Zeila (historical region)

Zeila also known as Zaila or Zayla was a historical Muslim region in the Horn of Africa. The region was named after the port city of Zeila in modern day Somalia.

Geography
In the medieval Arab world the Muslim inhabited domains in the Horn of Africa were often referred to as Zeila to differentiate them from the Christian territories designated Habasha. According to Ibn Battuta, a journey through the whole of Zeila and the Mogadishu region would take eight weeks to complete.

Fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari recounted on the usage of the term and its origin being the city of Zeila, a vital port in the region.

"this is the region which is called in Egypt and Syria the land of Zaila. This however is only one of their coastal towns and one of their islands, whose name has been extended to the whole"Ethiopian scholar Taddesse Tamrat noted that according to the Arab historian Al-Maqrizi, Jabarta was considered part of the region of Zeila.

History
The term Zeila in the thirteenth century was often interchangeable with the Ifat Sultanate which ruled over the entire region and later in the fourteenth century onwards used to denote its successor state the Adal Sultanate as well as Adal region. Throughout this period the attribution "al-Zaylai" frequently signified an individual from this region however it was not made consistently clear whether it referred to the denizens of city specifically or the Muslims further inland.

In the fourteenth century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi mentions the inhabitants of Zeila country were fond of the narcotic khat leaf grown in the region. One of the earliest accounts of coffee in text is by the sixteenth century Islamic scholar Ibn Hajar al-Haytami who writes about its development from a tree in the Zeila region.

The fifteenth century empress Eleni of Ethiopia was styled as "queen of Zeila" due to her Muslim upbringing and connection to the Hadiya Sultanate. The leaders of Adal were also often referred to as Zeila kings in texts most notably Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi conqueror of Abyssinia.

The seventeenth century saw the decline of Adal, described as being divided into smaller separate states due to the “long and bloody” wars waged on Abyssinia. According to American geographer Samuel Augustus Mitchell, the neighbouring port of Berbera in the Somali country and its respective provinces were flourishing in trade stretching through depths of Ethiopia from the Emirate of Harar whose leader rules over the Somalis. However during this period, British government official James Henson noted that Berbera was ruled by the local merchant Sharmake Ali Saleh

Inhabitants


According to John Fage and I.M. Lewis, the main inhabitants of Zeila were ancestral to the Somali tribes who historically resided in the region. Ibn Fadlallah Al Umari’s account of Ifat states that the people of Zeila spoke a distinct language possibly of Semitic origin. He refers to this language as (Zayla’i) in his account. According to British explorer Richard Burton, al-Maqrizi mentions the "Kingdom of Zayla" using the Harari moniker.

With the spread of Islam into Africa in the seventh century, the Somali language, especially certain northern dialects were influenced immensely by Arabic as well as the Harari language with traditional titles such as Garad, Malaq, and Aw adopted by various Somali clans. The Zeila region itself positioned at the crossroads of two continents has often been included under the sphere of the South Semitic languages.

In the nineteenth-century the inhabitants of Zeila narrated to one British commissioner that the ruined town of Amud (in the Zeila region) was built by the ancient Harla people. The British commissioner attested to the similarities between the ruins of Amud and that of the walled city of Harar.