Issue No. 90

The Politics of Religion in the Horn of Africa

Of any region in the world, the Horn of Africa is home to some of the oldest, richest, and varied religious traditions, featuring sites such as the Masjid al-Qiblatayn in Zeila and artefacts from the ancient Axumite kingdom in Tigray. For centuries, faith has and continues to play an integral part in the daily lives of most within the region, with Islam and Christianity the two dominant religions today. And in turn, spiritual life has naturally shaped the politics of the Horn, with elites having long grappled with how best to accommodate, co-opt, or suppress religious movements and identities. Over the centuries, this has encompassed Muslim leaders couching their fight in the rhetoric of jihad as well as the 'civilising' expansion of the Orthodox Christian Ethiopian Emperors into neighbouring regions in the 19th century. Religious movements in the Horn have often explicitly turned to violent means as a way to advance their competing aspirations. And in recent decades, alongside a rise in religious militancy, there has been a resurgence of political leaders framing their actions within religious rhetoric-- even if their states are nominally secular. Today, nearly every leader in the Horn of Africa associates their leadership, to some degree, with either Islam or Christianity. 

Structural factors such as marginalisation-- real or perceived, social inequalities and poverty are all well-documented in academic literature for their roles in motivating religious radicalisation and extremism. Similarly, globalisation has played a particularly prominent role in the political expression of religious movements, with Islamic extremist groups mirroring counterparts in the Middle East and South Asia, and fundamentalist Christians echoing their counterparts in North America and Western Europe. The modernisation of life in the Horn of Africa has forced religious movements to redefine their place in the 21st century. Some have adapted by moderating their views and making them more accessible, while others have felt driven to assert claims over a 'purity' of faith. At the same time, the widespread use of technology has further brought about new avenues for religious expression, though this has often accentuated the sharpness of identities and interfaith competition. 

Naturally, expressions of religion and faith across the Horn are difficult to divorce from their particular historical, cultural and political context as well, be it the Sufism of the paramilitary Ahlu Sunna Waljama'a movement in Galmudug or the strains of animism in parts of South Sudan. And the nuance, scale and variation between religious-political movements across the Horn are far too diverse and complex to cover in a single stroke. But the most notable extremist group is, of course, Al-Shabaab, the jihadist group that controls swathes of south-central Somalia and has tendrils extending into both Kenya and Ethiopia. Its lesser-known ideological cousin, Al-I'tisaam, is another highly influential and wealthy movement that has swelled in size in the past two decades, with influence stretching from Djibouti to Nairobi.

Yet there are others as well, while perhaps less overt in their extremist framing, that are undeniably working towards the fusion of faith and government, and are happy to deploy violence to this end. This arguably could include some militias within the disparate Fano insurgencies in Ethiopia's Amhara region, which blended strains of Orthodox Christianity with ethnic cleansing in Western Tigray during the 2020-2022 war. In Ethiopia, however, religion is far from the sole determinant in its many given conflicts, with political expressions concerning ethnicity having played a more prominent role in the clashes ongoing in Amhara and Oromia. Such interplay between ethnic, clan or tribal identity and religious expression is another immensely complex and nuanced subject.

The simultaneous rise of militancy alongside non-violent religious movements has coincided with the penetration of Gulf interests within the Horn. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have played a particularly prominent role in empowering a range of Salafist and Islamist groups in the 21st century, deploying their immense hydrocarbon-backed funds to establish madrasas and mosques across parts of the Horn. In the vacuum of the state, the more moderate strains of Sufism in Somalia have been forced to retreat, replaced with a more hardline interpretation that dominates the country's political and economic spheres today. Qatar has further empowered political opportunists nominally aligned with Doha's Islamist vision, be it Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud or Sudanese army commander General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. On the flip side, the UAE has sought to constrain what it considers Islamic extremism, supporting a range of rival actors, including Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, Somaliland, and some of Somalia's federal member states. Iran is another that has quietly sought to empower its own set of Islamist players in the Horn, increasingly relying on the Yemen-based Houthi movement as a proxy. Such theocratic and geostrategic differences from the Gulf have bled into the Horn with calamitous consequences, helping to drive the raging conflict in Sudan in particular.
 
