Haqq ad-Din I

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Haqq ad-Din I (flourished 1328) was an amir of Ifat and the son of Nahwi b. Mansur b. Umar Walashma. According to I.M. Lewis, Amir Haqq "turned the sporadic and disjointed forays of his predecessors into a full-scale war of aggression, and apparently for the first time, couched his call to arms in the form of a religious war against the Abyssinian 'infidel'".[1]

He was encouraged by Sultan Al-Nasir Muhammad of Egypt to attack Ethiopia. Amir Haqq captured an envoy of the Emperor of Ethiopia, Amda Seyon, returning from Cairo, whom he attempted to forcibly convert to Islam, and when this failed killed the man.[2]

According to the Royal Chronicle of Amda Seyon, news of this outrage so angered the Emperor that he immediately rode off to Ifat with only seven other horsemen. The chronicler claims that once he arrived there, the Emperor slaughtered large numbers of Haqq ad-Din's men, and when a part of Amda Seyon's army caught up with them, they sacked the capital of Ifat and hauled away a considerable amount of gold, silver, bronze and lead, as well as considerable garments.[3]

He was later defeated in battle by Emperor Amda Seyon in 1328.[4]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ I.M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali, fourth edition (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), p. 25
  2. ^ J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (Oxford: Geoffrey Cumberlege for the University Press, 1952), p. 71.
  3. ^ Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Borderlands (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1997), p. 41
  4. ^ G.W.B. Huntingford (translator), The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 56.
Preceded by
Ali ibn Wali Asma		 Walashma dynasty Succeeded by
Sabr ad-Din I
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