Reviewed by: Anwar Maxamed Diiriye
Author: Abdi Sheikh Abdi
Publisher: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd
Pages: 226 pp
Publication date: 1993

“Madness, when guided by divine fire, can awaken a nation from slumber.”

Reading Divine Madness by Abdi Sheikh-Abdi was a transformative experience one that left me reflecting not only on the legacy of Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan, but also on the deeper role that history, poetry, and resistance play in the shaping of Somali identity. Far more than a historical biography, this book is a profound literary and philosophical meditation that challenges colonial narratives and reclaims indigenous memory. It weaves together oral traditions, political resistance, religious conviction, and poetic imagination in a way that invites readers into an intimate conversation with the past.

Many respected scholars, such as Ali Jimale Ahmed, Mohamed Haji Mukhtar, and Abdisalam Issa-Salwe have offered thoughtful analyses of Divine Madness, each highlighting its significance as a cultural and historical biography. My reflections seek to add to this ongoing conversation by emphasizing the role of Somali oral tradition, the poetic foundations of resistance, and the contemporary relevance of the Sayyid’s legacy.

What struck me most from the outset was Sheikh-Abdi’s commitment to writing from within the cultural and spiritual universe of his subject. His use of Somali oral poetry as both a historical source and literary expression immediately distinguishes this work from conventional Eurocentric histories. By allowing the Sayyid to speak through his own verses ‘gabay’ composed in exile, in battle, and in contemplation. Sheikh-Abdi restores a silenced voice to the historical record. These poems do not merely supplement the narrative; they are the narrative. They carry within them the rhythm of a people’s struggle, the cadence of resistance, and the pulse of an unyielding spiritual vision.

The Sayyid emerges in this book not as a remote historical figure frozen in the colonial archives, but as a living, breathing intellectual and religious leader, flawed, impassioned, and visionary. His project was not simply military; it was metaphysical. His ambition was not limited to driving out foreign forces but extended toward constructing a unified, morally grounded Somali polity under Islamic law. This dual vision, political and prophetic makes his mission uniquely compelling. He fused the sword and the word, the sermon and the spear, the Qur’anic injunction and the poetic line. In doing so, he blurred the boundaries between what is often seen as madness and what may, in fact, be the highest form of clarity.

The provocative title of the book, Divine Madness, invites readers to consider precisely this ambiguity. Was the Sayyid insane, as the British colonial administrators declared, or was he a mystic, a freedom fighter, and a revolutionary whose vision threatened the imperial order so deeply that it had to be dismissed as delusional and lunatic? The colonial effort to pathologize indigenous resistance is a well-documented strategy of ‘divide and rule’ domination, and Sheikh-Abdi deftly deconstructs this tactic by showing how the Sayyid’s so-called madness was, in truth, a coherent spiritual and political worldview. Through detailed historical analysis and cultural interpretation, the book argues that what appeared as “madness” to colonial eyes was, in fact, the product of divine conviction expressed in the idiom of Somali oral literature.

In this sense, Divine Madness shares intellectual terrain with postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Mahmood Mamdani, authors who expose how language, psychiatry, and historical framing have been used by colonial powers to delegitimize native agency. Like these scholars, Sheikh-Abdi refuses to reduce the Sayyid to a caricature. He does not romanticize him, nor does he absolve him of strategic errors and excesses. Instead, he provides a complex portrayal that holds in tension the Sayyid’s poetic brilliance, his authoritarian impulses, his theological rigor, and his capacity for sacrifice. He is, above all, a tragic figure, a man too large for the fragmented world he inherited, and too visionary for the fractured loyalties around him. One could argue that he was a figure whose vision and actions anticipated the intellectual and sociopolitical currents of a later era.

One of the most powerful dimensions of the book is its treatment of Somali oral poetry not merely as aesthetic expression but as a political and spiritual instrument. The Sayyid’s poems were sermons, rallying cries, indictments, and blueprints for action. Sheikh-Abdi’s translations capture both the poetic beauty and the moral urgency of the original verses. In Somali culture, poetry has always held authority and is used to negotiate, persuade, rebuke, and remember. In the Sayyid’s hands, it became a weapon that could cut deeper than any sword. His verses humiliated colonial proxies, inspired his followers, and left a legacy that still echoes in the tea shops, schools, and political speeches among the Somalis today.

