harar: the muslim city in ethiopia

From The Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies
Section B / April 13-16 1978 / Chicago, USA Robert L. Hess, Editor
HARAR: THE MUSLIM CITY IN ETHIOPIA *
Sidney R. Waldron
Harar, Ethiopia, is a walled, Muslim, pre-industrial city whose approximately 20,000 inhabitants speak a unique
language and have their own culture. 1 The history of the city has been discussed by Caulk (1971:1-19), Burton
(1966:176-187), Cerulli (1936:1-55), Trimingham (1965:76-98), and others. Although little is known of the
archaeological background of Harar or of the abandoned sites of other walled cities which stretch from the Somali
Republic to the Ethiopian Highlands (Azais and Chambard, 1931; Curle, 1937:317) it is apparent that Harar is the
last remnant of an earlier widespread Muslim culture with urban centers. (Recent archaeological surveys by
Richard Wilding (1977) should provide a much-needed refinement of present theories).
According to the oral tradition of the city, which is in essential agreement with historical reports, Harar has
been the sole representative of its way of life since the reign of Emir Nur (1552-66) (Paulitschke, 1888:224). For at
least four hundred years, the city functioned as an important regional center of Islam and a vital market area. Both
influences served to connect Harar with internal Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, and, indirectly, to the outside world.
Although the city follows the general pattern of the Muslim city, its social institutions, conditioned by local
ecological and economic influences, have developed along their own path. Harar thus presents a doubly interesting
situation to those interested in pre-industrial urban society: it was, until very recently, an intact Muslim city whose
society had developed in comparative isolation for four centuries.
Harar is a cultural isolate, a one-city culture. This fact of existence is reflected in Harari terms of self-reference.
They refer to Harar as ge "the city"; to themselves as ge usu', "people of the city"; to their culture as ge 'ada,
"customs of the city"; and to their distinct Ethiopian Semitic language as ge sinan, "the language of the city."
Nevertheless, by almost all criteria, Harar fits the models and concepts of the Muslim city developed by
Islamicists. Map 1 is designed to illustrate the spatial arrangement of the mosque, the market, and other features
regarded as diagnostic by von Grunebaum (1955:141-155), Hourani (1970:20-23) and others.
As Map 2 shows, Harar is conceptually subdivided into five quarters or beri (sing. "gate"):
Asumberi, Argoberi, Suqutatberi, Bedroberi, and Asedimberi. No physical markets or bound aries exist, although,
most Harari know the exact points of demarcation between quarters. As the Harari term for quarter indicates, these
are named after, and associated with, each of the old gates through the city wall.
As is characteristically the case in Muslim cities (Lapidus, 1970:197), the quarters of Harar traditionally served
as administrative units, of primary importance to the municipal government as units of tax collection. Under the
emirate, each quarter was under the charge of an official called the garad.
Andinnya Manget – “First Avenue”
Faras Magala – “Horse Market”
Madrusa – “Muslim School”
Amit Uga – “Amir Street”
Makina Gir-Gir Uga – “Sewing Machine Street”
Gidir Magala – “Big Market”
Au Abdul – “Shrine of Au Abdul”
Map 1:
Major Streets, Markets, and Buildings of Harar
(Quarter Boundaries are indicated by dashes.)
Map 2:
Quarters of Harar
(Names in parenthesis are names of new gates, not the name of quarters.)
Each of Harar's quarters is composed of numerous named neighborhoods (toia, sing.).
These are not bounded entities, but are centered around the points of reference from which their name
is derived. I have tabulated sixty-seven toias in Harar. As Gulick has indicated, these named localities
function in many Muslim cities as "geographical labels that are very much needed because of the
absence of house numbers and the uncertainty about the names of specific alleys and streets" (Gulick,
1976:109).
At this point Harar begins to diverge significantly from previous descriptions and ideal models of
Muslim cities. Neither quarters nor neighborhoods (toias) in Harar are institutional enclaves,
segregated from other such constituent units. However, this concept of the quarter as socially
independent has been firmly established in the literature of Islamic studies.
The loyalty of the townsman belongs to his family group and after this to the ethnic or
denominational unit, which shares his quarter. ... The occupants of the several quarters will
meet typically but in the market and the mosque (von Grunebaum, 1955: 149).
