Sultanate of Ifat

For roughly 130 years, from the late thirteenth century to the early fifteenth, the Sultanate of Ifat was the leading Muslim power of the Horn of Africa. Founded by the Walashma dynasty in eastern Shewa, in today's central Ethiopia, it stretched towards the Red Sea port of Zeila and spent much of its existence in conflict with the Christian Ethiopian emperors. Its defeat in the early 1400s cleared the way for its successor, the Adal Sultanate.

Arab writers called the state Wafat or Awfat, and it was also known as the kingdom of Zeila. The fourteenth-century scholar al-Umari described a well-populated land on the Awash River with seven cities and an army of 20,000 soldiers and 15,000 horsemen, though the historian Richard Pankhurst thought the size he implied might be exaggerated. Ruins of five towns from the fourteenth century survive in eastern Shewa. Its people included Argobba, Harari, Silte and Harla, as well as nomadic Somali, Afar and Warjih groups. Arabic served as a common language, alongside local Cushitic and Ethio-Semitic tongues.

Islam had reached the coast early: Zeila's two-mihrab mosque is thought to date to around the seventh century, and the port grew into a self-governing trading town linked to Yemen and Egypt. The Walashma dynasty claimed descent from the Prophet's Quraysh tribe through Aqil ibn Abi Talib, but historians consider them most likely of local origin. According to the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, the first ruler was Umar Walashma, who conquered the older Sultanate of Shewa and died around 1275. By 1288 Walashma rule had been imposed on Hubat, Zeila and other Muslim territories. The historian Taddesse Tamrat compares this unification with Emperor Yekuno Amlak's consolidation of the Christian highlands in the same years.

Relations with the Christian emperors were shaped partly by events in Egypt. In 1320 Emperor Amda Seyon warned the Mamluk Sultanate to stop persecuting Coptic Christians. Sultan Haqq ad-Din I of Ifat then attacked Christian territory and killed an imperial envoy returning from Cairo, and Amda Seyon retaliated against Shewa and Ifat. Each side's chronicles record burned towns and victories for its own forces.

In 1332 Sultan Sabr ad-Din launched a wider rising aimed, according to the emperor's chronicle, at ruling all Ethiopia. Neighbouring Muslim provinces joined, but Amda Seyon's army destroyed Ifat's capital, and Sabr ad-Din surrendered. The emperor spared his life and appointed his brother Jamal ad-Din in his place.

Fighting resumed under later rulers. Haqq ad-Din II moved the centre of power east to the Harar plateau and Zeila, and al-Maqrizi credits him with more than twenty battles against the emperor before his death in battle in 1376. His brother Sa'ad ad-Din II continued raiding until an Ethiopian army, probably under Emperor Dawit I, defeated him on the Harar plateau in 1403. Al-Maqrizi says he was then pursued and killed at Zeila; another source places his death in 1410 under Emperor Yeshaq.

Muslim power in the region recovered further east: by the later fifteenth century the Adal Sultanate, centred on Harar, had taken Ifat's place. Smaller Walashma branches held on in places until the eighteenth century.

Our 1200 map labels this region Ifat, about three-quarters of a century before the sultanate's traditional founding date of around 1275. The map places it in the Horn of Africa, with Makuria far to the north-west along the Nile; its successor, Adal, appears on our maps from 1492.