Author : Ahmed Zekaria
Year : 1997
The survival of the city-state of Harar remains one of the ‘mysteries of history of the region’.1 Harar, once a pivotal point for political dominance of the Horn of Africa, collapsed like a house of cards after the defeat of Gragn in the sixteenth century.2 But it survived as a trading and religious centre up to the region’s incorporation into the Ethiopian empire in 1887. Immediately after the wars of Ahmad Gragn,