This theme has been expanded by Sjoberg to include all pre-industrial cities. He states, "Segregation by
ethnic groups ... occurs widely in preindustrial cities .... Ethnic quarters tend to be self-sufficient
entities" (Sjoberg, 1960:101). Adequate data on the social organization of quarters of Muslim cities,
which would provide factual evidence concerning their social isolation from one another, is scant, to
say the least. The current state of knowledge of the relationship of the neighborhood to city society in
the Muslim town is summarized by John Gulick:
As to the present, there are so few pertinent studies that we do not have enough information to
make any general statements on how the named quarters correspond with the neighborhoods
(restricted territorially aware inhabitants) .... An assumption that such neighborhoods are
typical of the madinas, past and present, is safer than one that they are not, but we have no
evidence that madinas are completely subdivided into these neighborhoods, on the analogy of
beehive cells (Gulick, 1976:108-109). [ madina = city, place where non-Europeans live -jmc]
The rest of this discussion of Harar will concentrate upon examining the social organization of
the neighborhood in the context of the city's society, in the hope that it will join the studies of
Eickelman (1974) and Magnarella (1974) in providing the basis of an urban anthropology of
Muslim cities. Two approaches will be taken. First, the spatial distribution of membership of key
institutions of Harari society will be examined on a city-wide basis, to see whether or not
institutional membership is coincident with neighborhood or quarter membership. Second, the
composition of a specific neighborhood will be examined in order to establish the degree to which
the neighborhood is institutionally linked to the society of the city.
Family, Friendship, and Afocha: Spatial Distributions
The social cohesion of the city of Harar rests upon three primary institutions. These are ahli (the family
network), marinyet (friendship), and afocha (community organizations).
A Harari speaks of his kin '(reckoned bilaterally in a Sudanese terminology) as ahli. This collective
term describes all the households related to him. The ahli is not a corporate group with defined
membership, with common property, or with other monolithic aspects.
Table 1
Spatial Distribution of Ahli by Quarter
Same Toia (neighborhood)
as Ego
Same Beri (Quarter)
Number of Ahli Households
in other Quarters
N (# of Household in
Individual Ahli)
Number of Quarters in
which Ego has Ahli**
A*
B
C
D
% of Total N (45)
2
8
1
1
1
6
0
4
8.9%
42.3%
3
11
4
8
57.7%
11
12
10
12
100%
3
5
4
4
(Harar has 5 quarters)
*not including ego's household
**including ego's household
As the Table 1 indicates, one can make certain conclusions about the spatial distribution of ahli in
Harar. First, each ahli is dispersed throughout the city to a greater or lesser extent, rather than being
limited to a particular quarter or neighborhood. Second, within this general pattern of dispersal, there are
often clusters of kinsmen in particular areas. As this and other documentation make clear (Waldron,
1974:120-146), the web of kinship connects each individual to households throughout the city.
Ultimately it interconnects the entire population and constitutes one basis of the city's high degree of
social solidarity. When one Harari deals with another; he assumes that he is dealing with his relative's
relative, unless the ties are known to be closer.
Friendship (marinyet) is extremely important among the Harari (Waldron, 1974:47-75).
Harari society is permeated with status inequalities, and one's friends are one's only close confidants.
(Seldom are close kinsmen included in one's formal friends.) Each male child forms close friendships
with males of his neighborhood who are approximately the same age. Usually these groups are limited to
five to ten members. A male grows up with his friends; who are particularly important to him-and he to
them-during adolescence. One belongs to one and only one friendship group. These friendships are
expected to last throughout life, and they often do.
Spatial distribution of residences of friends does not greatly affect their frequency of interaction, since
they will seek each other out on a daily basis and gather together as a group at least once a week.
However, if one does have friends in the local neighborhood, he will be provided with emotional and
social support in local affairs. On the other hand, if one's friends reside in other neighborhoods or
quarters, one does not have immediate access to them, but does have intimate contacts with the news of
affairs and events of these other sections of the city. Thus, considerations of spatial distributions of
friends must always be tempered by the understanding that, as long as they reside within Harar, friends
will spend time with one another on a frequent and regular basis, just because they are friends.
Table 2
Spatial Distribution of Ego’s Friends
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Ego's Residence
Argoberi, Magala Oxat Toia (A)
Bedroberi, Beri Toia (A)
Bedroberi, Harat Dabli Toia (A)
Asumberi, Xazir Aboin Toia (A)
Asumberi, Au Zin Toia (A)
Bedroberi, Au Asad Toia (A)
Bedroberi, Arab Musgid Toia (A)
Asedimberi, Au Hamid Toia
Suqutatberi, Geberaro Toia
Suqutatberi, Au Abadir Toia
Friends in Same Other Toia Same
Toia
Quarter
Other Quarter(s)
2
4
3
1
2
0
0
2
2
3
19 (36.5%)
4
3*
1
3 (2*)
1
1
4*
3
2
2*
24(46.1%)
1
1
2
0
1
2
0
0
1
1
9 (17.3%
Total = 52
(A) indicates that persons 1-7 were all members of one informant’s ahi.
(*) indicates that these friends in other quarters than ego's lived, themselves in the same toia.
