Sultanate of Harar

Overview

The Sultanate of Harar was the final, Harar-centred phase of the Adal Sultanate in the Horn of Africa—the period after the city's rise to become Adal's capital (1520) and especially after the collapse of Imam Ahmad's conquest of Abyssinia, when the sultanate contracted to a walled Muslim city-state holding out amid the Oromo migrations. The table's window, 1547–1578, spans from the aftermath of Imam Ahmad's death to the removal of the capital to Aussa in 1577.

History

Harar's ascendancy began when Sultan Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad transferred Adal's capital from Dakkar to the Harar plateau city in 1520. From Harar, Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi organized the heterogeneous Somali, Afar, Harla, Harari and Argobba tribes into the jihad armies that overran most of the Ethiopian Empire between 1529 and 1543. His death at Wayna Daga (1543) and the Portuguese-assisted Ethiopian recovery left Adal shattered; it was in this moment of peril that Harar emerged as the polity's sole durable centre.

The architect of Harar's survival was Emir Nur ibn Mujahid, who from 1550 ruled as de facto sovereign. He encircled the city with the great defensive wall (Jugol) that still stands today, and in 1559 led a last victorious campaign into Ethiopia, killing Emperor Gelawdewos at the Battle of Fatagar. But the same year Sultan Barakat ibn Umar Din was killed defending Harar, ending the Walashma dynasty, and the Barentu Oromo migrations engulfed the countryside. Harar survived behind its walls as "a kind of Muslim island in an Oromo sea," but famine in the 1560s reached such extremes that chroniclers report people eating their own dead; Nur himself died of pestilence in 1567. His successor Uthman's humiliating trade treaty with the Oromo provoked rebellion, and Muhammad ibn Nasir's disastrous defeat and death at the Battle of the Webi River permanently ended Harari aggression against Ethiopia.

Decline and legacy

In April 1576 Muhammad Gasa assumed the title of Imam, fusing secular and religious authority, and in 1577 transferred the capital to the oasis of Aussa, founding the Imamate of Aussa—closing the Sultanate of Harar. Harar itself continued as an independent emirate (formally the Emirate of Harar) until the Egyptian and then Ethiopian conquests of the 19th century. Its legacy is the living city of Harar Jugol, a UNESCO World Heritage site revered as the "fourth holiest city of Islam," and the enduring Harari (Adare) language and identity.