is "a well known town in El Maghrib, and a race located between El Zanj—Zanzibar and the Negrotic coast—and El Habash[1]: they are descended from the Himyar chiefs Sanháj (Sinhagia) (صنهاج) and Sumámah (ثمامه), and they arrived at the epoch of the conquest of Africa by the king Afríkús (Scipio Africanus?)." A few details upon the subjects of mutilation and excision prove these to have been the progenitors of the Somal,[2] who are nothing but a slice of the great Gala nation Islamized and Semiticized by repeated immigrations from Arabia. In the Kamus we also read that Samal (سمل) is the name of the father of a tribe, so called because he thrust out (سَمَلَ, samala) his brother's eye.[3] The Shaykh Jami, a celebrated genealogist, informed me that in a.h. 666 = A.D. 1266–7, the Sayyid Yusuf al-Baghdadi visited the port of Siyaro near Berberah, then occupied by an infidel magician, who passed through mountains by the power of his gramarye: the saint summoned to his aid Mohammed bin Yunis al-Siddiki, of Bayt al-Fakih in Arabia, and by their united prayers a hill closed upon
- ↑ This word is generally translated Abyssinia; Oriental geographers, however, use it in a more extended sense. The Turks have held possessions in "Habash," in Abyssinia never.
- ↑ The same words are repeated in the Infak al-Maysur fi Tarikh bilad al-Takrur (Appendix to Denham and Clapperton's Travels, No. xii.), again confounding the Berbers and the Somal. Afrikus, according to that author, was a king of Al-Yaman who expelled the Berbers from Syria!
- ↑ The learned Somal invariably spell their national name with an initial Sin, and disregard the derivation from Saumal (صومال), which would allude to the hardihood of the wild people. An intelligent modern traveller derives "Somali" from the Abyssinian "Soumahe," or heathens, and asserts that it corresponds with the Arabic word Kafir or unbeliever, the name by which Edrisi, the Arabian geographer, knew and described the inhabitants of the Affah (Afar) coast, to the east of the Straits of Bab al-Mandib. Such derivation is, however, unadvisable.