For instance, person 4 has three friends outside of Asumberi. Two of these share the same toia.
Afocha are communal organizations formally concerned with weddings and funerals. Each male family head is
expected to belong to a male afocha and each woman is expected to join a woman's afocha. In 1975, there
were twenty-four men's afochas and fourteen women's afochas in Harar. Afochas are viewed by Harari as the
most important social institution in the city's society. They are of great importance in maintaining the Harari
way of life in both their formal and informal aspects (Yusuf Ahmed, 1966; Waldron, 1974; Koehn and
Waldron, 1978). Exhaustive documentation of afocha membership distribution (Waldron, 1974:167-177) leads
to two conclusions, which are of great importance to the comparison of Harari community composition with
that of other Muslim cities. First, Harar is not divided into mutually exclusive afocha territories. Afocha
membership is not spatially limited to specific toia or quarters or any other arbitrary boundaries (see Maps 3
and 4). This supports the earlier statement that in Harar community organization is not coincident with the
spatial boundaries of the local neighborhood or quarter. This is further attested by data presented in the next
section which will show that in anyone toia or quarter, members of several afochas are in residence. Second, in
the majority of cases, most members of an afocha come from the same general area of the city. Thus, although
there are not mutually exclusive afocha territories, most afochas have a local focus in the distribution of their
members. Succinctly put, most of one's afocha-mates are neighbors, but, as the next section will show, not all
of one's neighbors are afocha-mates.
As this summary presentation of the key institutions of Harari society ha~ indicated, spatial distributions of
institutional membership are not coincident with either quarter or neighborhood. One usually has several ahli, a few
friends, and many afocha-mates in the general area of one's residence. One also has connections to all parts of the city
and its society through those ahli, friends, and afocha-mates who live in far-flung parts of town. Both intensive and
extensive institutional connections are important in structuring Harari society.
Toia Afocha and Community Composition
"Local community" may be conceptualized, in the abstract, in both social and spatial terms. The social dimension
includes all those persons who have more or less defined relationships based on a high frequency of face-to-face
interaction. The spatial dimension implies that these interactions are most frequent in a particular area. Harari include
both dimensions in their concept of the toia afocha. Both terms involve the idea of neighborhood; however, "toia"
refers to the locality, and "afocha" refers to the social category. A valid gloss of "toia afocha," then, is "members of
the local community," in the dual sense above.
Harari use the term toia afocha to describe the relationships and obligations they have with the people who live
around them. Some of these accrue simply from the fact of propinquity, but the structure of the local community
derives primarily from relationships defined by the three dominant Harari institutions: ahli, friendship, and male and
female afocha membership.
Harari neighborhoods are faced with the generic problem of urban society: establishing functional social
relationships, or "role-sets" (Merton, 1957:108), in conditions of great social complexity, or more precisely stated,
high "role-density" (Southall, 1973:80-84). Their problems are those which, in one version or another, are typical of
urban residential areas: social control, the definition of social behavior in casual daily encounters, resolution of local
crises, and the representation of individual interests in a large opuln Harar, these' problems and related ones arise in
the virtual absence of municipal services and agencies. Although there is a Muslim court (Map 2), which applies the
principles of shari'a, primarily to divorce and inheritance disputes; there is no effective police force or other agency of
enforcing municipal rule in the interior of the city. There is no fire department; a city-wide sanitation system is nonexistent; and, until the late 1960's the city water supply was marginal. The problems of living in a crowded
neighborhood, in Harar, are solved primarily by the traditional social organization of the community, the toia afoeha,
which focuses public opinion on violations of the customary way of life of the city, ge' ada. Thus, although hundreds
of Harari live within shouting distance of one another, the residential areas of the city are usually very quiet: shouting
or causing any disturbing noise':"-even possessing clucking chickens-is considered a breach of custom, and attracts
the critical attention). of toia afoeha.
As a zone bf face-to-face contacts, the toia or neighborhood, is structured by its layout and architecture. Each
residence is guaranteed a realm of privacy by its compound wall and the etiquette, which restrains all but purposive
visits. Each compound has one gate which opens onto the street, and it is the. houses which share a street in common
which are the heart of a neighborhood. Adjacent compounds do not have interconnecting doors. As a consequence,
the residents, whose houses are back to back, sharing a compound wall but opening onto different streets, probably
will encounter each other only occasionally and may not be particularly "close" neighbors.
In this respect, compound architecture fits von Grunebaum's model of the Muslim town:
The Muslim house is oriented away from the street; it receives its light from an inner court, and the complex of
its constituent buildings is so arranged as to secure a maximum of privacy to its inhabitants. This desire for
privacy, which is the outgrowth of the social mores demanding as complete a withdrawal from the public as
possible of the women of the family, inspires the insistence that windows and roofs must be constructed in such
a way as to prevent anyone's intruding unseen into the intimacy of his neighbor's lives. For the same reason,
house doors on opposite sides of a street may not face one another. (von Grunebaum, 1955:148).