Meanwhile, Kenya's William Ruto and Ethiopia's Abiy Ahmed have both given full voice to their Christian faith, at times driving awkward tensions between their constitutions and their own roles. Both countries are highly diverse and multi-faith, with constitutions that enshrine the freedom of worship and expression. In practice, however, Ruto rode to power in 2022 partially on the back of the Christian vote, picking up significant support from evangelical churches and being dubbed 'deputy Jesus' by his opposition. More recently, he has fuelled even greater controversy by announcing the planned building of a mega-church at the cost of roughly USD 9 million on State House grounds. 

Similarly, PM Abiy Ahmed's own evangelical vision for the centralised, ruling 'Prosperity Party' directly draws from the 'Prosperity Gospel' vision of Protestantism to which he ascribes. Particularly popular in the US, the doctrine has spread across much of Africa and proclaims that its followers can manifest their hopes and dreams. The Prosperity Party has actively sought to constrain and co-opt the influential religious bodies within Ethiopia, particularly the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC), which was divided during the Tigray war after senior clergy supported the government's war and has been further split by the conflicts in Oromia and Amhara. Amid Ethiopia's autocratic slide, many of the EOTC's senior leadership have been forced to flee the country and are unable to return for fear of arrest and persecution.

In Somalia, religion plays an explicit and prominent role in public political life-- a far cry from the 'scientific socialism' of the Siad Barre regime in the 20th century. Indeed, it is hard to envisage a secular state emerging in Somalia today, with various Islamist movements having alternated in government in the 2010s and 2020s-- all while battling the violent extremist group of Al-Shabaab. Today, it is Hassan Sheikh Mohamud who heads up the government, a figurehead of the Muslim Brotherhood Damul Jadiid (New Blood) faction. As president, he has sought to empower his own particular religious sect, while alternately fending off or co-opting other influential Islamist movements in Somalia. 

But there are constraints on such powerful religious groups as well. Somalia's president, for example, relies on the Muslim Brotherhood to advance his authoritarian state-building agenda, but his authority and legitimacy have been kneecapped by vanishing public support beyond his own Abgaal / Wa'eysle sub-clan rather than by any ideological lacunae. The situation of Sudanese army commander General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is more complicated. One of the principal questions of the Sudan war remains the degree to which the influential Islamist factions within the Sudanese army have control over al-Burhan and the future of the country. The widespread interpretation has been that al-Burhan is a more 'straightforward' military autocrat in the style of his predecessor and former ally, Omar al-Bashir, and resistant to the Islamists' creeping influence but dependent on their manpower and links to the Gulf for patronage and arms. Another would be that the Sudanese leader is far more ideologically in step with them, and is performatively diverging from their influence for his more guarded Egyptian allies. But whatever the case, the outcome has so far been the same, and the resurgence of the 'banned' National Congress Party in shaping Sudanese politics has been all too clear. Unlike Abiy, whose power is near-absolute within Addis, the more constrained al-Burhan and Hassan Sheikh have both enabled and attached themselves to movements as a means to access power and patronage, with significant compromises required as a result. Al-Burhan may eventually regret making a pact with factions that incorporate Islamist extremists, whose loyalty is not to a military figurehead but to the caliphate.

As so often is the case within the Horn, Eritrea is the outlier, where all non-state-affiliated religion is regarded with utmost suspicion, as is anything capable of mobilising a movement against the highly centralised autocracy. Expressions of Christian and Islamic identity within Eritrea are heavily monitored and controlled from Asmara, with the country ranking as one of the worst places in the world for freedom of expression and worship. In the mid-1960s, Eritrea's long-serving dictator Isaias Afwerki underwent military training in China at the onset of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, which helped inspire the formation of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) upon his return. A revolutionary Marxist movement, Isaias has sought to create a unified Eritrean national identity by eradicating and suppressing traditional societal structures, including religion. 

When the German philosopher Karl Marx famously decried religion as the "opiate of the masses", he was invoking the cynical manipulation of faith by political leaders to distract their subjects from execrable maladministration. Faith was, in other words, the refuge of the weak and incompetent leader rather than the confident and the capable. Gazing down on today's Horn of Africa, Marx might well feel validated in his critique: many of today's politicians and warlords intoxicate their supporters with religiosity in order to win wars or elections. That may earn them tactical victories and short-term advantage, but it is also a recipe for societal friction, polarisation and scission. And while such elites may believe themselves to be steering the religious movements upon which they've hitched their fortunes, history has shown time and again how these can easily veer off-piste and consume themselves and their leaders. Hardly the stuff of which strong and prosperous states are made.

The Horn Edition Team