What is a Nominal Muslim? An Arab Traveller’s Encounters with Muslim Communities in 17th-Century Ethiopia

The Yemeni intellectual al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad ibn Ṣalāḥ al-Ḥaymī, sent by the Yemeni ruler as an envoy to the court of the Christian Ethiopian emperor, left to us an interesting account of his journey undertaken in 1057–1058/1647–1648 from the Red Sea coast to the capital Gondar in the Ethiopian highlands. Shocked by what he perceived as a mere veneer of Islam over the primitive culture of the Afar nomads of eastern Ethiopia, he vividly describes and condemns the quintessential features of ‘nominal’ Islam. For him, the Islam practised by the Semitic-speaking Jabarti highlanders epitomised a far more civilised and profound Muslim religious tradition. Comparing al-Ḥaymī’s description of these two types of Muslim communities and analysing his terminology, the study attempts to define the elusive concept of a ‘nominal’ Muslim