In Harar, women are by no means limited to the compound or otherwise formally secluded. Moreover, the compound is
usually inhabited by two, occasionally more, families who are not close kin. Here the value of the seeming exceptions of
Harar to the general models of the Muslim city is clearly underwritten. Household and compound architecture can be
seen as an adaptation ensuring residential privacy in extremely crowded conditions, rather than being specifically related
to the treatment of women.
Even without the reinforcement of kinship, friendship, and male and female afocha ties, toia afocha share certain
rights and expectations based on propinquity alone as defined in ge 'ada. Good relations with one's closest neighbors,
called gar agamberi or gar afoeha ("adjoining or neighboring houses") are considered very important, as the following
statement by a ge usu' indicates:
The gar afocha is a kind of emergency afocha. If there is a death in your house, these and other toia afocha will
rush into the house to clean up the corpse before either the male afocha or female afocha arrive. Also some of
their houses will be used in amota gar (funeral) and beleehu gar (wedding). Your nearest neighbor, your gar
agamberi, automatically shares your celebrations and needs no invitation. You use his house as your own, and
when you whitewash your house in preparation for a celebration, you whitewash his at the same time.
Neighbors are considered to be equals, and, as in many ideally egalitarian communities, generalized reciprocity
(Sahlins, 1972:193) is the ideal mode of transaction. The ties between neighbors, which are essentially informal, are
both symbolized and cemented by reciprocal exchanges of food on specific occasions. When the excellent fruit of
Harar's orchards first ripen, neighbors make gifts of them to each other. As Abdulmuheiman Abdulnasser explained it,
Ge usu' have sold fruit to ea-ch other only in the last ten or fifteen years. Traditionally each farm owner shared
the fruit from his farms with his neighbors. He would say, "This is the annual production of my farm and these
are samples." When my father was still alive, there was a peach tree in our compound. My father would watch
the peaches as they ripened and decide who was to be given each peach. "That one is for Haji Sufian, that one is
for so-and-so," he would say. (1975)
Women share delicacies with their close neighbors whenever possible. Ceremonial exchanges of dishes take place on
the seventeenth day of Ramadan (Bedri Yam) and the twenty-seventh (Xatimut Yam) as a means of expressing the ties of
toia afocha.
The toia afocha exerts a strong but informal form of social control in the neighborhood whose
sanction is the pressure of public opinion. During the day, when men are in their farms or shops, the
neighborhood is largely the domain of women, who are constantly visiting one another and are especially
sensitive to the opinions of their neighbors. (Here there are clear parallels to the defended neighborhoods
in Susurluk, Turkey (Magnarella (1974:44).) If a woman has unruly children who dash in and out of
neighbors' compounds, if she shouts too much, if she has a reputation of being stingy, or if she in any
other way disturbs the neighborhood or challenges its ethos, her neighbors talk about her and begin to
avoid her. This is a form of internal ostracism which effectively curtails the offender's social life in the
toia. If such avoidance is not sufficient to encourage the offending woman to mend her ways, an ad hoc
committee of elder and respected neighborhood women may complain to her, sometimes emotionally
and vigorously. On occasion, such a woman may be considered incorrigible and may be excluded
completely from the casual neighborhood contacts which form an important part of the daily li fe of
most Harari women.
A common way that men are brought into neighborhood conflicts is through the
misbehavior of their children, as the following statement indicates:
If your son fights with a neighbor's son, and if you speak up for him against your neighbor, you
will alienate your neighbor. If one has bad relations with the toia afocha, it can be difficult.
You will get no cooperation from them when you need it. A wise father lets children fight and
lets them make up in the normal course of events without getting involved.
Another likely course of action, in such a case, is that the father will punish his son for jeopardizing his
toia afocha relations. It is in this way that public opinion is effective in social control in Harar.
Traditionally the closest neighbor (gar afoeha) acted as an informal community welfare committee: .
Until about twenty years ago, the gar afocha were still functioning as a neighborhood
organization. Its members, who were both men and women, were to be consulted in matte rs of
neighborhood interest. Such things as building an extension on one's house, or, more seriously,
the threat of selling one's house, were matters of their concern.
Once every year, they organized a campaign to clean the accumulated debris and sewage o ut of
their street. They also had street paving campaigns, which is how many of the streets became
paved. These activities were done during the month of Ramadan.
