December 25, 2025
Yonas Biru, PhD
Abstract
The dilemma Islamic politicians face epitomizes the inherent crisis in Ethiopian political life that the TPLF experienced with devastating consequences. Their political discourse remains locked in a backward-looking civilizational contest against the long vanished Solomonic empire rather than confronting the present reconfiguration of power. This fixation obscures the more immediate and consequential challenge posed by Oromummaa, leaving them strategically vulnerable to a far more potent threat to their survival not only as equally empowered political forces but also as autonomous co-founders of Ethiopia’s plural civilizational legacy.
The ultimate test of Ethiopia’s political maturity will be its ability to hold multiple truths simultaneously: that the Solomonic state was both an oppressive imperial structure and a carrier of enduring achievements; that Islamic sultanates were both rivals to the Christian centric Abyssinian legacy and co-architects of Ethiopian civilization and history; that Gadaa represents both sophisticated indigenous governance and an oppressive history.
Introduction
First two caveats. First, the reference to Amhara, Oromo, Tigray and Islamic politicians refers to those who dominate the political space, not the general political class. Unfortunately, the dominant forces in all cases tend to be extremists. Hence the tone and tenure of the article. Second, this analysis is produced with AI research and editing assistance.
Historically, four Ethiopian civilizational centers have competed for supremacy, namely the Christian-centric Abyssinian (Axumite, Zagwe, and Solomonic) dynasties; Islamic civilization; the Oromo Gadaa system; and the Southwestern indigenous civilizations, consisting of the Kaffa, Wolayta, Sidama, and Hadiya kingdoms. The contemporary political crisis is, at its core, a struggle over which of these civilizational legacies will define the state’s past narrative and future order.
The historically dominant Abyssinian dynasties did not merely rule Ethiopia; they pursued a sustained effort to remake the state and its civilizational order in their own image. Over centuries, they advanced a project of Christian–Semitic supremacy. The corollary outcome was the subordination of Oromo, Muslim, and other cultural orders to an ideology that fused church, state, and the Solomonic imperial identity.
Today, a new civilizational project is unfolding under the banner of Oromummaa (Oromo ethno-nationalism). It presents itself as a political and spiritual doctrine of national self determination and multinational democracy in the service of global humanity. In practice, however, it advances its own cultural, civilizational, and religious primacy. While tactically embracing Muslim and southern populations as indispensable political allies, it systematically marginalizes their civilization legacies and political rights within Ethiopia’s historical order.
Oromummaa’s effort to center Gadaa (Oromo socio-political system) and Waaqeffanna (Oromo religion) as the foundations of authentic Oromo identity mirrors the Solomonic imperial hegemony it historically revolted against. The Solomonic creed was, “Our civilization is the state’s excusive civilization.” The Oromummaa equivalent is, “Your civilization must adapt to ours.” This article examines that parallel and its consequences.
The focus on Islam is threefold. First, it exposes a stark demographic and ideological paradox: Islam is the faith of the majority of Oromos, yet Oromummaa delegitimizes it as an outsider intruder and demands its subordination to Oromummaa’s institutional and cultural governance.
Second, by the 7th century, Islamic civilization had produced great architectural works. By the 16th century, it has fortified the city of Harar and created networks of trade enterprises linking the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trading centers. This is centuries before Gadaa assemblies convened under trees. Yet Oromummaa refuses to acknowledge Islamic civilization in its pursuit of marketing Gadaa civilization as an exclusive phenomenon.
Third, this imposed subordination reveals the hierarchy embedded at the project’s core: the primacy of ethnic identity over religious characters.
Section I establishes the historical baseline by outlining Ethiopia’s major civilizational centers. Section II examines post-1991 realignments and the emergence of ethno-national
projects. Section III analyzes Oromummaa’s three-pronged strategy for achieving civilizational and political supremacy. Section IV examines the weaponization of civilizational grievance and the systemic exclusion of Muslim leaders from Oromo liberation movements and the Oromo regional government. Section V discusses the race to the bottom of the pathology of civilizational supremacy. Section VI concludes the article, stressing that the path forward demands a move away from civilizational clashes for supremacy toward a shared legacy, forging a common identity that inhibits the fangs of tribal orthodoxy.
I. Ethiopia’s Civilizational Baseline: The Anatomy of Competing Traditions
Understanding the historical context of civilizational conflicts is essential to grasping Ethiopia’s enduring power struggles, because its recurring political conflicts are as much about civilizational primacy as they are about ethnic supremacy and religious rivalry. This section establishes the four primary civilizational periods whose legacies continue to structure contemporary politics.