The use of poetry in this way is what I would call “poetic theology,” resonates beyond Somali borders. It reminds us of Amílcar Cabral’s (Guinea-Bissau) revolutionary oratory, of Thomas Sankara’s (Burkina Faso) militant speeches, of Malcolm X’s sermons. Like them, the Sayyid understood that language, when charged with moral clarity and collective memory, can galvanize people into action. Sheikh-Abdi’s book restores this function of poetry and insists on its role in the epistemological fabric of Somali resistance. By doing so, the author refuses to separate culture from politics, or aesthetics from ethics. For him and for the Sayyid, these dimensions were inseparable.

Yet the book does not overlook the internal contradictions and tactical failures that accompanied the Sayyid’s movement. Sheikh-Abdi documents the punitive raids on rival clans, the ideological rigidity that sometimes-alienated potential allies, and the difficulty of sustaining a pan-Somali vision in a landscape fractured by colonial manipulation and historical rivalries. These failures, however, are not the product of madness but of the tragic mismatch between vision and reality. The Sayyid dreamed of a unified Somali nation long before such an entity existed even in imagination. His defeat, in that sense, was not a personal failure but a symptom of the historical moment; an era in which colonial borders and internal divisions made collective resistance both urgent and nearly impossible.

What makes Divine Madness so remarkable is not only the story it tells, but the voice that tells it. Abdi Sheikh-Abdi writes as a Somali historian, writer, and literary craftsman. His voice is intimate and analytical, lyrical and grounded. Unlike Western accounts such as Douglas Jardine’s The Mad Mullah of Somaliland, which rely heavily on British military reports, informants, and Orientalist tropes, Sheikh-Abdi draws from Somali oral traditions, communal memory, and religious texts. His narrative approach is not merely about offering an “alternative” view, it is a decolonial act of narration. It reclaims Somali agency and reasserts the value of Somali epistemologies. It also challenges the reader, particularly non-Somali readers to listen differently, to pay attention to what poetry, prayer, and resistance sound like when voiced by the colonized rather than the colonizer.

Reflecting on this book reminded me of the role literature can play in cultural survival and national imagination. As Somalis continue to navigate the legacies of colonialism, civil war, and diaspora, the story of the Sayyid remains vital, not because it offers easy answers but because it forces us to confront enduring dilemmas. What does it mean to resist fragmentation? What is the cost of uncompromising vision? How do we balance faith and politics, poetry and power, unity and diversity? These questions, embedded in the life of the Sayyid, are still alive in Somali political and historical discourse today.

Divine Madness warrants a deliberate and contemplative reading, akin to the attentive listening demanded by a gabay at twilight. Its rhythms, silences, and rhetorical textures engage not only the intellect but also the collective cultural consciousness. Far from a conventional biography, the work constitutes a multifaceted intervention; a synthesis of historical reclamation, literary exegesis, and philosophical engagement. Abdi Sheikh-Abdi reconstructs the contested legacy of Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan, recasting him not as a sanctified martyr or a pathological dissident, but as a poet of resistance whose intellectual and spiritual fervor continues to animate Somali historical imagination.

This text should be approached not merely as an archival account of anti-colonial struggle, but as a dialogic encounter with the Somali past, an archive of memory transmitted through verse, voice, and cultural resilience. For Somali readers, and especially for emerging scholars and students, Divine Madness offers a rare opportunity to engage history on terms shaped by indigenous epistemologies and lived experience. It reminds us that historical narration is not a neutral act but a form of cultural authorship, capable of shaping political futures as much as it reconstructs the past.

In a postcolonial world still shadowed by imperial residues and epistemic silencing, the story of Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan, as retold by Sheikh-Abdi, remains profoundly relevant. It is a chronicle of fracture and fire, faith and defiance. The Sayyid’s poetic interventions, his uncompromising vision, and his tragic limitations continue to echo through contemporary Somali discourse, not as relics of a bygone era, but as unresolved questions that demand renewed engagement.

Divine Madness is, therefore, more than a literary biography. It is a meditation on the politics of memory, the poetics of resistance, and the moral ambiguities of leadership under colonial duress. In Sheikh-Abdi’s careful hands, the Sayyid emerges as a figure of immense complexity, at once visionary and flawed, spiritual and strategic, revered and contested. His words, forged in moments of solitude, exile, and confrontation, retain the capacity to stir reflection, mobilize sentiment, and unsettle dominant historical narratives.

Thus, I invite readers not simply to consume the text, but to inhabit it, to internalize its voices, cadences, and provocations with the reverence due to an oral tradition that has long served as the repository of Somali knowledge and resistance. In doing so, one may discover that beyond the facts of history lies a deeper truth; the enduring soul of a people whose identity, though assailed by colonial violence, continues to speak through poetry, language, and cultural memory.

Anwar Maxamed Diiriye  
Author, Composer, and Literary Critique
Minneapolis, Minnesota