Paths toward the Nation: Islam, Community, and Early Nationalist Mobilization in Eritrea, 1941–1961 by Joseph L. Venosa (review)

Eritrean nationalist historiography has suffered from two biases: pro-Christian and pro-Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (eplf). Since the Christian-dominated eplf was the one that eventually delivered on Eritrean independence, the prejudice echoed the old cliché about history being written by victors. The major significance of Joseph L. Venosa’s work lies in its rejection of this hegemonic narrative. In seven chronologically organized chapters that span two decades, plus a detailed introduction and epilogue, Venosa addresses one of the most conspicuous silences in Eritrean history: the history of the Muslim League.

The history of what is now Eritrea starts in the 1890s when Italy, unable to penetrate the Ethiopian interior militarily, managed to annex the Red Sea plateau as a colonial territory. In 1935 Mussolini launched another war on Ethiopia, and this time his army was able to occupy the country for five years. The ejection of Italy from Ethiopia with the help of British forces, in 1941, served as a catalyst for Eritrean decolonization. Eritrea was placed under British Military Administration (bma), while the international community decided on the ex-colony’s fate: union with Ethiopia, federation with Ethiopia, partition between Ethiopia and Sudan, or full independence. It was in this volatile context that the Muslim League came into being in December 1946 as the most vocal champion of Eritrean nationalism (chapters one and two).

Between 1947 and 1952 the League, along with a small party of Christians and members of the Italo-Eritrean community, campaigned relentlessly on three objectives: territorial integrity, political independence, and rejection of any kind of association with Ethiopia (chapters three through five). To this effect, founding president Ibrahim Sultan travelled to New York twice, in 1949 and 1950, in order to have his organization’s voice heard at the United Nations General Assembly (105–10, 130–31). In the mid-1950s, following Eritrea’s federation with Ethiopia under un Resolution 390-A, the League tried to work within a constitutional framework to make sure Muslim minority rights and the official status of the Arabic language were respected (chapter six). In the late 1950s, when all peaceful protests against “Ethiopianization” failed and Eritrean autonomy was but in name, Sultan and other League leaders fled to Sudan and Egypt from where they began their armed struggle as the Eritrean Liberation Front (elf) (chapter seven). elf fighters would dominate the Eritrean insurgency in the 1960s and 1970s, only to be destroyed by the splinter forces of the eplf in a protracted fratricidal civil war.

What particularly enables Venosa’s reconstruction of early Eritrean nationalism from a Muslim perspective is the League’s own weekly newspaper: Sawt alRabita al-Islamiyya. Published on and off from February 1947 to September 1952, the Arabic newspaper served the duel functions of disseminating nationalist propaganda and facilitating a vibrant intellectual platform. Excerpts from al-Islamiyya and other local papers lend a rich insight into contemporary thoughts and feelings, and are as such the book’s main strength as an original work of research.

However, without Unionist or Ethiopian sources to counter the nationalist discourse, one is left with a one-sided interpretation of events and developments. For example, the Haile Selassie government is portrayed as a sinister force, carrying out urban terrorism and assassinations, arming and dispatching rural bandits, and underwriting the violent tactics of the Unionist Party (93–95). While the Ethiopian stance with the Unionist camp was never doubted, how a newly reconstituted postwar government could muster enough resources to destabilize with impunity the security of the British-administered territory was never clear. Obviously, this was a self-serving myth that early nationalist historians promoted in order to strip the Unionist cause of any moral legitimacy, and one that Venosa has accepted at face value. Shumet Sishagne has deconstructed this myth in Unionists and Separatists: The Vagaries of Ethio-Eritrean Relation, 1941...