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Harar, Ethiopia – When Abdallah Ali Sherif was growing up in eastern Ethiopia, his parents never spoke about the history of his city.

“When I asked my parents about our history, they told me we didn’t have one,” the kind-faced 75-year-old recalls as he reclines on a thin mattress on the floor of his home in Harar’s old walled city. Shelves of dusty cassettes line the walls and old newspapers lie scattered about the floor.

The father of five and grandfather of 17 pauses to pluck some khat leaves to chew as he explains: “Our parents were afraid to teach us about our culture or our history.”

‘Peeking through a window’

For centuries, Harar, with its colourful clay houses and narrow cobblestone streets, was a centre of Islamic scholarship and home to a thriving manuscript culture producing Qurans, legal texts and prayer books in Arabic and Ajami, a modified Arabic script used to write Indigenous African languages.

Nestled atop a plateau that overlooks deserts and savannas linking the coastal lowlands and central highlands of Ethiopia and Somalia, in the 16th  century, Harar became the capital of the Adal Sultanate, which at its height controlled large parts of modern-day Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea.

Governed by powerful Muslim rulers, it was situated along trade routes that traversed the Red Sea to connect the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.

Then, in 1887, Harar’s military was defeated by the forces of Menelik II, and the city was forcefully absorbed into a Christian empire.

The following decades were shaped by state repression, social discrimination and the erosion of the city’s Islamic culture and institutions.

Arabic street signs were replaced with Amharic ones, Harar’s largest mosque was turned into an Ethiopian Orthodox Church and numerous Islamic educational centres were demolished. Severe restrictions were placed on religious practices and education – once a central part of Harar’s identity.

It was against this backdrop that Sherif grew up.

“We learned from a young age that if we expressed our culture or talked openly about our history, then we could end up in the prisons,” he explains, smacking his wrists together to mimic handcuffs.

Then, in 1991, ethnic federalism, which organised and defined federated regional states by ethnicity, was implemented throughout the country, allowing newfound religious and cultural freedom. The Harari people now belonged to the Harari region, with Harar as its capital.

Ever since, Sherif has been on a mission: To explore his city’s cultural identity by collecting artefacts, from old music cassettes to minted coins and, most importantly, manuscripts.

After years of painstaking searches going from household to household, he collected enough items to open Ethiopia’s first private museum, Abdallah Sherif Museum, 14 years ago in the hope of reconnecting Harar’s people with their history. The collection of hundreds of old manuscripts has become a particular passion.

“Each book I find, it feels like I am peeking through a window into a beautiful and rich culture that was almost forgotten,” he says.

To preserve these manuscripts, Sherif has also revitalised the ancient tradition of bookbinding. By tracing the last Hararis with knowledge of this art form, he has brought a once-extinct practice back to life.

A city of manuscripts

The production of manuscripts – as a way of sharing and safeguarding religious knowledge – was an important aspect of Harar’s culture, says Nuraddin Aman, an assistant professor of philology at Addis Ababa University.

Manuscript making is believed to have emerged in the city in the 13th century, when an Islamic scholar, known colloquially as Sheikh Abadir, is said to have come from what is today Saudi Arabia and settled in the area with about 400 followers.

According to Sana Mirza, a researcher at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University who specialises in Islamic art, Harari scripts were influenced by Indian Gujarati, Yemeni, and Egyptian Mamluki styles.

“The Indo-African relationship was very deep,” explains Ahmed Zekaria, an expert in Islamic and Harari history. “There was a strong linkage between India and Africa for centuries before the British arrived.”

Some Qurans found in Harar use a unique cursive calligraphic script said to have been developed in India’s northern Bihar region at about the 14th century and rarely seen outside India.

Manuscript makers developed their own style that merged local creativity and outside influences.

Within families, manuscripts were considered sacred heirlooms passed down through generations. Each Harari house had at least two or three manuscripts – often, the Quran, Hadiths, or other religious texts – Zekaria says.