I.1. The Christian Abyssinian Civilization
Recorded history of Ethiopian civilization begins with the Axumite Kingdom that, adopted Christianity in the fourth century, developed the Geʿez script, minted coinage, and participated in transregional trade. Following Axum’s decline, the Agaw-led Zagwe dynasty preserved Christian continuity and produced the iconic architectural marvels of the rock
hewn churches of Lalibela. The Solomonic dynasty later blended Axumite and Zagwe dynasties into an expansionist imperial empire that dominated the Ethiopian state until the twentieth century. Church and state shared the same altar, sanctifying Ethiopia as a “Christian Island,” while Muslims, Oromos, and Southwestern peoples were relegated to the margins as outsiders or second-class subjects.
I.2. Islamic Civilization
Islam arrived in Ethiopia in the seventh century and established the sultanates of Ifat, Adal, and Harar kingdoms. Together these sultanates produced urban areas with architectural distinction and commercial corridors that linked the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trading centers. The sixteenth-century campaigns of Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi severely weakened the Solomonic and shifted the trajectory of the national history by changing the regional power balance. Though Islamic civilization is a significant part of Ethiopia’s civilization and history, Abyssinian historians portray it as an antithesis to the Christian centric civilizational order.
I.3. Oromo Gadaa Civilization
The Gadaa system represents an indigenous, age-grade–based political order characterized by rotational leadership, consensus governance, and collective accountability. Its large-scale expansions from the sixteenth century onward profoundly reshaped Ethiopia’s cultural and political landscape. Gadaa constitutes a sophisticated socio-political system suited to decentralized societies; it differed from Christian and Islamic civilizations in institutional scale, urban development, and state formation.
I.4. Southwestern Indigenous Kingdoms
Polities such as Kaffa, Wolayta, Sidama, and Hadiya developed centralized monarchies, advanced agricultural systems, taxation regimes, and military organization long before their incorporation into the Ethiopian empire in the late nineteenth century. These kingdoms constitute a distinct civilizational history, yet often marginalized in narratives dominated by northern and eastern powers.
II. Post-1991 Civilizational Realignments and the Rise of Oromummaa II.1. A Fractured North
The ethnic federal arrangement introduced in 1991 reactivated ancient civilizational contests under new ideological forms. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), whose leadership originated from the symbolic heartland of Aksum, severed Tigray’s Axumite legacy from the later Solomonic imperial project. Framing the Solomonic era as a period of “Amhara hegemony” and colonization, the TPLF recast Tigray not as a core province of the historic empire, but as its primary victim. This ethno-centric grievance politics fractured the unity of the “North,” creating a deep Axumite-Solomonic rift.
The consequence was a profound weakening of the historic Abyssinian political formation as a cohesive force just as the new federal order was being built, leaving it internally divided between a Tigrayan project focused on Axumite exceptionalism and an Amhara project increasingly oriented toward the defense and restoration of a (real or imagined) Solomonic Amhara centrality.
II.2. The Rise of Oromummaa: From Counter-Narrative to a Hegemonic Project
Oromo nationalism seized the opportunity northern fracture created. The early 1990s saw a tactical and myopic alliance between the TPLF and the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), united primarily by opposition to the Amhara-championed Solomonic legacy. However, once the TPLF consolidated power, it had little to no purpose in sustaining the alliance. The Oromo political class felt instrumentalized and abandoned. From this disappointment emerged a more radical, liberation ideology under the Oromummaa banner.
Oromummaa evolved from a simple anti-colonial grievance into a full-fledged civilizational counter-project. Its narrative expanded the enemy frame from the “Amhara imperialist” to the broader “Abyssinian colonizers,” encompassing both Amhara and Tigrayan elites as joint heirs to a predatory historical order. It articulated a vision centered on the revival of Gadaa as a democratic ideal and Waaqeffanna as its spiritual core, presenting these not just as Oromo heritage but as superior, indigenous foundations for a reconstituted Ethiopian polity.
With an unveiled fervor and passion, Shimelis Abdissa, the President of Oromo regional government declared “the future of Ethiopia is Gadaa” and facilitate this eventuality “Prosperity Party is built in such a way to advance the interest of Oromo.” A report produced by a more radical Oromummaa wing reiterates the same plan to “transform Ethiopia to Gadaa democratic Ethiopia, i.e. de facto Great Oromia.”
III. Oromummaa’s Three-Pronged Strategy
Oromummaa is anchored in three distinct yet reinforcing strategies.
First, it frames Ethiopia’s political history through a rigid binary narrative of “Amhara Tigray colonial structures” versus a colonized “Oromia and all other southern nationalities.”
Second, in pursuit of civilizational supremacy, it romanticizes a mythologized Pan-Oromo Gadaa Republic—one that never existed as a unified polity—as the pinnacle of “Classical African Civilization.”
