and also Sheikh Darod was a SufiHassan received education from as many as seventy-two Somali and Arab religious teachers. In 1891, upon returning home, he married an Ogadeni woman. Three years later, along with two uncles and eleven other companions some of whom were his maternal kin, Hassan went to Mecca to perform the Hajj. The party stayed there for a year and half and came under the charismatic influence of the newly-developing Saalihiya order under the leadership of the great Sudanese mystic, Mohammed Salih. Hassan received initiation and very rigorous spiritual training under Salih. From this experience, Hassan emerged a changed man — spiritually transformed, 'shaken and over-awed', but determined to spread the teachings of the Saalihiya order in Somalia.
Authors such as Ibn Hawqal, Al-Muqaddasi and Ibn Said have confirmed the early presence of Arabian tribes in municipalities such as Berbera, Zeila, Jabarta (an old metropolis now in ruins) and Massawa in the northern Horn of Africa.
Al-Masudi wrote about the specific Arabian families and tribes that lived in Jabarta and Zeila in his 9th century book Aqeeliyoon. This book sheds light on one individual, a Sufi Sheikh of the Qadiriyyah order called Isma'il ibn Ibrahim al-Jabarti, who fathered several children, one of which was named Abdirahman.
