Muhammad Al-Sumaalee

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Shaykh Muhammad Al-Sumaalee (Somali: Sheekh Maxamed Soomaali, 1910-2005) was a Somali scholar who was a teacher in Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca. He influenced many of the prominent Islamic scholars of today.

[edit] Early life

Shaykh Al-Sumaalee was born in Ogaden in the village of Amaadin, the Shaykh remembered seeing as a child the Dervish leader Sayyid Abdullah Hassan who led one the fiercest colonial resistance wars in Africa during the scramble for Africa. From the time he was seven he sought knowledge and began memorizing the Quran and read it to his teacher. When the Shaykh was old enough to travel and had memorized all his teachers could teach, he travelled to other lands for knowledge.

At the age of 20 he began his travel through Ethiopia and studied the book Nadhm Al-'Umarbatee with Shaikh Muhammad Mu'allim Husayn and several other scholars. He stayed in Ethiopia for two years and then decided to go back home, during the journey he became very sick because of the difference in food between Ethiopia and Somalia, and his Paternal aunt helped him recover from it, after that she gave him an ox so he could sell it on the market and travel to his next destination which was Djibouti. There he studied the book Safeenah An-Najaa but did not finish it due to his short stay in Djibouti which only lasted for two months for he traveled by sea to Yemen. It is said that Shaykh Muhammad became so ill during his boattrip to Yemen that he swore he would never again travel by sea. He arrived in the Yemeni city of Zabeed and stayed there for three months, from there he went to Sana'a