A Walled City

Traveling onward to eastern Ethiopia, the country's past and present became even clearer for me in the thousand-year-old walled city of Harar, a place rich in Islamic culture.

Travel writer Paul Theroux, in his book "Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town," described Harar as "one of the great destinations in Africa, for its exoticism, its special kind of fanaticism and its remoteness ... unique in its languages and customs."

Exotic? Certainly. Fanatic people? Some. Remote? Absolutely. Worth the hassle? Definitely.

It's easy to believe local claims that Harar is the fourth holiest Muslim city after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. It has the most mosques per square mile of any city in the world — 99 within the 1-½ square miles of the walled town — and eight more in the sprawling community outside the wall.

My guide, Endale, led me through narrow alleys to a Koranic school. Children, seated three or four to a desk, were exuberantly singing songs. Their instructor, a bearded man in his 60s, used a wooden tablet, probably like that of his predecessors during the last 1,000 years.

At Ras Tafari House, I saw the home of the former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled until 1974. It's now occupied by a holy man who doubles as a healer, sleeping by day and, according to a hand-scrawled sign out front, curing by night anything from cancer to hemorrhoids to mental illness.

As I left Harar, I wondered how an estimated 130,000 Muslims and Christians in this city have peacefully lived side-by-side for generations.

Back home, I'm still grappling with that question and many others about Ethiopia. Does the Ark of the Covenant still exist? If so, was I only mere yards from it? And why does that man risk his life every night to feed wild hyenas?

The answers to those and many other questions, as Tafesse, the former national tourism minister, says, lie somewhere in Ethiopia's "checkered, illustrious and tumultuous history."

Dean R. Owen is a freelance writer and works for Federal Way-based World Vision.