Waging ceaseless wars against his country's enemies – poverty, disease, ignorance – and launching national campaign after campaign, Siyad was presented as the omnipotent leader in the relentless struggle forward to progress and victory. In such an atmosphere of Sturm und Drang there are traditional precedents for Siyad's style of leadership. In the past, however, personal authority of this kind and scale had usually only been successfully wielded by national religious heroes, waging the holy war (jihad) against the infidel. The two outstanding examples of this proud tradition in the Somali national consciousness were the famous Islamic champion, Ahmad Gran (1506–43) who conquered and briefly ruled the Christian Ethiopian heartland in the sixteenth century, and the fiery twentieth-century Dervish hero, Sayyid Muhammad 'Abdille Hassan (1864–1920).

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 548