To some people it looks strange why Islamic leadership is not in power in Bangladesh and other parts of the Muslim

world even after working for several decades to bring about the required social change. The reasons are many and every Muslim country has its own idiosyncrasy and peculiarity. It is generally true that leadership of the Islamic movements has not been able to properly use their vast manpower, the workers of dawah, call and guidance. There is also no doubt that Muslim leaders have failed to take a realistic and pragmatic assessment of the existing scenario and draw a well thought-out action plan to solve the critical ills of the life of the ummah. Islamic movements have not done enough work to train their manpower to meet the challenge of the age and are busy with what the Indonesian Vice president of the World Bank Ismail Serageldin has described: As the world explores the marvels of genes, breaks down the secrets of the atom, reaches to the stars, and calculates the age of the oldest rocks, we Muslims debate whether a womans nail polish prevents her from making full ablutions. Ismail Serageldin expressed his dismay over the discussion on such minor issues as to whether it is Islamic to have golden teeth or to give the Quran to a non-believer, or whether it is permitted to study Western law in the Islamic columns of prominent Saudi Arabian newspapers like Arab News, Saudi Gazette and Riyadh Daily. It is also largely true that Islamic leadership took a very negative attitude towards public good and social welfare of the common masses and has failed to earn the trust and confidence of the people. Sheikh Rashid Ghannoushi while commenting on the objective of the Islamic movements remarked: Islamic movements should not make their primary goal to assume power in the government. Taking over the government does not necessarily mean the biggest achievement of the struggle. The bigger success would be when the society loves Islam and respect its leaders As Islamic movement, we must be critical in assessing our strategies. Our activities and efforts must be reviewed in order to be relevant with the current changes Islamic activists must prepare themselves with the correct knowledge and relevant skill so that they will be able to apply wisdom in carrying out effective and efficient dawah activities. Malaysian Islamic Party leader Abdul-Hadi Awang rightly pointed out: Politics of Islam is the politics of dawah, of winning hearts and minds of the people more than getting votes. It is based on fundamental truths, not ephemeral interests. Thats how Islam has been winning people all through history.
The leadership of the Islamic movement is bent on shifting the failures to others. Dr. Farish A Noor, Malaysian academician and human rights activists has rightly pointed out: One cannot continue to blame foreign agents and international power brokers for the loss of ones credibility at home. The real problem that beset the economy and political system stem from cronyism, corruption, abuse of power and lack of accountability and transparency in the government.

The most important reason that the workers of the Islamic movement or the workers of dawah are poorly equipped and not well trained is that they are not up-to-date of the latest developments in the field of knowledge. They are not aware about the most recent ijtihad, whatever little research is being done by the eminent Muslim scholars in various fields throughout the world. The leadership of the Islamic movement is mostly happy with the past heritage. Self-glorification for the past achievement and success has blinded Muslim leadership to the need to examine their history in a critical and analytical manner with a view to exploring the points of weakness. In actual fact the Muslim legacy is not adequate enough to provide solutions of our contemporary crisis. Islamic movements still measure themselves by the past models and ignore time and distinctive features, and yet expect identical results. The right perspective and perception needs to be invoked. In this way, a fair interaction with the past can be made instead of vainly trying to revive it. The study materials for the workers of the Islamic movements do not empower them with sufficient knowledge and ideas for meeting the changing needs of the age. The dawah workers, the cadres of the Islamic movement, are forced to read substandard books as rightly pointed out by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Professor of Physics, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He said: In fact many individuals make huge profits by producing substandard and badly written books filled with conceptual, pedagogical, and printing mistakes. Shoddy books are included in the compulsory study materials of the dawah workers of the Islamic movement for the financial benefit in terms of royalty of the so-called elite writers of the Islamic movement. Consequently Islamic workers have lost sight of the comprehensive totality of the Quran and thus losing the opportunity to relate to reality and control the inevitable changes in time and circumstances as the Quran behooves Islamic workers to do. The Muslim leadership rather is now behaving in a way that circumstance dictates their thinking. Muslim leadership is not the master of the circumstance rather circumstances dictate them. The most regrettable affair of the todays Islamic movement is that its elite leaders have developed weakness for wealth and money. To put in the language of Malaysian academician Dr.Chandra Muzaffar: The love of money has given birth to the religion of moneytheism The worship of wealth, and the worship of power and prestige it generates, have become so pervasive that we can perhaps talk of moneytheism as a formidable challenge to monotheism. Moneytheism, the ideology which legitimizes the relentless pursuit of riches is an end in itself. It has been argued that certain contemporary approaches to religion which eulogies wealth without an iota of concern for social justice are nothing more than conduits for the propagation of moneytheism. Moneytheism contradicts the essence of faith in a variety of ways. One, the blind worship of money often leads to the displacement of God in ones worldview. Even if it does not, the pursuit of wealth for the

moneytheists is at least on par with the worship of God. Two, since the accumulation of wealth for its own sake is a self-serving activity, it fosters a form of selfishness which is antithetical to the values which religion so cherish. Self-gratification becomes the overriding goal of human existence. Three, consequently moneytheism not only legitimizes greed but it also sanctifies acquisitiveness. It is in this moneytheistic civilization that greed and acquisitiveness have acquired legitimacy and respectability that was denied them in all previous epochs of human history. Four, because greed has become legitimate, the culture of moneytheism emphasizes acquiring more and more and more. That is why the entire system of economic production in contemporary societies is geared towards the constant stimulation of desires. Religion, however, is the ethic of restraint, of controlling and curbing ones desires, that is regarded as worthy of emulation. Conspicuous consumption and a fetish enslavement of fads and fashions, which are defining characteristics of modern living, is totally alien to religion with its commitment to moderation, balance and equilibrium. Five, the consumption patterns and the underlying attitudes engendered by moneytheism have become so pervasive and penetrative that they threaten to transform human personality so completely that the person who might dominate the 21st century could well be an utterly self-serving individual with very little empathy and compassion for his fellow beings. How moneytheism, which manifests itself in almost every sphere of life, is changing the human personality is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges confronting religion nay the Islamic movement. For the moulding of character has been one of the time honoured roles of religion, the Islamic movement. Materialism or acquisitiveness is a new phenomenon in the Islamic movement. Allah swt has promised victory to the Muslim if we live and die for Islam. Al Quran states: Never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves [Al Quran-13 (Surat Ar Rad): 11]. Mohammad Asad in his celebrated commentary of the Quran - The Message Of The Quran - translated this verse as: God does not change mens condition unless they change their inner selves. Unless the leaders of the Islamic movement shun moneytheism and bring change in their hearts, pattern of behaviour and their priorities and goal of life, Allah will not give victory to the Islamic movement. The concept of an exclusive or one-dimensional organization, political, social, cultural or intellectual, has wreaked great damage to the unity of the Islamic movement. It has led such organization to believe that it is the embodiment of the will and consciousness of the Islamic movement, which surely is a misleading concept; one does not truly realize the implications of such a perception. Never can an individual organization be a substitute for the Islamic movement as a collective endeavour and will of the people. Rather such single organization or party will become mere splinter

group on a long list of adversarial groups. The Quran and sunnah do not sanction the claim of sole representation of the entire Islamic movement by any particular Islamic organization. An organization persisting in its claim that it alone possesses the knowledge and legitimacy ends up not only alienating every other member of the Islamic movement but also accusing them of apostasy and ignorance. It starts with the wrong premise of introducing Islam to the world anew, ignoring all history and precedence. There exists no justification for any faction or individual to claim sole representation of the Islamic movement or monopoly of the Truth. Some people think that joining a particular Islamic organization in a particular country is obligatory otherwise you remain out of the Islamic community, which is indeed a wrong perception. In this connection the comment of eminent Egyptian Islamic scholar Sheikh Adil Salahi who is the English translator of monumental Tafsir Fi Zilal al Quran (In The Shade of Quran) by Sayyid Qutub Shaheed is most relevant and noteworthy. He wrote: If we interpret this requirement as an obligation to join a Muslim organization in the country where we live, then certainly we are way off the mark. There may be an Islamic organization in our area, which sincerely works for the re-establishment of Islam in our country. Its efforts certainly deserve support. But there can be no question of joining its being a religious obligation. We may have a different approach from that chosen by this particular organization. An individual may be of such temperament that membership of an organization does not suit him. He cannot be forced to join it. However, he should render support in any situation where he feels the organization is right and its attitude serves the Islamic cause. Indeed, no broad-minded founder or leader of an Islamic organization ever suggested that his organization represents the Muslim community, or that its membership is obligatory to all Muslims. It is true that some groups advance such a view, but these were rigid in outlook, mistaken in approach. Imam Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, used to say to all Islamically minded people: Let us help one another in all matters on which we agree, and let us excuse one another where we differ. This is the proper attitude. He never suggested that those who did not belong to his movement were in error, or deviated from the right path. His attitude was echoed by most leaders of the enlightened Islamic movements throughout the Muslim world. Narrow-mindedness is alien to the nature of Islam. Hence, to suggest that the line adopted by a particular movement is the only one acceptable to God is totally wrong. Since approaches may differ, choosing a particular approach is acceptable (Our Dialogue. Arab News. 11 October 1993. Jeddah).

Eminent Iraqi scholar Dr. Taha Jabir al Alwani in his monograph Missing Dimensions In Contemporary Islamic Movements has highlighted some of the very fundamental weakness of the Islamic movements: 1. The Islamic movements have become tainted with a partisan mentality; they have allowed themselves to turn into groups at odds with the higher interest of Islam. Indeed they have become incapable of carrying out any form of collective work within the body politic. That is why they have become easy targets of others to isolate or destroy them. 2. Some of the Islamic movements are confused about distinction between the sacred texts with human interpretation and jurisprudence of ijtihad based on these texts.

3. This confusion of the divine and the human has resulted in some of these movements claiming that they are the sole possession of the Truth, thus conferring on their own human thought and ijtihad the sanctity of fundamental texts. By the same token, they have expropriated the historical achievements of the Muslim community as a whole and credited it to themselves through the claim that they are the only extension or embodiment of the historical reality. 4. Some Islamic movements have deluded themselves into believing that they could do without intellectual effort or ijtihad so long as they had the Quran and the Sunnah to hand. By thinking along these lines they have failed to link the Islamic text with the real world and lost the ability to actualize the faith. Some of them have indeed launched themselves as full-fledged organization well before determining or reforming the world of their thoughts. It followed that they began to haphazardly select notions from the real world and Muslim tradition in order to respond to the requirements of their organizations and everyday activities instead of proceeding in the light of sound and rational judgment. 5. Besides their claim to encapsulate, through their ideological platforms, the whole faith, many of these movements have claimed to embody, through organization and membership- and to the exclusion of all other groups- the whole Muslim community. This cannot but be the result of intellectual immaturity and a juvenile fondness for exclusiveness and theatrics. 6. Despite their untiring verbal commitment to the Quran and the Sunnah, these movements have failed to draw up appropriate programmes for themselves, thus reflecting a poor grasp of the methodological foundations of Islamic doctrines and Shariah. Indeed methodology constitutes the cornerstone towards the

development of comprehensive Islamic discourse capable of implementing the ultimate objectives of the Islamic message. 7. Since the beginning of modern contacts with the West, the Islamic discourse has been marching on the spot, stranded as it were, between high and low tide, between progression and retrogression. At times when all-out mobilization of effort and resources was needed to ward off an outside danger, it rose to the occasion; however, during times of construction and development, the Islamic discourse seemed almost everywhere- pathetically lacking in vigour and wholeness. Be that as it may, an analysis of the silent characteristics of the present Islamic discourse ought to instill among the Islamic activists more awareness towards rectifying the form and content of Islamic discourse to make it more viable in an age fraught with intellectual and other challenges. Another weakness of the Islamic movement is that although it believes in human equality in principle but it has failed to translate such equality in real life practice in the state and society as a whole. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar rightly pointed out: If one looks at the contemporary situation, one could argue that contemporary Islamic movements have by and large, with a few exceptions such as the An Nahdah Party of Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, inherited this notion of equality and political, economic, social, and gender relations from the history It is a notion of equality which has been embodied in the fiqh tradition, the Islamic tradition of jurisprudence, which must be distinguished for the purpose of analysis from the divinely rooted shariah. It is this fiqh tradition, which has formed the basis of Islamic movements approach to this fundamental question of equality in society. What Islamic movements have done the most notable amongst them being the Ikhwan-al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) and the Jamaat-e-Islami is to say that they have accepted equality as an important principle at the general level. However, when it comes to translating that principle into specifics you will find that there are many inequalities and that they accept the inequality as divinely sanctionedFor example, in the realm of politics the fiqh oriented approach of contemporary Islamic movements is to say that you need a powerful ruler, a ruler who would centralize authority and thus be able to establish the norms and principles of an Islamic polity. That this in itself an act of inequality is something that does not occur to them. You will find that within these Islamic movements there is very little support for the idea of peoples participation and empowering the individual. Rather there exists this notion of a strong leader at the apex of society. Islamic movements are not still ready to accept and embrace women in leadership, which is another example of inequality between men and women. Those who object to assigning political position to women forget that in todays world rulers are parts of an

establishment. Indeed government itself is one of a group of institutions that share out among themselves the power and authority, which used to be exercised by a single ruler, regardless of the title he assumed. During the earlier days of Islam the Kholafae-Rashadeen used to combine in them comprehensive and broad authority, over the whole Muslim world which no ruler is expected to exercise in foreseeable future, including leading prayers, commanding armies, exercising absolute ijtihad in fiqh, and being the supreme judge. From the point of view of her competence, a woman may be assigned some of these powers, including the post of the head of the state, because none of these powers, including that of head of state, constitutes the overall authority over the community which assigns it to a woman. Dr. Kaukab Siddique in his book The Struggle Of The Muslim Women (American Society For Education And Religion, INC, U.S.A.) has discussed in depth and details the pros and cons of the issue and has concluded that woman leadership is allowed in Islam. Interested readers will find the book analytical and authoritative. To conclude, it should be kept in mind that in this overview an attempt has been made for a brief appraisal of the Islamic movement. Issues have been raised and talked about to initiate a wider deliberation and reflection by the ulama, academicians, scholars and Islamic activists, the workers of dawah, meaning the advocacy of Islamic order. What has been discussed here is not the last word, rather the subject demands in depth analysis, critical examination, rigorous and painstaking exercise.

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International Influences Chapter 2. The Foundation of the Movement

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International Influences
Islamic reformist movements in Indonesia have always had connections with other Islamic movements in other parts of the world. The emergence of reformist movements, such as Muhammadiyah and PERSIS, was deeply influenced by the Islamic movements in the Middle East, such as Wahabism in Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic reform movement of Muhammad Abduh (18491905) and Jamaluddin alAfghani (18391897) in Egypt. Like previous Islamic movements in Indonesia, contemporary Islamic youth resurgence movements in Indonesia are also influenced by international Islamicmovements. Different from their predecessors, current Islamic movements developed in an era of globalisation, in which mass communication technology has been revolutionised. Recent advances of technology have led to a situation where citizens of the planet earth are linked inextricably by satellites, receiver dishes, transmitters and cable television networks and relays. At this stage, all humans are in one community, a global community (Shupe 1990:1726) or in McLuhan and Fiore's (1968) term a global Village. This situation, in relation to the Islamic movement, creates a closer connection among various Islamic movements. Previously, the influence of the international Islamic movement reached Indonesia after a period of time. Usually, the founders of the Indonesian movements met reformist ideas in the Middle East when they studied Islam or when they did pilgrimage (hajj) in Mecca. When they returned to Indonesia they preached their reformists ideas and later established a movement. For this reason, there was a time lapse which differentiated the Islamic movement in other parts of the world and the Islamic movements in Indonesia. The agents of these movement were individuals. In later developments, this agency of change was also through books and other printed media. Finally, the agency of the contemporary Islamic movement is not only through individuals and printed media but also through various electronic mass communication media, such as television networks and direct broadcasting systems. This advance of telecommunication technology has revolutionised the spread of ideas and information. What is on television in America can also be seen at the same time in a small village in Bandung, Indonesia. Through television, what happens in other parts of Islamic world can immediately be seen and heard by Muslims in Indonesia.