According to Aman, the structured production of manuscripts made the city unique. Artisans were required to get permission from a local Islamic scholar – someone descended from Sheikh Abadir or one of his followers – to produce each religious manuscript. Then, before circulation, they needed approval from the incumbent emir. Still, full-time scribes were rare. “Most of them were farmers and produced manuscripts in their free time,” says Zekaria.

Harar also grew into a centre for bookbinding with artisans making leather covers to protect manuscripts, and people travelling to the city to learn the craft.

When Harar was absorbed into the Ethiopian empire, education centres, once responsible for manuscript production, were shut down or destroyed. Without new manuscripts, bookbinding disappeared. Meanwhile, madrasas (religious schools) were shuttered, and children were forced to attend government schools teaching only Amharic.

Sherif was born into a middle-class Muslim family in 1950. He grew up during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 and under whom repression of Muslims escalated.

In the 1940s, Harari elites united with their Somali neighbours inside Ethiopia to organise a rebellion, advocating for Harar to join Somalia. When Selassie caught wind of this, he deployed thousands of soldiers into Harar. Mass arrests followed, leading to dozens of Hararis being imprisoned for years without charge or trial. Selassie’s forces confiscated the properties and belongings – including cherished manuscripts – of residents believed to be rebellion supporters. An estimated 10,000 Hararis fled to other Ethiopian cities or Somalia and Middle Eastern countries.

While Sherif says he grew up knowing he was Harari, he did not know what that meant outside of being Muslim and speaking the Harari language. Fearing state repression, Harari families were forced to hide their histories from their children. But as a teenager, Sherif could no longer suppress his curiosity about his identity.

In high school, he remembers asking his teacher if the city ever had Muslim leaders.

“The teacher responded that we had no leaders outside the Ethiopian Christian ones. After this, the other [Christian] students began teasing me about not having a history,” he recounts.

“I was taught that Haile Selassie was our king, and there was one country, one history, one language, and one culture,” he continues.

“Our community was too afraid of the state to challenge this or to teach us about our real history. They feared we would become angry over it and fight against the state.”

In 1974, when Sherif was in his 20s, the Derg, a Marxist-Leninist military group, overthrew Selassie.

The group brutally suppressed any opposition. Half a million Ethiopians were killed and thousands were crippled as a result of torture.

When the 1977-1978 Ogaden War broke out, with Somalia attempting to annex Ethiopia’s Ogaden region that is inhabited by ethnic Somalis, the Derg accused Hararis of collaborating and carried out massacres of civilians in Harari neighbourhoods of Addis Ababa.

In their region, Hararis were still the land-owning class, and many were completely dispossessed of their livelihoods as the Derg sought to eradicate private land ownership. Harari youth – like young men from all communities – were forcibly conscripted into the army. When an anti-Derg resistance movement emerged in Harar, the repression increased, while more Hararis moved abroad to escape it.

Today, Hararis are a minority in their region, with more living abroad than in Harari.

‘Missing pieces of myself’

Like many Harari families, when Sherif graduated from high school, his parents began educating him on who he really was.

He was bewildered to discover that what he’d been taught in school was a lie. “My whole life, I have suffered from a severe identity crisis,” says Sherif, sighing loudly and tossing a leafless khat stalk to the side. “I have always felt like there were pieces of myself that were missing – and I couldn’t feel peace until I found them.”

After high school, Sherif began a science degree in Addis Ababa, but dropped out within a year when he found out the woman he loved, who was his then-girlfriend, was being forced by her family to marry another man in Harar. “There was nothing in my life more important to me than her,” he says, with a wide, bashful smile. He returned home to marry this woman, Saeda Towfiqe – today his most enthusiastic supporter – and began working in the family business.

It wasn’t until 1991, when the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), overthrew the Derg and implemented a system of ethnic federalism designed to promote minority ethnic and religious rights, that Hararis, along with various other groups, suddenly found themselves with the freedom to develop and express their cultures and histories.

