Shire Jama Ahmed

In addition, he was one of the main organizers and administrators of the Somali Youth League (SYL), a nationalist and youth-oriented political movement that existed in the 1930s through to the late 1960s.

Shire Jama Ahmed (Shire Jaamac Axmed, شيري جامع أحمد; 1936-1999) was a Somali linguist and a scholar.

He is notable for creating and developing of the modern Latin script for transcribing the Somali language.

Shire was born in the Dusamareeb region of Somalia to a Marehan family.

He grew up in Dhuusamareeb and Abudwak, two of the region's more prominent cities.

In 1940, at about the age of five (the usual age when children first start Qur'anic studies), Shire began learning the Qur'an at his nearby dugsi or madrasah.

He continued his religious studies up until 1945.

It is widely reported that he attained Kabir or student head.

One attains the Kabir designation when one succeeds at memorizing scripture at an above average pace.

Here, Shire quickly attained complete knowledge of the Qur'an, which consists of 30 chapters of roughly equal number of verses or volume.

Jama Ahmed, Shire's father, then decided to move his family to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

Shire subsequently experienced a considerably different kind of schooling.

He started attending local language schools where his peers were learning Arabic and English.

While in Mogadishu, he also took up some Italian language studies.

As it was his character to excel at most tasks put before him, Shire thrived in all of his academic work.

From 1951 to 1954, Shire matriculated at a college run by former graduates of the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.

His studies focused on Arabic and Islamic Law.

Later, in 1955, he was part of a group of students who received scholarships to study at Egyptian institutions of higher learning.

Shire Jama Ahmed graduated from Jamal Abdinasir Secondary School in downtown Mogadishu.

The school was also known to Mogadishu residents as Allahi Secondary and Arabic Grammar School.

Two successive governments, from 1960–1967 and 1967–1969, could not settle the debate over what script to use: Arabic, a script which most Somalis had used for centuries and which is featured in the Qur'an, or Latin, a script that only really came to the attention of the Somali people during the late 18th century upon contact with the British and Italian European administrations.

Shire campaigned for the Latin script, while Sheikh Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur, Osman Yusuf Kenadid and Muse Haji Ismail Galal each favored different writing systems for transcribing the Somali language.

Originally, there were 18 different scripts that were brought before the newly established Somali Language Committee.

Of these 18 proposed orthographies, 11 were new inventions, while 4 were derived from the Arabic script and 3 were Latin.

Anything less than choosing an Arabic alphabet was equated with being a non-Muslim.

In fact, a common taunt designed to cast a bad light on those supporting the Latin script was the expression "Latin, laa diin", which translates as "Latin, no religion" (Laa in Arabic means "no" and the word "diin" refers to religion).

Shire, on the other hand, was more pragmatic in his arguments.

He pointed out that the printing presses and other machines that were then in use in most other parts of the world were mostly set to the Latin alphabet, as were the machines and typewriters already extant within Somalia.

In the late 1960s, Shire and a few other Somali linguists presented before the Somali Language Committee, an organization in charge of settling Somalia's outstanding language issue, and eventually deciding between several prospective orthographies.

These scripts ranged from Arabic to some resembling Ge'ez, an ancient Ethio-Semitic writing system.

Among those proposed was the Osmanya script, an orthography invented in the early twentieth century by the Majeerteen poet and ruler, Osman Yusuf Kenadid, which had enjoyed a strong following.

Shire's competing orthography, for its part, was derived from Latin characters, and it omitted a few letters (p, v and z) to accommodate the unique sounds of the Somali language.

He subsequently graduated from a Russian university in 1967, though his first intention was apparently to attend McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Shire was the first president of the Somali National Academy of Culture, as well as the founder of the first Somali national magazine, The Light of Knowledge and Education.

Between 1967 and 1969, he also took up the post of Chief Presidential Protocol in the Sharmarke government.

For about a decade, there was an effort to find a common orthography for the Somali language, with many Somali scholars working hard to introduce new writing scripts.

Shire, a linguist by training, was a proponent of the use of Latin for transcribing the Somali language, but this preference didn't stop at merely favoring one script over another; Shire also printed many books based on Somali oral culture using a modified Latin script.

Teachers and administrators at Jamal Abdinasir Secondary School, a fixture in Mogadishu for more than six decades up until the late 1980s, helped secure for Shire and several dozen other highly motivated students trips to Egypt for further studies in advanced Arabic.

Shire eventually earned a degree from Al-Azhar.

After having successfully completed his studies in Egypt, Shire again found himself among a group of students selected for scholarships to study abroad, albeit this time in the Soviet Union.