The Islamic Courts Union: The ebb and flow of a Somali Islamist movement

The Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in Somalia was a social-religious movement with a political programme. This internally diverse movement emerged from local Islamic courts active in Mogadishu in the late 1990s. In the absence of state authority and public security in 2004, it responded to the social needs of local people and grew into a large militia force that, by late 2006, controlled much of southern Somalia. In December 2006 a military campaign by Ethiopia, in support of the Somali Transitional Federal Government, ousted the ICU. The movement subsequently declined, split and withdrew to transform itself into a new military grouping. Its socio-religious programme waned, its violent militant agenda re-emerged and it morphed into a new nationalist movement. This chapter considers the ICU as a social movement and questions its precedents, its social-reformist agenda and ideology, and its mobilizational procedures. The reasons for the rapid rise of the ICU in 2006 within the unstable and militarized society of southern Somalia have to be understood against the background of Muslim movements that existed in the country in earlier decades and unsuccessful attempts to establish a national government. This is marked by a mixture of political segmentation determined by the Somali clan-family system, socio-religious innovation, economic competition and local political manoeuvring in the stateless environment of southern Somalia since 1991. While local political dynamics are very important, the analysis also relates ongoing conflicts in Somali society to global geopolitics and Islamist radicalism.