Dr Zakariya Weyrax Warsame

From oceanic power to fractured kinship — how unity became the engine of disorder in a civilisation held in moral suspension.

They should not be chaotic. They should not appear fractured, disordered, or indecisive. They built cities that dazzled the seas. They ruled islands. They carried knowledge across oceans and centuries. They preserve identity as fiercely as any people alive. Still, the world sees chaos — but how can disorder persist among a people who should, by every measure, have transcended it?

As explored before, their latent unity — that instinctive cohesion when the sacred is touched — proves their capacity for collective purpose. This question becomes even more urgent in the face of that very capacity. How can a people capable of such powerful, reactive unity fail to generate a stable, constructive one?

History itself answers part of the question. Mogadishu was once the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, a city whose wealth and influence rivalled any along the eastern littoral. Somali traders were not mere merchants; they were conduits of knowledge, the first to translate Chinese texts and bring them into Africa. Across the Indian Ocean, their influence extended to islands where they governed and shaped societies. Civilisation itself could bent to their will — yet today, the world sees only instability.

What was built across oceans is now fractured along clan lines.

Consider the Maldives, far from the Horn of Africa. In the 14th century, Abd al-Aziz al-Maqdishawi, a Somali island chief of Kinolhas, ruled with wisdom and authority. His surname, “al-Maqdishawi,” links him directly to Mogadishu, to Somali culture and heritage. When Ibn Battuta visited in 1344, Abd al-Aziz welcomed him with the courtesy and command of a leader who understood both his people and his place in the world. Through trade, governance, and scholarship, Somali influence left a lasting mark on law, commerce, and culture across oceans.

Even the islands’ sovereign, Sultana Khadija, ruling in the mid-14th century, bore testament to Somali tutelage. She navigated political turbulence, reclaiming her throne multiple times, and Ibn Battuta described her as “one of the wonders of these islands.” Leadership, law, and culture flourished under frameworks shaped, in part, by Somali wisdom and networks.

The Maldivian people remain predominantly Shafi’i, unlike India’s Hanafi majority. This is no coincidence: Islam likely reached the islands through Somali intermediaries, traders, and scholars. The Shafi‘i school of jurisprudence they carried — with its emphasis on balance between reason and revelation — the knowledge they transmitted, the governance they exercised — all were extensions of a people whose identity and moral force could travel oceans, crossing seas and generations unbroken.

But history’s continuity was severed not by weakness, but by interruption — a deliberate unmaking of what once worked.

Today, Somalia is portrayed as fractured, chaotic, leaderless. The paradox demands understanding. Before the fall, Somalia was not drifting in disorder — it was ascending. In the 1970s, while most of Africa still bore the marks of colonial dependency, Somalia was building something rare: self-belief. Literacy was not a slogan; it was a national movement. Students left their cities every summer, carrying chalk and notebooks into the dust of the countryside, teaching shepherds, traders, and farmers to read and write in their own tongue. In less than three years, Somalia became one of the most literate nations in Africa — the first to elevate its own language, Af-Soomaali, to the level of government, education, and science.

Roads, hospitals, schools rose not from foreign grants but from a collective ethic the people called “Iskaa wax u qabso” — work for yourself. When resources were scarce, citizens built with their own hands. Soldiers built schools. Teachers planted trees. Women formed cooperatives that sustained villages. It was a social contract that no constitution could codify: you build your nation because it is yours.

Mogadishu was not a ruin, but a rhythm. Poets and engineers, merchants and scholars — all believed they were part of something larger than the state: a shared moral horizon. Visitors from across Africa came to learn from the experiment. Somalia had found a way to modernise without losing its soul.

Then — the collapse. Sudden. Complete. Defying explanation. Civil wars do not erupt from nothing; they require ignition, fuel, design. Something — or someone — buried the memory of self-sufficiency. And in the absence of a strong state and collective purpose, tribalism — the oldest social fallback — surged to fill the vacuum.

