| Summary: | The region of Wallo, in central Ethiopia, was dominated between the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth by a dynasty of Muslim Imams who were called Māmmadoč. They distinguished themselves by their highly combative disposition in the conflicts between regional powers that characterized the period called “The Era of the Princes” (end of the eighteenth c. – middle of the nineteenth c.). The rare historical sources related to this period describe these Māmmadoč imāms as fanatical Muslims, that were aimed at destroying their Christian neighbours. However, these representations can be put under different perspectives through unpublished notes collected in the years 1840 by the French traveller Arnauld d’Abbadie, from an informant of Wallo who seems to have lived in the entourage of these imāms. The history of this dynasty, as it is narrated by these notes, reveals that these imāms had very ambiguous relations to religious affiliations. These Muslim leaders were very strongly, even violently, engaged in the defence and diffusion of their faith, but at each generation they maintained nevertheless close links with the Christian religion, often concretized by matrimonial alliances. Most of these imāms were of Christian mother and lived among their Christian collaterals during their childhood. Then they reverted to Islam and married in their turn Christian wives. These series of interreligious alliances is unique by the fact of its repetition on several generations. In this way, the Māmmadoč imams seem to have been the precursors of practices of matrimonial mixity and reversible conversion which became a standard later in the region of Wallo.
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