ግእዝን እና ገዳን ከሞት እናስነሳለን የምትሉ የመንጫጫት መብታችሁ የተጠበቀ ነው:: ካጠፋሁ ግን ይቅርታ.

Koki Abesolome ·Follow

ግእዝን እና ገዳን ከሞት እናስነሳለን የምትሉ የመንጫጫት መብታችሁ የተጠበቀ ነው:: ካጠፋሁ ግን ይቅርታ.

Thanks AI for research assitant and editing for typo.

This is the Intro Section of My Forthcoming Article. I have sent it to Asafa Jalata, Jawar Mohammed, Bekele Gerba, Merera Gudina, and Esekiel Gebissa for their comments and inputs so I can correct mistakes if any. I tried to send it to inheritors and custodians of the Solomonic enterprise. I could not find email addresses to Lij Tedla Melakou and company. Please pass it on to them. I will finalize my article in two days and circulate it widely. My intention is not to attack Oromummaa but to educate and enlighten its leaders that its current path is manipulative and self destructive.

Please read it standing up and bow after you finish.

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OROMUMMAA’S HISTORICAL & CIVILIZATIONAL SUBORDINATION OF ISLAM TO WAAQEFFANNA

Ethiopia’s historical and political landscape has been shaped by multiple civilizational centers that have interacted through trade, conflict, migration, and, frequently, forced assimilation. Understanding this multiplicity is essential to grasping Ethiopia’s enduring power struggles, because its recurring political conflicts are as much about civilizational primacy as they are about tribal supremacy and religious rivalry.

The primary centers of civilization include the Abyssinian civilization—rooted in the rival Axumite and Solomonic kingdoms—Islamic civilization, and indigenous civilizations such as the Oromo Gadaa order and the southwestern kingdoms of Kaffa, Wolayta, Sidama, and others. As competing political forces sought historical legitimacy and civilizational supremacy, the clash of civilizations became a central battleground and a powerful lever of political authority.

This dynamic is evident in the contemporary obsession among Amhara elites with the archaeological and linguistic resurrection of Geʿez, and among Oromo nationalists with the political revitalization of Gadaa. Tigrayan political thought, by contrast, is preoccupied with reasserting Axum as the original Ethiopian civilization while severing its legacy from Solomonic ties and Amhara imperial nationalism.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s socio-economic indicators reveal a starkly different reality. Child stunting affects approximately 37 percent of Ethiopian children under the age of five—worse than the Sub-Saharan African average of 34 percent. The World Bank projects Ethiopia’s poverty rate to rise to 43 percent by 2025, up from 33 percent in 2016. Yet political elites remain preoccupied with civilizational rivalries, instigating wars and continually reshuffling alliances, often with little strategic coherence or social accountability.

Political alliances in Ethiopia frequently straddle these civilizational and tribal lines. The TPLF–OLF alliance of the 1990s, for example, was a temporary and ultimately myopic coalition directed against the Amhara-centered Solomonic power structure. More recently, alliances between Oromo nationalists and various southeastern groups have coalesced around opposition to the broader Abyssinian (Amhara–Tigray) civilizational legacy. While such alliances can be tactically effective, they are inherently ephemeral and fail to address the structural hierarchies underpinning Ethiopia’s historical conflicts. Instead, they tend to reproduce civilizational and ethnic dominance in new forms, substituting one hegemonic narrative for another without achieving genuine pluralism.

This article argues that Oromummaa—the modern political ideology of Oromo nationalism—has weaponized Ethiopia’s complex, multi-civilizational past to establish Oromo-centric civilizational primacy and secure hegemonic political legitimacy. A central yet underexamined strategy in this project is the instrumentalization and subsequent subordination of Islam. Oromo nationalist discourse mobilizes Muslim political forces as demographic and ideological allies against the Axumite–Solomonic legacy, while simultaneously subordinating Islamic identity and theology to the primacy of Oromo ethnicity.

Public declarations such as Jawar Mohammed’s statement, “I am Oromo first, Muslim second,” exemplify this hierarchy. In Islamic theology, the ultimate allegiance is Tawḥīd—the uncompromising affirmation of worshipping none but Allah. This is followed by the unity of the Ummah, signifying an unbreakable brotherhood among believers, explicitly commanded as essential to the community’s strength, continuity, and survival. Without the Ummah, there is no global Islam. Regular ṣalāh sustains the bond between the believer and God, while congregational prayer both reinforces and is reinforced by the collective integrity of the Ummah.

Placing ethnic identity above this religious affiliation fundamentally reshuffles Islam’s theological hierarchy, subordinating the Ummah to ethnonational loyalty. The stark disparity in communal responses to violence—where the killing of more than 400 Wolloye Muslims elicited muted reaction compared to widespread outrage over atrocities committed by Amhara extremists—illustrates how tribal identity, anchored ultimately in a Waaqeffanna-inflected civilizational framework, can supersede Islamic solidarity.

This pattern reflects a core strategy of Oromummaa: the reduction of Islamic civilization from a co-foundational architect of Ethiopian history to a politically curated adjunct culture—mobilized as a supporting force yet denied autonomous civilizational and political parity. This subordination is historically incongruent. Islamic civilization predates the Gadaa system by centuries and exceeds it in institutional breadth, urban development, transregional connectivity, and intellectual production. Long before Gadaa assemblies convened under sacred trees to deliberate governance, Islamic civilization had already produced cities, architecture, legal systems, and global networks of trade and learning.

The remainder of this article is organized into four sections.

Section One provides a bird’s-eye view of Ethiopia’s major civilizational centers and the enduring contest over who constitutes the founding framer and rightful custodian of the nation’s civilizational legacy.

Section Two analyzes Oromummaa’s two-pronged strategy: (1) reducing Islamic civilization to cultural ornamentation rather than recognizing it as an autonomous co-founder of Ethiopian civilization; and (2) mobilizing Islamic political forces against the Christian-centered Axumite–Solomonic tradition. This section demonstrates how Islamic actors risk trading one civilizational usurper (Abyssinian imperial dominance) for another (Oromummaa).

Section Three examines the systematic exclusion of Muslims from leadership positions within the OLF, Oromummaa institutions, and Oromo regional governance, despite their notable presence in the upper echelons of the federal government.

Section Four outlines a path toward civilizational pluralism beyond manipulative power politics, arguing that Ethiopia’s long-term stability requires abandoning zero-sum historical narratives and recognizing Christianity, Islam, Gadaa, and the southwestern indigenous kingdoms as equal and co-founding pillars of Ethiopian civilization—without subordination, instrumentalization, or erasure.