This fast current of information is very important in understanding the emergence and early development of the Islamic youth resurgence movement in Indonesia, especially in Bandung. One of the most important international events which greatly influenced the early development of the movement was the Islamic revolution in Iran in1979. This event for Muslim activists had three impacts. First, it gave Muslim activists the idea of an Islamic revolutionary movement and that Islam could become a radical ideology which could challenge established ideologies. Second, Islamic revolution in Iran psychologically motivated Muslim activists and convinced them that they could also succeed like the Islamic movement led by Khomeini in Iran. Third, the Islamic revolution in Iran also influenced the way Muslim females wore clothes or at least reinforced the teaching of the veil (kerudung, jilbab) This was because female Muslims who supported the revolution in Iran wore the veil and black clothes. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, these influences could be seen clearly. There was a kind of admiration toward Khomeini as the leader of the revolution. The portrait of Khomeini was hung in young Muslim activists' rooms and in offices of student and youth Muslim organisations. Another influence could be identified clearly in the way Muslim female activists wore clothes. In the late1970 s there were very few female Muslims who wore the veil, however in the early 1980s- just one or two years after the Islamic revolution in Iran- those who wore the veil increased rapidly. Furthermore, the distinct Iranian influence was that Muslim female activists wore black veil and clothes similar to those female activists in Iran. The influence of the revolution in Iran was reinforced by the translation of books written by important revolutionary figures. The works of some Shi'ite scholars, such as Ali Shariati and Imam Khomeini were published and read by Sunni Muslim people in Indonesia. Along with other books written by Sunni scholars, such as Sayyid Qutb, Hasan al-Banna and Mawlana Maududi, these books shaped a new Muslim view on Islam. These impacts of the Islamic revolution in Iran on the early development of Islamic youth resurgence movement are clear despite the fact that the revolution in Iran was a revolution of the Shi'ite (Si'ah) Muslims. It is a quite interesting fact that regardless of differences,[14] Indonesian Sunni Muslims accepted revolutionary ideas from the Shi' ite Muslims in Iran. An informant says, we do not agree with some of the faith and teachings of the Shi' ite, but we have learnt from the revolutionary ideas of the Shi'ite. At this stage, as Khurshid Ahmad (1983) says, the contemporary Islamic movement reached a very important phase in Muslim history marked by its nonsectarian characteristic (p.223).

The movement of Islam in Ethiopia Now a days Islam is becoming the political, economical and social force in Ethiopia. It is challenging the church and the government as well. Islam is also growing in an alarming rate, i.e it is the fast growing religion in the globe, in the continent Africa and Ethiopia. The world population doubles in every 56 years, but Islam doubles in every 25 years (In 1950 the Muslim population in Ethiopia was 25%, but now Muslins claim that they are the majority, i.e more than 50%. This percentage shows that the number of Muslims doubles four time in the past 50 years. Out of this number only 0.08% of Muslims came to Christ. This presents the challenge for the church and for all of us to reach out the lost world. Brothers and Sisters Islam is moving forward to control Africa, especially Ethiopia. In the last 30 years many conferences were held in various parts of the world to expand Islam to apply the Sharia law, and to weaken Christianity. The special conference that brought tremendous impact in the African continent is the Islam in Africa conference held at Abuja in Nigeria in Nov. 1989. In this conference the representative of Islamic scholars and leaders from 24 nations participated. At the end of the conference the participants came up with key strategies to win Africa for Islam and unity al the Muslims with out geographical boundaries. All the strategies are being implemented in Ethiopia, especially after the fall of the Dergue regime. The religious freedom gave Islam a fertile ground to expand its influence in each individuals life and other

religious groups. I think it is good to mention some of the strategies of the Islam in Africa conference in order to see where Islam is aiming to go. 1. It says To ensure only Muslims are elected to all political posts of member nations. This point shows that Islam do not believe in democracy and free election. 2. I says To eradicate in all its forms and ramifications all nonMuslim religions in member nations (such religions shall include Christianity, Ahmadiyya and other tribal modes of worship un acceptable to Muslim). In this declaration the word Christianity is underlined, you know why, the main target of Islam is to eradicate Christianity from the continent. The Jimma masscar is the reflection of this strategy. 3. It says To ensure the ultimate replacement of all western forms of legal and judicial systems with the sharia in all member nations before then next Islam in Africa conference. Now the Ethiopian Muslims are moving forward to implement the Sharia law all over the country. 4. It says To support the establishment and the application of sharia to all Muslims. Surprisingly, the Sharia courts were opened both in Muslim dominated and Christian dominated areas of the country. This will lead the ultimate Islamizaiton of Ethiopia. 5. It says To ensure the appointment of only Muslims into strategic national and international posts of member nations. There are other strategies that are being implemented in the country in order to change Ethiopia to Muslim nation and a member of Arab Legue. To achieve this goal the implementation of the strategies are

heavily finance by Muslim nations. Millions of dollars are invested to build mosques, quran and Academic schools, for training and for development works. After the implementation of the Abuja declaration here in Ethiopia, the situation drastically changed. In the post 15 years large number of mosques were built all over the country. Now the number of mosques is estimated to be more than 30,000. Many quran and academic schools were built next to mosque buildings especially in city settings. The type of schools range from kindergarten to colleges. This program started in Addis Ababa an expands through the country. Examples of these are Iqra academy, Awaliya school and college and etc. In addition Muslims are taking the key political posts. Due to this fact many Christians in Muslim areas are being persecuted, assassinated, the church were burnt, and believers are living with fear and oppression economically, the Muslims are controlling the import and export sectors. Besides this the Arab companies are investing in the country for the sake of fulfilling their hidden religious Agenda. Fundamentalism is another treat for the church. There was virtually no literature and cassette production by Muslims in Ethiopia before 1990. Since that time they have opened printing presses and started to print and distribute historical, theological, ethical and polemical materials (material that opposes christianity) in Arabic, Amharic, Oromipha and other local languages. To speed up and broaden their distribution, they sell the cassettes and literatures at very low prices. Furthermore, Various development programs are also being

implemented in Muslim dominated areas, such as Borena, Afar, and Somalia. In all these challenges and difficulties, God is doing amazing things in Muslim evangelism. Before 10 years, it was very rear to get Muslim converts in the churches. Now things are changing. Even it there are various challenges, God opened the hearts of Muslims to respond to the gospel message. In the last 10 years more than 20,000 Muslims come to Christ. Evangelical Churches and various ministries started to present the gospel in a contexualized way. Church planting movement is already started in Muslim dominated areas. Salvation gate ministry is also contributing a lot to reach the Muslim community. Brothers and Sisters, this is the time of harvest. God opened doors to reach Muslims. We have to use this chance to bring glory to God and Save the lost. Since there is plenty of harvest, these who are working at the field, they need man power, finance and prayer. Please let us work together to save the lost.

Introduction The demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 has left a notable point in the minds of many Muslim activists across the Islamic world that led to the emergence of various Islamic

movements. Traditionally, the Islamic caliphates were of the opinion that their Islamic state was a religious necessity to serve and protect Islam. However, when the Ottoman caliphs were no longer able to defend their Islamic empire in the face of colonial ambitions, politics and wrong socio-economic policies of the Sublime Porte in Istanbul have jointly served the infamous governing concept of 'divide-and-rule' applied by the European colonial powers in their newly conquered Muslim dominions.

In rst decade of the twentieth century, one signicant issue that has featured in global politics and international relations was the development of Islamic movements some with militant and radical characterizations that shaped the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism. Current western explanations regarding this phenomenon, however, often pay little attention to the political history of Islamic movements. Instead, many interpretations are more implicitly concerned with the clear and present danger that most Islamic movements are posing to Western conceptions of political and economic order. This in turn, creates international concerns to provide governments with means to combat Islamic fundamentalist organizations and their supporters. These concerns simply contend that to thoroughly analyze the historical contexts in which Islamic fundamentalism is apparent would not only divert attentions to combat its violent nature, but also irrelevance in terms of determining what response is needed to bring an end to its terrorizing acts that have wrought on Western societies. However, for the analysis of conflict and conflict resolution, understanding the historical background of Islamic movements and their offshoot Islamic fundamentalism is imperative and essential. It is essential because it signals to us the deviations and the apparent upheavals in most countries where Islamic movements have presence and it should warn us to the powerful myths that their leaders construct around extreme lines of thinking as a way of mobilizing their followers for change; to violently break with the current secularist status-quos and work for the future where Islamic traditions and life are in control. This paper sets out to address this conflict by examining a number of issues that describe and explain the ongoing phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism. Inasmuch, this paper concentrates on the political manifestation of Islam in the twentieth century, specifically after the Islamic revolution in Iran. Also, rather than being geographically specic and focusing on the regional heartland of Islamthe Middle Eastthe focus of this paper is the whole of the Muslim world where the majority of the population are Muslim. This is not to ignore the fact that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, citizens in the majority of Middle Eastern countries have been subject to a range of political conditions: colonialism and interwar occupations, secularism, revolutions for independence, rising nationalism, growing Islamist movements, and repression

IS ISLAM GENUINE?
The following is a provoking critique on the authenticity of the Islamic religion

"Is Islam genuine?" It is an easy question to pose, but the answer is far from simple, if only because the answer is dependent on who is giving it. This will, of course, strike the reader as strange because the question appears to be very similar to the same question about Judaism or Catholicism, and thus beyond essentially subjective responses. The question, "Is Islam genuine?" does not receive an objective response in this article. It is because Islam is at once a fact and an illusion, a contradiction which will be shown in due course to a paradox, and on that has tremendous implications not only for the Catholic Church, but also for the one in six people walking this earth who call themselves Muslims. Some Jewish theologians down the centuries have treated Islam as a Judaic heresy in the same way that they have treated the Creed of Jesus Christ a Judaic heresy, although it has to he said that Jewry has frequently found it possible to work with Muslims in a way that it has not been able to do so with Christians. Whether this has been due to historical figures or historical circumstances, or even merely psychological dispositions, is something to he debated, though there is an a priori case for thinking that there is something inherent to Christianity which Judaists fear profoundly and which is not to he found in Islam. Some of the facts of this article may add a certain measure of conviction to this notion. In the Catholic Church theologians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas. and lay writers, such as Hilaire Belloc, have treated Islam as a Christian heresy. This will come as a surprise to many readers who have been brought up thinking that Islam was something set well apart from the Catholic Faith. hut the fact remains that there is much to underpin such an opinion in spite of contemporary appearances. Belloc writes, for example, that: Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it wasnot a denial. but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing [The Great Heresies, 1938] Fr. Sheehan, Archbishop of Germia. in his Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine 1944 wrote of Islam: The fragments of revealed truth which the religion contains were borrowed from Judaism or Christianity. In other words, if Islam drew upon both creeds, there is a certain truth in saying that it is simultaneously a Judaic and a Christian heresy. What we're told

Let us look at what the world at large and Muslims in particular think is genuine Islam. We are told that it is a new religion that was founded hy the Prophet Muhammed, also was horn in Meccaa large and important trading center as well as a site of pagan religious pilgrimagein western Arabia in 570AD. We are told by the Pakistani writer, Dilip Him, in Islamic Fundamentalism 1988) that Islam means state of submission. Professor Edward Hulmes of the Universities of Durham and Princeton, in his 1986 Catholic Truth Society pamphlet entitled Muhammed says that it means peace through submission to the revealed will of God. We are told that, inspired by the Archangel Gabriel, Muhammed wrote the Holy Book of Islam, the Quran (Koran), and that this book, full of subtlety, wisdom and insight, is the defining proof of Muhammeds prophetship, because he was an uneducated manvariously a shepherd or traderwho could neither read nor write. The fact that the Quran is written in classical Arabic and has no literary antecedents adds weight to the claim that Muhammed was inspired by the Divine Will. We are informed that he sought to preach the Quranic creed amongst the pagans of Mecca, but that he was driven out and forced to seek refuge in Medina [both places located in modern-day western Saudi ArabiaEd.]. He persevered, however, making converts here and there through the power of his word and example. Given the violent nature of society in those days, he necessarily came into conflict with the pagan forces around him and in 624, won the decisive Battle of Badr. A few years later, Mecca fell to the truth of Islam, and the Kaba, the house which contained the stone idols of the Meccan pagans, was turned into the House of God. The Kaba becomes the center of the Islamic world, the foremost shrine, to which all Muslims should seek to go at least once in their lives on pilgrimage. This is a summary of the reply to Is Islam genuine? It is a standard description that will be found in books written by Catholics. by Muslim clerics. by secular academics and by Western Islamologues. The sole problem with this description can be summed up in one phrase: Virtually none of it is true! That will come as a shock to many. but only because they have absorbed what has been handed down to them at face value. It is exactly like the conviction of many Conciliar Catholics that Mgr. Lefehvre was an excommunicated schismaticit is not something that they hare proved through reading, research and study, but something that they have taken as truth simply because it has been repeated to them from every side with barely a dissenting voice. But mere repetition, be it by academics or by the apathetic. is not the hallmark of Truth. Thus, to get to the truth about Islam, to get a truly objective and historical handle on Islam, we are going to have to dig much deeper, not with the intention of offending or insulting Muslimsthey too are creatures of God made in His image and

likenessbut with the intention of bringing light to bear on a twilight zone, so that the Truth might shine forth and set free those disposed to receive Gods grace. Pride and Prejudice In the early 1980s, Dr. Maurice Bucaille published, through Seghers of Paris, a book entitled The Bible, the Quran and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge. Throughout his work, he lays great stress upon the fact that in comparing the Christian Bible to the Quran, he is acting purely objectively. He emphasizes that he is a surgeon, that he has been formed in the spirit of Western scientific objectivity, and that when he set out on this work, he had no preconceived ideas. Before long the reader comes to see that the whole purpose of the book is to demonstrate the inferiority of the Bible to the Quran, and to do this in the name of scientific investigation. We are told: Today, it is impossible not to admit the existence of scientific errors in the Bible (p.6). He concludes the Quran does not possess scientific errors and therefore it is the true revealed Word of God. Equally important for our study is another of his statements: In the West the critical study of the Scriptures is something quite recent. For hundreds of years, people were content to accept the Bible as it was. It would have been a sin to level at it the slightest criticism ibid., p.l6. You can feel the slightly mocking tone here, the intellectual looking down upon the masses who believed the superstitions of the Bible. The doctors spirit is that of the 18th- and 19th-century rationalists disproving the Bible, but printed on a page in the 20th century. Implicit, of course, is that this is not the case with the Quran: that it is has been tried and tested to the satisfaction of science. Dont be crestfallen. Dr. Bucailles scientific approach is a lie t)f the first order, and is typical of so many Islamic apologists, whether they be practicing Muslims or simply people calling themselves secularists or agnostics! It is certainly true that a systematic and critical study of the Old and New Testaments by Christians and approached by many differentt disciplines such as textual criticism, archaeology, epigraphy, history, theology etc.only really got underway at the beginning of this century [Unfortunately, false and haughty critical study was used by modernists to undermine the credibility of the Bible.Ed.] What is devastatingly true is that Muslims have not even begun to do this to their religious books! Thus, we find the Dominican. Fr. Calmel. writing: The Muslims have never subjected their religious books to criticism. They would think that this profanes them and that they would be guilty of sacrilege. From the

moment one of their books is held to be revealed by God, it is not possible to maintain that it might be penetrated by the historical thought of Man. We are not used to seeing things in this way, and the Catholic doess not understand that one can posit a principle (tf separation between divine faith and historical or philosophical reason [Islam: A Jewish Undertaking (1961)]. In case people think that Fr. Calmel is being partisan, it should be noted that many Western Islamologues, who are no friends of Christianity, say exactly the same thing. Regis Blachere and Denise Masson, who have both made attempts unsuccessful) to make coherent translations of the Qur'an, have said the same thing. Masson writes: The critique, historical and scriptural, based upon epigraphy and archaeology. has still not been applied to the Qur'an following the normal methods. Introduction to her translation of the Quran (Pleiade, 1967)]. When Denise Masson sought to suggest that certain verses of the Quran were obscure, she was forbidden to do so by the Supreme Islamic Council, to which she submitted. When the Biblical School ofJerusalem began studying critically the Old and New Testaments at the beginning of this century, there were some scholars who undertook to study Islamic tradition. It needs to be understood that in addition to the Quran, there are three other works which combine to make up Islamic tradition. The first is the Hadith Sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which was put together two centuries after the death of Muhammed, and is claimed to be authenticated by the companions and eyewitnesses of the Prophet passing down this information from generation to generation. The second is the Sunna, which is the juridical legislation pertaining to Islam. The third is the Sira, which is the Lfe of Mohammed, and which was allegedly put together in the form that we now know it by Ibn Hisam in the ninth century, a man about whom we know little or nothing, and who also claims that the information contained in the Sire is genuine because it was passed down by the companions and eyewitnesses of the Prophet from generation to generation. Getting the truth The first person who really began to expose the tenuous nature of islamic origins was the Jesuit Fr. Lammens, working at the University of St. Joseph in Beirut (Lebanon) at the beginning of the century. Drawing upon the work of many scholars, such as De Weil in 1843 and Caetani in 1905, he demonstrated that the eyewitnesses that guaranteed the Hadith and the sira were pure fiction, and that the Hadith and the Sira were no more than paraphrases and embellishments of statements to be found in the Quran. He wrote:

