam Ahmed's jihad on the Muslim or Christian side, the author argues convincingly that the Oromo communities were probably not independent political units but part of regional coalitions led either by Christian Habasha kingdoms or Muslim city states. Hassen demonstrates that the sixteenth-century Oromo conquests were neither historically lineal nor related to one unequivocal Oromo ‘cradle land’, but rather a series of local rural uprisings initiated from different locations in the southern Bale region, then expanding to the north through diverse patterns of territorial conquest. The two final chapters point out that the progressive collapse of the pan-Oromo national project from the seventeenth century was also closely related to the frequent choice of local Oromo communities to renegotiate their political autonomy with(in) the Christian Habasha kingdoms, rather than strengthening independent and sustainable pan-Oromo confederations.
However, Mohammed Hassen's book also includes a paradoxical gap between its focus on the ‘long history of interactions among the Oromo, Christian and Muslim communities’ (p. 15) and an exclusive and hermetic interpretation of Oromo religious genesis that emphasizes its connection with early monotheism in Egypt and the ancient indigenous peoples described in the Old Testament. Hassen does not consider that this particular discourse on Oromo ‘traditional religion’ might reflect the indigenous re-articulations of Oromo ethno-nationalist elites aimed at countering the regional hegemonic status of the Christian and Muslim ‘peoples’ or ‘civilizations’. Also, Hassen's discussion of the term ‘Galla’ closely reflects the local Christian discourse about Oromo ‘alien pagan invaders’, even though the term has a longer history within Islam, referring to long-distance merchants and camel herders, separatist Muslim groups who revolted against regional Muslim sultanates after Imam Ahmed's defeat, and even local Muslim Oromo federations distinguishing themselves from Christianized Oromo groups.
Focusing on population growth and pastoral movement, Hassen's analysis of the Oromo political centres that emerged around the southern Bale region from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries could have done more to examine the political dynamics of Oromo mobility and expansionism in medieval Ethiopia. The controversial Oromo migrations of the sixteenth century often involved cavalry raids and other military campaigns, and reorganized regional politics around Oromo agro-pastoral groups, breaking their former allegiance to the south-eastern Muslim sultanates or northern Christian kingdoms. Last but not least, the four final chapters illustrate the author's tendency to represent the Christian kingdom(s) of Ethiopia as unitary and almost monolithic, despite the plurality of the Habasha political systems. Centred on mostly Christian medieval accounts, such as the famous Zenahu le Galla of Abba Bahrey, the re-reading of regional history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tends to be limited to the conflicts and diplomatic relationships between often poorly identified local Oromo federations or Gada assemblies and the Christian sovereign or ‘King of the northern Christian kingdoms’ from Galawdewos (1540–59) to Iyasu I (1682–1706).
These critical remarks do not aim at undermining Hassen's work, nor at considering the Oromo culture as a sub-product of the hegemonic Christian and Muslim ‘civilizations’ of East Africa. Indeed, the rich historical accounts examined in the fourth volume of the Oromo democracy project series – edited by Hassen and other Oromo scholars living in North America or Europe – reveal that the history of the Oromo religious tradition and political philosophy goes far beyond the conflict between ‘Afro-traditional religion’ and ‘republican government’ on the one hand, and the Christian Habasha kingdom(s) on the other.
By revealing the long and changing relationship that both federated and cleaved the Christian and Muslim regional confederations and their ambivalent Oromo political and matrimonial allies, economic partners or foes, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300–1700 could have indeed invited its author to perceive the identities less as those of ‘peoples’, but rather as both complementary and competing urban and rural civitates aligned with different religious and political dynamics. Even as Hassen's latest book offers a comprehensive counter-narrative to Ethiopia's imperial history through the lens of Oromo identity, it also encourages scholars to explore the trajectories of Oromo, Christian and Muslim communities in medieval Ethiopia through the dynamics of Islam.