The gar afocha also controlled men's attendance in the local mosque. A neighborhood man was
expected to pray there at least once a day. If he was missing for three days, his neighbors would
come to his house and ask him what was wrong. (Fatuma Abdulkarim, fide Dr. ElisabethDorothea Hecht, personal communication).
Despite the manifestations of common action and mutual regard among neighbors cited here, the
toia is not a separate realm in Harari society. Underlying the egalitarianism and reciprocity which
ideally guide relationships between toia afocha are individual roles and status gradients defined by the
three major institutions. The next step in understanding the social organization of the toia is the
documentation of the types of interrelationships which toia afocha have in terms of shared membership
in ahli networks, friendship groups, and male and female afochas.
The Neighborhood of Musgid Toia
Musgid Toia ("Local Mosque Neighborhood") is the fictional name of a neighborhood in the interior of the city,
not far from the central market. Interviewing on a door-to-door basis is typically difficult in Muslim cities, as
Gulick confirms (1976:88). Although Harari compounds usually have two, sometimes three, unrelated families
per compound, it was possible in most cases to interview only one family per compound. To preserve anonymity
all names of persons, places, and institutions are changed. Only one compound in the area sampled is inhabited
by non-Harari. In the mosaic of local characteristics that constitutes the city of Harar, the selection of one section
as "typical" is somewhat of an abstraction, but Musgid Toia seems to me to be representative of the dominantly
Harari sections of the city.
The integrity of Musgid Toia's society rests upon ties between women. Visiting patterns between
women were cited previously as being the informal bond uniting the toia afocha, and this was strongly
attested in Musgid Toia. Even those old women whose friends and siblings inside and outside of the
neighborhood were dead, and who had retired from participation in a woman's afocha, were not
necessarily isolated. One old woman, whose only institutional ties were the passive representation in her
late husband's afocha and one sister residing outside of Harar, described herself as "visiting all over."
Another elder, blind and arthritic, was a wise ~nd friendly woman who always had a pot of tea prepared
for the visitors who came and went throughout the day. Despite her lack of afocha connections, she was
very well informed about the affairs. of the neighborhood and the city as a whole. Institutional
connections, however, assure participation in the city's society. A widow without affiliations in any but
her dead husband's afocha, and this for the purpose of her ultimate burial, described herself as "very
lonely."
Musgid Toia is unusual in the degree of dominance of a single woman's afocha. Of the women in
the sample who maintained membership in a woman's afocha, all but two belonged to women's afocha
"A". I was assured by these women, moreover, that the entire toia followed this pattern of
representation. Most neighborhoods show at least two women's afochas in residence, but in Musgid
Toia the cohesion of the neighborhood established by visiting patterns was strongly cemented by the
frequent shared activities of the women's afocha.
Map 5 shows the layout of the toia and the representation of male afochas. A more complex and less
solidary pattern is apparent here. In this survey of twenty-five households, eight male afochas are
represented, although four of these have only one member each. Forty percent of the households (10)
belong to male afocha "A". This would seem to provide a core to male afocha affiliation within the toia,
but it is slightly misleading. Four of the ten members included here are widows who are represented on
their husband's afocha rolls, but who do not participate in afocha affairs. In fact, male afocha
membership in Musgid Toia is fractionated between four groups (and four with single representatives).
Although the afochas with only one representative in Musgid Toia are not numerically significant in the
neighborhood, they provide social connections between Musgid Toia and the rest of the city.
Two conclusions may be derived from this distribution of male afocha representation within the
neighborhood. The first is that there are four blocs of afocha affiliations which include twenty-one of
the twenty-five households. To this extent, male afocha membership provides sub-groups of affiliation
within the toia. However, the second conclusion points to the opposite direction. The fractionation of
afocha representation tends to divide the male society of the neighborhood. During the wedding season,
for instance, the men of Musgid Toia may be going, individually and in small groups, to weddings in
eight different households.
Friendship provides a second category of potential ties for the resident of Musgid Toia. Of the
twelve men in the sample, five had one or more friends within the neighborhood (although not
necessarily within the sample), and seven did not. Once again, women's society in Musgid Toia seems
somewhat more solidary: eight women had friends in the neighborhood, five did not.
Ahli (family network) ties also connect the residents of Musgid Toia to a certain extent.
Although it was not possible to collect complete ahli data from each person interviewed, each person
was asked, "Do you have ahli in Musgid Toia?" The results were consistent with data from other
neighborhoods: most people had one or two relations in one or two households within the
neighborhood. Complete data certainly would have shown more ties. In ten
2.
1.
households interviewed, four had no close ahli in the neighborhood, four had only one related
household, one was related to two, and two had three related households in Musgid Toia.
