bro/sis These western kids are quite ignorant. They think the 20-30 years of forced Barre regime xijab-less and night club secularism is Somali culture. I think they value western customs more than our own and are super freaking ignorant on our history and culture. They like to talk about "Pre-Islamic Somalis" as if we had any value to the world before Islam. we weren't Persians or Byzantines or Axumites. we were some unknown backward Nomads with no name. All of the Somali peninsula belonged to other people not Somalis and places like Muqdisho was a Persian colony inhabited by Persians and lowland other Cushites. all those pre-Islamic coastal cities and states from Zeila to Xafun to Muqdisho were other people's not ours.
with our Sultanates we completely Islamized and eventually Somalized almost all the ethnicities in the Horn of Africa. Ajuran Somali Sultanate conquered the entire south of Somali and NFD and turned the natives 100% Muslim. All the Muslim Oromos and Afar and minority Ethiopian tribes were Islamized by Somalis and If the Portuguese empire didn't save them, Abyssinia, which successfully defeated Arab Umayyad conquest and which has existed as a state since before 1st century AD, would have been completely conquered and Islamized by Somali Sultanate of Adal.
bump all these conquests and Sultanates do you forget about our Scholars who contributed to Islam? Zaylici being the most famous one? and all the less known Somali Muslim scholars that were in Qairo and Dimishiq and Baghdad since the Umayyad-Abassids period ? Also, are you forgetting what makes our food so great and diverse and the centuries and centuries of Somali Muslim traders becoming a dominant force in the historic Indian ocean trade? Are you forgetting who contributed to the spread of Islam in South East Asia?
We have literally become the most successful single ethnicity in the Horn of Africa and possibly the entire Africa because no single ethnicity has achieved all this.
Could we have achieved all this glory without Islam? I don't think so! without Islam we were nothing. It brought great honor to our people. We have everything to thank for Islam because it has built our culture and identity from absolutely nothing. Alxamdullah