Christianity, Islam and the redefinition of today’s Ethiopia

Haggai Erlich is Professor of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His most recent book is The Cross and The River, Ethiopia, Egypt and the Nile (Boulder Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002).

ASC Research Seminar. Second in a series of four on ‘Secular States and Religious Societies’.

The seminar will discuss the religious dimensions of Ethiopia’s long history – known as a ‘Christian island in an Islamic sea’. Ethiopia was arguably the more enduring entity marrying the Cross and the Crown and identifying the Church with the State. Muslims, always a substantial minority but a good half of the population as of the early 20th century, were disunited, marginalized and only rarely rendered their religion political. They followed popular versions of Islam but were often influenced by developments in the greater Islamic world of the Middle East. After analyzing the Ethiopian Christians’ concepts of Islam and the Muslims’ polarized concepts of historical Christian Ethiopia, Prof. Erlich will address the revolutionary changes in our time. After the fall of Haile Selassie, the last absolute Christian king, Ethiopia’s political culture has changed twice – to communism and to ethnic pluralism. In this process, especially since 1991, Islam has become gradually more politicized. The seminar will follow these changes and combine local Ethiopian contexts with influences from Middle Eastern Islamic radicalism in assessing today’s dilemmas and options.