Hiiraan Online

You begin to behave in the village for you to be called a person, in our village parlance, tightening your Macawis so little beings do not sprout accidentally under your raging passion. It is exactly at this time of your growth that elders notice the change and one so perceptive poet of the past aptly summarized the emotions inside the body of a young man when he said “Baaluqa ismood wiil haduu buuryo-goys yahaye, bisqinbaa rag kuu gaysa oon biidna kuu tarine”.  So, the barbs the young man threw at Faysal Roble of Wardheernews are part of the adolescence in our thinking as Somalis, as we slouch towards the maturity of debating issues coolly and abstemiously. Hence, no need for overreaction.

I am not disappointed so much about the content, which in any case is nothing more than a gigantic spew of self-serving vitriolic sophism marinated in shameless personal attack and a hefty dose of maxims, proverbs and quotes which I could not relate either to each other or to the assertions they were supposedly meant to substantiate. I mean how does Moleire’s ‘uneducated fools’ saying link with Timacadde’s timeless Dugsi-male qabyaaladi line? It is clear someone is mistaking words for ideas and is taking the tuneful incantation of quotes as proof of the veracity of his accusations.

I am more worried about the moral decadence of our youth from whom I expect better things. Here you have a young man removing his shirt in defense of a clan ostensibly ‘wronged’ to badmouth an elder, and an acquaintance of his father for that matter, without any regard to known decorum and with embarrassing absence of self-introspection. It is even more disturbing that juveniles are thrown right into the raging fire of Somali clan politics/vendetta by manipulative elders, for it is patently clear the young man could not have twisted with such fist of rage without the agitation of men of older age who sought to throw him as a human pebble at a ‘villain’ they despised with passion. I find it supremely naïve to imagine that an article with such an overdose of insults, diatribe and pure undiluted violence escaped the attention of the editors of the website it was posted by fluke!!

It is hard to get the central argument of Mr. Mohamed Haji Ingiris’s article, which was a medley of all sorts of things: Faysal Roble, Somali history, Somali irredentism, Obama and the invention of automobiles, and even an entertaining fable about lions which learned or are about to learn how to write. But I will try to concentrate on the issues that concern Faysal Roble. The writer accused Faysal Roble of being an educated fool, a pseudo-intellectual, and a devil clannish.  Yet, the writer didn’t bother to produce a single shred of evidence or argument to tell the readers why he thinks Faysal is so. 

Instead, he felt it was enough to put a tiring catalogue of what great men of this and that age have said and apparently thought the adages would put paid to Faysal’s stature. It isn’t so easy. Is it? An objective reader would need to be presented with facts and material that he could glean through to form an opinion on indicted individuals before passing verdict. I would not even go as far as reminding the author that debating the ideas and actions of Faysal and not the person would have been appropriate. It should have been possible to present a judicious and sedate critique of the man if the intention was to do so. But I am under no illusion that the schemers knew what job they wanted the young man to do!

One of the crimes of Faysal in the eyes of the writer is his comments on Dr. Ali. Jima’le Ahmed’s book ‘the invention of Somalia’. I am not sure if Faysal actually said what he is accused of and under what context. I also can’t say if he had issue only with the title or with the content in the book. Mr. Mohamed Haji, the writer, could have elaborated on that. And if it turns out Faysal is wrong in his assumption the title was plagiarized and if we assume his opinion was solely based on the existence of other books with similar title, why would the writer want us to believe Faysal was driven by malice against Dr. Ali Jim’ale? Is it a possibility Faysal might have made a genuine mistake?  Is he not entitled to the presumption of innocence until found guilty doctrine or doesn’t he deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt? Again, I want to repeat I am not privy to whatever Faysal is alleged to have said about the book. But the link between someone’s comments on other people’s work and bad intent is not scientific and not automatic as well.

