The myth of Somali “Arabisation”

An emerging online discourse has taken shape around Somali culture, Arab and Islamic influence, and the extent to which these forces are alleged to have contributed to the erosion of an ostensibly authentic Somali identity. In recent months, social media feeds have become increasingly saturated with videos by young Somalis, many of them living in the West, warning against what they describe as the “Arabisation” of Somali culture. Several TikTok users advancing this argument have amassed millions of views across numerous videos, each attracting thousands of comments. Their central claim, echoed by others within the same discourse, is that Somalis have progressively abandoned their indigenous cultural identity in favour of an imported Arab one.

The argument format is remarkably consistent. A contemporary photograph of a Somali woman wearing a Jilbaab is placed alongside a colonial-era photograph of a woman from the early twentieth century, the contrast presented as self-evident proof of cultural displacement. Yet many of the colonial photographs now circulating online are treated as transparent records of everyday Somali life when they were anything but. Colonial photography was frequently staged, selective, and mediated through European expectations of the “exotic native.” Subjects could be posed, dressed, or accessorised in ways designed to satisfy the aesthetic and ethnographic conventions of the colonial gaze. Clothing and jewellery, in particular, were often arranged for visual effect rather than documentary fidelity.

Women were particularly vulnerable to this representational gaze. Colonial photographers and Orientalist writers repeatedly constructed Muslim women as enigmatic, concealed figures whose supposed liberation or intelligibility required their unveiling. Ironically, elements of the contemporary online discourse risk reproducing a similar logic. The more closely a Somali woman resembles the unveiled female subjects preserved in colonial photography, the more readily she is presented as “authentically Somali.” Conversely, the hijab is cast as a visible marker of foreign intrusion and cultural estrangement, despite the long and deeply rooted presence of Islamic dress practices within Somali society. The result is a peculiar inversion -- colonial representations, themselves shaped by European fantasies of authenticity and difference, are repurposed as the evidentiary standard by which contemporary Somali authenticity is judged.

This preoccupation with the unveiling of Muslim women was by no means confined to colonial photography. Under French colonial rule in Algeria, the veil itself became a political frontier, a site upon which civilisation, modernity, and colonial power were inscribed. As Frantz Fanon observed in A Dying Colonialism, French authorities understood the unveiling of Algerian women as a means of penetrating and ultimately transforming Algerian society from within. Public unveiling ceremonies were accordingly staged as spectacles of liberation, while the veil was recast as a visible emblem of indigenous backwardness and oppression.

This history should give us pause when colonial images are invoked today as evidence of a supposedly freer and more authentic past. If photographs of marginalised and vulnerable women -- often posed, dressed, and presented for the consumption of the European voyeur -- are uncritically presented as symbols of freedom, then the language of liberation begins to reproduce the very assumptions it claims to resist. Can we meaningfully claim to champion a woman’s freedom to choose while simultaneously measuring the legitimacy of her choices against an aesthetic inherited from the colonial gaze? Or, in attempting to recover an “authentic” Somali identity, do we risk internalising colonial standards of authenticity and imposing them upon ourselves?

This problem of historical decontextualisation also applies to the colourful photographs of Somali women that circulate from the late twentieth century. The Kacaan era, under Siad Barre’s scientific socialist regime, was marked by an ambitious programme of social and cultural transformation. In its attempt to remake Somali society according to its own conception of modernity, the regime claimed the authority to determine which customs, religious interpretations, and social practices belonged in the new national order. That “transformative” project was frequently coercive, and resistance could carry consequences. Most notoriously, in 1975 the regime executed ten religious scholars who had publicly opposed changes to family and inheritance law.

