This response to internal disagreement within the S.R.C. made it indisputably clear that General Siyad's word was law and brooked no defiance or disagreement. If this uncompromising sentence administered a sharp jolt to national feeling, the public execution of ten local religious sheikhs in January 1975 had wider and more serious repercussions, touching a deeper nerve. With twenty-three others who received long prison sentences, the ten executed religious figures were charged with preaching in the mosques against a liberal new law which, contrary to traditional Islam, gave women the same inheritance rights as men. By this action, taken in International Women's Year, the government demonstrated its secular, reformist intentions – but at the cost of raising in an acute form the whole question of the Islamic identity of the Somali people.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 521