Third, it elevates Oromo “indigenous identity and culture” above religious identity and tradition, subordinating competing civilizational allegiances to ethnic primacy.
III.1. The “Colonizers North vs. Colonized South” Narrative
This binary framing constitutes the strategic cornerstone of Oromummaa ideology. It does not merely offer an alternative interpretation of Ethiopian history; it redefines the thiopian state to justify the construction of a new political legitimacy rooted in ethnic supremacy. In this narrative, the dominant Ethiopian account of national unification under late-19th century Abyssinian expansion is replaced with a framework of “internal colonization” and subjugation. Menelik II’s expansion is recast not as state formation, but as the colonial conquest of a sovereign entity – a purported Oromo Republic.
As scholar Asafa Jalata writes, before colonization the Oromo possessed a central organizing ideology embedded in Gadaa civilization. This romanticization portrays a historically nonexistent Oromo republic as a lost utopia. By constructing this dichotomy, the strategy unifies a southern political base, provides moral justification for acts framed as decolonization, and delegitimizes the Ethiopian state as inherently colonial. Here, history ceases to be a record of the past and becomes a weapon for present political mobilization.
III.2. The Mythologized Gadaa Republic: Inventing a Civilizational Legacy
The second strategy elevates the conflict from political grievance to civilizational competition. Gadaa is mythologized as a golden age of egalitarianism and democracy and elevated to the status of “Classical African Civilization.”
This is not merely historical recovery; it is historical reconstruction. The Gadaa system— historically localized, generational, and non-statist—is transformed into a unified civilizational order. The myth thus displaces religious and imperial narratives with Oromummaa and claims moral and historical superiority.
III.3. Primacy of Indigenous Identity: Subordinating Islam to Ethnicity
The third strategy consolidates the project by subordinating Islam’s religious identity to ethnic primacy. Jalata describes Waaqeffanna and Gadaa as leaving “indelible and enduring marks on Oromo personality, peoplehood, and conventional Oromummaa,” presenting Gadaa as the “totality of Oromo civilization.” Historian Tesema Ta’a reinforces this, noting the close link between Waaqeffanna and the Gadaa institution.
This strategy functions as a consolidating mechanism, establishing an absolutist ethnic nationalism insulated from Islamic cultural influence. Islam, despite being the majority religion in Oromia, is delegitimized as an imposed identity. Jalata characterizes Islamic identity as a “sub-identity” and argues that “borrowed cultural and religious identities were imposed on the Oromo.” He contends that Muslim Oromos at times identified more with Arabs, Adares, or Somalis than with fellow Oromos. This framed Islam as an internal impediment to ethnic consolidation. Given the Muslim majority, he demands that they “adapt to a national Oromummaa” which is anchored in Gadaa and Waaqeffanna.
III.4. Synthesis of Oromummaa’s Three-Pronged Strategy
The three strategies interlock seamlessly to advance Oromo civilizational and political primacy while containing potential rivals and transforming them into instrumentalized victims.
The first strategy (north-south colonial binary) temporarily elevates Muslims and southern ethnic groups as essential tactical allies, uniting them under a shared narrative of victimization by Amhara-Tigray imperial structures.
The second strategy mythologizes a unified, pre-colonial Pan-Oromo Gadaa Republic as the apex of Classical African Civilization and lays the ideological groundwork for Oromo cultural and historical supremacy.
The third strategy elevates indigenous Oromo identity and culture above religious traditions completes the enclosure. It subordinates Islamic and other religious identities to ethnic primacy, effectively turning the very allies mobilized by the first strategy into instrumentalized victims: rallied for the struggle, yet systematically disempowered, denied autonomous civilizational standing, and compelled to adapt their faiths and legacies to Oromummaa’s ethnic core.
Far from fostering genuine multinational pluralism, this synthesis produces a hierarchical order in which southern and Muslim forces are tactically indispensable but strategically expendable. The purported allied were utilized not merely as partners, but also as instruments whose own aspirations are sacrificed to the greater project of Oromo hegemony.
IV. The Weaponization of Civilizational Grievance and Muslim Exclusion IV.1.The Weaponization of Civilizational Grievance
The Axumite–Solomonic rift explains one of the defining narratives of the 2020–2022 Tigray War. Throughout the conflict, the TPLF leadership consistently accused “Amhara forces” of committing genocide against Tigryans. This fixation persisted despite the war was initiated and overseen by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (Oromo); the Ethiopian National Defense Force was led by Field Marshal Berhanu Jula (Oromo); the ground campaign was commanded by General Bacha Debele (Oromo), and the person in charge of the Ethiopian Air Force and Drone operations that devastated Tigray was Yilma Merdasa (Oromo), The fighting force included the ENDF, Amhara regional forces, Eritrean troops, and contingents from other regions. The Tigryan narrative fixation on “Amhara” culpability shows how ancient grudges can generate more potent conflict narratives than contemporary political realities.
