Transfer of knowledge in twentieth-century Muslim Ethiopia: The library of al-sayh al-hagg Habib from Wällo

Abstract

Although Muslims in Ethiopia are a large part of the total population, nevertheless, their literary tradition and their cultural heritage have, until the present, hardly been studied by the academic community. The present article aims to shed light on the Islamic manuscript tradition in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on several codices owned by al-Šayḫ Ḥabīb, a renowned scholar and respected walī from Wällo, in northeastern Ethiopia.