The statements found in the writings sacred to the Muslim tradition form not the control, not a source of further information, as was thought until now, but a fantastic development. On the basis of the Quranic text, the Hadith embroidered its legends. happy to create names of players in the field so as to pad out the basic themes [Quran and Tradition 1910)]. The French monk. Bt. Bruno Bonnet-Evmard, whom we will mention later. summarizes the position of Fr. Lammens: Tradition explains the Quran, which itself is the basis of Tradition. in other words, it is a vicious circle which the scientific enquiries of the likes of Bucaille fail to notice. Was Fr. Lammens simply a biased priest? Well, we find Professor Goldziher, a Jew, writing in Mohammedan Studies (1989) of the profoundly tendentious nature of the (Islamic) Tradition. Again, in the Ecclesiastical Dictionary of History and Geography (1924) Rene Aigrain writes in the entry on Arabia: In such circumstances. we can no longer deal with the life of Mohammed by using the Sira as a basis, as have several of his biographers. Caetani wrote in his Annali dellIslam: We can find almost nothing true about Muhammed in Tradition, and we can reject as apocryphal all the traditional materials that we have. Maxime Rodinson, in his Mahomet (1974) informs us that nothing allows us ever to say: this dates mdispu times of the Prophet. Even those (e.g., Gaudefroy-Demombnes, Noldeke, et al) who are not prepared prepared to eliminate the Sira and the Hadith as fictitious, do so not because of evidence for their historicity, but because the alternative would be to start from scratch. Noldeke, for example, simply states that he will leave aside the mystery surrounding the personality of Muhammed (cited in Fr. Lammens work, Quran and Tradition). The importance of the work of Lammens should not be underestimated, for it is highly destructive of Islam" as we know it. It is destructive for this reason: once you have eliminated the Sira, there is not a single, positive source attesting even to the existence of Muhammed! This is a truly incredible thing given the immense collections of manuscripts, parchments, monuments, sculptures, tombs and inscriptions of the ancient world that have come down to our day. Thus Dilip Hiro can describe Muhammed in the following terms: He grew up to be a sturdy man of average height, with a curved nose, large eyes, sensuous mouth and thick, slightly curly hair. He was a quiet man, serious, reflective, given to speaking briefly and pointedly. Without the Sira, there is nothing to back up this apparently reasonable description. We do not hear about this fact, and the reader can make up his own mind about why this may be, but it does not detract in anyway from the fact.

Digging more Deeply Fr, Lammens does not take us all the way to the truth. What he did was to begin a process, a process which was continued 50 years later by the Dominican Fr. Thery writing under the pseudonym, Hanna Zakarias. Fr. Thery was a renowned medievalist in his day, and was highly respected in the scientific world. He is considered the founder of the scientific exegesis of the Qurn, although he did not read Arabic or Hebrew,, and thus had to read it in various translations. His intuitions came from an understanding of texts and their make up, and his major critical contribution was his conclusion in Islam under Evaluation (1957) that the Qurn did not originate in Arabia at all and its author was scholar from elsewhere who created the Arab religious language. This is an important point because for the Iraqi exegetes of the ninth century, the fact that the Quran had no literary antecedents was in itself a miracle. Far from decrying the Qurn as rubbish,, Fr. Thery establishes the fact that it has some real worth, a value that is not found in the other elements of Islamic tradition. He says in The Quran is Not Arab (1957) that when one considers the Quranic text alongside the Sira, the latter are only the babblings of stupid children, and the disorder, unlikelihood and grossness of their legends on the life of the prophet allow the detail and power of this uneven Arabic text to stand out marvellously. The kind of thing he had in mind can be gleaned from an example. As Lammens showed, everything in Tradition has been taken from the Qurn and embellished. Thus the Quranic text, We have sent you a light," (a mistranslation in fact) is developed in Hadith and Sira so that it comes to be applied directly to the Prophet himself. Thus, Islamic tradition tells us that Muhammed actually gave off waves of light so that he was visible even in the darkest shadows. The light that he gave off was so powerful that it allowed someone to find a lost needle in the dark! Comparing the Quran to the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinical Midrashim, Fr. Thery concluded that the Quran was only the Bible explained to the Arabs, though he also isolated a residue, drawn from allusions made to contemporary events by the Quranic author, which could not be explained away in this fashion. This residue he believed was a little like the Acts of the Apostles, and so he dubbed them the Acts of Islam, thereby presenting them as kind of diary of rabbinical attempts to convert the Arabs to Judaism. Although Fr. Thery did not have a completely closed and satisfactory theory, he advanced the study of Islam and declared the key to discovering it would be a systematic and scientific translation of the Quran, for the Quran was the only sure document. He believed that the Quran had to explain the Quran in the way that the Bible explained the Bible. His linguistic deficiencies, however, made him unsuitable for the task.

The process has been greatly advanced in our days; by Brother Bruno BonnetEymard. He is not merely a gifted theologian, who has studied Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in depth, but he is also a talented linguist who reads Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Arabic. The first thing to understand is that his systematic translation of the Quran is necessary because no one has ever succeeded in doing it to date. The reason is that the translators have been guided not by the actual meaning of the text, but by taking into predominant consideration the received sense of the text. There is actually no agreed translation of the Quran in existence! We may be used to differences of phraseology and emphasis in the various editions of the Bible that exist, but no one disputes the essentials. With the Qur'an, however, it is all the other way round. One writer will translate a phrase in one way, another will do so in a completely different way, and both talk of breaks in meaning, interpolations, amendments, and adaptations in an effort to cover up the essential uselessness of their work. Speaking of such translations, Fr. De Nantes, a colleague of Br., Bruno, writes: Nonsense, fantastic inventions, contradictions, incoherence without even mentioning the innumerable omissions of embarrassing words and misplaced additions-such is the method of the traditional translation for 13 centuries. Thus when the text (Sura III, vs.14) clearly refers to gold and refined gold, translators like Blachere and Masson write gold and silver because they do not understand the reference. They create the word silver, which is not in the text, although the reference is clearly taken from the Psalms. It is a question of Psalm 18:11, which says: They are more precious than gold, than heaps of purest gold. [Confraternity edition, 1946.] This is an example of the kind of invention that goes on in such translations. An example of contradiction is to be found in Sura ILL, vs.13, with the word mitlayhim. Blachere translates this as meaning in equal number, whilst Masson informs us that it means "two times superior in number. Which is it? Or again, there is the problem of arbitrary meaning, where the same word in one context is ascribed a wholly different meaning in another. Thus Sura III, vs.25, contains the word; wuffiyat, and is translated as holding faithfully to an alliance, whilst in Sura II the same word is translated as receiving a just reward. Space requires restraint here, but let it be said that we are confronted by a mass of shifting sands, a problem that has to be resolved before a serious answer to the question,. Is Islam genuine? can be given. This is the historic task that Br. Bruno had and has before him, and to date he has published three volumes, totalling some 1,000 pages of dense script, which has translated and explained in great depth the first

five chapters (Suras) of the Quran. His research has shown that not only is the Quran not a hodgepodge theological work of dubious value, as previous translations might lead people to believe, but that it is a mine of information that is coherent and interesting, and which is the work of a truly erudite man. Although there are still another 109 Suras to translate, his work has revolutionized the study of the Quran to the point where one can already say that Islam, as we have known it, has been dealt a fatal blow. Br. Bruno begins by stating: Whatever incertitude remains concerning the genesis of Arabic script, it is an incontrovertible fact that the alphabetic system was fixed precisely for one given purpose: the publication of the Quran.... He goes on to say: Our exegesis will show clearly that the alphabet used in the Quran is only a pure and straightforward transposition into Arabic from the Hebrew alphabet. Thus, Fr. Therys intuition that the author of the Quran was a rabbi, whilst not absolutely confirmed, is clearly not a million miles off target. Br. Bruno tells us that the word Islam is traditionally translated as submission, something that we saw at the outset of this article. He says that the translation is clearly wrong and wholly unconnected to the text. The Hebrew root word, sim, is also to be found in Aramaic and is simply aslim in Arabic. The word means perfectin Aramaic, hawei selim means, Be perfect! Why this should be will be explained in due course. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this article to follow Br. Bruno through all his translation, so we will have to content ourselves with a brief overview of the text, which shows the true meaning of the Quran, and also through looking at certain key words. Firstly, however, we will have to review our historical knowledge a little, so that the full impact of what has been discovered comes home to the reader. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 7OAD, the Jews were dispersed. Where did they go? Historians, such as Torrey, believe that many went en masse to Teima, an oasis in southern Palestine, hoping and believing that they would be able to return at some time. What is not in dispute is the fact that the Arabian Peninsula has a tremendous history that is only becoming known in our day, and in which the Jews have a pivotal role. For those who have thought it was just so many miles of sand, with Arabs travelling about aimlessly by camel, the following will come as a shock. We know from inscriptions in 280AD that the inhabitants of Sheba and the Yemenat worshipped Athtar, that is to say, the goddess Venus, but that by 378 such paganism

had died away to be replaced by a monotheism which invoked the Lord of heaven and earth and who was designated the Merciful. We know from historians such as Jamme and Danielou that southern Arabia from the end of the fourth century played a dominant role in the history of the Arab peninsula. We know too that not only was Yemen a fertile and prosperous place, but that it was the theater of a real attempt at complete Judaization which had neither precedent nor equivalent. Naturally, we will ask ourselves how this came about and why. The first point to bear in mind is that the Judaism of today does not actively seek converts, and has not done so for a long time, but it would be a mistake to believe that it was always this way. In the early days of Christianity, Jewry fought long and hard against Christian missionaries wherever they appeared. using whatever methods were available, and one of these methods was to seek to win people over to Judaism. The second point to bear in mind is that Judaism spread easily in the Arab Peninsula because circumcision was common amongst the Arabs. The third point to bear in mind is that Jews were numerous in the land of the Himyarites (Yemen), a fact attested to by Philostorge, who relates coming across an Arian mission headed by Theophilus of Dibous in 356. We are informed that while the population was mainly pagan at the time, Theophilus made great inroads, converting the king and building churches everywhere. Such reports demonstrate the scale of Roman and Christian expansion. but it also demonstrates that such expansion was coming up against a well-entrenched Jewish community. In 378, the king of Yemen turned against the Roman Empire and allied himself to the Persian Empire, a change brought about by the Jews since they were the sole intellectual and social elite in the country. This was the high tide in Romes attempts to colonize the peninsula, and it also marks the high tide of Christian missionary effort since the Persians were far from sympathetic to the religion of its imperial rival. Thus, the fifth century saw the region becoming evermore Hebraic in outlook. We know from John of Ephesus that, at the beginning of the sixth century, a war broke out between Aidog, Prince of Ethiopia and Dimion, King of Yemen. The latter was heavily pro-Jewish, to the point that he had all Roman merchants entering his territory arrested because of the Roman persecution of the Jews. Nonetheless, the Ethiopian prince won the day, converted to Christianity, and built churches everywhere. This Christian expansion was seen by the Jewish community as a provocation, and Simon de Beth Arsham, a Persian bishop, relates that the Jews at Tiberias [the majorJewish school of the day Ed.J) send their priests (sic) year after year and season after season to provoke trouble for the Christian Himyarites.

The anti-Ethiopian and anti-Christian reaction was led by a Jew named Dfi Nuwas, who promptly allied himself with the Persians. He in his turn was also crushed by the Christian forces. We know from an inscription in 618 that the king of Yemen was a monophysite (Arian) Christian by the name of Abramus, and that the inscription, in an Arabic-type script, says: By the power, the favor and the mercy of the Merciful, and his Messiah and his Holy Ghost. In the north of Arabia, a different situation developed. The pressure of imperial conflict between Byzantium and Persia caused the various Arab tribes to unify, serving either one empire or the other. Yet it is known that the Arabs who converted to Christianity did not stay in the Hedjaz, where modern day Mecca is to be found, but migrated to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The negative result was that by 582, the Hedjaz looked for all the world like a jewish province. The voluminous literary and epigraphic evidence for a implantation in the first centuries of Christianity in the Hedjaz can be found in, for example, Joseph Horovitzs article. Arabia, published in the Encyciobedia Judaica in 1929. Francois Nau in his The Christian Arabs of Mesonotamia and Syria in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. published in 1933, tells us that, at the beginning of the seventh century all the Arabs of Mesopotamia and Syria were to a certain degree Christian. at least in atmosphere. Everyone had seen some of the hermits or ascetics, had eaten at the doors of the monasteries, had been present at the controversies between the monophysites and diphysites. Fr. Henri Charles tells us in his The Christianity of th Nomadic Arabs in thc Limes and in th SyroMesopotamian Desert in the Region of the Hegira (published by Le Roux in 1936) that, the powerful personality of famous hermit, St. Euthyme, marks the begining of a highly fruitful mission, constantly spreading, so that the territory of the Ghassanides by 570 was flourishing with Arab monophysite monasteries.. Thus, for centuries the Arab Peninsula was the scene not merely of military warfare, but also of theological warfare: warfare between Jews and Christians, and between various heretical Christian sects and Catholicism. Inevitably, there is a seeping down of all such influences into the fabric of society, a penetration, a cultic mixing, which, as we shall see, prepares the way for the appearance of the Quran. While all of this is going on, there is a steady development and change in the alphabets used in the region. Such changes are now virtually clear, and they demonstrate that the Quran in Arabic, far from being a miracle, is, in fact, the end of a centuries-long progression.