“I became mad to understand my history,” explains Sherif, the tone of his speech rising sharply as he smacks his head. “I really became mad.”

Taking advantage of this opening, Sherif began collecting hundreds of old cassettes of traditional Harari music. But he quickly realised that the history he sought existed in the old manuscripts still owned by many families in Harar. Through these religious and legal manuscripts, Sherif was able to glimpse the rich intellectual life of his ancestors.

“Each manuscript I found added a missing piece to a puzzle,” he explains.​​

Over centuries, families had developed a practice of conserving and transmitting manuscripts to the next generation, Aman explains.

Manuscripts were inherited or given at significant life events, such as weddings, the birth of a child, or during religious ceremonies. Scholars and religious leaders also gave them to students as a token of appreciation, “thereby fostering an environment of knowledge sharing and manuscript mobility”, says Aman.

People kept the manuscripts wrapped in cloth and would only uncover them on special occasions.

At first, Sherif, who was 40 when he began his project, purchased the manuscripts. “Eventually, when the community saw the importance of what I was doing for our heritage, they started donating manuscripts and other artefacts to me.”

But Sherif found that the covers and bindings of many manuscripts he acquired were in disarray.

The last bookbinder in Harar was Kabir Ali Sheikh, a local Quran teacher who learned the craft from elders and kept the tradition alive until his death in 1993. The ancient art of Harari bookbinding died with him. But Sherif was able to learn the traditional process from a few of Ali’s former students. He also went to train in Addis Ababa and Morocco.

“If you don’t bind the books, then you will lose them,” Sherif says. “Collecting manuscripts is useless if you do not also work on their restoration and preservation. If you lose just one page, you can lose the whole book. Beautiful things need to be protected and covered.”

It took Sherif two years of practice to perfect the art. He is now considered one of the best bookbinders in Africa, Zekaria says.

Sherif has strictly adhered to the traditional Harari way of bookbinding by using old ornamental stamps retrieved from around Harar – which are also displayed at his museum – to block-press motifs onto the front and back of covers, in the same way his ancestors did.

Ensuring a history stays alive

In 1998, Sherif opened his private museum in his house. But, in 2007, a year after Harar’s old town with its unique architecture was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the regional government provided Sherif with the double-storey former residence of Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael, the father of Selassie who served as governor of Harar under Menelik II, to use for his museum. The museum reopened to the public in 2011.

Sherif’s museum now houses the world’s largest collection of Islamic manuscripts from Harar, numbering about 1,400. Almost half are Qurans, one of which is more than 1,000 years old. There are also more than 600 old music recordings, tools, swords, coins, and items of jewellery, basketry, and weaponry.

Over time, Sherif’s museum has transformed from a space showcasing Harar’s cultural heritage to one actively revitalising it. In a side room of the museum is a manuscript conservation room with locally assembled tools and equipment for restoring manuscripts, with a particular focus on bookbinding.

Scholars are still tracking down various manuscripts from Harar that are scattered around the world, Zekaria says. Most of them left with European travellers, especially in the 19th century, when colonialists were expanding into the Horn of Africa. Many of these manuscripts are preserved in Italy, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In the US, the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC alone has 215 manuscripts from Harar.

In the meantime, Sherif continues to look after the manuscripts he acquires.

“When I first get a manuscript, I carefully clean it,” he explains. He removes dust and dirt, adds new pages to damaged manuscripts, and fills in the missing text. He covers the paper in transparent paper and has bound and digitised almost all the books.

“Each new piece of information I get about my history, it opens up a new world for me and I realise how far we still have to go to preserve our culture,” Sherif says.

About a decade ago, Sherif began training dozens of youths around Harar in bookbinding and has also led training in neighbouring Somaliland.

One of his students was Elias Bule, a soft-spoken 31-year-old, who was first hired as a security guard at Sherif’s museum. After a few months, “Sherif asked me if I wanted to learn the Indigenous way of bookbinding,” explains Bule, as he sorts through scattered pages of an old manuscript in the museum’s conservation workshop. “Of course, I accepted immediately.”