It was within this broader political context that urban centres such as Mogadishu developed a highly visible culture of cosmopolitanism in which women participated in a wide variety of fashions, frequently appearing without veils and wearing Western-style dresses, short sleeves, and other styles now invoked as evidence of a more socially liberal past. Yet contemporary discourse often detaches these images from the political world that produced them. In doing so, it risks converting a complicated historical moment into a simple visual narrative of emancipation. The photographs may indeed testify to forms of social freedom and cultural experimentation, but they existed alongside an authoritarian project of social transformation sustained, in part, through repression, intimidation, and violence. To celebrate the aesthetic surface of that period while ignoring the coercive structures beneath it is therefore to reproduce precisely the kind of historical decontextualisation that such images demand we resist.

It is also telling that the principal evidence offered for Arabisation almost always consists of clothing and photographs of it. This reflects the way many of us, having grown up in Western societies, have come to understand identity, through immediately visible symbols that can be recognised and consumed at a glance. In the absence of spoken and written Somali language, visual language is the only medium in which diaspora Somalis can engage with our culture, and so what we see is surely all of said culture itself. This is far removed from reality, and history is far more complicated. Despite this large chunk of historical context missing from these photos the conclusion is presented as self-evident, this used to be us, now we have become Arabs.

The argument is emotionally compelling, in part because it speaks to a genuine condition of diasporic life. As young Somalis in the diaspora, many of us occupy an increasingly peculiar position. Our relationship to Somali culture is often fragmented, mediated through family, memory, social media, and intermittent encounters with a homeland we may know only partially. It is therefore unsurprising that many feel a profound desire to recover something that appears distant and diminished. That longing, however, can also make us particularly receptive to narratives that offer a simple and emotionally satisfying explanation for perceived cultural loss, whether in the diaspora or in Somalia itself. The anxiety underlying such arguments may be sincere, but sincerity does not make the diagnosis correct. As an explanation for cultural change, the case for “Arabisation” is historically and sociologically weak.

Arabisation is not simply the adoption of particular garments, religious expressions, and isolated customs associated with the Arab world. It is a broader sociological process through which elements of Arab culture become incorporated into the linguistic, institutional, and social identity of a non-Arab population. Historically, this has involved transformations in language, literature, social norms, and collective identity. In the early Islamic period, Arab culture accompanied, though was not identical to, the expansion of Islam across North Africa and the Middle East. In the modern era, particularly amid the rise of Pan-Arabism during the twentieth century, it also took the form of deliberate state-led programmes of linguistic and cultural assimilation, often directed at non-Arab minorities within newly independent Arab states. Somali society does not readily conform to either of these historical patterns.

Part of the conceptual confusion arises from an increasing inability, particularly within the diaspora, to distinguish between Islam and Arab culture. Arabic occupies a privileged position within Islam because it is the language of the Qur’an, ritual prayer, and a vast body of foundational religious scholarship. Muslims therefore pray in Arabic, recite the Qur’an in Arabic, and engage with Arabic religious terminology whether they are Somali, Indonesian, Nigerian, Bosnian, or otherwise. These practices signify participation in a shared religious tradition, they do not, in themselves, constitute cultural assimilation into an Arab identity. Outside explicitly religious contexts, Arabic remains peripheral to the everyday linguistic life of the overwhelming majority of Somalis, whose principal cultural and social medium remains the Somali language.

Nor is there persuasive historical evidence that Islam, and the Arabic religious vocabulary that accompanied it, was imposed upon Somali society through conquest or forced assimilation. On the contrary, Islam spread gradually through trade, migration, scholarship, intermarriage, and sustained contact across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Somalia’s geographical proximity to the Arabian Peninsula made centuries of commercial, religious, and diplomatic exchange not exceptional but inevitable, long before the emergence of the modern nation-state. The relationship is sufficiently deep that traditions of Arabian ancestry appear within the genealogical histories of several Somali clans, some claim descent from the Prophet’s family or early Muslim figures, while others trace origins to Oman or other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Whether these genealogical traditions can be established as literal historical fact is, for the present argument, almost beside the point. Their endurance within Somali social memory is itself evidence of the antiquity and depth of Somali engagement with Arabia and its peoples.