There is a bi-lingual inscription at Umm-al-Jimal which has been dated to the end of the third century, and Littman comments in Florilegium Meichior de Vogue (Paris 1909) that the script is already a transitory stage towards Arab script, whilst the inscription at Namara is dated December 7, 328, and is by then proto-Arab. The definitive evolution of this development can be seen in the inscription at Harran which is dated 568, and in the inscription at Zabad in the Syro-Mesopotamian region, both being what we would now call Arabic. It is a variety of Aramaic, Aramaic being the commercial language of the Old East at this period. What is not only interesting, but actually vital, is the fact that both the Harran and Zabad inscriptions are Christian inscriptions. Nan tells us: It is the Christians above all who created alphabets for the people they converted, and taught them how to read and write. So-called classical Arabic is no exception. Its alphabet is owed to Christians, because in the homes of the Christian Arabs of Syria are to be found the oldest examples of this writing. Having taken on board a little of the historical background leading up to the Quran, we can now place it and its message in a defined context. It is not a spontaneous creation, a revelation falling from the skies, but a work with deep roots, an ancient lineage and a sting suited to the times. Even a brief perusal of the Quran will demonstrate that Abraham is central to Islam, and yet from the opening prayer we see that there is a distinct lack of lslamic coloration. In the name of God, the Merciful, the Mercy-Giving Praise be to God. Lord of the Universe, the Merciful, the Mercy-Giving! Ruler of the Day of Judgment! You do we worship and from You do we seek help. Guide us along the Straight Road, the Road of those whom You have favoured, with whom You are not angry, nor who are lost. [ Quran, Thomas Ballantine Irving translation, published by the Islamic Foundation in England 1979)] It can be readily seen that there is nothing specifically Islamic about this prayer. Indeed, it could be just as equally Jewish or Christian in origin at first sight. If you think about it, this is certainly a strange occurrence in an apparently new religion. Br. Bruno, however, demonstrates that, in fact, it is a very old Jewish prayer which is given a subtle. anti-Trinitarian bent, and that Irvings translation is inaccurate in that it has lost much of the subtlety and finesse of the Quranic original. As Br. Bruno has proceeded to translate the first two Suras of the Quran, its basic theme is becoming clear and hints are being revealed regarding its author and his background.

Confronted by the violent and unending conflicts between Jews and Christians in the peninsula, it is evident that the Quranic author was forced to reflect on why the alliancethe covenant with Godhad come to this sorry pass. He remarks that the sign of the alliance with God is circumcision, and that the alliance was made with Abraham. Yet he also remarks that the first son of Abraham to be circumcised is not Isaac, but his son, Ismael, by the slave Agar. Recall that God demonstrated his power to Abraham by giving a son, Isaac, to his elderly wife, Sarah. We know too that, at the insistence of Sarah, Agar and Ismael were sent away, and Ismael would become the father of the Arab people. Thus the alliance was made with Abraham, who was neither Jew nor Christian, but was a pagan who became perfectthe first Muslim. Abraham and his son Ismael were made perfect menmuslimayn and they were told to consecrate their ancestors to God, to make of them a perfect people muslimat. This call to perfection was a justice which came upon Abraham and Ismael (because God never stopped listening to the prayer of Agar and her son, according to the Quranic author) and also upon Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets including Moses and Jesus without distinction. In other words, there is no distinction made between the Old and New Testaments, for the author holds that the Torah of the Jews and the Gospels of the Christians have been used wrongly to divide the Peoples of the Book. The Jews are held to have fallen away from the Law, and the Christians have distorted the prophetship ofJesus, making a mere man a God, and thus fallen into apostasy. The Quranic author apparently felt called to reunite the Peoples of the Book. This he does by taking the racial line of Judaism through circumcision and adding to it the call to perfection from the Gospels, emphasizing all the time that the falling away of the Jews and Christians from Gods alliance did not abolish the alliance made with Abraham and Ismael. We see another view of Islam as "a call to perfection. In one sense, we have to see this theological reasoning as a stroke of genius by the author of the Quran. and as something that suited the warring theological atmosphere of the peninsula. Br. Bruno states: The author does not have as a plan to found a third religion, but to abolish the two othersJewish and Christian by restoring what he believes is the sole tradition (qiblat), that of authentic Abrabaminism. Whilst the first Sura is purely Jewish and very old, Sura II is concerned with reminding people of the demands of the Jewish Torah, and Sura III with the demands of the Christian Gospels. Thus Sura II ends with a prayer of the authors making, the Our Master, Our Circumciser, which stands half way between the Yalzwe/z of the Jews and the Pater Noster of the Christians.

How, then, does the Quranic author believe that the true religion of Abraham can be restored? Simply by a return to Jerusalem, by a return to the place or house of Abraham, and by uniting with the true believers, the offspring of Ismael. Now tradition tells us that the place or house of Abraham is to be found in the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem, and this because it is believed that it was at this spot on Mount Moria that Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac. The House carries the name Bakka, and the purest form of adhesion to the alliance is the pilgrimage to the House (hi jju lbayti) at Bakka. It is portrayed as an unlimited blessing and as the Way to God. By insisting on this, the Quranic author is attacking the Jews, who had stopped the pilgrimage to the ruins of the Temple centuries before, and equally the Christians, who had forbidden it in the name of the Gospels, because it is not the Law, but the spirit which saves. [For Catholics, going through the motions of a Catholic life, that is, observing the Law, is not the same thing as living a Catholic life. The first gives little or nothing; the second opens the door to salvation.Ed.] At the same time, we see that the Quranic author, while being anti-Christian, does not see all Christians in the same light. He makes distinctions. He refers in Sura III, vs. 113 to those Christians who stand and recite the words of God throughout the night, whilst in another place in Sura III, vs.114, he states: They speak with softness and remain calm, they are distant from what is extraneous, and they give of themselves freely. These are amongst those who prosper. These are clear references to the desert monks, and Aigrain demonstrates in his article, Arabia Ecclesiastical Dictionary of History and Geography, 1924), "the real fact of the prestige of the monks and their power of conversion upon the Arabs." So it should not be surprising that this man of intellect and subtlety would also be an admirer of a Christian phenomenon of which he would have had direct knowledge. Furthermore, Br. Bruno demonstrates that the author had a profound knowledge of Christian culture, had meditated deeply on the Gospels and upon the other books of the Christian revelation, and this is shown in the precisions and allusions of the Quranic text. The Quranic author was a scholar of the first order. The aim of the author and of the faithful is to return to the House of Abraham, to Bakka, by means of pilgrimage. Suras IV and V of the Quran are concerned with the means of that return. History tells us that Jerusalem fell in 614, with the armies of Emperor Heraclitus of Byzantium being crushed by the Persians. Krauss tells us (Jewish History) that Jews from southern Palestine were allied with these Persianspossibly the Jews from the

oasis of Teima mentioned by Torrey as well as from Arab bands. Upon arrival in Jerusalem the Jews threw themselves with fury upon the Christian population and their shrines including, naturally, the Holy Sepulchre. Yet it is recorded that they threw themselves with greatest fury upon the Nea, the Church of Our Lady, a point whose significance will appear later. In 617, the Jews, according to Krauss, demanded certain rights of autonomy in the Holy City. The Persians by this time had been in the presence of the Christians of Jerusalem for three years and had found them most accommodating, so when the Jewish demand for autonomy was made, the Persians decided enough was enough. They deported the Jews to Persia. From the writings of historians like Krauss and Graetz, it would appear that the Arab bands were dispersed beforehand, thanks to the treachery of the Jews, and Br. Brunos translation (Sura III, vss.118119, 122) shows that the Quranic author complains of treachery and the perfidy of false brothers, the sons of Israel. Sura III deals with this defeat of the Arabs, and the author talks of his calvary, but he turns his meditations upon the Gospels to good effect and demonstrates that this defeat is not an absolute defeat, but a purification. It is at this point that the historical myth of the Battle of Badr, mentioned earlier on, comes in. The town of Badr is currently a small town south west of Medina, but no map of antiquity records its existence. Furthermore. the word badr does not exist anywhere in the Quran. neither in Sura VIII where all previous authors insist on talking about the Battle of Badr, nor in Sura III where the word bi-badrin is wrongly translated as at Badr. In Sura IV, vs.6, the related word biddran is correctly translated by Blachere and Masson as dissipation or dispersion, and is a straightforward transposition of the rabbinical Hebrew word bidder meaning to dissipate. Bi-badrin, therefore, means through or by dispersion. The reason why Islamologues translate the word as at Badr is because they do not see the meaning of the text, either in whole or part. while on the other hand Br. Brunos translation makes logical sense. The Quranic author is referring to the miracle of the saving of his Arab bands through the dispersion" brought about by the Persians in 617. It is one of many examples where senselinguistic and historicalis made clear in the text where others have only brought confusion and contradiction until this point, we have consistently talked about the Quranic author," rather than Muhammed, who is everywhere stated to be its author. Why? For the simple reason that a man called Muhammed did not write the Quran. We noted above that once one has put the fantastic myths of the Hadith and Sira aside, there is no irrefutable proof for the existence of Muhammed. Historically, however,

Muslims claim that the author refers to himself in the Quranic text as Muhammed, so there can be no doubt about his identity. Is this really the case? It is certainly the case that in the Quran, the author makes several references to himself, but he is remarkable for the overall silence about himself. In Sura III, vs.144 he calls himself muhammadun, and from the work of Ibn Hisam onwards, this has been taken to be the real name of the founder of Islam. Br. Bruno says that this is not the case, and gives his proofs at length. It is interesting to note that this assertion of the non-existence of Muhammed has not drawn a single rebuttal from Fr. Michel Lagarde, a priest who is not only an expert in the field himself, but who is also heavily committed to Islamic-Christian dialogue. On the other hand, Br. Bruno translates the word muhammadun as the beloved. He is saying that it is not a name as such, but a title bestowed upon someone; a little like saying the light of my life in referring to your child, for example, which could not be misconstrued as the name of the child. He says that the word muhammadun is derived from the root word hmd, which is the Arabic transposition of the biblical root word hamad, meaning "to covet or to desire. In Sura I, vs.2, the monk had already shown that the related word al hamdu was the love that one ought to have for God, the Master of the centuries. Now, a southern Arabic inscription at Jamme uses the word mhmd to refer to the God of the Jews, so the obvious sense of the expression is "he who is the object of lovethe belovedthe supreme divine name. This ought to evoke in the reader the memory of the Gospel: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him (Mt. 17:5). This is not the only time that Jesus is said to be the muhammadun of God. We read in the account of the meeting of Our Lord and St. John the Baptist at the River Jordan: ...and he saw the Spirit of God descend like a dove, coming upon him. And behold, a voice from the heavens saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased (Mt. 3:16,17). It is not being suggested that the author is presenting himself, or thinking of himself, as God. Rather he presents himself and Qur Lord Jesus Christ in the first Sura as rasulun, that is, oracles, prophets, both being men, both beloved of God. We find in the Book of Daniel that the prophet is called the man of predilection." that is, is hamudot. The substantive, is, means "man" and is replaced in the biblical expression by the Arabic prefix m thus mhamudot, muhammed. For those of us who are not linguistic scholars, this may seem a little difficult, but a little perseverance will show that it makes the most perfect sense in the given context. Throughout the Quranic text, it is evident that the author knows St. Paul and turns him to his desired end, which is to confer the divine alliance upon the sons of Ismael, the perfect people. the musliymat. Fr. De Nantes, a colleague of Br. Bruno goes further, saying that throughout the whole Sura the similarities with the Gospel are so close and

so numerous that he believes that the Quranic authors intention was not merely to imitate the approach of St. Paul, but to substitute himself for Christ. This may not be as far-fetched as it first sounds. The parallel between the failure of Christ leading to Calvary is paralleled by the failure of the Quranic author to take the House at Bakka in Jerusalem in 614.His faithful are dispersed, and this is his calvary. He uses the term qarhun, meaning calvary. specifically to emphasize the parallel. Yet the Sura also makes clear that the failure has not forced him to renounce his objective. Let us take a look at the word Mecca, which we are told is the translation of Makka. We are told by Hiro that Mecca was the birth place of Muhammed, that it was a trading center of some 5,000 people, and that this was where Muhammed began his apostolate. There are two problems with this: 1) the word Mecca does not appear in the Quran at all. Rather, the word Bakka appears once and is wrongly translated as Mecca, and 2) all of the maps of antiquity prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the city of Mecca did not exist in the seventh century. The great mapmaker of the 19th century, Vidal de la Blache, was an expert in the great commercial routes of antiquity and, using the Geography of Ptolemy, showed that Mecca did not exist. Even Blachere does not dispute the point, nor does Fr. Lagarde in his 1990 review in the publication IslamoChristiana of Br. Brunos first published volume. Indeed, given Blacheres desire to promote Islam at the expense of Christianity. his testimony is all the more weighty: There is no doubt that Byzantine writers have given us precious information about the Arab emirs ruling on the steppes of Syria with the consent of the emperor. Thanks to these authors, we are reasonably well informed about the conflicts of these emirs with their Babylonian counterparts in the service of the Persian Sassanids. Through these authors we can determine the religious affiliation of the Arab tribes, either nomadic or settled, in the Transjordan or on the steppes to the west of the Euphrates. Even mysterious Yemen furnishes us with several scraps of information about its past, and allows us to make out foreign trends, some of which come from Ethiopia, standing alongside its age-old paganism. But on the cradle of Islam, on the Hedjaz and Mecca, its holy city, in the sixth century, we have nothing more than the examples of Muslim cartographers (The Problem of Mahomet, 1952). In other words, there is no pre-Islamic map in the world which shows the existence of Mecca. Attempts to show that Macoraba was Mecca under another name have always been pure speculation, and have no serious evidence to back them up. So if there is no Mecca, what is the meaning of this word, Bakka? It appears only once in the whole Quran (Sura III, vs.96) in the same Sura that is concerned with the

return of the faithful to Jerusalem. Now, in Sura II, vss. 125 and 127, the author talks about the Houseal baytand attributes its foundation to Abraham. It is, therefore, perfectly obvious that the House is in Jerusalem specifically among the ruins of the Temple. It just so happens that the word Bakka is used in the Sura in relation to the House, with the consequence that the word can only be a reference to the valley of Baka, which is to the north of the Hinnom Valley and to the west of Jerusalem. Indeed, the meaning is so transparent, one wonders why none of the scientific enquirers have ever even suggested it as a possibility. But there is more. The Quran gives no idea of the geography or layout of Mecca, but it does give some precise information about Jerusalem, which reinforces the fact that the theme of the Quran is concerned up to this point with a return to Jerusalem, to the cradle of the alliance made between God on the one hand, and Abraham and his son Ismael, on the other. In Sura II, vs.158 the author refers to as-safa, which is the Hebrew transposition of hasophim. meaning the sentry. It just so happens that to the north of Jerusalem, there is a hill which is connected to the Mount of Olives, which is rendered in Greek as skopos. It is to be found in rabbinical literature, and is a point where one can overview Jerusalem as from a watchtower. Skopos is Greek for sentry. Again, when the Quranic author promises his faithful in Sura IV, vs.13 and elsewhere, that they "will enter gardensjannawhere rivers flow underground min tahtiha, he is not writing mere literature. It is an exact description of the irrigation system of the Jerusalem of his time! In the Byzantine period, the area outside the walls of Jerusalem to the southwest were known as the Gardens. To Christians who spoke Aramaic. it was known as Pordesaya. The Greeks called it Phordesa and the Jews, Pardesaya. These are all words meaning Paradise. The reason for this is not hard to discern. Jerusalem, situated in difficult terrain, always suffered drought from May until October, and this was made worse by the prevailing east wind. To combat this, a system of storage tanks was built underground and which came to the surface through a narrow opening. These tanks filled from November to March thanks to the abundant rain, and thus allowed the crops and so on to thrive. J. T. Milik in his book, St. Thomas of Phordesa (1961), tells us that it was a complete and complex system of irrigation. Here are your underground rivers. Or again, we find that the word "Gehenna" appears once in Sura II, three times in Sura III and seven times in Sura IV. The word in Arabic is jahannam, and it is called the valley of Anger. Gehenna is a valley to the south of Jerusalem leading off from the valley of Baka in the west. It was a desolate public place where a permanent fire

