Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi
Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, whom the Ethiopians called Gragn, the left-handed, was the imam of the sultanate of Adal who in fourteen years of jihad overran three-quarters of Christian Ethiopia, beat its emperor at Shimbra Kure in 1529 and drove him to die a fugitive, burned Aksum and the monasteries of the highlands with their manuscripts, and was killed in 1543 by a musket ball from one of the four hundred Portuguese arquebusiers the next emperor had brought in to save him. The war he made is the event Ethiopian history is divided by, and the Oromo migrations that filled the country he had emptied were its consequence. He was born about 1506 near Harar, a soldier of the sultan's guard, and rose by killing the sultan's governor and taking the leadership of the reforming Muslims who thought the sultans too soft on the Christians. He married the daughter of the old emir and took the title of imam rather than sultan, keeping a puppet sultan in Harar. He united the Somali and Afar clans of the lowlands behind a holy war and bought firearms and gunners from the Ottomans of Zabid across the Red Sea, which the Ethiopians did not have. At Shimbra Kure in March 1529 his small army broke the emperor Lebna Dengel's much larger one, and from 1531 he invaded the highlands in earnest, taking Shewa, Amhara and Lasta, burning the churches of Lalibela's region and the cathedral of Aksum in 1535, and forcing the conversion of whole provinces. His chronicler Arab Faqih's Conquest of Abyssinia records the plunder church by church. Lebna Dengel died in 1540 and his son Galawdewos raised the war again with the Portuguese under Cristovao da Gama, Vasco's son, who landed at Massawa in 1541. The imam beat and captured da Gama in August 1542 and had him beheaded, and then, at Wayna Daga near Lake Tana on 21 February 1543, met Galawdewos and the surviving Portuguese and was shot in the chest; his army broke at the news and his wife Bati del Wambara escaped to Harar with the remnant. The reconquest of the highlands took the Christians a generation, and the Oromo took the rest.
- Lived: 1506 CE – 1543 CE
- Nationality: Somali
- Roles: imam, general, ruler
