Note 126 — Chapter XI · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN AFRICA.

The North-East Africa of the present day presents indeed the spectacle of a remarkably energetic and zealous missionary activity on the part of the Muhammadans. Several hundreds of missionaries come from Arabia every year, and they have been even more successful in their labours among the Somali than among the Galla.126 The close proximity of the Somali country to Arabia must have caused it very early to have been the scene of Muhammadan missionary labours, but of these unfortunately little record seems to have survived. The people of Zaylaʻ were said by Ibn Ḥawqal127 in the second half of the ninth century to be Christians, but in the first half of the fourteenth century Abu’l-Fidā speaks of them as being Musalmans.128 The new faith was probably brought across the sea by Arab merchants or refugees. The Somalis of the north have a tradition of a certain Arab of noble birth who, compelled to flee his own country, crossed the sea to Adel, where he preached the faith of Islam among their forefathers.129 In the fifteenth century a band of forty-four Arabs came as missionaries from Ḥaḍramawt, landing at Berberah on the Red Sea, and thence dispersed over the Somali country to preach Islam. One of them, Shayk͟h Ibrāhīm Abū Zarbay, made his way to the city of Harar about A.D. 1430, and gained many converts there, and his tomb is still honoured in that city. A hill near Berberah is still called the Mount of Saints in memory of these missionaries, who are said to have sat there in solemn conclave before scattering far and wide to the work of conversion.130 Islam gradually became predominant throughout the whole of North-East Africa, but the growing power of the Emperor Menelik and his occupation of Harar in 1886 resulted in a certain number of conversions to Christianity.131