burned for the disposal of garbage. The fires of Gehenna (Mt. 5:22; 18:9) are a symbol of eternal punishment, or, if one likes, for eternal anger. The text is also more appealing because in travelling from the valley of Baka to the valley of Gehenna, one is travelling from Paradise to Hell, a physical reality with a theological component. Finally, let us look at the problem of the Ka ba, the stone temple or House of God, which is to be found in the middle of the mosque of Mecca (see magazine cover), and which is the most important shrine in the Islamic world. Since Mecca did not exist, we have to ask ourselves what the word Ka ba meant to the Quranic author. It is first mentioned in Sura IV, vs.6. It means cubekubos in Greekand pertains to the foundation stone of a house. Fr. Jomier in his article Kaba, says that the word comes from the more or less cubic form of this sanctuary. He goes on to say that the word was also used already to refer to specific sanctuaries of the same shape. Br. Bruno has managed to identify two such sanctuaries: one at Petra, where the Quranic author and his faithful set out on the return to Jerusalem, and the other at the gates of Jerusalem. It is also important to note that the word Ka ba appears for a fourth and final time in Sura LXXVIII, vs .33 bearing the meaning virginskawaa iba. The two meanings are so radically different that we are justified to ask: Is the Ka ha a house or a virgin? We know that the Ka ba was always associated with the esplanade maqam of Abraham, such that both one and the other were connected to the House al bayta. The House is the Temple at Jerusalem and the maqam is the courtyard of the Temple that is to say, the sacred Rock of Mount Moria. Thus, if we want to find the real origin of the Ka ba, we need to be looking at Jerusalem. From a homily of St. Germain of Constantinople (634733). concerned with the Dormition of our Lady and the transportation of her body from her home in Holy Zion to her "tomb" in Gethsemani. we learn that along this route there is a monument known in Greek as Kubos. He says: It is along the route followed by the funeral cortege, going down the valley of josaphat. that there is to be found a monument in the form of a cube... [It] is at the center of this cube that there is the venerated column which commemorates the miracle wrought in the healing of the impious Jew. We also find the monk Epiphany, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the seventh century, describing this monument with the word: tetrakoinin. He states, It is a cubic edifice with four columns and crowned by a cupola. Fr. Daniel (10991185) is even more precise: It is 100 yards from the gates of the City (Jerusalem) to the place where Jephonias [the High PriestEd.] tried to throw down the body of the Holy Mother of God from her

stretcher, who was being taken by the apostles to Gethsemani. An angel appeared, cutting off his two hands with a sword, and leaving his hands fixed to the stretcher. Fr. Daniel adds: From this point to the tomb of the Holy Mother of God is 200 yards. This allows us to situate precisely this cubic monument outside the Beautiful Gate on the eastern side of the Holy City. The miracle referred to by St. Germain is that the impious Jew, Jephonias, had his hands restored, and converted to the Catholic Church. Thus the apparent riddle is easy to solve. In reparation for the attack on Our Lady, the Christians of Jerusalem put up a monument in her honor. The High Priest, Jephonias, came to it and was miraculously healed. It is plausible that during the seventh century, in the time of Epiphany, the Muslims still maintained respect and veneration for this holy place, kubos, consecrated to the Virgin, ka ba, and vilifying the impious action of Jephonias. In this way, we see how easily the cube could become a virgin. The hypothesis at this stage for the good monk is that the Muslims took the Kubos to be a symbol of the House of Abraham, and thus transported it (or simply its base) at another date for reasons unknown. Of course, it could be that the Ka ba in Mecca has wholly different origins, which have no connection whatever with the Quran. All this article has tried to do is convey some of the spectacular research being done spearheaded by Br. Bruno, and hope that it will encourage the interested to dig deeper for themselves. The research is far from finished. There are 109 Suras more to be translated, each bearing vital and revealing information of the birth and development of Islam as outlined and desired by the Quranic author. There will also undoubtedly be pertinent information forthcoming from the experts excavating the vast Christian monastery discovered in the sands of Al Oousour (1990), and which has already been dated as late sixth, perhaps seventh, century . This is all for the future. Through serious and genuine scientific enquiry, the validity of the Hadith and Sira of Islamic tradition has been eliminated. It can be shown that neither Mecca nor Badr existed at the time, and thus all the stories of Muhammeds prophetship and battle victories are just so much invention. It can be demonstrated, indeed, that there never was such a man at all. By systematically translating the Quran. even the meaning of the name, Islam, can be shown to have been corrupted. and the historical and theological background that made the Quran possible demonstrated. The importance of the Jewish community in this development has set researchers on tracing the path to the true identity of the Quranic author, a man who was clearly of exceptional talent, energy and insight. In fact, Br. Brunos work is spurring research which is showing that Islam is a fact, because the Islam of the Quran is a fact; but it is now becoming increasingly evident that the Islam of today is an illusion in the sense that all that it truly holds in common with the outstanding genius of the Quranic author is the name

of the religion and a mutilated understanding of his powerful book. This is the contradiction become the paradox mentioned at the beginning of this article.

BACKGROUND Ethiopia has a long history of religious tolerance and its constitution protects freedom of religion or belief and provides for separation of religion and state. Inter-religious marriage and conversion are socially acceptable and there is an established tradition of religious organizations working together. However, Ethiopia has experienced religious freedom problems, particularly at the local level with regard to access to land to build houses of worship and for cemeteries. There also have been sporadic instances of inter-religious violence, although the Ethiopian government has made a concerted effort to hold perpetrators accountable and maintain religious harmony.

Accommodation, tolerance or forbearance? The politics of representing Ethiopias religious past Introduction Ethiopian historiography, like history writing elsewhere, is a contested terrain. Historiography is acutely contested particularly in countries where history is one of the cores of political legitimacy (Veyne 1984; Toggia 2008). If the 10th BC legendary king Menelik I son of the Ethiopian Queen Sheba and the Israelite king Solomon was the foundational myth for political legitimacy of imperial Ethiopia, so is the peasant rebellion of the 1940s (the Weyane rebellion) the historical reference point for the current government of Ethiopia the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which in fact styled itself as the Second Weyane (Medhane and Young 2003). Historical consciousness from below is also filled with references to the remote past. If Christians refer to the Solomonic legend to claim the status of the chosen nation (Bonacci 2000), so are Ethiopian Muslims ground their struggle for recognition as Ethiopian citizens in reference to their own foundational myth; the emigration of the companions of the Prophet Mohammed to Ethiopia, that they prestigiously describe as the First Hijra (Dereje 2011). Overwhelmed by the hegemonic narrative of the Orthodox Church as the chosen nation

and the Muslims counter-narrative of Ethiopia as the land of the First Hijra, it is no wonder thus Ethiopian Protestants, too, have sought to establish local roots through the construction of yet a new Great tradition for Ethiopia as the land of the Reformation, according to which Ethiopia protested ahead of Germany by three decades. Perhaps there are very few countries as burdened by their past as Ethiopia. It is no wonder thus history has been one of the major sites of political contestation. The Ethiopian polity has gone through a period of contestation in the last four decades. The terms of the contestation has been variously defined. The 1974 revolution has redefined imperial Ethiopia in class terms, the country ultimately embracing socialism for nearly two decades. The 1991 regime change has brought ethnicity to the political centre-stage which translated into a new political order in the form of ethnic federalism. In recent years religion has rivalled ethnicity as a focus of social identification and a site of political contestation. According to the 2007 census the major religious groups in contemporary Ethiopia are followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (42 %); Muslims (34%) and Protestants (18%) of the countrys 80 million people. 1In these new frames of reference class, ethnicity and religion - heroes have now become villains, and villains have been redefined as heroes, evident in the attempts to bring down old monuments or erect new ones. Similarly, dark ages have been lighted and perceived as golden

ages, and the very life span of the country is contested whether it is three millennia old or a mere centenary. The paper focuses on the contested nature of Ethiopias religious past in which three sets of actors advance competing schemes of interpretation. For Christian Ethiopians the dominant plot in Ethiopian history is religious accommodation by the dominant Ethiopian Orthodox Church of the countrys religious minorities. The current Ethiopian government advances the discourse of religious tolerance while describing the countrys religious past. The Muslims, on the other hand, contest both the Christians discourse of accommodation and the governments discourse of religious tolerance. In their perspective the dominant historical plot in Ethiopian history is rather Muslims forbearance of the structures of religious inequality upheld by the dominant Christian elites and the Ethiopian state that they represent. Whether state or popular historiography they all have a narrow focus that guides the selective memory and reduction of historical complexity. Unfortunately even academic historiography, particularly the predominant nationalist variety, is very partisan and largely corresponds to the EOCs historiography (Toggai 2008: 324-325). A more balanced account of Ethiopias religious past is still under construction. Hussein Ahmeds recent rendition is perhaps a pioneering work. In an article entitled Coexistence and/ or Confrontation: Towards a Reappraisal of Christian Muslim encounter in contemporary

Ethiopia, Hussein argued that Christian-Muslim relations in Ethiopia from the earliest times to the present were both consensual and conflictual, and that the conventional overemphasis on the former has obscured - and marginalized and distorted - the occasional confrontational aspects of the relations that also need to be historicized, contextualized and assessed (Hussein 2006: 1). The objective of this paper is not to shed further light on objective history but rather to describe and analyse the one-sided accent that the state and popular historiography have on Ethiopias religious past. Narratives play a crucial role in building legitimacy for a cause. As Rotberg (2006:4) noted, at the heart of narratives of struggle and response is collective memory and such memory need not reflect truth; instead, it portrays a truth that is functional for a groups ongoing existence [] The social reality of the present explains the past. After describing the dominant plots, the paper analyses the political project each discourse serves. The competing narratives accommodation, tolerance and forbearance - signify contemporary political struggles, which have resulted in the escalation of religious conflicts in post 1991 Ethiopia. The paper argues that writing history is as much about making history as it is about understanding of the past. The key 2historical events which are at the heart of the contestation are the coming of the companions of the Prophet Mohammed to Ethiopia in AD 625 and the ultimate conversion of their Christian

king host; the wars of Amhmed Gragn in the 16th century, and the nation building project of the Christian emperors and the formation of the modern Ethiopian state by the end of the 19th century. Competing Narratives of Ethiopian History The EOCs narrative of religious accommodation The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is one of the oldest Christian establishments in Africa (Tadesse 1972: 28). Christianity was introduced to Ethiopia in the 4th century AD from the Church of Alexandria which had supplied all of its bishops up until the mid 20th century (Erlich 2000). The EOC uses the term mechachal to describe Ethiopias religious past. The Amharic term mechachal as used by the EOC means accommodation, a double-edged discourse that signifies both the nativism of the EOC and the latecomerness of the other religious groups. EOCs selfunderstanding and the Ethiopian polity is principally based on references to sacred narratives, i.e., the primacy of Ethiopia in the Judeo-Christian tradition as attested by scriptures. Foremost in these sacred narratives is the mentioning of the name Ethiopia more than forty times in the Old Testament (Ullendorff 1967). The special status Ethiopia occupies is buttressed by the 14th century manuscript known as Kebre Negest (Glory of kings). The Kebre Negest has produced a textual evidence for the Solomonic legend as the foundation of the Ethiopian state. As a national epic it has also served as the mythological charter for Ethiopians as the chosen nation (Budge

1932). The associated belief in the transfer of the Ark of the Covenant from Israel (Jerusalem) to Ethiopia (Axum) is emblematic of the geographical transfer of divine favour. The EOC also claims supremacy in Christianity which claims its earliest origins from the royal official who is said to have been baptised by Philip the Evangelist1 , not the conversion of Axumite king Ezana in the 4th century AD. Central to EOCs narrative of the religious past is the intimacy between Church and state in Ethiopian history that run until the 1974 secular rupture, and by extension the ownership claim it advances over the Ethiopian nation. It is true that with little exception such as the Judaic challenge of the 9th century (Queen Yodits destruction of the Axumite kingdom); the Islamic challenge of the 16th century (the wars of Ahmed Gragn), and the Catholic interlude in the 17th 1 Act 8:27 3century, the Ethiopian state has been ruled by Christian elites who proclaimed Christianity as the official state religion of the country, and since 1974 by power elites predominantly with Christian background. In effect, the EOC views other religious groups as mete (late comers), and foreigners at worst. Despite its nativity the EOC claims a high moral ground the way it has accommodated Islam and other Christian denominations. The EOC recognises the coming of the companions of

the Prophet Mohammed (the sahaba) to Ethiopia in 625 Ad (Aba Samuel 2009: 1415). What it rejects, and does so vehemently, is the Muslims claiming that the Christian king Armha who hosted the sahaba was converted to Islam. Underneath the controversy surrounding this historical event we find a selective memory at work. None of the Christian sources have documented the coming of the sahaba to Ethiopia. The story was documented by Muslim Arab scholars and is stored in local Muslim traditions. The EOC has got to know about the event therefore primarily through the works of Muslim scholars. The EOCs major attraction in the story relates to the description of habesha (Ethiopian) by the Prophet Mohammed as the land of righteousness and the hospitality the sahaba got from a Christian king, a gratitude which the Prophet is said to have reciprocated by forbidding Muslims from attacking Ethiopia so long as they do not take the initiative. The reference to the conversion of king Armha (renamed by Muslims as king Ahmed Najashi ) by the same sources is rejected as biased, worst a fabrication by Muslim fundamentalists to advance a political agenda (EOC 2008). Academic historiography, most of which is written by Ethiopian historians of an EOC background (Sergew 1967; Tadesse 1972; Ephrem 2008) and western scholars very sympathetic to the EOC (Trimingham 1952; Budge 1965), corroborates EOCs position. The EOC also refers to the economic ties with and the political tolerance towards the Islamic

principalities that sprung up in the south-eastern part of the country in the medieval period. To the extent it acknowledges the protracted wars between the Christian kingdom and the Islamic principalities the EOC interprets it as punitive measures when the latter had become insubordinate and disrupted the long distance trade. The wars are talked about as religious only with rise of Ahmed Gragn who the EOC depicts as an Ottoman proxy. The involvement of the Turks and the Portuguese, respectively, on the side of the Muslims and the Christians, certainly escalated the hegemonic struggle between the Christian kingdom and the Islamic principalities (Hussein 2006). If the military support Ahmed Gragn got from the Turks was important in altering the power relations in 1529, so was the Portuguese support central in restoring the hegemony of the Christian kingdom in 1543. However, Islamic revival and ChristianMuslims conflicts in Ethiopia have been externalised ever since. Even what appears to be the most conspicuous example of religious homogenisation as a strategy of nation building first attempted 4by emperor Zera Yaqob in the 15th century (Bahru 2008) and in a more dramatic manner by Emperor Yohannes IV in the second half of the 19th century (Hussein 2006) is represented by the EOC as Christian irredentism than religious coercion, i.e., restoring Christian territories and people lost to the Muslims during the wars of Ahmed Gragn (Aba Samuel 2009:32). The second

half of the 19th century marked a renewed struggle for hegemony between the Christian kingdom and the Islamic states. The revival of the Christian kingdom was initiated by Emperor Tewodros (1855 -1869) and Emperor Yohannes (1872-1889), who vigorously sought to curb the rise of Islamic power in the region (Bahru 2002). Both attempted to formally proscribe the practice of Islamic religion, endeavoring to enforce mass conversion to Christianity to enhance national unity (Abbink 1998: 115). The recurrent theme in EOCs representation of Ethiopian history in general and the countrys religious past in particular is condescended in one Amharic expression: bagoresin tenekesin (aggression in return for hospitality). Accordingly, the EOCs accommodation of religious minorities has never been reciprocated by whether the Muslims, Catholics or Protestants. In fact, they have all followed a usurpatory strategy and sought to expand at its expense. According to the EOCs definition of the inter-faith relational situation, this is the case because they have all external constituencies and ultimately serve the interests of foreign countries. Specifically, Muslims who are assertive of their rights are under Saudi Arabian payrolls, whereas Protestants are latest edition of the conspiracy of the western missionaries. EOC alone truly represent national interest, a Church which provides the country with its dominant national symbols.

