We Do Not Have Borders. Keren Weitzberg
the state that “governed a racially defined citizenry” and “was bounded by the rule of law and associated regime of rights.”152 They were able to hire British lawyers, who sent letters on their behalf directly to the secretary of state for the colonies and King George VI.153 Isaaq representatives in Kenya were also able to turn to their kin abroad in order to bypass lower-ranking officials and “internationalize their struggle for Asian status and rights.”154 They appointed Haji Farah Omar, a prominent anticolonial nationalist, to serve as their representative in British Somaliland and petitioned the Duke of Gloucester through a local agent during his visit to the protectorate. In addition, they selected Abby Farah as their representative in London and requested that he hire a solicitor to represent their interests before the Colonial Office.155
The goals of alien Somali leaders in Kenya converged, as E. R. Turton notes, “with the interests of their brethren in British Somaliland.”156 At the same time as the poll-tax campaign in Kenya, religious and political leaders in Somaliland were resisting British attempts to implement a school curriculum that would include Somali written in the Roman, rather than Arabic, script. Opponents of the curriculum—which included Haji Omar and several Qadiriyya sheikhs—feared that rendering their language decipherable to European powers would reduce them to a “Bantu” people and enable the protectorate government to implement a system of registration and direct taxation. They were also concerned that the new curriculum would undermine the authority of religious leaders and hasten Christian proselytizing by allowing for the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. Rumors circulated that the director of education was a priest in disguise.157
To some extent, the campaign against a Latin script can be understood within an instrumentalist framework—as an effort to avoid taxation, registration, and a reduction in status. Nevertheless, this conflict also reflected differing understandings of education, language, and religion. Influenced by a nineteenth-century view of nationalism, colonial and protectorate authorities saw language as largely coterminous with “culture.” They operated along the premise that their subjects could be similarly subdivided into members of delimited “tribes,” each with a distinct territory and dialect. Many Muslims, however, did not conceptualize Arabic as an “ethnic” language that belonged exclusively 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.
NON-NATIVE STATUS COMING UNDONE
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