Bule is now employed full-time at the museum, supporting Sherif’s various endeavours and giving tours to visitors.

India and Pakistan are in danger of a military conflict, with Pakistan and Pakistan standing on the verge of a standoff after 11 days when gunmen killed 26 people in the picturesque Baisaran valley in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The nuclear-armed neighbours have each announced a series of tit-for-tat steps against the other since the attack on April 22, which India has implicitly blamed Pakistan for, even as Islamabad has denied any role in the killings.

India has withdrawn from the Indus Waters Treaty, which establishes a water-sharing arrangement for Pakistan. A previous ceasefire line between them in Kashmir, a disputed region that they both claim in its entirety, was recognized as a Line of Control (LoC) by both countries in the 1972 Simla Agreement, which threatened to force Pakistan to withdraw from the agreement. Both nations have also expelled each other’s citizens and scaled back their diplomatic missions.

Despite a ceasefire agreement in place since 2021, the most recent upheaval follows a 40-person fatal attack on Indian soldiers in Pulwama, in Indian-administered Kashmir, that India launched air strikes on Pakistani soil in 2019. They have recently exchanged fire across the LoC.

And the region is now on edge, amid growing expectations that India might launch a military operation against Pakistan this time too.

However, both nations have also spoken with their counterparts diplomatically. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pleaded with S Jaishankar and Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, to find a de-escalation on Wednesday. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called his Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, on Thursday to condemn the attack and offered “strong support” to India.

Sharif met with China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, three of Pakistan’s allies, to ask for their assistance. He also urged the two Gulf countries’ ambassadors to “impress upon India to de-escalate and defuse tensions.”

Moeed Yusuf, a Pakistani national security adviser (NSA) under former prime minister Imran Khan, spoke with Al Jazeera to understand how Pakistani strategists who have worked on ties with India view what might come next.

Prior to his role as NSA, Yusuf also worked as a special adviser to Khan on matters related to national security starting in December 2019, four months after the Indian government, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, revoked the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir.

Yusuf, who is based in Lahore, is currently the vice chancellor of a private university and the author of and editor of several books on regional security and South Asia. His most recent book, Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments: US Crisis Management in South Asia, was published in 2018.

Al Jazeera: How would you rate the actions taken by both sides so far in the crisis?

Moeed Yusuf: Pakistan and India have long struggled with managing crises. They don’t have a bilateral crisis management mechanism, which is the fundamental concern.

Relying on third parties as the main crisis management tool has been used by both parties, with the intention of preventing both parties from escalating the situation and preventing it from escalation.

The issue that India has encountered this time is that they have followed the old rules, but that the United States’ leader hasn’t campaigned in its place.

It appears that they have so far taken a neutral and a hands-off position, as indicated by President Donald Trump few days ago. Trump claimed to be aware of the leaders of both India and Pakistan and that he believed they could resolve the conflict alone.

Both Pakistan and India have historically been at odds with one another, and that is how it has historically been. This time too, a number of punitive steps have been announced.

Even when things improve, and they may wish to do so, these are simple to set in motion but very difficult to reverse.

Unfortunately, in every situation where they are at odds with one another, the retaliatory measures are getting more and more significant, as India has decided to suspend the Indus Water Treaty, which is against the law because it doesn’t have any provisions in it.

Al Jazeera: Do you believe a strike is imminent and if both sides are indicating preparedness for a showdown?

Yusuf: It’s impossible to say in such a situation. India’s plan of action is still possible and plausible, but the time has come to consider imminent events.

What usually happens in crises is that countries pick up troop or logistics movements, or their allies inform them, or they rely on ground intelligence to determine what might happen. These can occasionally be misinterpreted, leading to misreading them for the offensive side to believe an attack might be coming when it isn’t, or for the defensive side to believe otherwise.

Pakistan must show unwavering commitment to take any chance. You don’t know what will come next, so you have to be ready.

