We must be on our guard here about arguments too easily won – Stuart Hall 

Galladduna waxay saaran tahay, wax isu geygeyne – Hadraawi 

Mahamed Hersi’s recent essay in Geeska, “Between Somaliweyn and Islam-weyn,” offers a bold critique of Somali nationalist discourse that warrants serious engagement. However, his analysis suffers from fundamental conceptual and methodological limitations that undermine his conclusions. Rather than dismissing Somaliweyn as an anachronistic project, we must understand how political ideas emerge from historical conditions, evolve through struggle, and can be reimagined to address contemporary challenges. This response will first examine the theoretical weaknesses in Hersi’s approach before proposing an alternative framework that recognises Islam as the most viable foundation for reconstructing Somali political imagination.

Hersi’s central error lies in treating Somaliweyn as a static, primordial programme of ethnonationalism, rather than understanding it as a historically contingent response to specific colonial conditions—that is to say, not as an age-old expression of Somali ethnic identity or nationalism, but as a political idea shaped by the specific circumstances of colonial rule and partition. Somali intellectuals, such as Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, have written at length about the traumatic impact of the partition on Somalis, describing it as the “dismemberment of his land and psyche.” This methodological flaw—reading political ideas as self-referential, unchallengeable manuals—prevents him from grasping the dynamic, evolving nature of political imagination.

Somaliweyn did not emerge from ethnic chauvinism but from the lived reality of colonial dismemberment. The five Somali territories were violently partitioned by European powers who carved up existing social, economic, and cultural networks. The organic ties between Somalis is what fed the development of a shared understanding of the problems Somalis faced in the Horn of Africa during the European imperial age. 

Hersi is right to be concerned about the dangers of ethnographic chauvinism. His critique of ethno-symbolist nationalism reveals an important tension in how identity is mobilised in Somali politics.

The project’s coherence lay precisely in its ability to galvanise diverse Somali communities around the shared experience of colonial fragmentation and subjugation. From British Somaliland to Italian Somaliland, from French Djibouti to the Somali regions of Ethiopia and Kenya, people understood their separation as artificial and harmful. This was a practical recognition of disrupted grazing territory, severed kinship networks, and imposed borders that made no sense to those who lived across them.

Hersi is right to be concerned about the dangers of ethnographic chauvinism. His critique of ethno-symbolist nationalism reveals an important tension in how identity is mobilised in Somali politics. One need only glance at the experience of those on the periphery to see the glaring contradictions in post-independence conceptualisations of Somalinimo. The HDMS party, led largely by the Rahanweyn, campaigned early for federalism—not out of reactionary instinct, but out of foresight. They feared domination by northern pastoralist communities, a fear tragically realised during the land-grabbing campaigns of the 1980s. The political and cultural marginalisation of agro-pastoralist communities like the Rahanweyn was not an aberration but a structural feature of a nationalist project that had ossified.

This is what happens when revolutionary ideas are not allowed to grow—when a vision like Somaliweyn, originally expansive and anti-colonial, is frozen in time. What was once a path to freedom becomes a dead end. It is like when Hadraawi says in his masterpiece Gudgude:

Gobannimadu waa libin ku taxan, geeddi nololeede
Marka uu gabaabsiyo xilliga, laga gu’weynaadey
Ayuun baa ninkii gudan karaa, dhan ugu guuraaye

Freedom is a victory sequenced on the journey of life
When an era comes to an end and its people outgrow it,
Only he who can fulfil it may move forward towards it.

Freedom is not static. It is a living force that must evolve. When we fail to let it move and carry us into the next stage, it dies. The tragedy of Somaliweyn is that we failed to carry it forward into new periods of struggle.

We are now confronted with a choice: we can abandon the ideal of Somaliweyn because of its historical distortions, or we can reclaim and reimagine it.

The Somaliweyn I advocate is not rooted in ethnonationalist chauvinism. It grows instead from the shared anti-colonial struggle and the lived histories of interdependence: the trade routes linking Zeila to Luuq, the patterns of intermarriage across pre-colonial regions, the webs of economic and social necessity that bound communities together. This is a vision grounded not in the myth of ethnic purity, but in the reality of mutual survival and collective liberation.

When Hersi dismisses these concerns as nationalist nostalgia, he fails to grasp how neocolonial fragmentation continues to shape Somali experiences across the region.

