There is no single Arab culture. From the cosmopolitan Arab cultures of the Levant to the Bedouin cultures of the Gulf and beyond, Arab culture is not a monolith. This is simply a truism, evident to anyone who cares to look, right? So what exactly is this discussion about “Arabization”?
I think it is a misnomer, a misleading term used to describe a well-known phenomenon in a way that confuses the reader. After decades of civil war beginning in the 1990s, Somalis were traumatized, and we collectively sought refuge from that chaos and horror by becoming more religious. That is something nobody can seriously dispute. It is a fact, whatever your feelings about it may be. You can see it simply by reciting your abtirsi. Your name is most likely Mohamed, Abdullahi, or Abdirahman, but go back a few generations and you will see the occasional Warsame, Faarax, or Guuleed appear. From the clothes ordinary people wear to the way we address one another, a social evolution has occurred. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about that. If you know anything about world history, you know that societies change in this way. It is only natural.
Historically, we have been Muslim since perhaps the tenth century onwards, and, as far as I am aware from the historical record, no Arab power has ever ruled over us, apart from a few exceptions in some coastal towns. Islam did not reach us by the sword. We adopted it through trade and contact with our neighbours, while the various Somali kingdoms that emerged across the Horn, seeking legitimacy and power, took it upon themselves to proselytize among the large populations living in the hinterlands. Perhaps they sometimes employed coercion or violence, but we were never ruled by Arabs.
In that sense, Islam was already deeply woven into our cultural fabric. Of course, it was very different from the twentieth-century Wahhabi and Salafi forms of Islam. Somali Islam was largely a deeply syncretic Sufi tradition. The only people who seem to believe that Somalis became Muslims in the 1990s are two kinds of extremists: literal Takfiri terrorists and terminally online atheists. Ironically, they arrive at the same conclusion.
In my opinion, this discussion about Arabization is really a lament for the loss of a modern society. Young people see old videos of Somali women and men dancing together, laughing, and simply enjoying themselves. They see women attending school and going to work, wearing only a small head covering to keep their hair in place. We appeared to be a modern nation.
Compare that with today. We are a joke, an embarrassment among the nations of the world. Every form of misanthropy imaginable is committed daily, without consequences or the slightest semblance of the rule of law. If you want to inject people with the saliva of Qur’anic teachers, that is acceptable. If you want to murder and plunder, just make sure you have a powerful clan and enough money to protect you from the consequences. Starvation and mass murder have become national pastimes, while the diaspora remains preoccupied with discussing the next relationship drama to unfold.
We are confused bunch to say the least. We confuse natural reaction to calamity people have namely becoming overly religious with some deeper conspiracy, where there is none. But to be charitable i understand the sentiment, it is true we lost something but we don't seem to know what we lost. We are yearning and begging for it to come back, but we don't know who we are calling.
Some time ago, I published an essay titled Cargo-Cult Governance, and I think its central argument applies here as well. We often confuse outward appearances with lived realities. Some of us imagine that modernity will arrive if we wear Western clothes and present ourselves as modern. But true modernity means becoming confident in your own culture while building a form of human existence that becomes the envy of the world.
As long as our people continue to live in squalor, outward transformations will mean very little. We could become even more religious, or some totalitarian government could, through some weird historical accident, seize Somalia and attempt to de-Islamize the country, as Atatürk did in Türkiye. Yet if the material conditions of ordinary people remain unaddressed, neither path will deliver us from our predicament. So I suggest my dear reader, go beyond the headlines, and read for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