Accordingly, Muslims are divided into good and bad, respectively, referring to the homegrown Sufis and the foreign-based Islamic reform movements. While highlighting the exceptionally tolerant track record of the Orthodox Church, Ephraim (2008: 156) noted one cannot think of any other country besides Ethiopia with a state religion of Christianity - as was the case until 1974 - where a large Muslim minority had lived along with Christians. The governments discourse of religious tolerance The imperial government had basically echoed the EOCs historiography. Church and State were intertwined. The EOC had enjoyed economic privileges and wielded a political leverage over the Ethiopian state for which it had supplied with the foundational myth. The military regime (the Derg) that replaced the imperial government had followed an entirely different policy of state building on a secular basis. Religion was not only redefined as opium of the masses but the Derg had even sought to stamp out the religious institutions that shape the world view of the ordinary 5people (Bonacci 2000: 8-13). It was only in the last darkest hours of the regime that religion was accorded a more dignified position in public space. In fact, the Derg made some attempts to recycle old national symbols that it had deconstructed during the revolutionary fervour when it had faced strong resistance from Eritrean nationalism and various ethno-liberation movements. History reconstructed this way the Christian emperors were no longer feudal lords who oppressed the broad masses but nation builders who valiantly fought the preservation of the

sovereignty of the country against foreign invaders. Ethiopia has entered a new period of historical contestation since 1991. The Derg was overthrown in 1991 by ethnic liberation movements that formed the coalition of the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), a political organisation which claims to represent the Tigrean ethnic group, is the dominant political force within the EPRDF coalition. This is despite the smaller population size of the Tigreans as compared with the other member organisations of the EPRDF which claim to represent the three largest ethnic groups of the country, i.e., the Oromo, the Amhara and the southern Ethiopians2 . The new political order established by the EPRDF ethnic federalism is built on an entirely new historical edifice. Ethiopian history was rewritten by the EPRDF ethnicity as the dominant plot. The new deconstructionist drive has reduced Ethiopias historical longevity from three millennia to a mere centenary. The new historical reference point in the writing of Ethiopian history is the territorial expansion of emperor Menelik II in the second half of the 19th century that culminated in the formation of the modern Ethiopian state by the end of that century. The accent is not on the Ethiopian nation that was built but rather on the nations destroyed by the nation-building project. Ethiopia is no longer the chosen nation but a prison

house of ethnic groups which needed emancipation. As such, Ethiopia has embarked on a unique experiment in building a political order with a formal recognition of ethnicity as the most legitimate principle of social organisation and unit of political action. The imperial and the Derg governments are associated by the TPLF/EPRDF with the Amhara ethnic group. Amhara domination and liberation from it has been the main reference point in the political mobilisation of ethno-liberation movements. The 1995 Constitution and the new Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has generously recognised ethnic rights with self determination up to and including the right for secession. In fact, political sovereignty resides in ethnic groups, who are accorded the status of the authors of 2 According to the 2007 census, the Oromo, the Amhara, South, and the Tigreans constitute, respectively, 35 %, 25.9%, 19.4, and 5.9% of the countrys population. 6the Constitution as the new ethnic contract. Nine ethnic-based regional states have been formed, most of which are owned by a majority ethnic group. The Constitution also recognises religious inequality and grants the right to freedom and secularism. Although the main thrust in EPRDFs political dispensation is ethnicity it has also sought to make alliances with other marginalised groups such as Muslims. Taking advantage of the new liberal opening Muslims have attained a

greater visibility in the Ethiopian public space since 1991 (Hussien 2006). Emboldened by the rights language popularised by the EPRDF Muslims have pressed for greater rights in their struggle for recognition by the dominant Christian population and a more substantive rights regime by the EPRDF. The EOC has also gone through a period of revival, especially after the establishment of a neo-conservative youth movement known as Mahibere Qidusan (Association in the name of Saints). Other religious groups, especially, the Protestants, have become vibrant and registered a dramatic demographic growth, with an exponential growth from a merely 1 per cent in the 1960 to nearly 19 per cent in 2007 (Tibebe 1997: 4). The competition among these religious groups have not only resulted in sporadic conflicts but also sent the message to EPRDF that ethnicity is no longer the unit of social identification upon which the new political structure is built. Although the constitution prohibits a political manifestation of religious identity various politically oriented religious organisations have sprung up. The solidifying of the religious boundary, coupled with the state sponsored ethnic bordering process, has threatened the survival of the nation, and particularly EPRDFs claim that its emanicipatory project has redressed all forms of social inequality including religion. Amidst religious tension the EPRDF has propounded the discourse of ye haymanot mechachal (religious tolerance). This has necessitated a modification on the gloomy painting of Ethiopias

past that it has been intensely engaged in over a decade and brightens its religious past. While claiming to have abolished religious inequality from above (state level) the long standing peaceful co-existence from below has come to be celebrated. Ethiopia has been hailed as a model of peaceful co-existence and religious tolerance through government mass media and the various speeches delivered by the Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The rise of religious conflicts in post 1991 Ethiopia is explained as the use of religion as a cover by bankrupt politicians, especially since the contested May 2005 national election. The following extract from a speech the Prime Minister delivered in a youth meeting throws light on the governments discourse of religious tolerance: There are destructive forces on both sides that operate under the cover of religion. Among Christians, particularly some followers of the Orthodox Church, there are attempts to interpret Ethiopian history only from a Christian perspective; a perspective which has generated the slogan of Ethiopia is an Island of Christianity. This position is exclusive and is anathema of religious equality. This is in fact a sick 7perspective. There are even some in the EOC leadership who espouse this backward perspective. There are also some internal and external political forces who subscribe to this backward perspective in order to foment unrest in the country. Similarly, among Muslim circles, there are even forces who want to destroy by force the home-grown Islam [Sufism]. There are also Muslims who provoke religious conflict by going to

other religions places of worship and pronounce religious slogans. There are even some sheikhs and other Muslim leaders who support such provocative acts. There are also some political forces from inside and outside the country who subscribe to the same position. But the truth is that Ethiopias especial trade mark in the international community is religious tolerance. Let me cite here one anecdote. When the president of Germany came to Ethiopia he paid a visit to Harar. He could not believe what he saw, i.e., the ease at which Muslims and Christians blend and the tolerant ambience of the city of Harrar. He was baffled by the strong social ties across the religious boundary and wanted to know where it is coming from. In fact, he reprimanded us for not sharing it with the rest of the world at a time when religious conflict is on the rise globally. This is the dominant impression of other foreign visitors to the country. It is this unique history which is now targeted. My government will do its level best to thwart these destructive forces. The governments patience is running out regarding the incitement of religious conflict under the pretext of being a priest or a sheikh. We recognise that religion and state should be separated. That is what we have enshrined secularism in the Constitution. But this does not mean that the government would sit idly while destructive forces incite religious unrest. There is a concerted effort by internal and external forces to destroy our cultural fabric and the pride we take on our history of religious tolerance (Extract from a Speech by Meles Zenawi during the meeting with the youth, ETV, February 9, 2009, Addis Ababa, authors translation from Amharic).

The discourse of religious tolerance here abundantly refers to destructive forces. Internally these are opposition political parties who are politically bankrupt after the failure of their bid to power during and since the 2005 election. The external destructive forces is masterminded by Eritrea with whom Ethiopia has been locked in conflict over a disputed border since the outbreak of a major war in 1998 and its transformation into a proxy war since the inconclusive peace agreement in 2000. Forbearance Muslims narrative of Ethiopias religious past Muslims contest the Christians discourse of religious accommodation and the governments discourse of religious tolerance. Twisting the term mechachal, which variously signifies accommodation or tolerance, the Muslims use the term mechal as the dominant historical plot in inter-faith relations. The Amharic term mechal means forbearance. Muslims reject the term mechachal because it signifies symmetry which Ethiopias religious past is not. Accordingly, there has never been religious tolerance in Ethiopia. Despite its antiquity and large demographic size Islam in Ethiopia has been marginalized by the church and the state. Muslims have either adapted to or resisted Christian political power in the post-Najashi period. They critique the Christians discourse of religious accommodation, which in their perspective is tantamount to a call for assimilation:

The term mechachal is inappropriate in the Ethiopian context. Tolerance or coexistence is understood as assimilation. Muslims are regarded as good Muslims in places such as Wello where they attend Christian holidays. The quintessential Christian story of religious tolerance is recounting Muslims celebrating Timiqet 8(Baptism); drinking tej (mead) in a mahiber (religious association) or making contribution for the construction of Churches. But these are neither accommodation nor co-existence. According to Islamic tenets all these practices fall into the category of shirk (idolatry practices). Co-existence means accepting ways of life other than ones own for what they are. Terms such as accommodation, co-existence and tolerance are mistranslated in Ethiopia. When a Muslim starts practicing the regular prayers, quits smoking or drinking, he becomes akirari (fundamentalist) in the eyes of the Christians. Otherwise, these are the ABC of Islam. There are more strenuous demands than these elementary ones. It is the same with hijab or niqab. Veiling is not a sign of fundamentalism. It is part of religious fulfillment. Terms such as akirarinet, tsinfegninet and mechachal need to be redefined in the Ethiopian context (Hassen Taju, interview, Najashi online radio, www.ethiopianmuslims.net, March 20111). Muslims foundational myth as Ethiopian citizens dates back to the First Hijra. They contest the Christians double standards in reading history. In an incisive article entitled The narrators of our history published in many Muslim media outlets as well as popular news papers, Ibrahim Mulushewa (2009) criticized the selective memory and collusion between academic and

Christian historiography in vehemently denying Najashis conversion into Islam. Ibrahim contests the Christian historiography at various levels. For one, the story of one of the sahaba being converted to Christianity was reported by the Muslim Arab scholars in the same works where they mentioned Najashis conversion into Islam. Besides, the Arab scholars had also mentioned clerical opposition that Najashi faced despite the Christians contention that had the king been converted into Islam there would have been mass unrest like when an Orthodox king converted to Catholicism in the 17th century. Muslims also bring in a third type of evidence to substantiate their claim that Ahmed Najashi was converted into Islam, i.e., the first ritual of Salatul Ghaib, the Islamic funeral prayer in absentia, was first done by the prophet to king Najashi honoring the favors he did to his companions and accepting Islam. Ibrahim, and many other Muslim scholars and activists characterize the scholarly denial of Najashis conversion as part of establishing the Christian hegemony in Ethiopia. In the perspective of the Muslims the First Hijra and the conversion of king Najashi as the first Muslim ruler outside of Arabia is more plausible than the controversial Solomonic legend. They refer to the original Hebraic version of the bible in which the word Kush is used instead of Ethiopia unlike the Greek version. Accordingly, both the Hebraic term Kush and the Greek term Ethiopia refers to Nubian/the Sudan, not present-day Ethiopia (Ye Muslimoch Guday 2009).

Another important bone of contention between Muslims and Christians is the diametrically opposite representational mode of Ahmed Gragn. Christian historiography depicts Ahmed Gragn as demonic under the service of external interests. Invoking Ahmed Gragn is in fact a code word for the permanent danger Muslims can pose to the very survival of the Ethiopian nation. Expectedly, for Muslims Ahmed Gragn has always been a hero, a source of fame and glory for not only reversing Christian aggression but also establishing an Islamic empire at the ruins of the Christian kingdom. As the Christian historiography was hegemonic throughout the imperial 9period and somehow continued during the Derg period, Muslims` alternative historical narrative had gone underground. It was in Somalia, not in Ethiopia, where Ahmed Gragn has been accorded a heroic status inscribed into a statue that is erected on his behalf in Mogadishu. Post 1991 Ethiopia has created a new field of political possibility for historical reexamination. In addition to the contentious nature of king Najashi and his conversion Muslims have focused on redefining Ahmed Gragn as a hero in post 1991 Ethiopia. Books have been written in Ethiopia and in the diaspora challenging Christian historiography. A third contentious area in Ethiopian history is the process of state formation that culminated in the formation of the modern Ethiopian state at the end of the 19th century. What Christian historiography calls irredentism or

reunification is contested by Muslims as the dark side of Ethiopian history when Muslims were forcefully converted into Christianity and their kingdoms and sheikdoms lost their political sovereignty; a political process which they consider is at the centre of the continuity of structures of religious inequality. Aided by EPRDFs historical revisionism, which centers on the process of empire building by emperor Menilik, albeit for ethnic if not religious motive, Muslims have noted in their own burgeoning historiography the painful birth of the modern Ethiopian state at the expense of the Islamic heritage of the country. The battle of Chelenqo, the decisive battle where king Menelik conquered the Islamic city state of Harrar in 1887 is, for instance, now celebrated in the regional state of Harrar not for the reunification by Menilik but the resistance put up by its ruler Amir Abdullahi. The city of Harar is not celebrated as a model of religious tolerance, as the Prime Minister put it, but rather lamented for the progressive decline of Islam in its home town under the pretext of multi-culturalism. Similarly, Muslims protested when the Amhara regional state sought to erect a status for king Michael of Wello as part of the Ethiopian Millennium celebration. King Michael is a sell out for Muslims who betrayed his Islamic faith under duress during the forceful Christianization project of Emperor Yohannes IV and in return for a political reward as the king of Wello. Confronted by a determined resistance the regional state suspended

its plan to build a status for king Michael of Wello. Interestingly, Muslims proposed that should a status be erected let it be for his son, Lij Eyasu, who dearly paid politically for his policy of genuine religious accommodation (Bahru 2008: 60). Muslims acknowledge the redress through religious reforms carried out by the Derg and the current EPRDF government. They are thankful for that. The socio-political reforms brought by the 1974 revolution and the end of the Christian monarchy partly redressed the marginalization of Muslims in Ethiopia (Hussein 1994). Church and state parted company and Ethiopia has been 10a secular state ever since. For the first time in the history of the country, religious freedom was proclaimed and Islam gained parity with Christianity in political dispensation (Abbink 1998; Hussein 2006, Ostebo 2008). The religious reform of the Derg, however, did not go to the extent of redefining the parameters of Ethiopias national identity. True to its socialist orientation, the Derg by and large considered religion as the opium of the masses. It was also fervently nationalist which entailed, among other things, recycling old national (Christian) symbols. Ethiopian historiography was left untouched with its unbroken three-thousandyears-history paradigm (cf. the Solomonic narrative); a historiography still populated by Christian heroes whereas the Islamic heritage of the country was largely silenced. The Derg, however, had inadvertently positive effects on Ethiopian Muslims. By equalizing all religions, the EOC,

Protestants, and Muslims all got off from the same starting block at the same time in the postDerg period, though slowed down by historical baggage. The regime change in 1991 brought yet another opportunity to redress the issue of religious inequality in Ethiopia. The EPRDF came to power as a champion of minority rights, though its attitude towards the Muslims has changed over time. As part of its project of deconstructing imperial Ethiopia, the EPRDF made connections with various marginalized groups, including Muslims. The 1995 Constitution generously provides for religious rights. Article 11 ensures separation of state and religion; Article 27 ascertains freedom of religion, belief and opinion; Article 29 ascertains the right of thought, opinion and expression and grants freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art or through any media of his choice. Article 31 grants freedom of association; Article 32 allows freedom of movement within and outside the country. These have been translated into the emergence of a confident and assertive Ethiopian Muslim community. Taking advantage of the freedom of movement, Ethiopian Muslims are now better connected with the Islamic World through Hajj and Umra as well as other forms of travel to Muslim countries (Carmichael 1996)6. Freedom of association has meant that Islam in Ethiopia, for the first time, has got a legal organizational expression through any media of its choice.