Somalia’s membership in the Arab League, similarly, is often invoked as though it constituted definitive evidence that Somalis adopted an Arab ethnic identity. Yet membership in a political organisation is not synonymous with ethnic transformation. Somalia’s accession was shaped by the diplomatic and geopolitical calculations of the Cold War era, as well as by its longstanding historical, religious, and commercial connections with Arab states. It did not amount to a declaration that Somalis had ceased to understand themselves as Somali and had become ethnically Arab. Nevertheless, the accusation of Arabisation persists, in part because very different historical processes are repeatedly collapsed into a single category.

None of this is to suggest that Somali religious life has remained static. It has not. Over the past half-century, changes in religious education, labour migration to the Gulf, the circulation of Salafi and other reformist currents, foreign funding of religious institutions, and the expansion of mass media -- from satellite television to social media -- have all influenced the ways in which many Somalis understand, express, and practise Islam. These developments, alongside the emergence of Islamist radicals such as Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, Jama’at al-I’tisam and, later, Al-Shabaab, have undoubtedly affected religious discourse, standards of dress, conceptions of public morality, and visible expressions of piety.

But to describe these developments simply as Arabisation is to confuse religious transformation with ethnic and cultural assimilation. The adoption of a more conservative interpretation of Islam, the increased visibility of particular forms of religious dress, or the growing influence of transnational Islamic movements does not in itself amount to the abandonment of Somali language, kinship structures, historical memory, poetry, social institutions, or ethnic self-identification. A society may undergo profound changes in religious practice while remaining recognisably itself. To collapse these processes into the language of Arabisation therefore obscures more than it illuminates. More fundamentally, it reveals a conceptual failure to distinguish between religion, culture, ethnicity, and the complex ways in which they have interacted throughout Somali history.

The selective anxiety surrounding Arabic and garments perceived to be Arab therefore raises a questions, why are certain external influences treated as innocuous, or scarcely recognised as foreign at all, while others are framed as existential threats to Somali identity? More pointedly, why are influences that have demonstrably altered our linguistic and cultural habits often regarded with indifference, while practices with centuries of history in Somali society are portrayed as alien intrusions? Is this anxiety really the product of historical analysis, or has it been shaped, at least in part, by the societies in which many of us in the diaspora were raised and by the prevailing attitudes towards Arabs, Muslims, and visible expressions of Islam within those societies?

The contrast is especially apparent in our relationship with language. Many Somalis in the diaspora are most comfortable speaking to one another in English; some speak Somali only imperfectly, while others scarcely speak it at all. At the same time, English has acquired increasing prestige within educational and professional life in Somalia itself, often at the expense of Somali as a language of instruction, scholarship, and formal knowledge. Yet the growing displacement of Somali by English has generated nothing resembling the intensity of the diaspora discourse surrounding “Arabisation.” Why?

That asymmetry should trouble us before we declare, often from thousands of miles away, that Somali society has somehow been culturally conquered. If the preservation of Somali culture is genuinely the objective, then our priorities should reflect the elements through which culture is actually transmitted. Those of us who cannot speak Somali confidently should learn it. We should read Somali literature and poetry, preserve oral traditions, record the memories of our parents and grandparents while we still have the opportunity, and ensure that our children inherit the language rather than merely an abstract attachment to Somali identity. We should support Somali writers, scholars, journalists, historians, artists, and institutions capable of preserving and developing Somali intellectual life.

Culture is not preserved through performative outrage on TikTok, nor is it erased whenever fashions change. Its survival depends far more profoundly upon transmission -- upon language, memory, literature, institutions, and the willingness of one generation to pass its inheritance to the next. Somali culture has endured colonial partition, dictatorship, state collapse, civil war, mass displacement, and migration across continents. It is resilient enough to survive changing preferences in dress. The more serious danger lies elsewhere, that we allow the Somali language, the principal vessel through which so much of our collective memory is carried, to gradually recede, while persuading ourselves that a change of clothing constitutes our greatest cultural crisis.