Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Religion, Language, and Nat i o n a l i s m 2 3 7the continued and future importance of Amharic in the region, if not elsewherein the country.I heard one story about a Harari whom others classified as being unnecessarily“fanatic.” He was one of the occasional court litigants who are known tospeak Amharic yet who, because of their anti-Amhara, anti-Amharic, or anti-Christian views, claim that they do not and therefore that they need to be assigneda translator. In this humorous incident, after claiming not to knowAmharic and demanding a translator, the Harari man interrupted proceedingsin order to correct the court official’s translation, sending all present intopeals of laughter. Abdurahim Ahmed, the president of Harar’s Supreme Courtin 1998, explained that since language issues were still very much in flux,judges had been lenient in such cases and did not charge such persons withcontempt of court (interview with the author, June 19, 1998).As part of Ethiopia’s ethno-linguistic revival, Harari authorities have beenworking to standardize a writing system for Harari, a language that in the pasthas been written in the Arabic, Ethiopic, and Latin alphabets. In the early1990s, when Harar had been established as a region separate from Oromiya(the regional state of the Oromo people) but before local elections wereheld, the interim government decided temporarily to adopt the Latin script.After elections in 1994, a special committee was formed to study the issue.Around 1996, according to Abdurahman Mohammed Korram of the HarariNational Council, the Harari regional government decided on the Ethiopicsyllabary (interviews with the author, June 16, 1998 and August 5, 1998). It islikely that the choice was made as much on political grounds as any other. InHarar, there was considerable opposition to the Oromo, the majority populationin the area whose own separate region engulfs Harar (or, more specifically,there was opposition to the Oromo Liberation Front; see below). Whenthe Harari made their decision, the Oromo, of whom most in and aroundHarar are Muslim, had already abandoned the Ethiopic syllabary in favor ofthe Latin alphabet. Therefore, to judge from the sociopolitical situation ofthe time and from the fact that Harari had been written in Latin for a coupleof years before the switch back to Ethiopic, it is likely that what influenced thechoice of the syllabary was the opportunity for the Muslim Harari to allythemselves more closely with the secular/Christian government in AddisAbaba and thereby distance themselves further from the dominantly MuslimOromo around Harar. This switch from Latin characters back to Ethiopic wasno small thing. Previous expenditures had included the production of educationalmaterials in the Latin alphabet; under the revised system, the materialsmust be redone yet again.In some cases, then, ethnicity appears to have been judged to be more importantthan religion in defining communal identities. Indeed, my conversationswith non-Oromo (for example, Harari, Amhara, Somali, and Gurage)