Garen

The House of Garen was the hereditary ruling dynasty of the Ajuran Sultanate in southern Somalia. It grew out of the thirteenth-century Garen Kingdom, and as Somali groups moved south the line developed into an Islamic monarchy whose rulers took the title imam and claimed baraka descending from the saint Balad.

From the late 1300s the Garen imams dominated the Banaadir interior for some three centuries. Their empire monopolized the Jubba and Shebelle rivers through dykes, dams and stone wells, earning Ajuran the name of a hydraulic empire, while its armies checked the Oromo and repelled Portuguese raiders at Barawa.

Heavy taxation sparked revolts at the end of the seventeenth century: the Abgaal took Mogadishu and set up the Hiraab Imamate, and the general Ibrahim Adeer founded the Gobroon dynasty. By the early 1700s Garen rule had vanished from Banaadir.