A Political History of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (1975-1991): Revolt, Ideology, and Mobilisation in Ethiopia

This study examines and analyses the expropriation laws and practices in Ethiopia. The objective of the thesis is to analyze and describe the land rights and expropriation laws in Ethiopia and to c ...

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Land Rights and Expropriation in Ethiopia

The dynamics of constructing collective memory in relation to the politics of Muslim identity form the subject matter of this research. It explores how the state and the Muslim activists agitate and reinforce a meta-political narrative among Ethiopian Muslim communities to harness collective memory. By examining the self-narrative of Ethiopian Muslim identity rhetoric reveals the process of forming collective memory and the politics of Muslim identity, it fills the empirical gap that how the state and the Muslim activists have used the historical repository to form and maintain certain kinds of collective memory that have utility for the present. Besides collective memory, super diversity and informal institutions are also used. The overarching narrative of the Muslim activists is that of the religious marginalization of Ethiopian Islam in both Ethiopian politics and Ethiopian history due to three intertwined elements, namely, the monopoly of non-Muslim historians that biased the historical accounts, the dominance of the Christian perspective, and the heavy reliance on Christian sources for historical reconstructions. The overall goal of the activists is to provoke sympathy and charging the Muslim communities with positive energy. The early 1990s friendship stance of the state in courting the support of the Muslim communities has changed in the mid-1990s as the state started to list Islamic fundamentalism from the neighboring Muslim nations as security threat. Between 2001 and 2005 the state attempted to purge the leadership of the Ethiopian Muslim communities in order to curb the growing intra-religious conflicts and the interreligious polemics. From 2006 until 2008, the state promoted interfaith dialogue as a legitimate precept of Christianity and Islam that promotes religious tolerance. Since 2009, however, the state has actively taken preemptive measures intended in a way to domesticate Islam and contain the influences of radical interpretations. The siding of the state with the majority Sunni Sufi interpreters with the conception that there is only one mainstream Islam is ill informed. It would have been better to recognize the existing diversity within the Muslim community and mediate the process in a neutralist stance. The exclusivist stance of the state that discredits the Salafi-Wahhabi interpretation forgoes the potential benefits of an inclusive approach. The state holds a cynical view that the religious fall prey easily to extremism. A more positive view of the religious adherents, as partners in the identification and combating of extremism, would create a grassroots strength that champions religious freedom and equality as democratic ideals. The problematic characteristics of the recent Islamic activism are a failure to be ready to accept a gradual solution to the perceived problems, the desire to dominate the formal institutions, and unwillingness to negotiate in the presence of the other that they consider religiously deviant. The mutual exclusion of the other from the religious community and framing it as anti-Islamic made the Islamic religious space a hostile ground. Changing hostility would require nurturing a religious dialogue that accepts theological differences as alternate expressions of Islam within the Muslim communities. In the context of diversity, a sense of openness and willingness to accommodate the needs of others in order to live peacefully in a shared space is required. The selective use of scientific knowledge, the avoidance of historical nuances, praising one’s own religious tradition and being critical of the other, framing disagreements as irreconcilable, and failing to present our opinions as tentative conclusions are also not helpful. There is also a need to look into one’s religious traditions from a critical distance.

Reconstruction of Ethiopia's Collective Memory by Rewriting its History : The Politics of Islam

Ethiopia is a historically antique polity. It is one of the very few places that managed to sustain an unbroken chain of historical civilization free of foreign "corruption." Unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and others that were later overrun by alien and destructive forces, Ethiopia maintained its brand of African civilization intact. This created a fascination among Western intellectual circles. Nevertheless, Western scholarship saw Ethiopia as outlandish to Africa. Like ancient Egypt, Ethiopia was systematically deAfricanized in the annals of Western high culture. In this article, I attempt to identify the fundamental perceptions of Western Ethiopianist scholarship and the many images of Ethiopia that emanate from it.

Ethiopia: The "Anomaly" and "Paradox" of Africa

This study offers the first comprehensive review
of the Tempietto in Ethiopian art. The motif was an indispensable feature in illustrated Ethiopic Gospel books,
appearing systematically as an explicit to the Eusebian
apparatus in manuscripts from the Christian Aksumite to
the early Solomonic Period. While the Ethiopic version of
Eusebius’s Letter to Carpianus and the canon tables have
attracted considerable scholarly interest, the Ethiopian
iconography of the Tempietto has not yet received the
attention it deserves. By analysing the iconography of the
Tempietto in Ethiopic gospel books this work shows how
it is possible to offer a partial reconstruction of the practices of illuminators in Ethiopia in the century following
the rise of the Solomonic dynasty, providing important
insights into the elusive question of the development of
manuscript illumination in Ethiopia.

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An Ethiopian Miniature of the Tempietto in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Its Relatives and Symbolism

This important book offers the reader much more than the title might suggest, for it examines most aspects of both the Ethiopian state and the Ethiopian church from the supposed restoration of the supposedly Solomonic dynasty to the eve of the Muslim invasion in the sixteenth century. It is not a narrative history but a study of the functions and organization of the court, the government, the army, trade, the secular and monastic clergy, and the policy of the kings towards their Muslim and pagan neighbours and subjects. Its principal theme is the sequence of territorial conquest, military colonization, religious conversion, and eventual absorption of the population. Much attention is naturally given to the reign of Zar'a Ya'qob whose 'highest ideal' is defined as being 'the assimilation of his pagan subjects into the Christian community, and the creation of a religiously homogeneous society' (p. 238); however, 'his attempts to bring about a radical change in the religious life of his people did not bear substantial results' (p. 243). To this the author attributes the collapse of the heterogeneous kingdom before the attack of Ahmad Gran, whose disruption of the system of frontier defence is held responsible in turn for the success of the Galla. In a sense, therefore, the failure of Zar'a Ya'qob's policy is represented as decisive for the whole future history of Ethiopia. The book is, however, much more than a closely argued plea for this thesis, plausible though it may be. No one interested in any aspect of mediaeval Ethiopian history, whether political, administrative, ecclesiastical, military, ethnic or cultural, will find Dr Taddesse Tamrat's monograph unrewarding.

C.F. Beckingham

Papers

Church and State in Ethiopia