The writer argues “over the years, I have observed him [faysal] blemishing highly-reputed personalities, like President Ahmed Silanyo, President of Somaliland; Abdullahi Ahmed Addou, the longest serving Somali Ambassador to the United States; Ahmed Gure, founder of Hiiraan Online and Yusuf-Garaad Omar, Head of BBC Somali, for the sole reason of not hailing from his clan-family.” What is the common denominator in the list of the personalities presented here, save one name [Silaanyo] sprinkled to hoodwink?

Is the young man arguing Faysal did not speak out against Sheikh Sharif, Rayale Kahin, Dau’d Mohamed Ali, Ismail Omer Ghele, Abduallhi Yusuf, and many other Somali public figures on issues? Where is the evidence? Far more important, who think those personalities the writer named are ‘highly-reputed’? Mr. Mohamed? Kofi Anan? The Noble Peace Commission? Isn’t that subjective? For instance, the bulk of my own Ogaden clan don’t want to hear the name Yusuf Garad of the BBC, because they think he stifles information about the oppression in the Ogaden region, rightly or wrongly?  For the record, I personally think Yusuf is a very objective journalist and a competent editor. Different people would have different opinions in the case of the others too! So, the writer should go easy with his plaudits.  

In fact, let me rattle the young writer a bit on a more general issue. In the first place, he must learn to tell between correlation and causality in debates, as a rule of thumb. You cannot offer conclusions on the basis of ‘if one spoke against so and so, and so and so belong to group A, the person is undisputedly against group A’. It is a fatuous conclusion, made even worse when you add the dimension of selective short-listing to come up with the list of individuals spoken against, or spoken for! 

Secondly, in the area of social science discourse, where matters are more complex than right or wrong, guilty or not guilty, the law of conclusive generalizations does not exist. There is no case law in social sciences, only examples and opinions arising from interpreting them. These opinions stand or collapse by their degree of plausibility. They do not become truisms. In debates like the ones he is advancing here and there on Somali history, intellectualism, and the like, it hardly helps the young writer to point at all by citing two, three, ten scholars as if these cited scholars are God’s deputies, and as if these set iron-clad precedents for cognizing and even moulding intervening reality.

They don’t. Molière, Amos Wilson, Dr Mohamed Enow, Dr Abdikadir Enow, Dr. Ali Jima’ale, Catherine Besteman, Francesca Declich, Virginia Luling, Lee Cassanelli, Gramsci, Hisham Sharabi, Barack Obama and all the endless list of literati’s, project mere viewpoints. The views of these writers and scholars are not canonical. In any case, to these few writers which the young writer itemizes as in exhibits in a criminal case, I can spew hundreds more with contrary viewpoints, a thousand more who are dismissive of these, his thought heroes. I have no intention of discussing whether Somali History has been ‘Dervishized’ and by who, and whether the reinvention of Somali history should involve retroactive balancing act and the recreation of history. I see troubling trends in the young man’s many unguarded postulates on Somali history and the way forward, but that debate is for another day.

By the way, I found the references presented on Somali irredentism most superfluous to the moral of the article. In the end, I could only take it as yet another pretention of eruditeness.  When we were not told what Faysal’s thoughts on the issues are, why would we need to go and check those materials? They could happen to be a good read, and Saddia Touvel’s book is certainly enjoyable for a Somali, but which of Faysal’s ‘misguided’ claims would they refute?

I am not here to defend Faysal Roble. I don’t know him personally. But from what I know of his contributions to Wardheernews, I find him very objective and genuinely patriotic. And a good writer, with sound analytical and emotional intelligence to boot!  I don’t think the article gave us good reasons to doubt the morals of Mr. Faysal. I also think the young writer should reflect on his article with sober head. Manners are important and one has to choose his battles! Insulting your elders, no matter how evil they appear to you, is not justifiable! I also confess that I will have trouble seeing Hiiraan Online the same way again!

Finally, Isn’t it a cruel irony that the young writer actually never thought Faysal could be comforted by this very quote of Moliere, which in his fondness of any fancy quotes that look studious Mr. Mohamed Haji (Ingiris) added to his article: “a wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behaviour is patience and moderation”. If I were Faysal, I would!