Somali Iranians, an old ethnic group

[Voltage]

Obviously they are descendants of Somali seafarers who traveled around. Check the pink

http://www.farsinet.com/farsi/images/ir ... gemapl.jpg

[Basra-]

I am terribly disappointed. I thought u would post those love archaic british journals of the ancient somal .

[Muhammad bin Harti]

You have waaaay to much time on your hands, bro.

[Dhaga Bacayl]

You have waaaay to much time on your hands, bro.

You never lie!

[Voltage]

Sorry Basra, not this time.

Mo, give me a week. But if you must know I was reading the killing of the Tutsi queen which was in the headlines so I checked wikipedia then clicked more got to ethnic groups in Africa than check European ethnic groups then Middle Eastern then check ethnic groups in Iran and voila the magic of procrastination combined with easy accessibility of net info!

[Enlightened~Sista]

Hayaaaay we're in Pakistan as well

I googled 'makrani' and this is what came up


Makrani boy in Pakistan. He is African, but is He really of Somali descent?

[Voltage]

The kid is clearly not Somali descent. Enlightened if you go to Mombasa or the coast of Kenya, the Baluchi are part of the what the Somalis call "Biibi" (Baajuun, Barawani, Balachi, Benadiri) so the Baluchi have a history in the Swahili coast, notice their geographical location in Iran. That kid is probably a left over of the Swahili slave trade in which the Baluchi brought back his ancestors.

[senoritaa]

In Pakistan and India there are ethnic somalis who are descended from seamen and colonial officers. I am not surprised they are in Iran too. They have communities here in the UK like wales and near newcastle upon tyne of mixed somali/white families.

[Enlightened~Sista]

Makrani (Urdu/Persian: مکرانی) are the inhabitants of Makran coast of Balochistan in Iran and Pakistan.



The African people were enslaved and brought to Balochistan in medieval times. The descendents are called Makrani or Sheedi. The Sheedis (also called Habshi, from Arabic حبشي ḥabashi) are a Negroid people in Pakistan. They are the descendants of slaves first brought to Pakistan by Arab merchants in medieval times from the Bantu-speaking parts of eastern Africa. Siddis were referred to as Zanj by Arabs, and Seng Chi (a malapropism of Zanj) by the Chinese.[1][2][3]

[Voltage]

As I thought, waa iska Swahili.

[Enlightened~Sista]

Yeah, waa Zanjibaris. There are tons of Baluchis in the GULF especially OMAN, I'm guessing they brought them to their regions.. but kuwa wadamada carabta dagan iska carab bay noqdeen, they have 'Al Baluushi ' at the end of their first/second names.



Those pics were posted on a Pakistani forum...btw.

[paidmonk]

Why did the map claim the Makkrani blacks were then Somali?

[XKeyse_]

senoritaa,

Those people you are taking about are decendant of the 40 Ugaadh Cumar gaurds who left Berbera in 1857 to India. They were hired as gaurds of the Indian king of the state of Heydarbad. Their decendent were interviwed by http://www.somaliweyn.com in 2001, they are pure Indians by now some century and half later, they havely intermarried with Yemeni families in Heydrbad. The cheif of the police of Heydrbad provencial capital is among them , in 1988 when Maxamed Faarax Aydiid was the somali embassdor to India some 150 families have applied for somali passport , Aydiid couldn't hold his laughter here are Isaaqs who left Somaliland in 1857 and of all that time for the first time they are applying for passport to go and visit "Gatiitelay the Ugaadh Cumar village" on exactly 1988 when all isaaqs were on arms, needless to say Aydiid updated them on the news of somaliland. Those familes now number around 5000 at least.

http://www.hyderabad.co.uk/africa.htm

Be aware that some African slaves who came as slaves to India rather claim decent from the Somali gaurds of 1857.

[XKeyse_]

The crowing of the cockerel greeted me at Mohammed bin Hassan's immaculate little house, down a side street in an old quarter of Hyderabad.

The Sidi ancestors were guardsmen
brought over by Muslim rulers


We talked while Mohammed's young grandson looked shyly on.
Mohammed, who is in his 70s, is one of Hyderabad's Sidis - a community of people of African descent.
While some of India's Sidis came as slaves, this southern city's community has its roots in a troop of guards recruited to serve the Nizams - the old Muslim dynasty of this one-time princely state.

