Hadiya

The Hadiya are a Highland East Cushitic-speaking people of the Ethiopian Rift Valley's western highlands, heirs of the Muslim Hadiya Sultanate, one of the Zeila federation's Islamic states.

The kingdom is named in the thirteenth-century Kebra Nagast, and al-Umari called it the federation's richest and strongest state; Emperor Amda Seyon campaigned through it in the fourteenth century and put its rebellious king to the sword. Under Zara Yaqob a ruler refused tribute and was deposed and killed about 1445, after which the emperor married the Hadiya princess Eleni, later empress.

When Imam Ahmad al-Ghazi launched his jihad in 1529 the Hadiya joined him, massacring the Christian garrisons among them, but Oromo migrations then overran their frontier and the sultanate broke into scattered clans. In 1689 a chief submitted to Abyssinia and accepted Christianity, though Muslim Hadiya principalities such as Qabeena kept their autonomy.