Tales of Travelers through the Horn of African Coasts: Saila, Siyaro, Sheikh Issa, and the Issa/Dir
The history of Zeila (Saila) and Sheikh Issa is a palimpsest, written and rewritten by navigators, monks, colonial translators, and modern archaeologists. Each source preserves a different fragment of the same layered chronicle. The external testimonies—from the fifteenth-century navigator Ahmad ibn Majid to the French archaeological team of Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch—do not describe a static port. They trace a cosmopolitan hub where trade, faith, and the gradual Islamization of the Horn met, and where the Issa (Ciise), a sub-clan of the Dir, came to play a foundational role. External accounts trace that role as especially visible from the eighteenth century onward; local tradition pushes it much further back, to Sheikh Issa, to the fabled port, and to the Dir/Issa lineage. Saila emerges as a maritime gateway whose identity was inseparable from Sheikh Issa and from the wider tension between the Muslim coast and the Christian highlands.
The oldest thread is the Arab geographical tradition. Ahmad ibn Majid, the fifteenth-century “Lion of the Raging Sea,” whose sailing manuals guided vessels from the Red Sea to East Africa, did not speak of Zeila alone. He framed the Gulf of Berbera and Siyaro as part of a single Somali maritime world. Zeila was already a known landfall on his routes, a working harbour in the monsoon-driven trade linking Arabia, India, and the Horn. Goods from the African interior flowed through it to international markets across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. For Arab, Persian, and Indian merchants, it was a critical node. Ibn Majid’s navigational knowledge provides the economic backdrop against which the local history of Sheikh Issa and the Issa clan must be understood.
Medieval Islamic chronicles deepen that picture. Al-Maqrizi and Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari describe the Ifat Sultanate as a powerful Muslim state with Zeila as its principal port and a gateway for the Islamization of the interior. The Ifat and Adal Sultanates integrated the coast into a larger political narrative. Yet a Christian counterpoint survives. A monk from Bugna, an Agaw Christian region in the Ethiopian highlands, left testimony later gathered by the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi in his Ethiopian itineraries of 1519–1524, collected in Venice in the early 1520s. The Chronicle of ase Amda Seyon I mentions a regional army contingent, sarawita Bugna, posted to eastern Ethiopia in 1332, showing that the Christian kingdom was acutely aware of the Muslim polities on its eastern flank. In Zorzi’s collection, preserved “from Ethiopian monks who visited Italy,” Zeila appears as the enemy’s gate: the port through which the “king of Zeila” would send envoys and launch battles against Christian Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. It was, from the highland perspective, the door through which Islam entered the Horn.
Another coastal tradition, Siyaro, near Berbera, adds a religious layer. The Somali name Siyaro is a corruption of the Arabic Ziyarat, a place of pious visitation. Sayyid Yusuf al-Baghdadi visited there in 1266–7 and found a port occupied by a “traditionalist magician.” Preserved in local Somali hagiography, the anecdote illustrates the gradual and often contested process of Islamization along the coast—a process in which figures like Sheikh Issa became pivotal.
European travellers and their later editors added their own observations. Ludovico di Varthema, who visited Zeila between 1503 and 1508, recorded: “There is an abundance of provisions in this city, and there are many merchants here.” His account, translated for the Hakluyt Society in 1863, became one of the most quoted European descriptions of medieval Zeila. Hakluyt Society editions also preserved Portuguese narratives of the wars of Imam Ahmad, the “king of Zeila,” against the Christian empire. These show Zeila as the political heart of the Adal Sultanate and the launchpad for the sixteenth-century jihad that nearly extinguished the Solomonic dynasty. Zorzi’s itineraries, collected in Venice in the early 1520s, supplied valuable geographical information about Ethiopia and the routes from Zeila to the interior. A further, obscure “Pilatte” reference may belong to the same genre of travel or geographical writing that fed European knowledge of the region, reinforcing the pattern of external observation.