The story goes that in the 19th century, the 6th Nizam got word of Africans serving in the court of another Indian nobleman.
Impressed by their qualities, he asked for a batch of Africans to be brought to Hyderabad. A group of around 300 soon followed.
Most accounts suggest they came from Africa voluntarily.
They included Mohammed's grandfather. "My grandfather came from British Somaliland, from Hargeisa. My father was born here," he told me.

"Nothing African is left - no music,
no clothes; everything is Indian"
Mahmud bin Farzullah


Showing me some family photos, Mohammed pointed out his maternal grandfather and uncle, both of them in the Nizam's African Cavalry Guards or "AC Guards". The military staff also included Arabs, but the Nizams had wanted Africans as bodyguards "because they are loyal, and physically good", he told me. Also pictured are a number of Ethiopian Christians.

The part of Hyderabad where most Sidis live today is known simply as AC Guards.
it has a pronounced Muslim feel to it, centred as it is around an old mosque; Muslim businesses including beef butchers line the lanes.
But also in the neighbourhood is a large church - St Mary's.
In these streets, most people you see are not Sidis. But some of the local Sidis are highly venerated.




Mahmud bin Farzullah believes he is at least 100 years old and has South African ancestry.
He was a guard for the seventh and last Nizam, who lost his powers in 1948 when India, with great violence, took over Hyderabad.

"I used to ride horses, do horse-jumping and the daily parade," he told me.


"I was also part of the contingent that used to greet the Nizam on his birthday and present him with gifts."
The last Nizam was extremely eccentric, but for Mahmud, "he was a great person. He really loved his people."

The memories are equally vivid for a non-Sidi I met - Mir Moazam Hussein, now nearly 90.

As a member of Hyderabad's old nobility, he and his cousin, as young boys, used to sit under the Nizam's balcony on the royal birthday for a prime view of the AC Guards.

"They were the most brilliantly-attired, uniformed men; the men did justice to the uniform - they were great big dark-skinned men, you know. And so were their horses!" said Mir Moazam.

He has sweet memories of the AC Guards playing the military band, and of some of them coming to his boyhood palace selling duck and snipe which they had shot on Hyderabad's lakes.

The palace had a staff of hundreds, including Sidi women, the female relatives of the guards, who would check in visitors.


Only Urdu

A Sidi music group performs at the recent Zanzibar film festival



The Hyderabad Sidis still excel in music.
One man I met, Abu Pahalwan, runs a band of drums which plays at weddings and sounds unmistakably African.

They have also scored outstanding feats in sport, especially hockey.

But I got the sense that this community had fallen on hard times.

"In the past, people used to respect us," Mahmud bin Farzullah says.


"But now, when they realise we are Sidis, they move away from us. They don't want to talk to us. And this government gives jobs only to Indians."
Because men vastly outnumbered women in the African immigration to India, with each generation the African blood is diminished.

I was struck by how much the Sidis have lost touch with their African cultural roots, apart from perhaps in music.

Many do not even know what part of Africa they are descended from.

"The Ethiopians here speak only Urdu - me too," Mohammed bin Hassan told me.

But he has no regrets about having lost his Somali culture.

It is the same for Mahmud bin Farzullah.

"Nothing African is left - no music, no clothes; everything is Indian," he said.

But he does feel sad that more and more young people are marrying outside the Sidi culture.

The Nizam's Sidi guards were just one in a series of African immigrations to India over the centuries.

But it was never a mass phenomenon.

And today, you feel privileged to meet and see something of a community that perhaps, in a few more decades, will be barely discernible as African at all.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 116817.stm

Published: 2003/08/04 05:14:18 GMT

[Hussein53]

Hundred if not thousands of amharic and tigray where enslaved by Ahmed Guray and shiped them to Gujarat who was at the time governed by a muslim who had strong relations with Ahmed Guray. This was back in 1500's and and somalis from the north used to trade in slaves for hundreds of years in the port zalac and berbera. Thats how the tribe Nouh Ismail (saad musa) got rich and where well known in the arab world as salve traders.