To fall from greatness, learning, and moral confidence into the pettiness of clan rivalry is not merely tragic — it is humiliating. Once, Somalis competed in poetry, commerce, and piety. Now, too often, they compete in lineage.

Clan has become creed; blood, a theology of its own.

This is the great inversion: where faith was to unite, lineage now divides.

To say “my kind is better than yours” is not strength — it is decay. The mind that once mapped oceans has been reduced to defending sand. “My death is a tragedy, but yours is statistics.” The most un-Islamic arrogance masquerades as loyalty.

For a people who profess Islam so deeply — whose cities were once centres of learning, whose ancestors carried the Qur’an across deserts and seas — this descent into tribalism is a betrayal not just of unity, but of faith itself. Islam abolished tribal superiority fourteen centuries ago. The Qur’an declares plainly: “Indeed, the most honoured of you in the sight of God is the most God-conscious of you.” Not the richest, not the loudest, not those born into a certain name — but the most righteous.

The sickness did not end with the fall — it was codified. The so-called 4.5 power-sharing formula turned clan into constitution. It presumes that identity must be negotiated, not understood. Merit does not matter; talent, wisdom, achievement are irrelevant next to birthright.

The system does not find the best leaders; it merely finds the right relatives.

Authority is not earned — it is inherited, allocated by clan, celebrated as normal. Competence is ignored; the capable are silenced in favour of the right lineage.

Even “federalism,” another word recited with modern pride, is hollowed of its meaning. What is called federalism is, in truth, tribalism with a flag. It takes the vocabulary of statecraft and fills it with the spirit of division. To appropriate a modern term and inhabit it tribally is worse than ignorance — it is self-deception. It is to claim the world’s language while refusing its meaning.

Yet tribalism did not arise from ignorance alone; it is psychological. When state and trust collapsed, people retreated to the smallest circle of safety — the clan. It was not wickedness but fear. What began as protection became paralysis. The same instinct that shelters can also suffocate. The Somali mind — sharp, strategic, and restless — has been reduced to defending lineage instead of destiny. A people who once crossed oceans now fear crossing boundaries of blood.

The greatest indictment is moral. Tribalism is the re-emergence of asabiyyah — blind partisanship the Prophet ﷺ warned against, calling it “the smell of jahiliyyah.” To prefer clan over conscience, lineage over justice, is to step back into the age of ignorance.

This creates a devastating paradox: the Somali people are trapped between two unities. The first is Latent Unity — vertical, sacred, and reactive, a unified people against an external threat. The second is Tribal Asabiyyah — horizontal, profane, and constant, a unified clan against other Somalis. One builds civilisation in fleeting moments of defence; the other prevents it from ever being built in peace. The very instinct that provides micro-security guarantees macro-chaos.

Yet this historical greatness and moral cohesion was never guaranteed; it has always depended on memory, faith, and shared purpose. The collapse of the state, the rise of tribalism, and the codification of lineage over merit did more than fragment politics — they left a rupture in the moral fabric itself. What once bound Somalis in purpose now binds them only in reaction. And it is here that the idea of latent unity becomes both a mystery and a warning.

Latent unity has always been Somalia’s hidden equilibrium — a silent covenant that awakens only when the sacred is touched, when dignity or belief are threatened. It is not orchestrated; it is instinctive. In Somalia, that unity still flickers: when crisis strikes, a moral pulse runs through the people, and difference dissolves. It is a social reflex rooted in shared faith and memory.

But in the Western diaspora, that instinct is absent. The same people, the same faith, the same intelligence — yet the moral reflex that once safeguarded them lies dormant. Somali youth abroad — in London, Toronto, Stockholm, Minneapolis — face a crisis that feels eerily synchronised: knife crime, imprisonment, addiction, nihilism. These are not isolated social failures; they follow a pattern too precise to dismiss as coincidence.

