Bu'ur Ba'ayr

Somali · mortal · Somali traditional religion; continuing · mortal

Bu'ur Ba'ayr is the pagan king and magician of the legends attached to Aw-Barkhadle (anciently Dogor), the great shrine town near Hargeisa. Tradition describes him as an oppressive religious leader who claimed the right to lie with every bride for the first six nights of her marriage, a motif that Sada Mire interprets as the sacral consecration of marriages and the conferral of divine fertility by a priest-king of the pre-Islamic Waaq religion. When the Muslim saint Aw Barkhadle (Yusuf al-Kawneyn) came to the country, the two met in a duel of mystical strength: Bu'ur Ba'ayr passed through the hill by his magic, but on the final attempt the saint invoked God and the rock closed on him forever, and the people accepted Islam. The Yibir, a small hereditary lineage of soothsayers and amulet-makers, are held to descend from him, and the customary gift called samanyo, paid to Yibir who bless newborns and newlyweds, is explained as the never-ending blood-price for his death. In some accounts he bears the name Mohamed Hanif, with Bu'ur Ba'ayr as a mocking epithet; historians treat him as a legendary rather than a documented ruler, but his story remains the classic Somali narrative of the passage from the old religion to Islam.

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