Unlike the women, men do not routinely visit other men of the toia merely because they are
neighbors. Visiting on a larger scope is important for men. On Sunday mornings and oth er free times
when the shops of Harar are closed, groups of male friends can be seen walking through the streets of
the city. "Aide tahorax?" ("Where are you going?") is the standard greeting between groups, and "Shirshir!" ("Visiting!") is the standard answer. However, these visits are city-wide, often to the homes of
friends and ahli. Perhaps the most important aspect of this "shir-shir" of friends is the conversation that
takes place between them as they roam the streets. A parallel of the visiting relationships between
women exists in male society between occupational cohorts. Men who have shops speak of their
"dukan afocha," or "shop neighbors," and farmers speak in the same way of the" harshi afocha," or
"farm neighbors."
The lower density of institutional ties between the men of the neighborhood, as compared with the
women, does not mean that the men are strangers to one another. On the contrary, they meet as a group
on a regular basis in the neighborhood mosque. As an earlier quotation mentioned, in former times if a
neighbor did not appear in mosque for three days, his neighbors would check up on him. Tradition
states that there were eighty-eight local mosques in Harar. Although this number is certainly too large
for the Harar of today, there is still a functioning local mosque in nearly every neighborhood, many of
them associated with saint's shrines.
A more subtle degree of coherence in Musgid Toia's society becomes apparent when
interconnections between afocha, friendship and ahli ties are traced. The most important links between
blocs of affiliation already described are those between the men and women of the toia. Although the
men are split between four male afocha groups, nearly all the women of the neighborhood belong to a
single, localized women's afocha. His wife provides each male with a voluminous source of
information about daily events and crises in the neighborhood. Moreover, because of the strong ties
between the wives of the toia, men cannot behave in disregard of one another even though they
themselves are not directly related or participating in the same institutions.
Other secondary links establish further interconnections between the men of the neigh borhood. In
two cases men had friends in Musgid Toia who belonged to afocha other than theirs. In a very
meaningful way, a bridge was thus established between the afochas involved. Friends owe their
primary allegiances to each other. Should they be members of different afochas, (a) they may be
expected to keep their friends informed of events in their afocha, and (b) to the minor extent that it is
necessary, they will represent their friends' interests in their own afocha affairs. Pres~ures of public
opinion emanating from neighborhood conflicts will be aired in informal afocha discussions. When
friends reside in the same neighborhood but belong to different afochas, the discussions and opinions
voiced in each become pooled knowledge in the confidential conversation of the meetings of friends.
Indirectly, then, the neighborhood is held closer together by these overlapping memberships. In a
similar way, overlapping ahli ties also contribute to the network of roles which underly the structure of
the toia afocha.
Thus, every Harari male has these secondary links to kinship, friendship, and afocha.
Supplemented with the visiting relationships of his mother and the community of men at the mosque,
these strongly connect him with the residents of Musgid Toia. What they do, he knows, and what he
does, they know.
The Toia in the Context of City Society
"Toia" is the term by which Harari describe their neighborhood, much as New Yorkers refer to their
"block" and Londoners their "turning." Harari call the social relations they have with their neighbors,
as well as the informal organization of the local community, the "toia afocha." As this material makes
clear, however, no accurate picture of Harari society could be formulated by simply analyzing a
single toia and then multiplying this by the number of neighborhoods in the city.
As has been demonstrated here, the toia afocha is structured by (a) relations accruing from
propinquity, particularly the visiting patterns of women and the co-attendance at a neighborhood
mosque by men; and (b) a core of specific relationships within the neighborhood define~ by
connections to the three major institutions. The first category of neighborhood relations are important
in formulating public opinion about local events and circulating it throughout the toia (and
elsewhere). But it is the institutional connections, particularly ahli networks, which are capable of
exerting the effective disciplinary actions upon which social control in Harar is based (Waldron,
1974:258). To use an organic metaphor, the neighborhood relations based on propinquity are akin to
sensory preceptors, which communicate their information to the homeostatic organs, which, in Harar,
are the ahli, friends, and afocha.
The significance of the spatial distribution of institutional memberships is twofold in its
relevance to the question of toia composition in the context of the city society. First, the dispersal of
ahli and, to lesser extents, friends and afocha mates, emphasizes that each Harari is a member of the
society of the city as a whole, not just his neighborhood. A ge usu' has more institutional connections
outside his neighborhood than within it, and these are distributed throughout Harar. Second,
concentrations of afocha mates, and to lesser extents friends and ahli, provide the individual ge usu'
with several specific ties within his neighborhood and give him local identity and enforceable
responsibilities. Although the toia is held together by the ethos of toia afocha and the daily face-toface contacts upon which this is based, it is structured by a conglomerate of individual institutional
representations, the endpoint in their distributional patterns through the city.