Just as Somalia’s collapse was sudden and sustained — a chaos that buried the memory of self-sufficiency — one must ask whether the diaspora’s moral disintegration is being shaped by similar unseen forces. Destabilise the youth, and you control the future. To fracture Somalis at home halted a civilisation; to corrupt diaspora youth prevents its rebirth.

Yet external design alone cannot explain the diaspora’s moral disintegration. The crisis of the youth is not a parallel failure, but a direct consequence of a more intimate pathology: the hoarding of generational power. The middle-aged, who inherited leadership by default in the early days of resettlement, cling to it with a suffocating grip. They control community boards, masjids committees, and cultural associations not as stewards, but as gatekeepers protecting their own relevance.

This systemic failure to transfer power is the root of the youth’s drift. By offering grievance instead of guidance and veto power instead of vision, they have actively created the vacuum that consumes their children. How has this been allowed? How have we stood by as the generation that survived war and famine now orchestrates, through sheer neglect, the spiritual starvation of its own heirs?

When young talent is silenced and ambition is met with suppression, the resulting frustration and nihilism are not mysterious — they are inevitable. The knife crime, the addiction, the despair — these are the symptoms of a generation disinherited not from a country, but from their own community’s future.

They are not elders; they are gatekeepers, and the garden is dying behind the walls.

And now, the ultimate indictment of this neglect is written not in community minutes, but in the silent, shattering verdict of their own homes. A new, unthinkable phenomenon is emerging: Somali men in their late 60s and 70s, who spent decades building relevance outside their households, are being confronted with the void they created within them. After decades of a marriage starved of companionship, wives who have lived as widows in their own homes are now, in the final chapter, asking them to leave. The door is closed. Adult children, who never knew their father’s guidance, feel no duty to intervene. The result is the solitary geriatric care home — a concept once as alien as abandoning one’s own soul, now becoming the logical conclusion of a life spent prioritising clan politics over kin, community standing over a child’s respect. To be exiled at the final hour by the very family you were meant to lead is the ultimate measure of a leadership that failed at its most sacred, primary level.

And this pattern is not local. From the fractured homes of London to the solitary care beds of Toronto and Minneapolis, the same story repeats with a chilling synchrony. What unseen current synchronises this continental collapse of the Somali home? Who studies these patterns as they unfold in real-time? And most damningly, are the Somali people, so attuned to the subtleties of their own chaos, even aware that they are living out a script written for their dissolution?

They have transformed community stewardship into a gerontocratic racket, silencing the young, monopolising platforms, and reducing vibrant potential to a crisis they then bemoan but will not solve. This is not just a failure of leadership; it is a betrayal of ancestry, a hoarding of the future for the price of a dying ego.

The refrain that “Somalia waits for a leader” misses the point. Leaders exist — in classrooms, masjids, communities — but they are denied space to lead. What is missing is a righteous people ready to sustain righteous leadership. Corrupt soil cannot nourish honest seed. To produce good leaders, society itself must first become good.

Latent unity, powerful but reactive, is not eternal. It cannot build. It cannot educate. It can only respond. And in the diaspora, no sacred lines remain — no shared soil, no visible threat to awaken that instinct. The danger is existential: the force that once bound the Somali people may fade from memory entirely.

If the next generation grows without that moral reflex, without sacred belonging, Somali identity will not die — it will drift. Drifting people cannot rebuild. Strong in memory, weak in structure, brilliant in isolation, lost in direction.

To prevent this, memory must become curriculum — not a eulogy for what was, but a blueprint for what must be. Elders must guide, not govern. Youth must lead, not side-lined. The reactive, latent unity must be forged into a proactive, creative will.

The Somali people must act — not when the sacred is touched, but because it is sacred. The choice is no longer between unity and division, but between two unities: one that only destroys invaders, and another that builds a future.

They should not be chaotic — and they are not. Their power remains, dormant beneath the drift, waiting not for rescue, but remembrance.

Dr Zakariya Weyrax Warsame
Email:  Aden133@hotmail.com

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When the Sacred is Touched: The Latent Unity of the Somali People By Dr. Zakariya W Warsame