Perhaps most problematically, Hersi’s analysis lacks adequate engagement with the ongoing neocolonial dynamics that make Somali unity necessary. His focus on the “failure” of past nationalism overlooks how contemporary challenges—ranging from climate change to economic exploitation to political marginalisation—require collective responses that transcend the artificial borders imposed by colonial powers.

The massacres at Wagalla, the denial of language rights, and the systematic attempts to erase Somali culture in Kenya and Ethiopia are ongoing realities that demonstrate the continued relevance of Somali political solidarity. When Hersi dismisses these concerns as nationalist nostalgia, he fails to grasp how neocolonial fragmentation continues to shape Somali experiences across the region.

Where does Islam fit? 

Hersi’s treatment of Islam as merely a reaction to nationalist failure reveals another significant blind spot. This reactive framing ignores the deep historical roots of Islamic governance, ethics, and dispute resolution in Somali society. It also overlooks how Islamic political thought offers resources for addressing the very problems Hersi identifies with ethnographic nationalism.

By positioning Islam and nationalism as opposing alternatives rather than potentially complementary frameworks, Hersi constructs a false choice that obscures more creative possibilities for political reconstruction. The solution to the limitations of ethnocentric nationalism lies in grounding it in more universal, justice-oriented principles. Islam readily provides precisely such a framework—one that is both indigenous and familiar to Somali experience and capable of transcending the exclusions Hersi rightly critiques.

The Islamic movements that emerged in the postcolonial period were not, as Hersi claims, simply derivative of Arab Islamism, but rather responded to specifically Somali crises: state corruption, moral vacuum, and the illegitimacy of clan-based politics.

An Islamic approach to Somali unity would shift the foundation of the political community from bloodline to a shared commitment to justice; from ethnic purity to moral solidarity. It would recognise the Islamic ethical tradition as a social grammar of justice and affirm its place within Somali history and culture.

This approach has deep historical roots. From the precolonial city-state of Zeila to the Sufi-led revolts against British and Italian colonialism, Islam has provided both spiritual guidance and political cohesion for Somali communities. The Islamic movements that emerged in the postcolonial period were not, as Hersi claims, simply derivative of Arab Islamism, but rather responded to specifically Somali crises: state corruption, moral vacuum, and the illegitimacy of clan-based politics.

These movements demonstrate Islam’s capacity to address the very problems that undermined secular nationalism: its ability to provide moral authority beyond kinship, to offer principles of justice that transcend ethnic boundaries, and to ground political legitimacy in service rather than lineage.

Perhaps most importantly, an Islamic framework for Somali political imagination transcends the limitations of colonial cartography without falling into ethnic chauvinism. Islam recalls older solidarities that preceded colonial partition while offering principles for building new forms of political community.

This is bigger than merely stitching back together a colonial map; we need to weave something altogether new: a political vision grounded in accountability rather than nostalgia, in morality rather than mimicry, and in shared ethical commitment rather than ethnic exclusion.

Final reflection

Hersi’s essay raises important questions about the limitations of nationalist politics, but his solutions remain trapped within the very conceptual frameworks he seeks to critique. By treating political ideas as fixed programmes rather than evolving responses to changing conditions, he misses opportunities for creative reconstruction.

The choice is not between ethnic nationalism and its abandonment, but between a politics grounded in exclusion and one grounded in justice. In a context where over 99% of Somalis are Muslim, where the Islamic tradition provides both historical precedent and contemporary resources for political reconstruction, and where the challenges facing Somali communities require collective responses, Islam offers the most coherent framework for reimagining Somali political imagination.

One cannot analyse the politics of the present through the anxieties of the Kacaan era. What is needed now is a revival of the imagination.

Somalia today is not the Somalia of the 1970s. We stand at a different moment. What are the people hungry for? Where does the restlessness lie? What are the fishermen, the farmers, the mechanics, and the women selling khat on the streets saying? What is the time signature beneath the beat of clannism, and what does it reveal about the material and spiritual conditions of our society?

Recognition that a sustainable political community requires deeper foundations than utility or ethnicity alone is essential. As Hadraawi and a generation of post-1991 thinkers understood, the collapse of secular nationalism opened space for exploring different possibilities—possibilities rooted in indigenous moral tradition and capable of addressing contemporary challenges.

What is needed is not the death of Somaliweyn but its transformation through Islamic and ethical principles. Only by grounding political imagination in shared moral commitment can we build forms of solidarity capable of transcending the divisions that have plagued Somali politics while addressing the urgent challenges facing all Somali communities in the twenty-first century.