Related to that, the abolition of censorship has meant the flourishing of Islamic literature with a massive translation of works of major global Muslim scholars. Religious equality is expressed in the construction of many mosques, though this has in some areas provoked strong Christian reaction, and liberalization of the press has also meant the emergence of Islamic publishing houses (Hussein 1998; 2006). 11Responding to the Muslims rights movement that centers on inclusive citizenship, EPRDF has also made some historical concessions to Muslims in the form of a greater recognition of the Islamic heritage of the country. As Hussein (2006:13) noted, it is a tribute to the openmindedness of the present government has in the end fulfilled one of the cherished aspirations of Ethiopian Muslims by providing sizeable plots of land and granting permission for the construction of mosques in many parts of the capital. Minarets and glittering domes of newly constructed mosques have further enhanced the visibility and prominence of Islam in the public sphere. Nevertheless, Muslims still see more continuity than change in religious inequality in Ethiopia despite the religious reforms since 1974. In their perspective the discourse of religious accommodation revives Christian domination whereas the governments discourse of religious tolerance diminishes their rights movements that demands respect and equality from state and society within the Ethiopian polity Historical narratives and political projects

The discourse of religious accommodation nativism by other means? The Orthodox Church has claimed the soul of the Ethiopian nation on the basis of its intimacy with the Ethiopian state until the revolutionary rift between Church and State in 1974 (Tadesse 1972; Abbink 1998). Nearly four decades later, however, the semantic of the Ethiopian nation is still contested by the various religious groups through competing narratives of political entitlement. Throughout the imperial period Muslims were not referred to as Ethiopian Muslims but Muslims in Ethiopia despite the fact that Islam in Ethiopia spread primary through the works of indigenous missionaries. Except for a small trickling of Arab missionaries and traders the bulk majority of the Muslims are indigenous people (Hussein 2006). In fact, with the exception of some groups of the western Nilotes in all ethnic groups there are Muslims. The EOC has lost its economic privileges and political leverage since 1974. Nevertheless, the parameters of national identity are still largely defined in Orthodox terms. As Abbink (1998: 113) noted, due to its link with the divinely ordained Solomonic monarchy, Christianity inevitably was the core world-view of the political elite and a defining element of nationhood in a historical sense. The EOCs claim over the historical ownership of the Ethiopian nation vividly resuscitated in the slogan Ethiopia is an Islam of Christianity that the Prime Minister referred to in his speech -

is currently revived by its neo-conservative wing, the Mahibere Qidusan. The following is an 12excerpt from the interview I had with two prominent members of the Mahibere Qidusan leadership: We wonder why we [EOC] are singled out in the discourse of identification of a nation with a certain faith. Look everywhere and you see the same. Even the largest democracy, the US, is identified with the Protestant Church. Isnt it the case that all American Presidents swear with the bible before they assume office? Isnt it the case that Saudi Arabia will remain a Muslim country no matter how multicultural it becomes? With us it is even different. We have accommodated religious minorities much more than any other country. It is an Axumite (Orthodox) king who protected Muslims when they were persecuted by their own people, though this is not due acknowledged by radical Muslims in contemporary Ethiopia who claim otherwise; that the king who they call Najashi became a Muslim. Who would deny that the EOC is the major contributor in the making of the Ethiopian nation and a repository of its history and values? (Excerpt from interview with two senior leaders the Mahibere Qidusan August 24, 2010, Addis Ababa). EOCs historical ownership pf the Ethiopian nation is particularly acted out in the controversy surrounding Muslims attempt to build a mosque in Axum town, a town which the EOC regards as its sacred space where the Ark of the Covenant is believed to have been hosted. A typical remark members of the EOC and the leadership make on the controversy is Muslims should not

be allowed to build mosque in Axum so long as Christians are not allowed to build a church in Mecca (EOC 1998). In the intense religious competition in post 1991 Ethiopia the EOC seeks to mobilize the Ethiopian state by securitizing Islam in geopolitical terms. A recent book by a devout member cum scholar of the EOC, Ephrem Eshete (2008), has revisited Ethiopian history from the perspective of Islamic fundamentalism according to which Muslim historical figures such as Ahmed Gragn are depicted as precursors to the current global Islamic fundamentalist movement. The book is a grand research on the current, major problem we all Ethiopians face i.e., Islamic fundamentalism. The core objective of this work is to explore and expose the inroads hitherto fundamentalism has made since the genesis of Islam in the context of Ethiopia. It is fundamentalism exploiting the lukewarm stance of the government for its Islamizing Jihad, and the misty understanding of Christian laity and of fair minded Muslim compatriots. The response from the government is also something we must carefully analyze. Today, there is a clear and imminent jihad wagged in Ethiopia but we are not witnessing measures pertinent enough being taken either by the government or by the laity or by the fair minded Muslims. The government and the EOTC must come directly for an open discussion on the issue (Ephrem 2008 : 2-3). EOC members at home and in the diaspora have been exhilarated by Ephrems rendition of the

main plot in Ethiopian history. As such they recommend it as a must-read by all Ethiopians, including moderate Muslims and the government: Ephrem Eshete clearly reveals the hidden motives of the jihadists in their mission to Islamize history over the question of the creed of Negus (king) Armah. The reason why state media such as ETV presented the king as though he had been a Muslim is another fascinating reading well explained in the book. The book devotes a substantial portion of historical narrations on the pre-Gragn and post Gragn period. Hence, it 13gives us a historical background on Fundamentalist activities and the catastrophe they have brought over Ethiopia. The lesson we learn from this portion of history is the evil potential of Fundamentalism and the unending chaos it can bring3 . Publicized in words of mouth and in the cyberspace Ephrem Eshete has become a household name among many followers of the EOC. Others are still determined to canonize it as a must read book and as an act of faith: Ephrem's book presents the historical crossing of Islam and its followers in Ethiopia from the past till the present time. It explicates the aspiration of fundamental extremism and its evolving strategies, to conquer, along centuries. In short words it marks a new observation in the history of our time. And in my on belief it is a matter that should be incorporated in all the teachings of the Church, Sunday school curriculum or even theological studies. It is a must own and must read book of our time4

. The Mahibere Qidusan media outlets and EOC affiliated websites have produced probably more widely read historical books than what academic history has managed to do so. The political motif of all these publications is reestablishing the dominant position the EOC has once occupied, but now doubly pressed by the Muslims, the evangelicals as well as the deconstructionist undercurrents within the EPRDF political system. It presupposes an organic link between faith and nation while externalizing revivalist movements of religious minorities. EOCs hegemonic aspiration is not short of support by objective academic historiography. Medhane (2003:1), for instance, wrote religious institutions and inter-religious relations will, in the coming decades, gradually and perhaps inescapably become a thorny issue of national political life and a fundamental source of conflict'. [As a result], the fault lines between religions will be the battle lines of the future in Ethiopia. Furthermore, Medhane identified the root cause of inter faith conflict in Ethiopia as a rise of particular strands of religious militancy, i.e., the globally situated political Islam (so-called Wahhabism) and the Protestant charismatic movement. The solution which Medhane implicitly proposes is maintaining the status quo which in effect means reinforcing the power of the historically dominant Orthodox Church; the historical equilibrium of one dominant religion tolerating the existence of other smaller religions, which has been at the

core of peaceful existence, is being dramatically eroded, incubating violent confrontation (2003:1-2). This political project appears more doable now than in the 1990s when the EPRDF was at the height of its deconstructionist thrust and historical revisionism. The main casualty of EPRDFs deconstructionism was the EOC within which it had appeared as a vestige of the old 3 http://www.dejeselam.org/2008/12/two-books-on-muslim-fundamentalism.html. 4 14political order and a bastion of its remnants. At the dawn of the 21st century a lot has changed in EPRDFs own historiography. The discourse of religious tolerance taming the salience of religious identification? The politics of EPRDFs discourse of ye haymanot mechachal (religious tolerance) is discernable at different levels. It is evident in its understanding of social identity upon which the political structure is built; TPLFs selective memory that greets controversial Tigrean kings with silence; the challenges of religious rights in the wider game of democratic politics, and the dictates of geopolitics that securitizes religion, particularly Islam in Ethiopia. In the following each political dimension of the discourse of religious tolerance is discussed. Ethnicity is the pillar of EPRDFs unique political order known as ethnic federalism. Influenced by Stalins thesis of the nationalities question the EPRDF has rebuilt the Ethiopian state on an ethnic basis since 1991.

Nowhere else in the world than in Ethiopia that ethnicity has been institutionalized as a principle of social organization and unit of political action. In fact, the authors of the 1995 constitution appear to be ethnic groups according to which political sovereignty resides in the nations, nationalities and people of Ethiopia. Unlike Stalins definition of the terms which ascribes a quality of social hierarchy in the degree of political entitlement based on stages of social development, the distinction among EPRDFs nations, nationalities and peoples is not spelled out. For analytical purpose we can take these three social categories as ethnic groups. Religious communities are not right bearing subjects, though religious right is enshrined in the constitution. In fact, no other form of social identity than ethnicity has a place in the new political structure. In a typically top-down imposition all Ethiopians are expected to fit into an ethnic mould. Even the primacy of national identity is politically incorrect, as the controversy during the 1994 census has shown when some people in Addis Ababa wrote their identity as Ethiopian instead of their ethnic identity. The enumerators then forced them to identify only on the basis of their ethnic identity. According to EPRDFs narrative of social identity one is thus an Ethiopian or Ethiopian with an Oromo or Amhara descent but Oromo-Ethiopian or Tigrean-Ethiopian5 . The primacy of ethnic identity has been contested by various social groups, not least religious

groups who demand greater recognition and visibility in the public space and within the political structure. In fact, it is because of the redefinition of what is primary in social identification that many people have signified their religious identity. There have been revivalist movements within 5 Interview with Meles Zenawi, 2009, www.ethiopiafirst.com 15all the major religious groups which have engendered a stiff competition to dominate the countrys religious landscape. Operating outside of the purview of the governments rules of the game the EPRDF appears to be politically nervous facing the religious bubble. As such the discourse of religious tolerance not only silences an alternative form of social identification but also externalizes the origin of its salience. According to EPRDFs definition of the situation heightened religiosity and the associated religious conflicts could only be the works of destructive forces. There is also another political spin in EPRDFs discourse of religious tolerance. EPRDF in general and its dominant political force the TPLF in particular has spilled a lot of ink describing and condemning emperor Menilik for committing the original political sin the forceful formation of the modern Ethiopian state. This has been associated with the rise of the political power of the Amhara. The process of modern state formation in Ethiopia goes back to the mid

19th century during the reign of the Amhara emperor Tewodros (185501968). Radically departing from the political culture of the medieval Christian kingdom which was a de facto federal entity (Teshale 1995), emperor Tewodros set in the process of building a modern nation state through political centralization and religious homogenization. Tewodros project of nation state building foundered as it provoked a determined resistance by regional and local political forces against a rigid form of political centralization. His successor, the Tigrean emperor Yohannes IV, reversed Tewodros project of political centralization and replaced it by what Bahru (2001) calls controlled regionalism. There was however continuity in the idea of nation building, particularly through religious homogenization. In fact, more than the Amhara emperor Tewodros who preceded and emperor Menilik who succeeded him it was emperor Yohannes who vigorously applied the policy of forceful conversion of Muslims into Christianity, particularly in the Wello region. At the council of Borumeda in 1878 emperor Yohannes IV passed a resolution stipulating that Muslims and pagans should renounce their faith and embrace Christianity. Although some Muslim leaders such as Mohammed Ali (Negus Michael) complied with the demand many other put up a strong resistance. To date, neither the EPRDF at the national nor the TPL at the regional level represented emperor Yohannes IV as a villain. In fact, he has been celebrated as a hero in a

number of occasions. The Emperors Memorial Day was, for instance, observed in August 2009 in Tigray region to commemorate his contribution for unity and sovereignty of the country. Besides, the foundation stone of the monument to Emperor Yohannes was laid at the city of Mekelle, and a suggestion was made for the return of his head that was cut off and taken to the Khalifa in Omdurman, Sudan during the battle of Metemma in 1889. Acknowledging the atrocities committed by emperor Yohannes would undermine the demonization of emperor 16Menilik, and through him, the Amhara as colonialists par excellence, thus the need for ethnic emancipation in Ethiopia that the TPLF/EPRDF represents. Many scholars have however described the inter-ethnic power relation between the Amhara and the Tigrean elites as a sibling rivalry (Levine 1968; Teshale 1995). It is this essential similarity in political history and political identity that ethno liberation movements such as the OLF and the ONLF refer to while describing the new political system as ethnocracy, a mere change of masters from Amharas to Tigreans who they collectively describe as Habesha. As Bahru noted, the making of the modern Ethiopian state was initiated by Tewodros, consolidated by Yohannes and consummated by Menilik. EPRDFs discourse of religious tolerance also fits the new reconstructionist political posture it has taken in recent years. As already mentioned, the Ethiopian state, like any other state, looks

different while administering it from the centre as resisting it from the periphery where the dominant narrative is often centered on marginalization and victimization. EPRDF has already started toning down ethnicity since 1998 when the war with Eritrea broke out, and like its predecessor the Derg, felt the need to recycle old national symbols to facilitate war mobilization (Toggia 2008: 323-324). By 2000 EPRDF had effectively salvaged the idea of Ethiopia and was ready to defend it against ethno-nationalist liberation movements and opposition voices particularly in Oromia and Somali regional state. The parliamentary debate on whether or not to invade Somalia (the Union of Islamic Courts) in 2006 aptly captured the shifting political discourse of the EPRDF regarding the nature of the Ethiopian state. When Dr Negasso Gidada, a former member of the EPRDF and president of Ethiopia (1995-2002) explained the root cause of the problem between Ethiopia and Somalia as part of the deep-seated crisis of state formation in the Horn of Africa that dates back to king Menilik, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi feverishly responded by invoking a Tigrean saying, that the song of the foolish person is always the same; an interesting remark that Ethiopia has already become a post-Menilik polity. For EPRDF, the UIC and the immanent and impending danger it posed to Ethiopia was a regional manifestation of the globally situated Islamic fundamentalism. A more dramatic change in perspective by the

