Somali society divides men into religious specialists and warriors

Evidence

Despite the prevalence of war, feud, and fighting, particularly amongst the nomads, not all men are warriors. Those who devote their lives to religion and in some sense practise as men of God are known as wadads or sheikhs, and thus distinguished from the remainder and majority of men who, whatever secular calling they follow, fall into the category of warriors (waranleh, ‘spear-bearers’). This general division still retains validity despite the proliferation of occupations available today. Men of religion, or sheikhs – to use the Arabic title which is usually applied to the more learned among them – fulfil such important tasks as teaching the young the Quran and the elements of the faith, solemnizing marriage and ruling according to the Shariah in matrimonial disputes and inheritance, assessing damages for injury, and generally directing the religious life of the community in which they live. Essentially their rôle is to mediate between men; and, through the Prophet, between man and God – with the help of the many local saints to whom Somali look for support in the preferment of their pleas for divine aid and succour. Ideally, whatever their diya-paying and clan obligations, men of religion are assumed to stand outside secular rivalry and conflict, although in practice in the circumstances of Somali life this expectation is rarely if ever fully sustained. What is significant here, however, is that in contrast to the position in so many other Muslim countries, Somali sheikhs are not normally political leaders and only in exceptional circumstances assume political power. — I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali_ Nation…, 75

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines key Somali categories wadad/waranleh that structure Lewis’s account of social roles.
• XREF: The claim that Somali sheikhs rarely wield political power becomes important when Lewis later analyzes religious leaders’ roles in anticolonial movements. — connects to: Somali sultans were honorific figureheads rather than powerful rulers; the MOC “The Nation That Couldn’t Hold: How Somali Clanship, Colonial Partition, and Pan-Somali Dreams Pulled the Seams Apart”

Related

• Somali sultans were honorific figureheads rather than powerful rulers (similarity 0.80)
• Somali religious leaders rarely hold political power (similarity 0.79)