Adal Sultanate

The Adal Sultanate was a Sunni Muslim state in the Horn of Africa, founded on the Harar plateau by Sabr ad-Din III after the earlier Sultanate of Ifat collapsed, and it flourished from around 1415 to 1577. At its height under Sultan Badlay in the fifteenth century the sultanate's authority reached from Cape Guardafui in modern Somalia to the port of Suakin in modern Sudan. Adal is best remembered for the long war its general and later imam, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, waged against the neighboring Christian Ethiopian Empire in the sixteenth century, a conflict that devastated much of the Ethiopian highlands before Ethiopian forces, aided by Portuguese musketeers, defeated him in 1543. The sultanate declined afterward amid internal succession disputes and pressure from Oromo migrations, and the polity eventually dissolved.