Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi

In the 1530s a commander from the Muslim lowlands of the Horn of Africa overran most of the Christian Ethiopian highlands, in a war that is still remembered there five centuries later. Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim, leader of the Adal Sultanate from 1527 until his death in 1543, is known in Amharic as Grañ and in Somali as Gurey, both names meaning "the left-handed".

Ahmad was born in 1506 in Hubat, in the lowlands near Harar, then part of the Adal Sultanate. Historians disagree about his ethnic origins: he has been described as Somali, as Harla or Harari, and as Balaw. He came to prominence as a follower of Garad Abun Adashe, a popular leader who fought the ruling Walashma dynasty, and married Bati del Wambara, a daughter of the earlier ruler Imam Mahfuz. After Sultan Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad killed Adashe in 1525, Ahmad held out in Hubat, defeated the sultan's forces and also ambushed an army sent by the Ethiopian emperor Dawit II. Mediation by the religious leaders of Harar briefly reconciled him with the sultan, but the peace soon broke down; Ahmad eventually killed Abu Bakr, set up a puppet sultan, and from 1527 held power in Adal with the title of imam.

In 1529 Ahmad invaded the Christian empire and routed a much larger imperial army at Shimbra Kure. The historian Richard Pankhurst credited the victory partly to his matchlock gunmen, perhaps the first firearms used against an Ethiopian army. From 1531 his forces advanced steadily, taking Fatagar, Shewa, Amhara and the southern provinces, and later pushing into Tigray and the regions around Lake Tana. The Adal chronicler Arab Faqih, the main source for the campaigns, describes the destruction of many churches and monasteries, mass killings of those who resisted and widespread conversions, many of them forced. Dawit II was reduced to a fugitive in his own kingdom.

Muslim sources present Ahmad as an austere leader who banned wine and gambling, patronised religious scholars and devoted plunder to the war. Ethiopian Christian tradition remembers him chiefly as a destroyer; later chronicles claimed that the great majority of the empire had been converted to Islam.

Dawit appealed to Portugal for help. When about 400 Portuguese musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama landed at Massawa in 1541, Dawit had died and his son Gelawdewos was emperor. Joined by the queen mother Seble Wongel, the Portuguese won a series of engagements, in one of which Ahmad was wounded in the leg by a stray shot. He then obtained musketeers and artillery from the Ottoman governor in Yemen, attacked the Portuguese camp at Wofla, and captured and executed da Gama. The Ethiopian–Adal War had become part of the wider rivalry between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottoman Empire in the Red Sea.

Believing the danger over, Ahmad sent most of his foreign troops home. The surviving Portuguese regrouped with Gelawdewos, rearmed and marched on his camp near Lake Tana. At the Battle of Wayna Daga in February 1543, Ahmad was killed while rallying his men; the sources differ on how. His army broke and fled, and his widow led the survivors back to Harar. Gelawdewos had the imam's head displayed across the country as proof of his death.

Adal never recovered its strength. Its leaders struggled to hold together the groups that had followed Ahmad, the state shrank around Harar, and by 1577 the sultanate had fallen apart under internal conflict and the Oromo migrations. In Ethiopia the invasion is widely seen as one of the most destructive episodes in the country's history, and his memory remains strong in Somalia and Harar too; a festival in Harar associated with him was added to UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in 2023.

Our 1530 map shows the Horn of Africa just as Ahmad's campaigns began, and the 1600 map shows the region after Adal's collapse.