Occupation, Sect, and Neighborhood Composition in Harar
Before concluding, I will give a brief consideration of the relationship between occupation, religious
order, and other possible bases of residential division in preindustrial Muslim cities.
In his consideration of the preindustrial city, Sjoberg emphasizes the relationship between
occupational categories and spatial patterns. He says, "Segregation by ethnic groups which in turn
are associated with specific occupations, occurs widely in preindustrial cities .... Differentiation of
land use according to occupation is usual. A special quarter, district or street is allotted to a particular
economic pursuit" (1960: 100-101).
Although shops in Harar are concentrated in the market areas and along the streets connecting
markets, this does not result in a quarter-by-quarter, or toia-by-toia, correlation of residents with
particular occupations. Occasionally, in Harar, a merchant may live over his shop. Usually however,
the shop is not a residence and merchants typically have separate homes which mayor may not be in
the same quarter or neighborhood.
Moreover, occupational distributions are not correlated with afocha membership. Indeed Harari
stress that afocha are egalitarian, including persons from all walks of life, rich and poor. Table 3
confirms this ideal.
Table 3
Afocha "2" and Occupation of Members
Occupation
Number
merchant
shop owner
shop assistant
sewing machine operator in shop
shoe maker
farmer
"old"
unknown
5
10
4
3
1
15
7
12
57
Membership in differing legal systems (madhhab, Arabic) is a schismatic principle which forms the
basis for quarter differentiation in some Muslim cities. Harari canon law (shari'a) is Shafi throughout the
city. Trimingham reports that, under Egyptian rule, the Hanah legal system was introduced (1965:231).
This was probably so, but I was unable to find any evidence of it in Harar in 1962 or later. (A men's
afocha in Bedroberi and a women's afocha in Asumberi are each called Hanafi, however.) Trimingham's
statement that "a quarter of Harar city" (ibid.) follows the Hanafi system is not accurate.
Sects, specifically Sufi brotherhoods (Crapanzano, 1973:3-4) and tariqa ("religious orders," Arabic)
are another basis for social separation between Muslim city quarters. In Harar the saints' shrines (awach)
are generously distributed. I have recorded one-hundred and fifty-five in and around the city (d.
Wagner, 1973). Of those within the wall, many serve as the nominal landmark for a particular toia.
However, it would be quite incorrect to conclude that the neighborhoods of Harar are synonymous with
mutually exclusive saints' cults for the following reasons: (1) Usually the saint's shrine is closely
associated with the toia musgid (local mosque), to which all men in the toia are ~xpected to come and
which any Muslim male may attend, regardless of his residence. (2) Anyone who is a believer may visit
any awach in Harar. Some are celebrated at specific times by women's afochas, brides' mothers, by men
interested in reading the Mowlud (a book praising the life of Mohammed), etc. But in no case are such
visits on a ~oia membership basis. (3) Harari deny that they have tariqa "the way Somali do." Some
awach have a resident Murid, or caretaker, some do not. Au Abdul Qadir al-Jailani is one of the most
widely praised saints in Harar. His shrine is commemorated with the reading of the Mowlud on the night
marking the end of the month of Sejer in the Harari calendar. However, to state that Qadiriyya is "the
semi-official tariqa of Harar" (Trimingham, 1965:234) is, once again, to impose the preconceived
categories of Islamic studies upon the culture of Harar.
Conclusions
In other Muslim cities, the quarter is described as a distinct social entity. In the best-documented analysis
of neighborhood in a "typical" Muslim city, Dale Eickelman describes the darb, or quarter, of the
Moroccan town of Boujad as a closely organized population with a high
degree of shared kinship ties, internal political organization, and an economic commonality
(Eickelman, 1974:283) vis-a-vis other such darb. I have shown that in Harar toia composition does not
adhere to this pattern. Rather than being the "building block," or fundamental unit, of Harari society,
the toia is basically the local representation of the major city-wide ins ti tu tions.
One approach to explaining the social organizational dissimilarity of Harar to other Muslim cities could
be based on a culture-area interpretation. Harar might be described as a Muslim city with Ethiopian
social institutions. The Harari afocha has a counterpart in the Amhara edir (Koehn & Koehn, 1975:399400). Shack has described the importance of friendship among the Gurage (1963~208). Structural
parallels, up to a point, and terminological cognates may be found which link the Amhara kinship
system (S. Hoben, 19'75:285) with that of the Harari. Since the city's distinctive Ethiopian Semitic
language is most closely related, among spoken languages, to Selti Gurage (Hetzron, 1972:42), one
might look closely at Selti society for other parallels. Herbert Lewis has aptly suggested that kinship,
friendship, and community-the three institutions so important in Harar-are crucially important to the understanding of Ethiopian social organization (in contrast to the unilineal groupings which have received
so much attention among earlier British anthropologists) (Lewis, 1975:204).
