SUFI POETRY IN SOMALI

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Somali began to be written in Latin script, first unofficially

and then as the National Orthography, Sheekh Caaqib dictated

his poems to dictation-typistsl and collated them in the form

11.

of typescript, a copy of which is available at the Academy of

Culture in Muqdisho and at the Library of the School of Oriental

and African Studie~. Thirdly, I have made use of tape-recordings

of Somali Sufi women's poetry, called sitaad , performed by

Khadiija Faarax Maxamuud, whom I have also interviewed, on tape,

about the nature and history of this poetry. A copy of the

tape is also deposited in the Tape Library of the School of

Oriental and African Studies and catalogued as SOM/XII,I.

Apart from the sources I have mentioned above, there

are also collections of recordings of Sufi poems in the

sound archives of Radio H&geysa, Radio Muqdisho and the

Academy of Culture in Muqdisho. I had access only to the

first of these collections in the summer of 1976. Apart

from Sheekh Caaqib's typescript I am not aware of any

written collection of Sufi poems in Somali. It seems that

this poetry lives almost exclusively in its oral form.

In my selection of represent~tive examples of poems

used in this thesis I was obviously influenced by the

limitations of their availability. But within the corpus

of tapes which I have examined I was guided to a large

extent by the subjective appeal of thei~ form and conten~.

This accounts for choosing a relatively large number of

poems composed by Sheekh Caaqib Cabdilaahi which are typical

par excellence of the Sufi poetry in Somali. I have found,

however, that my judgement here is not isolated since Sheekh