Issue No. 649

Islam and State: The Elephant Not in the Room

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"The future state should be democratic, with citizens' rights defended, but the state will have to embrace Islam or Somalia will continue to be unstable."
 Abdirahman Baadiyow, June, 2012
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For much of the last two decades, close-knit and secretive 'moderate' Islamist political factions have dominated Somalia's tortured state-building process. These factions have wielded immense influence across society and maintained the levers of power across four successive federal administrations since 2009. They remain the country's most organised political force and, in large part through well-established Gulf and Middle Eastern patronage networks, have accumulated vast material wealth.
 
Islamists will continue to shape Somalia's political destiny for the foreseeable future. Considering the modern history of Islam in Somalia as the 'veil lightly worn,' it is extraordinary that it is now inconceivable that a federal administration might be secular, yet no organised secular movement or parties exist today. Other political movements, particularly the ultra-nationalist section of Somali politics, have a habit of making common cause with the country's Islamists.
 
Fifteen years of covert state capture and an exercise of political power by stealth have now given way to an openly self-confident and assertive brand of Islamism. Under the incumbent President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, 'moderate' Islamism appears both confident and ambitious, as well as consolidating its political hold on the country through sweeping constitutional amendments. The moderate Islamist brand has certainly demonstrated its longevity and potency in Somalia. What it has not yet done is to define the end state - what a 'moderate Islamist' state would look like. More importantly, the politics of moderate Islamism has become murkier and hard to untangle.
 
2009 proved to be a seminal year in the rise of Somalia's Islamist parties. In late 2008, the weak Transitional National Government (TNG) President, Colonel Abdullah Yusuf, was forced to resign under intense pressure. Abandoned by Ethiopia, his closest ally, he was also hemmed in by a deadly insurgency and a regime deeply riven by power struggles and rendered non-functional. His resignation ended Somalia's brief experiment at charting a non-Islamist path towards state-building.

The former president was a strong federalist. While he did not articulate a secular vision for Somalia, he undoubtedly favoured a non-confessional state. Yusuf actively loathed Islamists and Islamism, responsible for waging war against the first armed Islamist movement in Somalia-- Al-Ittihad al Islamiyah in the early 1990s with Ethiopia's support.
 
But in 2009, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a conservative Islamist cleric, assumed the presidency of Somalia. The decision to elect him was based on a calculation that empowering the 'moderates' would undermine support for the violent extremism promoted by Al-Shabaab. Islamists have not left power since. Since then, power has rotated between an array of factions closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood; prominent among them are Al-Islah, Dam ul-Jadid, Aala Sheikh, and Daljir. The Salafist hardline group Al-I'tisaam remains an ideological competitor to these coalitions and tasted power under former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo. Fahad Yasin, the former National Intelligence and Security Agency director-general, actively promoted the group within the government as its treasurer.
 
In May 2022, Hassan Sheikh and his Dam al-Jadid faction returned to power. The president immediately shared the spoils of victory with Daljir, an allied Islamist party that backed his campaign. He appointed his mentor and friend, Abdirahman Baadiyow, a prominent leader of the Al-Islah movement, Somalia's oldest Islamist group inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, to spearhead a rewrite of the constitution. It is all but certain that Baadiyow was one of the key architects of the controversial and radical proposals that now seek to overhaul Somalia's political system by the National Consultative Council (NCC) in May 2023.
 
Islamists in Somalia have long favoured a strong centralised state and leader, and the NCC proposals do precisely that. Many of the changes that are currently being debated in Somalia's federal parliament are essentially ideological in nature, including abolishing the post of prime minister. It appears that older Islamists like Baadiyow and Hassan Sheikh spied an opening to push through a more ambitious Islamist shaping of the country's constitution. The now-tabled proposals have set the stage for a powerful leader unrestrained by traditional Somali checks and balances.
 
The notion that moderate Islamists are pushing through a seemingly authoritarian state-building agenda poses dilemmas for the international community that has embraced them as dependable partners in advancing democracy in Somalia. If Somalia had ever embarked upon a liberal state-building project, that project has now stalled, and an alternative Islamist state is now underway.
 
Recent events highlight the fraught nature of moderate Islamism. The speed and ease with which moderate Islamists have embraced the rhetoric of militancy in the wake of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) crisis with Ethiopia makes the term 'moderates' look dubious. And the spectacle of senior politicians within the federal government casually embracing Hamas as 'freedom fighters' and deploying anti-Semitic tropes to demonise Jews and Israel raises fundamental questions about what moderates actually stand for.
 
For decades, Somali moderate Islamists framed their politics and ideology as the antithesis of Al-Shabaab. Moderation needed not to define itself as long as what constituted extremism was clear and encapsulated by the militant group. Many uncritically understood the country's moderates as the counterweight to Al-Shabaab. But since the MoU, federal officials and Al-Shabaab leaders have increasingly echoed one another's talking points of Ethiopia as a 'historical enemy' and Somalia's sacrosanct 'territorial integrity.' Senior federal officials have even begun publicly referring to Al-Shabaab as a potential ally. In this light, it is extraordinary to consider that Al-Shabaab's extremism has been allowed to define moderation. 
 
The time has come for Somalis, and the rest of the world, to subject moderate Islamism to greater scrutiny. The sudden speed at which the NCC proposals have been tabled and are now being debated should be of immense alarm. A years-long process has been transformed into a matter of weeks as the federal government ploughs on with its centralising agenda. It has become increasingly clear that moderate Islamism is not inoculated against all forms of militancy; rather, they are highly vulnerable.

By the Somali Wire team