Mogadishu was founded in the 10th century by Arabs as a place for trading. The Arabs came often to Mogadishu which spread Islam throughout Somalia. As a result, the majority of the people there now are Muslims. Mogadishu was atrading hub between three major regions of commerce: Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and East Asia. The inhabitants of Mogadishu were mostly merchants. The people of Somalia and Mogadishu were heavily influenced by Arabs and Persians coming to trade, yet they were still very African and had a different culture from that of Ibn Battuta. During the 15th and 16th centuries, Somalia and, consequently, Mogadishu were under the control of the Portuguese [1]. In the early 1900s, Somalia was controlled by the British. The north of modern day Somalia was a part of Italy’s colonial empire, and was nominally called Italian Somaliland. Somalia gained independence in 1960, and the government that headed an independent Somalia fell in the early 1990s. Mogadishu is perhaps best known in American pop-culture for being the site of the events that inspired the Hollywood blockbuster “Black Hawk Down”.

The first non-Arab and non-Persian city Ibn Battuta visited was Mogadishu. The city was beautiful with large bazaars for trading. Ibn Battuta was requested by the sultan of Mogadishu to stay in a madrasah (religious school) and eat with the sultan. He recounts his time in Mogadishu and the culture of the people there as being different from that of Arabs. He says, “A single person of Madashaw (Mogadishu) eats as much as a whole company of us would eat, as a matter of habit, and they are corpulent and fat in the extreme” [2]. From this information, it is apparent that the city and people of Mogadishu thrived during this time if they were able to eat as much as Ibn Battuta describes.

Currently the capital of Somalia and seat of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Mogadishu does not have the same appeal that it once had. The city is still a place of historical sites, but the country has been heavily influenced by civil wars. The government in power is a transitional government, but the country is also under the influence of the Islamist militant group called al-Shabaab. They have control of the southern portion of Somalia, but luckily, they are not in control of Mogadishu. Because of the lawlessness and poverty of the Somali countryside, piracy has been pervasive in the Somali basin since 2008.

 

Sources:

[1] Dunn, Ross. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005

[2] Macintosh-Smith, Tim. The Travels of Ibn Battutah. London: Picador, 2003.