A few quotes from an article I was reading:
Ten years ago, armed Islamic extremists of a group called al-Itihaad, which recently turned up on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations connected to Al Qaeda, tried to unify Somalia by force in the name of Allah. They set up a training camp in an abandoned high school called Amoud, a collection of sunbaked stone buildings just a few kilometers down a rugged dirt road and across a dry riverbed from Borama.
Amound University was founded by terrorist wahabi group!
"If you want to measure how strong Islamic extremism is by measuring the number of mosques and the number of women wearing the veil, that would be a wrong measure. If American satellites could somehow count these things, they would have a very wrong measure. There's nothing behind it, absolutely nothing behind it. Even the ones who wear the veil drink alcohol, go to sleep with men and hide their identity." He concluded, without irony, "We hope this place will become the Mecca for education all over Somalia."
The drab, nunnish niqab and hijab--the veil that wraps tight under the chin--are new styles among urban girls, high school and university students, nurses in training, teachers. Some young women picked up the habit in the Gulf countries where their fathers held menial jobs; others saw it on CNN and the Arabic satellite network Al Jazeera. In Somaliland, puritanical Arab women's dress is a sign of Islamic sophistication, a globalization of "correct" Islam from the Arab countries outward.
I met with a small group of bright, ambitious, strictly Islamic students. I asked what kind of Muslims they considered themselves to be. The answer that came back was "new Muslims." By this they meant new in Somalia. In terms of faith and practice, they wanted to be as old as the Koran and the Prophet. "The Islamic revival is nothing else but the Somali people using the correct way," said a large-eyed, goateed young man named Ahmed. "The former Somaliland scholars didn't apply the basic teachings." He meant the Sufist sheiks, the old men with hennaed beards who worship saints and practice a kind of spiritual magic. "They took culture and turned it into religion," said Kadra, a young woman whose accent betrayed that she had grown up in Canada. "So what people believe now is the true religion." A boy named Ridwaan said, "Before 1990, I never saw a woman wearing a veil. Even some girls in my class didn't cover their hair." "And it is written in Holy Koran!" exclaimed Hassan, holding his copy aloft
Somalilanders believe in a "new Islam" and apparently all their forefathers before them were heretics practicing the wrong faith.
They longed for Islamic law to be instituted in Somaliland, but there was disagreement about the relationship between Islam and democracy. Ahmed saw them as compatible; for Hassan, democracy was a product of Western culture, and "Islam is higher, so they cannot go together."
If armed Islamic extremism resurfaces in Somaliland, it might well appear first in Burao, in the rugged highlands east of the capital, Hargeisa. Burao is the last city under the Somaliland government's authority--beyond it, one enters the rule of the clans. And Burao itself has the feel of a dusty, tough frontier town. An outsider draws longer and harder stares than elsewhere, and I was warned not to walk around by myself--a Swede had had his throat cut the year before. Al-Itihaad set up a major base here in the early 1990s, recruiting several thousand fighters who participated in a failed attempt to take power in Bosaso and were subsequently expelled to the south by clan elders. Their leader in Burao was even obliged to pay blood compensation of a hundred camels to a family who'd lost a son in the battle for Bosaso. I went to Burao to meet a hardware dealer named Nureddin Dualle, who had been described by a friend as "a clean, straightforward fundamentalist."
Unemployment in Burao is 95 percent, he said, pointing to the rows and rows of men idly drinking tea by the road and waiting for the sun to go down so they could chew khat, the stimulant shrub that makes life bearable for large numbers of Somalilanders. Every morning a hundred people came to his shop to ask for food. Somalilanders who had returned from overseas used their savings to set up stores, but no one could afford to buy anything, and inflation had rendered the Somaliland shilling almost worthless against the dollar. His hardware business was severely disrupted when the Bush Administration froze the foreign assets of the al-Barakaat telecommunications and financial services company on suspicion of funding Al Qaeda. Faith, Nur said, provided solace to the desperate, but what Burao needed most was business.
