Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, leader of the Dervish movement (born 1856)

Muḥammad Ibn Abdallāh Ibn Hassan was a Somali scholar, poet, military leader and religious, cultural and political figure who founded and headed the Dervish movement, which led a holy war against British, Italian and Ethiopian colonial intrusions in the Somali Peninsula. He was famously known by the British Empire as the "Mad Mullah". In 1917, the Ottoman Empire referred him as the "Emir of the Somali People". Due to his successful completion of the Hajj to Mecca, his assertion of being the descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his complete memorization of the Quran, his name is preluded with honorifics such as Hajji, Hafiz, Emir, Sheikh, Mullah or Sayyid. His influence on the Somali people led him to being regarded the "Father of the Somali People".

The Dervish Movement also known as the Dervish State was an armed resistance movement and polity between 1899 and 1920, which was led by the Salihiyya Sufi Muslim poet and militant leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, also known as Sayyid Mohamed, who called for independence from the British and Italian colonisers and for the defeat of Ethiopian forces. The Dervish movement aimed to remove the British and Italian influence from the region and restore an "Islamic system of governance with a Sufi doctrine as its foundation", according to Mohamed-Rahis Hasan and Salada Robleh.