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172 8 Ethiopia and Islam Historical Themes and Patterns In Ethiopia, interfaces between Islam, Christianity, African indigenous religions and perhaps even Judaism have been of particular intensity and longevity. However, in contrast to Egypt and Nubia, orthodox Christianity has remained the dominant faith, while Muslims have formed a powerful historical counterforce. In many respects, Christianity and Islam in Ethiopia have thus come to constitute each other’s flipside and cannot be understood without regarding the respective other. A historical account of Christian Ethiopia consequently has to consider this important Muslim legacy. At the same time, the historical anthropology of Ethiopia has to explain why Christianity has prevailed and why Islam has remained marginal, at least in political terms, in Ethiopia to this day. The following account starts with an introduction into some features of Ethiopian historical development that have come to inform Ethiopia’s Christian (and later Muslim) history in decisive ways. Ethiopian political history from Axumite antiquity to contemporary times can best be seen as a succession of phases of expansion and fragmentation, even of collapse of states and empires, linked with processes of centralization and the (re-)emergence of strong peripheries. Ethiopia’s history has equally been characterized by a series of geographical shifts of the greater region’s political cores: the first major political center , Axum, was situated close to the shores of the Red Sea in the northern highlands, but moved, after a period of crises and fragmentation, to Roha/Lalibäla in the central highlands, in the tenth century. Due to the impact of the jihād of Imām Ah ˙ mad in the sixteenth century, Christian Ethiopia’s political center moved to Gondär on Lake Tana, and finally, in the nineteenth century, to Addis Abäba in the southern highlands . In the process of this move from the shores of the Red Sea to the fertile southern highlands, the Ethiopian empire incorporated numerous ethnic and linguistic groups on the way and, in alliance with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (today, yä-ityop’ya ortodoks täwahdo beta krestyan) and its monastic orders, formed a vast Christian metropolitan population speaking several closely related languages such as Geʾez, Tigre, Tigriña, and Amharic. The move from the north to the south over time enhanced the development of specific doctrines of the Ethiopian Church, eliminating Ethiopian indigenous religious traditions as well as Jewish and dissident Christian concepts and ritual practices, while integrating both Muslims and adherents of Ethiopian indigenous religions in the newly conquered peripheries. The vanguard for the expansion of both the empire Ethiopia and Islam | 173 and the Church were monks of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church who had to fight numerous obstacles, and were often killed as a result; yet they succeeded again and again in establishing the church in the conquered regions: “Over the longer term, the people became more conventionally Christians and the conquest zones were absorbed into the Solomonic heartland” (Marcus 2002: 22). Political disputes and crises of orientation in Ethiopian imperial history were reflected in theological quarrels within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. At the same time, the struggle against external and internal enemies, in particular the Muslim emirates of the eastern highlands, dissident Jewish populations, and the Oromo, or, more recently, two wars against Italy, helped to forge Ethiopia’s unique character. The integrative power of imperial Ethiopia may also explain why Ethiopia has not become a bilād al-Islām and why Christian Ethiopia has managed to retain her remarkable coherence, despite numerous crises in her history. Ethiopia from Axum to Lalibäla Pre-Christian Ethiopian history and the history of the first Ethiopian empire and its capital city, Axum, were closely linked with the history of southern Arabia, and in many respects ancient Axum can be seen as an extension of the pre-Islamic culture of southern Arabia in northeastern Africa. Axum, in fact, was dominated by immigrant populations from southern Arabia and continued to maintain contacts across the Red Sea, not only in cultural but also in political terms. Thus, Axumite rulers intervened militarily at least twice in Yemen and seem to have controlled the Tihāma lowlands of Yemen on the Red Sea in the third century ce. In the fourth century, first Syrian Christian missionaries arrived and established Orthodox (monophysite) Christianity. However, conversion to Christianity did not affect the basic orientations of Axumite politics and Axum continued to expand in the region. Ellä Amida, the father of Ezana, who was the first Christian emperor...

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