to Arabs. Rather, it was a divine medium of instruction.158
British officials and their Somali subjects also held differing understandings of what constituted proper education. Most Somalis in this era viewed Western schooling as akin to Christian evangelism (not an unwarranted conclusion given how many schools were run by missionaries). One Somali elder, who had been sent to Hargeisa by his parents to be educated, described enduring taunts from his peers in British Somaliland, who called him a Christian.159 Ali Bule of Garissa explained that people did not want to study in colonial schools because they thought they would become Christian.160 These sentiments did not reflect a wholesale rejection of education, but rather a repudiation of colonial and secular approaches to schooling. Many Somalis attended dugsi (Qur’anic school) and some furthered their education at Islamic universities or under the guidance of religious sheikhs.161 Moreover, those who did see the value of British schooling often demanded instruction in Arabic and English, a language that offered them obvious benefits within the structures of colonial power. Haji Farah Omar, who was educated in India, where he fell under the influence of Gandhian philosophy, shunned the new curriculum not because it was Western or un-Islamic, but because it was based on an inferior “adapted” curriculum.162
Like the Isaaq leaders of Kenya, Somali leaders in British Somaliland fought a reduction in status by asserting their foreign origins and making reference to a broader geographic horizon beyond the colonial state. According to R. E. Ellison, the superintendent of education, the qadi (judge) of Hargeisa informed the administration: “We Somalis are Arabs by origin and we like to consider ourselves as still being of the Arabic race. We can never consent to our being considered as Africans. We are afraid that if our sons are taught to write Somali they will . . . forget that they are really Arabs.”163 Omar also argued that Somalis were “Arabs” and that Arabic, the language of religious instruction and legal contracts, could not be considered a “foreign language.”164 In July 1938, an article appeared in the Arabic newspaper Al Shabaab, which was published in Cairo. According to a government translation, the author (whom protectorate officials posited to be Haji Farah Omar) decried British attempts “to suppress the Arabic language . . . to build an iron wall between the Somalis, the Arab nations and the Moslems, in order that there should not be any connection between them.”165 The British protectorate administration feared they had inadvertently fostered a Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic nationalism.
Mobilizing through the juridical categories of empire led to a confusing patchwork of different legal identities. Isaaq and Somali leaders in different territories adopted their own localized strategies, which points to the contingent, situated, and strategic nature of identity politics. Yet their tactics also reflected broader discursive changes afoot across the Empire and the Muslim world. The strategies of leaders in Somaliland foreshadow epistemic shifts in Islamic education and reveal the links between colonial racialization and emergent forms of Pan-Arab nationalism. As Talal Asad argues, the idea of an Arab nation represented “a major conceptual transformation by which” the notion of an umma was “cut off from the theological predicates that gave it its universalizing power” and “made to stand for an imagined community that is equivalent to a total political society, limited and sovereign.”166 These moments thus highlight powerful new ways of mapping one’s place across the region and the globe.
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