EPRDF regarding Ethiopian history was seen in the events leading to the Ethiopian millennium in 2008 and since. In a speech he delivered at the Millennium hall Prime Minister Meles Zenawi introduced to the Ethiopian public the concept of hidasse, the Ethiopian renaissance. According to Meles, the first millennia of Ethiopian history was glorious that produced the genius of the Axumite civilization. The second millennium was a lost millennium when Ethiopia has regressed and deeply seeped into protracted conflicts and ravaged by famine. With the capable leadership of the EPRDF Ethiopia is projected to reclaim the third millennium. EPRDFs new mode of 17representing Ethiopian history implicitly refers to the three thousand years history, a history that it was busy deconstructing throughout the 1990s. Mind also the Ethiopian millennium of 2008 is based on the EOCs Julian calendar. It is in fact a historic irony that the greatest challenge to the Ethiopian state has come from Tigray, a region which is the repository of the countrys national symbols from artifacts related to the legendary Queen Sheba, the Axum Zion Church that hosts the Ark of the Covenant, to the battle of Adwa that secured Ethiopia as the only African country to escape colonialism. After all, the overwhelming majority of the population of Tigray region (95.6 %) is members of the EOC with only 4 % Muslims. The political dimension of the discourse of religious tolerance is also related to the role it plays in the reduction of complexity. Although EPRDF represents the rise of inter-faith tension and

violence as the work of destructive forces it is also connected to the emerging rights movement and the inability or unwillingness of the government to respond to the demands. This is particularly true for the Muslims who raise rights issues not only with the dominant Christian population but also with the government. The controversy surrounding the 2007 census; the right for an autonomous and legitimate religious organizations and the right for public manifestation of faith are some of the prominent human right issues Muslims raise in contemporary Ethiopia (see the next section). Most of these religious rights are part of the wider game of democratic politics. As various scholars have noted, EPRDF has had an authoritarian turn in recent years (Aalan and Tronvoll 2008; Clapham 2009; Abbbink 2009; ICG 2009). As such, a government with a strong democratic deficiency could not respond to the rights issues raised by the religious communities. Here again representing Ethiopias religious past as a model of tolerance and coexistence play the role of delegitimising contemporary demands for rights. The discourse of religious tolerance has also a geopolitical dimension. 9/11 and the so-called Global War On Terror (GWOT) that followed have tremendously enhanced the strategic significance of the Horn of Africa for western countries (Menkhaus 2008; Schimdt 2009). Closely situated near the volatile Middle East and neighbouring Somalia where political Islams centre of gravity Islam has shifted to in the 2000s Ethiopia is now defined as an anchor state and a

strategic ally to the west (Shinn 2005), or an island of stability in a troubled region. Although the discourse on Islamic terrorism in Ethiopia already started in the mid-1990s in reference to the AlIttihad Islamic insurgency in the Somali regional state, it is largely a post 9/11 phenomenon. Enthusiastically joining Bushs coalition of the willing, EPRDF has positioned itself to gain a new strategic importance in the US-conceived global order. Responding to the new security challenges the US has established counter-terrorism programs in East Africa. The Djibouti-based 18Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HoA) is part of US Africa Command for the GWOT (Berouk 2011). Ethiopia is assigned a key role in GWOT. Militarily the west counts on Ethiopias largest and one of the most effective armies in Africa which could easily be deployed to defend western interest when the need arises as was the case during Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. EPRDF also closely cooperates with the US in intelligence gathering on Al-Qaeda cells and other radical organisations in the region. Ethiopia is also one of USs black sites, using the country as a base to secretly interrogate undeclared prisoners of GWOT. Outsourcing black sites helps the US avoids criticisms at home by the international human rights groups. The CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating hundreds of detainees suspected of having links with terrorist organisations at secret prisons in Ethiopia.6 . Ethiopias large Muslim population and its potential

for radicalisation seems to be also a factor in USs politico-military partnership with the EPRDF. For the US Ethiopias approximately 30 million Muslims tie it with Morocco for the eleventh most populous Muslim nation in the world and that means Ethiopia has more Muslims than Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iraq, or Afghanistan (USIP 2004: 5). Adapting to and making itself relevant to such a global discourse, the EPRDF has managed to extract tremendous economic resources (development aid) as well as the much needed political legitimacy from the West, despite its poor record on human rights and its political repression, especially after the contested May 2005 election and the post-election violence.7 EPRDFs discourse of religious tolerance should be situated within this geopolitical context where it plays the role of enhancing Ethiopias relevance in the new US-led international order by creating links between global discourse of Islamic fundamentalism and religious extremism in Ethiopia, a new development which has even threatened the very existence of nebaru Islamina, the home-grown Islam, as the Prime Minister put it. In this new geopolitical context, religious rights, especially Muslims, are securitized. Forbearance - The historical framework for citizenship rights? The Muslims narratives of the Ethiopian religious past centres on marginalisation and inter-faith conflict. Muslims do acknowledge the religious reforms since the 1974 revolution and more so

since 1991. They give due credit to the EPRDF for further redressing the Muslims demands for 6 See 'Outsourced Guantanamo'FBI & CIA Interrogating Detainees in Secret Ethiopian Jails. http://www.democracynow.org/2007/4/5/outsourced_guantanamo_fbi_cia_interrogat ing_detainees 7 See Human Right Watch reports on Ethiopia in 2008; 2009, and 2010. 19citizenship rights. Nevertheless, they still have some outstanding grievances against the dominant Christian population and the EPRDF government. As Hussein (2006) noted, examples of Christians-Muslims peaceful co-existence and cooperation abound, as it has rarely been seen elsewhere in the world. But contemporary Muslims understate this part of ChristianMuslims relations in their representation of Ethiopian history. The marginalisation and domination plot in Muslims historiography is elaborated in a recent book written in Amharic by Ahmedin Jebal (2011), a well known activist for Muslims rights. Entitled, Ethiopian Muslims: A History of Domination and resistance, the book has been an instant celebrity. It is widely read by Muslims at home and in the diaspora, evident in the publication of already a second edition of the book in less than three months. Like Ephrem Eshetes book Islamic Fundamentalism in Ethiopia, Ahmedinss book is hailed as a must-read book8 .

The marginalisation and domination historical plot play the role of highlighting the structural continuity of religious inequality whereas the governments discourse of religious tolerance and peaceful co-existence appears to diminish the legitimacy of the demands. In other words, the representation of the past with an accent on domination and intolerance provides historical legitimacy to the contemporary political struggles. The resistance plot, on the other hand, seeks to reinforce the political agency of Muslims in contemporary political struggles through a reference to historical precedence. Muslims raise a wide variety of rights issues in contemporary Ethiopia. Firstly, they demand for greater historical and physical space. Although the Islamic heritage of Ethiopia is by far recognised now than ever before Muslims are concerned that EPRDFs nationalist turn could ultimately undermine the hard-won gains. Many objective historians still represent Ahmed Gragn as destructive as if his Christian counterparts were peaceful in the military campaigns they had waged against the Islamic principalities. Muslims historical thrust here is not even contextualising and historicising the wars of Ahmed Gragn but recognise him as a freedom fighter. Muslims also claim a greater physical space for Islam in Ethiopia commensurate with the larger demographic size. They vehemently reject the 2007 census according to which Muslims constitute only 34 % of the countrys population. In their perspective Muslims are at least 50%, if not more. The contest over the census has a direct

bearing on land claims for the construction of houses of worship. In a more emotionally loaded sense they particularly ask for the construction of mosques in the EOC dominated northern town such as Axum and Lalibela. The EOC claims these towns as its sacred place. Axum Muslims, who constitute 14 % of the towns population, are still not allowed to build a mosque within 15 8 Nejashi OJ. Campaign to know our history and let others know it. http://blog.ethiopianmuslims.net, April 28, 2011. 20km radius of the town. The right to build a mosque in Axum, a town which Muslims also regard as sacred as the land of the Najashi, is one of the contentious issues in ChristianMuslims relation in contemporary Ethiopia. The most contentious issue between Muslims and the EPRDF government is the legitimacy of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (Mejlis). The leadership of the Mejlis is tightly controlled by the government under the pretext of containing a take over by Islamic fundamentalists. Moves towards the formation of alternative Islamic organisations have also been blocked by the Mejlis. As a result, many Muslims do not recognise the Mejlis as their organisation and this has denied Muslims a functional organisation which they have been yearning for to enhance Islams standing in the countrys religious landscape. Lack of a legitimate and functional organisation has also

weakened an Islamic voice that could effectively contest EPRDFs assertive secularism. The EPRDF issues a secular directive in 2008 that banned the wearing of hijab and niqab and collective prayer in educational institutions9 . Although the directive applies for all religious groups Muslims have perceived it as directed against Islam, as other religious groups are not as prescriptive in religious conduct as Islam is. Protesting the ban many Muslims University students clashed with the government throughout 2009, an event which reminded Muslims the historic continuity of their marginalisation, whereas the government interpreted it as signs of Islamic radicalisation. In this political struggle between Muslims and Christians, and between Muslims and the EPRDF government, the Muslims have sought to establish a historical basis of legitimacy. The focus is on the Najashi narrative, a narrative which is functional at various layers of the confrontation. What I call the Najashi narrative refers to the strong Ethiopian component in early Islam the First Hijra; Najashi as the first ruler outside of Arabia to embrace Islam; the two leading Ethiopian companions of the prophet Mohammad (Bilal Ibn Rabah -Islams first Muezzin-and Umm Ayman Baraka -the prophets care-taker), and the representation of Ethiopia in the Islamic scripture and literature as the land of righteousness. At one level the Najashi narrative serves the

purpose of repositioning the Ethiopian Muslims vis a vis national identity. Accordingly, Ethiopia is not only a special country for the Christians it is also vital for the Muslims of the world in general and the Ethiopian Muslims in particular. Construed this way, goes the Najashi narrative, Islam owes Ethiopia big time to its very survival. The hospitality and the tolerance the sahaba got in Ethiopia is said to be critical for the survival and expansion of Islam. Ethiopian Muslims would have less trouble in identifying with Ethiopia as the land of the First Hijra than the 9 Ethiopian Ministry of Education Directive on Secularism in educational institutions, Addis Ababa, 2008. 21Ethiopia is an island of Christianity variety. Commenting on this new representation of Ethiopia one of my Muslim informants from Addis Ababa said, it is for the first time that we Ethiopian Muslims started reconciling being Muslim and being Ethiopian. For our forefathers reconciling both sounded a contradiction in terms. Tracing the history of Islam in Ethiopia to king Najashi thus helps Muslims to negotiate their foreignness, a new foundation myth in reconstructing a national identity. In the communiqu it made on April 12, 2009 on the growing interfaith tension, the Network of Ethiopian Muslims in Europe (NEME), for instance, contested the EOCs claim of indignity while asserting Islams long presence in Ethiopia in the following manner:

It is to be noted that the Ethiopian state preceded all the Abrahamic religions. Well before the introduction of Christianity in Ethiopia in the 4th A.D the Axumite had already built a sophisticated non-Christian civilization. Like Christianity, Islam was also introduced to Ethiopia from the Middle East at the same time it was being established in Saudi Arabia. Any ownership claim of the Ethiopian state and its history is thus not only ahistorical but also poses danger to the peace and security of the country. Instead of engaging in the fruitless debate on first-comer/late-comer we should combat all forms of religious extremism and build our common nation. The political sub-text of the Najashi narrative is therefore a secure sense of national belonging and a historical framework for citizenship right. A reference to the First Hijra is often made by Muslims in the sense of meaning we have been around the Ethiopian block for a long time, however marginalized they have been. Historical longevity is invoked to counter the securitization of Islam in Ethiopia that stipulates as if revivalist movements could only have external referents. Within the Umma (a universal Islamic identity) the Najashi narrative enables the Ethiopian Muslims to claim a special status. Like in all forms of collective identities there is also the issue of authenticity in Islamic identification. Many black Muslims face social discrimination during their pilgrimage to Mecca or in other forms of encounter. As one of my Muslim informants noted,

We need the Najashi story in order to show off with other Muslims particularly the Arabs. The Arabs misidentify Islam with Arab nationalism. They look down particularly upon black Muslims. Many Ethiopian students from Saudi Arabia and Egypt had bitter experience of discrimination. In circumstances such as this we are keen in reminding the Arabs that Ethiopia and Ethiopians are intimately connected with the Prophet Mohammed and Islam from early on10 . In this layer of confrontation the Najashi narrative becomes a discursive resource to justify a status claim. Ethiopian Muslims are thus not just one among the many black Muslims occupying 10 Despite their Islamic activism, northern Sudanese Muslims, for instance, are also derogatorily referred to as abids (slaves) as migrant laborers in the Gulf States and in the Middle East. Field note, Khartoum, 2002. 22a lower position in Islamic identification but Muslims with a special access to the Islamic great tradition. Contemporary Ethiopian Muslims also refer to the First Hijra as a catalyst and justification for integration within the wider Islamic world. This is not only a discourse of belonging to an Islamic identity but also used as a discourse to extract economic resources from the Islamic world. The double facility of the Najashi narrative to the reconstruction of religious and national identities is succinctly depicted in the document the Ethiopian Muslims diaspora delegation wrote and presented to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in 2007:

Although we do not have a conclusive evidence to claim that Ethiopia is the first country to grant asylum to the persecuted we understand that Najashi could have well set precedence for the contemporary human right conventions that include protection of the vulnerable and the persecuted. What makes Ethiopia unique in the annals of Islamic history is that the Muslim refugees had lived peacefully with other Ethiopians and this was the basis for the flourishing of Islam in the country to the level it has reached now. King Asmhas acceptance of Islam makes Ethiopia not only a land of justice and enlightenment but also the first country where Islam got recognition by a head of state (The Document: 9). The diaspora delegation presented a summary of Muslims human rights issues to the Prime Minister, from the controversial census, the autonomy of the Mejlis, the right to build Mosques in Axum, a balanced media, public manifestation of faith, to a historical justification for the membership of Ethiopia in the Organization of Islamic Conference. History here serves as a legitimating framework for basically political rights. Although the delegation was warmly welcomed by the EPRDF its mission was construed as if it were to give color to the Millennium celebration, once again sending message to Muslims that there are limits to Islam in Ethiopia. Conclusion Nationalist history has been the main thrust of academic historiography in Ethiopia up until 1991 with the dominant historical plots of unification, independence and peaceful coexistence (Toggai

2008). The contestation over Ethiopian history has reached its zenith since 1991. As Samir (2010: 171) recently noted, narratives about Ethiopias long history, its independence and heroes, its intimate and unified peoples, its sacred geography and common culture are all laid open to increasingly reckless counter-hegemonic storms. The paper has examined three historiographies about Ethiopias religious past; two by religious communities and a state historiography. The historiography of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church closely resembles the nationalist historical paradigm that stipulates an uninterrupted three thousand years of national existence with the dominant Orthodox Church accommodating religious minorities. Accordingly, inter-faith relations have been always harmonious and peaceful, save some exceptions when 23religious minorities such as Muslims were incited and reeked havoc to the national fabric. The hitherto religious minorities have contested the EOCs hegemonic knowledge production that has silenced, ignored and distorted subaltern voices in the radically changed sociopolitical contexts. Demographically the second largest and politically more assertive, Muslims have particularly in the forefront in this counter-hegemonic project. Expectedly, history has become one of the main sites of political contestation. What has passed as religious accommodation is now redefined by Muslims as forbearance of the politically dominant EOC, i.e., a powermediated tolerance of intolerance. As such, the dominant historical plots in the emerging

Muslims historiography are marginalisation, domination and resistance. Ethiopias glorious religious past looks quite different when written with these new meta-narratives. Like EOCs historiography Muslims historiography has also ignored some inconvenient facts that threaten to undermine the coherent stories it seeks to tell. EPRDFs state historiography significantly differs from preceding Ethiopian governments with its strong deconstructionist dose, though the tone has changed in recent years towards selectively appropriating from the nationalist historiography. EPRDF has grown impatient with the rise of religion - in lie of the state sanctioned ethnicity - as a major focus of social identification and unit of framing rights claims in that it has already redressed all forms of inequality, and in fact Muslims are supposed to be one of the main beneficiaries. The redress is said to have built a more cohesive political community (a reformed Ethiopian polity) and the focus now should be building a common economic community. In fact, EPRDFs main basis of political legitimacy is now shifting away from identity politics to the language of development, a regime which needs to stay on power not for its emanicipatory project but rather for the double digit economic growth it claims to have registered. This is the new political context within which EPRDFs temptation to recycle Ethiopias Great traditions and the nationalist historiography be embedded. One of these Great traditions is Ethiopia as a model of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence. At

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