IV.2. The Systematic Exclusion of Muslims from Oromo Leadership
Despite their instrumental role in Oromo mobilization, Muslims face systematic exclusion from the core leadership of Oromummaa institutions, revealing the limits of inclusion within the ethno-nationalist project. No Muslim has ever served as chairman of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) since its founding.
In the Prosperity Party-dominated Oromia administration, key security and finance portfolios are consistently held by non-Muslims. Ironically, Muslim Oromos have attained significant federal positions, suggesting a deliberate strategy of containment—granting influence at the symbolic federal level while restricting autonomous political agency within the Oromo heartland.
Even prominent Muslim Oromo political figures operate within this constrained framework. Internal debates on whether Irreechaa is a religious or sectarian festival demonstrates this. Muslims such as Jawar Mohamed and Awol Allo see it as “non-sectarian cultural heritage” and “cultural self-affirmation,” respectively.
On the other hand, Asebe Regassa asserts Irreechaa “has been understood and practiced within the context of Waaqeffanna” – a belief in one supernatural power called Waaqaa (God).” Asebe asserts Irreechaa “has been understood and practiced within the context of the Oromo religion, Waaqeffanna – a belief in one supernatural power called Waaqaa (God).”
Similarly, a government run website describes Irreechaa as a religious celebration where Oromos worship Waaqaa at rivers and mountains, believed to host His governing spirit. Gemechu Megersa markets it as a religious practice and berates those who oppose his views as “አቃጣሪ” (heretic). Jawar’s acceptance that he is “First Oromo and Second Muslim” is the ultimate capitulation to Oromummaa.
V. The Race to the Bottom: The Pathology of Identity Politics
Ethiopia’s civilizational debate has descended into a pathological competition, as Oromo, Amhara, and Tigrayan intellectual vanguards advance increasingly extravagant claims of supremacy.
Within Oromo nationalist discourse, Asafa Jalata promotes a “Gadaa-based Oromo classical civilization” as an alternative to what he calls the “transnational capitalist order of barbarism,” envisioning it as the foundation of a future egalitarian world order. Oromo media platforms amplify his narrative, claiming that Gadaa represents the “oldest democracy in the world,” while fringe elements claim Mosses is Oromo and attribute the teachings of Jesus to Waaqeffanna.
Amhara elites respond in kind. Professor Al Mariam frames Ethiopia’s strained relations with the US as the clash of civilizations. Professor Mamo Muchie escalates it further, proclaiming: “The world fears time; time fears history; and history fears Ethiopia.”
Tigrayan exceptionalism up the ante. A distinguished University of Chicago professor of Tigrayan origin asserts that while John Locke’s philosophical writings influenced the U.S. Declaration of Independence, “Tigrayan philosophers were ahead of John Locke.” Others claim that Axumite coins once functioned as a global currency comparable to the U.S. dollar in today’s international trade.
These narratives harden political identities, legitimize exclusivist projects, and make pluralistic settlement inconceivable. In the meantime, child stunting affects 37 percent of children under five, and poverty is projected to rise to 43 percent by 2025. As communities subsist on aid, political elites remain preoccupied with civilizational symbolism.
VI. Conclusion: Beyond Civilizational Absolutism
Oromummaa’s rise has successfully diversified the historiography beyond Christian highland dominance, yet it has succumbed to the very supremacy logic it ostensibly opposed. By instrumentalizing Muslim political forces while systematically excluding them from leadership and erasing their civilizational legacy, Oromummaa reveals itself not as a liberation theology, but as the latest iteration of a hegemonic project.
Ethiopia’s future does not lie in the resurrection of a single, hegemonic civilizational past. Salvation cannot be found in reviving Axum, restoring Solomonic mythology, or sacralizing Gadaa. The state will endure only by accepting that it has always been a composite civilization—messy, plural, and contested—and by building a political order capable of governing that reality rather than denying it.
This requires a constitutional settlement that recognizes civilizational pluralism as a foundational principle, an educational curriculum that teaches entangled histories, and a cultural diplomacy that celebrates multiplicity without hierarchy
The path forward demands a move from civilizational supremacy to shared sovereignty over a multifaceted history. Failure to make this transition will condemn Ethiopia to an endless cycle of zero-sum conflicts, where each new supremacy project, clad in the language of justice, merely replicates the old patterns of exclusion, ensuring perpetual instability and the inevitable collapse of any temporary order. The choice is between a pluralistic covenant built on the acknowledgment of complexity, or an endless war of unmitigated absolutes.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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