Despite that, I don’t believe we will have a major war, but one misinterpretation or miscalculation can result in significant things.

Al Jazeera: How do you feel about the US, China, and the Gulf States’ involvement in this crisis, and how would you compare it to earlier ones?

Yusuf: My last book, Brokering Peace (2018) was on the third-party management in Pakistan-India context, and this is such a vital element for both as they have internalised and built it into their calculus that a third-party country will inevitably come in.

Instead of escalating further, the idea is that a third-party mediator will intervene and the two countries will agree to stop because that is what they really want.

Since the 1999 Kargil War, the United States has dominated the group of third-party nations. (Pakistani forces crossed the LoC to try to take control of strategic heights in Ladakh’s Kargil, but India eventually managed to take back the territory. Bill Clinton, then-US president, is credited with putting an end to that conflict.

Everyone else supports the US position, which places the need for immediate de-escalation above all else during the crisis, including China.

This changed somewhat in the 2016 surgical strikes and 2019 Pulwama crisis when the US leaned heavily on India’s side, perhaps unwittingly even emboldening them to act in 2019.

After 19 Indian soldiers were killed in an attack on an army base in Uri, Indian-administered Kashmir, Indian troops launched a cross-border “surgical strike” that New Delhi claimed targeted armed fighters planning to attack India. After the attack on the Indian military convoy that left 40 soldiers dead, Indian fighter jets bombed what New Delhi claimed were “terrorists”‘ bases in Balakot, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. India and Pakistan then engaged in an aerial dogfight, and an Indian pilot was captured and subsequently returned.)

However, this time, the White House has a president who turned around and instructed both Pakistan and India to figure it out for themselves.

Because of Pakistan, they had previously discounted the possibility of significant US support, believing they had become too close to India as a result of their strategic relationship, which I believe has hurt them more than Pakistan.

But India would have been hoping for the Americans to put their foot down and pressure Pakistan, which did not exactly materialise. The secretary of state Marco Rubio is being called once more to urge both countries to end their war.

What they have done has, oddly enough, still contributed to India’s situation so far, given that, until now, they didn’t feel as pressured to act as they might have during Pulwama in 2019.

Gulf countries have played a more active role than before. China has also made a restraint statement.

Al Jazeera: How has Pakistan’s relationship with India evolved in recent years?

Yusuf: The relationship between the two nations has undergone a radical change. Despite serious issues and India’s unilateral actions in Kashmir in 2019, we witnessed both back-channel negotiations and a ceasefire agreement.

We have tried to move ahead and reduce India’s incentive to destabilise Pakistan, but I think India has lost that opportunity due to its own intransigence, hubris and an ideological bent that continues to force them to demean and threaten Pakistan.

The leadership there is now convinced that the restraint policy was unsuccessful, and India has mishandled and abused Pakistan’s offers for dialogue.

Pakistan shouldn’t be pleading either if India doesn’t want to talk. If India does reach out, we will likely respond, but there isn’t any desperation in Pakistan at all.

For either nation, this is not a pleasant place to live. I’ve long held the conviction that improving their relationship will ultimately help Pakistan get where we want to go economically and India get where it says it wants to go regionally. For now, though, with the current Indian attitude, unfortunately, I see little hope.

Al Jazeera: Do you anticipate any direct India-Pakistan discussions occurring during or after this crisis?

Yes, I’m not sure when or with whom it will be, but I believe one of the most important lessons that Indians could learn is that trying to isolate Pakistan is ineffective.

Indus Water Treaty in abeyance? Potential suspension of the SIMLA Agreement The two nations will need to talk through these important decisions, and I believe they will do so at some point in the future.

But I also don’t think that Pakistan will make a move towards rapprochement, as we have offered opportunities for dialogues so many times recently to no avail. As I mentioned, Pakistan’s attitude toward this issue has also gotten worse.

In the end, Indians must ultimately choose whether or not to talk. If they come forth, I think Pakistan will still respond positively to it.