History of Sayid Mohamed Abdile Hassan

Sayyid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan, also spelled Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, (born

April 7, 1864, Dulbahante area, British Somaliland [now Doli Bahanta, Somalia]—died
Dec. 21, 1920, Imi, Ethiopia), Somali religious and nationalist leader (called the “Mad
Mullah” by the British) who for 20 years led armed resistance to the British, Italian,
and Ethiopian colonial forces in Somaliland. Because of his active resistance to the
British and his vision of a Somalia united in a Muslim brotherhood transcending clan
divisions, Sayyid Maxamed is seen as a forerunner of modern Somali nationalism. He
also is revered for his skill as an oral poet.
Maxamed’s father belonged to a clan from the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, but he
was raised among his mother’s Dulbahante clan. At a young age he showed great
learning in the Qurʾān, and, during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1894, he joined the
Ṣaliḥīyah, a militant, reformist, and puritanical Ṣūfī order. Soon after his return to
Somaliland, he began urging the expulsion of the English “infidels” and their
missionaries and a strict observance by all Somalis of the Islamic faith. Through his
stirring oratory and didactic verse (some of his poems are considered classics in
Somalia), Maxamed attracted a fanatical group of followers who became known as
dervishes. In 1899 he declared a holy war (jihad) on the colonial powers and their
Somali collaborators. Between 1900 and 1904, four major British, Ethiopian, and
Italian expeditions were made against Maxamed. By 1905 he was forced to conclude
a truce, under which he and his followers constructed a small theocratic state in the
Italian protectorate. In 1908 he began his holy war again, winning a major victory at
Dulmadobe in 1913. Early in 1920, however, the dervish stronghold at Taalex (Taleh)
was bombed, and Maxamed escaped to the Ogaden, where he died of influenza.
With his death the dervish rebellion ceased.
Under colonialism, however, Somali territory was divided under five different administrations.
What emerged after decolonization an artificial creation, as were many other post-colonial
African states. The disintegration of that state may have less to do with ancient inter-clan
animosity than the failure of the nation-state model to deal with the Somalian reality, in which
while culturally one people, Somalis lived in smaller political units. The problem is not the clan
system as such but when different clans are competing for the same slice of the pie. Before the
different clans were lumped together in the same state, each clan has their own pie, even if they
sometimes coveted their neighbors larger pie. Only an equitable distribution of resources across
all the communities will bring an end to this type of envy. The international community needs to
re-think the idea that the nation-state is always the ideal system of political organization.
Hassan received education from as many as seventy-two Somali and Arab religious teachers. In
1891, returning to his home, he married an Ogadeni woman. Three years later along with two of
his uncles and eleven other companions some of whom were his maternal kin, he went
to Mecca to perform Hajj. The party stayed there for a year and half and came under the
charismatic influence of the newly developing Saalihiya order under the leadership of the great
mystic Mohammed Salih who was a Sudanese. Hassan received initiation and very rigorous
spiritual training under Salih. The Saalihiya opposed many Sufi practices as heresy, including the
role of the teacher as a mediator and visiting shrines of past teachers. Martin descibes it as
"puritanical.

Religious mission
In 1895, Hassan returned to Berbera which was then considered by the British merely as
"Aden's butcher's shop," since they were interested only in getting regular supplies of
meat from Somalia through this port for their British India outpost of Aden.
Taking advantage of British complacency and arrogance, Emperor Menelek II of Ethiopia
asked Ras Makonnen, the Governor of his newly conquered Hararghe Province, to send
armed bands to plunder and occupy Ogaden politically. The British withdrew from this
area of their territory in Somalia.
In Berbera, Hassan could not succeed in spreading the teaching of the Saalihiya order
due to the hostility of the local Qadiriyyah inhabitants who did not like him criticizing
their eating khat and gorging on the fat of sheep's tail and for following their traditional
Qadiriyyah order. In 1897, he left Berbera to be with his Dulbahante kinsmen. On the
way, at a place called Daymoole, he met some Somalis who were being looked after by
a Catholic Mission. When he asked them about their tribe and parents, the Somali
orphans replied that they belonged to the clan of the "Fathers." This reply shook his
conscience; he equated Christian rule with the destruction of his people's faith.
Reaching his region, Hassan established his first headquarters at Qoryawaye and started
preaching religious reform according to the Saalihaya order among the
pastoral nomads. He started calling himself and his followers "dervishes." The Arabic
word Dervish means a Muslim believer who has taken vows of poverty and a life of
austerity in the service of God. Soon, his influence spread over the majority of the Habar
Tol Jaalo and the eastern Habar Yoonis clans. For their part, British officials appreciated
his role of settling the tribal disputes and of maintaining peace in the area.