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Ethiopia Ethiopia and the Early Islamic Period
The rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula had a
significant impact on Aksum during the seventh and eighth
centuries. By the time of the Prophet Muhammad's death (A.D.
632), the Arabian Peninsula, and thus the entire opposite
shore of the Red Sea, had come under the influence of the
new religion. The steady advance of the faith of Muhammad
through the next century resulted in Islamic conquest of all
of the former Sassanian Empire and most of the former
Byzantine dominions.
Despite the spread of Islam by conquest elsewhere, the
Islamic state's relations with Aksum were not hostile at
first. According to Islamic tradition, some members of
Muhammad's family and some of his early converts had taken
refuge with the Aksumites during the troubled years
preceding the Prophet's rise to power, and Aksum was
exempted from the jihad, or holy war, as a result. The Arabs
also considered the Aksumite state to be on a par with the
Islamic state, the Byzantine Empire, and China as one of the
world's greatest kingdoms. Commerce between Aksum and at
least some ports on the Red Sea continued, albeit on an
increasingly reduced scale.
Problems between Aksum and the new Arab power, however,
soon developed. The establishment of Islam in Egypt and the
Levant greatly reduced Aksum's relations with the major
Christian power, the Byzantine Empire. Although contact with
individual Christian churches in Egypt and other lands
continued, the Muslim conquests hastened the isolation of
the church in Aksum. Limited communication continued, the
most significant being with the Coptic Church in Egypt,
which supplied a patriarch to the Aksumites, but such
contacts were insufficient to counter an ever-growing
ecclesiastical isolation. Perhaps more important, Islamic
expansion threatened Aksum's maritime contacts, already
under siege by Sassanian Persians. Red Sea and Indian Ocean
trade, formerly dominated by the Byzantine Empire, Aksum,
and Persia, gradually came under the control of Muslim
Arabs, who also propagated their faith through commercial
activities and other contacts.
Aksum lost its maritime trade routes during and after the
mid-seventh century, by which time relations with the Arabs
had deteriorated to the point that Aksumite and Muslim
fleets raided and skirmished in the Red Sea. This situation
led eventually to the Arab occupation of the Dahlak Islands,
probably in the early eighth century and, it appears, to an
attack on Adulis and the Aksumite fleet. Later, Muslims
occupied Sawakin and converted the Beja people of that
region to Islam.
By the middle of the ninth century, Islam had spread to the
southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and the coast of East
Africa, and the foundations were laid for the later
extensive conversions of the local populace to Islam in
these and adjacent regions. East of the central highlands, a
Muslim sultanate, Ifat, was established by the beginning of
the twelfth century, and some of the surrounding Cushitic
peoples were gradually converted. These conversions of
peoples to the south and southeast of the highlands who had
previously practiced local religions were generally brought
about by the proselytizing efforts of Arab merchants. This
population, permanently Islamicized, thereafter contended
with the Amhara-Tigray peoples for control of the Horn of
Africa.
Data as of 1991
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