Local tradition anchors these external reports in the figure of Sheikh Issa. Early Islamic books and Somali oral tradition call him ʿĪsā b. Aḥmad, an Arab/Dir shaykh who came from Arabia to the Somali coast. He settled between Rugay and Siyaro(30km South of Berbera) then in Dogarita(now Lughaya) in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and from him descended the Issa clan, a sub-clan of the Dir. His tomb, still venerated at Maydh, became the clan’s spiritual anchor, while his legacy remained deeply embedded in Zeila and its district where Sheikh Issa became known as Sheikh Issa Al Zailaci. Zeila city was historically inhabited by a mix of Somalis, Afars, and Arabs merchants, but the Issa sub-clan of the Dir is especially well represented in the wider Zeila triangle-Guban; other Dir, Darood, and Hawiye clan merchants were also present in the town itself. One tradition even claims that in the ninth century Zeila was the capital of the Issa, the city of Sheikh Issa Al Zailaci, linking the saint to the town’s early Islamic identity and to the early Ifat Sultanate. The Issa later spread toward what is now Goubet/Djibouti, through the Awdal region of now Somaliland, and into the Sitti Zone bordered by the Hawash River, now an Ethiopian Somali province, with Zeila and Lughaya as regional historic coastal towns. The intronisation of all nineteen Issa Ogases at Saila testifies that the port town is remembered as the homeland of the Issa clan. Dir clans trace their Arabian connections through Aqeel ibn Abi Talib, linking the Somali lineage to the family of the Prophet—a claim that gave the Dir/Issa both prestige and a sense of Arab origin. For centuries, the Issa and their Dir cousins were the human fabric of Zeila’s port town: the port was their window to the world, while the interior or hinterland was the pasturelands of the Issa.
Modern scholarship has tried to reconstruct this deep past through archaeology and critical history. The French team led by François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, including geographer Régis Bernard and archaeologist Frédéric Champagne, both of the French Inrap, undertook a major investigation, “Le port de Zeyla et son arrière-pays au Moyen Âge,” published in 2011. In their edited volume on Muslim spaces in the medieval Horn of Africa, they challenged the old prejudice that Islam was a late and marginal presence. Combining a “return to written sources” with new archaeological data, they aimed to “rethink the development and history of the port of Zeila.” They argued that Zeila was not a transient trading post but the centre of a settled, urbanised Muslim civilisation that flourished long before the sixteenth century. Its merchants dealt in slaves, ivory, frankincense, and textiles, connecting the Ethiopian highlands to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, Zeila was the commercial outlet for the Horn of Africa and a primary interface with the Red Sea(Bab Al Mandab-the port of lamantation) and Indian Ocean worlds, though the site later suffered neglect and destruction. Today it is a quiet town of ruins—a “deserted port” whose former glory the archaeologists have helped prove was real.
That memory did not disappear in the modern era. During the 1991 Zeila crisis provoked by the Somalia-SNM war, Issa militiamen of the United Somali Front (USF) briefly seized control of Zeila and the surrounding Saila Triangle. Their grievances included mistreatment by their the allied SNM, but the conflict was not merely territorial. It reflected deeper fears within the SNM that the USF might merge with Djibouti, and it showed how historical animosities and strategic interests could produce unexpected shifts in power and territorial claims. The failed bid was an armed attempt to reassert an Issa political claim on the ancient port, Saila—a reminder that the memory of Sheikh Issa’s coastal domain never fully faded.
The tale of Saila and Sheikh Issa, then, is not a single authoritative chronicle. It emerges from an intertextual dialogue among Arab navigators, Ethiopian monks, European travellers, colonial translators, and modern archaeologists. Ibn Majid saw a sailor’s landmark; the monk of Bugna saw the enemy’s gate; Varthema saw markets; the Hakluyt Society preserved the memory for empire; the Issa trace their name to a shaykh who landed on its shores; and Hirsch, Fauvelle-Aymar, Bernard, and Champagne have dug into its soil. Together these sources chronicle the rise and resilience of a port city and a clan that, for centuries, stood at the crossroads of Africa, Arabia, and the wider world. Zeila today may be quiet, but in these layered tales it remains the eternal Saila—the ancestral shore of Sheikh Issa, a clan of the Dir.