However, to explain the difference between Harari social institutions and those of other Muslim
cities by the fact that Harar is "Ethiopian" is less than completely satisfying. Stressing areal continuity
in social forms without considering the context within which they function would be, in effect, denying
the adaptive significance of Harari urban institutions.
Understanding the seemingly deviant case of Harar within the general category of the Muslim city
depends on appreciating the conditions under which its social institutions have developed and
functioned. For at least four centuries, Harar has been a single-city culture, an urban ethnic enclave.
Harari urban society dominated the surrounding Qottu Oromo population, which vastly outnumbers its
own, and upon whose labor and trade the economic system of the city depended (Waldron, 1974:265279; 1975:14). The Harari may be described as occupying the elite position in a system of ethnic
stratifaction (Waldron, 1974:293-298). This position was maintained, and Harari ethnic identity was
preserved, by limiting residence in the city to members of the Harari ethnic group in earlier times and,
most importantly, by stringently limiting the conditions under which a Harari might marry a non-Harari
(Waldron, 1975: Appendix I). This meant that Harar developed a social system which excluded the
constant immigration from outlying villages and from bedouin lineages which characterizes many
"typical" Muslim cities. For by so insulating its ethnic group from the surrounding peoples, Harar
diverged in a significant way from the established pattern of Muslim cities.
The rural-urban continuum which links the populations of "typical" quarters with outside
populations is absent in Harar. However, scholars of Islamic civilization as early as Ibn Khaldun noted
the importance of rural migration to the formation (and vigor) of cities:
Evidence for the fact that Bedouins are the basis of, and prior to, sedentary people is furnished
by investigating the inhabitants of any given city. We shall find that most of its inhabitants
originated among Bedouins dwelling in the country and villages of the vicinity. (Ibn Khaldun,
1958 (originally 1379): Vol. 1, 352)
The importance of in-migration is attested by Eickelman. He gives data for the percentage of Boujad
residents born in that town for each of thirty-four quarters (1974:285). As I calculate it, the average percentage
of Boujadi residents born in Boujad is only 52%. The rest were either born in “Boujad region” or elsewhere in
Morocco” (Ibid ) Hourani sees this rural influx as important to the development of the social encapsulation of
most Muslim urban Neighborhoods:
… the residential core is marked by at least two special characteristics: the combination of local with
ethnic or religious differentiation, and the relative separateness and autonomy of each quarter or group
of quarters. The development of both of these characteristics again is not hard to understand. As a new
city developed or an old one expanded, the immigrants-soldiers, peasants, nomads-tended to settle in
compact groups. (Hourani, 1970: 22)
Without the constant influx of immigrants (who retain outside alliances), the enclosed and exclusive nature of
the quarter or neighborhood of the "typical" Muslim city would probably be lost. Rather than exhibiting
adherence to a specifically Islamic concept of the city, the "typical" quarter is the urban endpoint of a dynamic
rural-urban continuum. The value of the seeming deviance of Harar from the standard concept of the Muslim city
thus becomes apparent: Muslim cities without strong primary rural ties may indeed develop the civitas, the truly
urban institution, whose absence was noted by Hourani (1970:24).
Harar long ago closed its gates to outsiders as far as intermarriage and coresidence with its citizens, the
"people of the city," were concerned. Perhaps at a time in the distant past the quarters of Harar showed the
expected social differentiation, as some of the city's traditions suggest. However, the fact that the city is a
closed society, and apparently has been since the construction of its wall by Emir Nur, provides a test case for
theories of the Muslim city: if many Muslims cities are made of their individual quarters, the toia in Harar is
made up of the local representations of the society of the city.
Most of the data presented here were collected in the summer of 1975. This research was made
possible by grant support from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York and the
Social Science Research Council. A return to Harar was made possible in summer, 1977, with the aid
of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.
NOTE
1.
This paper is concerned with the social organization of the old walled city of Harar. Especially since Ethiopian
conquest in 1887, another, non-Harari, urban population has grown outside the walls (Koehn & Waldron,
1978:4-10). The population of the two cities, old and new, has been variously estimated as 44,490 in 1970, and
51,190 in 1973 (Koehn & Waldron, 1978:9). No accu. rate censuses are available which specifically designate
the number of residents in the old city. In 1964, during my first period of fieldwork in Harar, I estimated the
total old city population as 20,000. In 1975, 15,000 seemed approximately correct. It is important to note that
the number of non-Harari, particularly Amhara residing within the wall has increased from an estimated 20% in
1964 to perhaps 40% in 1975, although the figures are, at best, intelligent guesses.
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