When Our Elders Pray- Somali Duco, the Language of the Qur’an, and the Wisdom of Our Mother Tongue

By Abdulhakim A. Sheik

In Somali society, the words of an elder often carry meanings far beyond their immediate expression. A blessing offered to a child, a young person preparing for a journey, or someone facing life’s uncertainties may contain generations of wisdom, affection, and lived experience. These words, known as duco, are more than wishes for a better tomorrow. They are expressions of faith, cultural memory, and the enduring relationship between language and the human experience.

Over the centuries, Somali elders have used duco to communicate hopes that ordinary conversation cannot always express. Within a few carefully chosen words, they preserve lessons about human relationships, the natural environment, dignity, and the challenges of life. Yet many of these expressions are repeated without their deeper linguistic and cultural meanings being fully understood.

This article explores five traditional Somali expressions of duco, examining not only what they mean but also what they reveal about the people who speak them. Through these blessings, we discover how Somali elders preserve knowledge about ambition, belonging, speech, protection, and emotional hardship. We also reflect on the Qur’anic recognition of linguistic diversity and why preserving our mother tongue matters for young people growing up far from their ancestral homeland.

Where Somali Wisdom Lives

These blessings come from a rich tradition of speech. Somali has long been written, first in adapted Arabic script and later in scripts of its own, before a Latin-based orthography became official in 1972. Yet much of the nation’s deepest knowledge traveled in memory rather than on paper, carried by communities that moved with their herds across open country.

Three forms of this spoken heritage stand out. The maahmaah, or proverb, compresses hard-won experience into a single line. Maanso, the great tradition of Somali poetry, preserves historical memory, gives voice to emotion, and carries cultural wisdom forward. Then there is duco, the most intimate of the three, because it speaks not about the world but to its Creator.

Elders are the keepers of all three. Their words carry the weight of seasons watched, hardships survived, and young people seen leaving home.

The five supplications gathered here belong to this tradition. Two were spoken by two different elders in two different Somali towns; the other three are shared without further detail about their origin. Read in sequence, they trace something like a life, from a young person’s first hopes to the sorrows they may one day carry.

The Blessings We Carry

The journey begins with hope. In one Somali town, an elder offered this supplication: “Hankaaga Eebahay kuu sahal, hanad wiilkayow. Dadku Hooyo iyo Aabbe kuu noqoy, halkaad joogtaba.” “May Allah make your aspirations easy to achieve, my noble son. Wherever you go, may the people around you become like a mother and father to you.”

Han is ambition, the reach of a person’s hopes. Hanad describes a young man of honor and courage, and to call him “hanad wiilkayow” is to claim him, for a moment, as one’s own son. Listen to the sound, too: hankaaga, hanad, halkaad. Somali verse has long prized alliteration, and the same instinct gives this blessing its music.

The heart of the blessing is its second sentence, and its direction matters. The elder does not ask the young man to become a parent to others. He asks that others become parents to him.

Mother and father are the most trusted relationships one can name, and the elder asks Allah to recreate them among strangers, wherever the young man may be. For Somali families spread across Minneapolis, London, Nairobi, Toronto, and beyond, it names a need many know well: to be received, not merely tolerated.

A second blessing turns to speech:

“Hadalkaagu deeq iyo hawraar noqoy.”

translation: “May your words become generosity and wisdom.”

The blessing does not ask for more words, or louder ones. It asks that a person’s speech itself become something given: generous to those who hear it and wise in what it says. Speech is measured not by cleverness or force, but by what it leaves behind in the listener.

In an oral culture, how a person spoke was how a person was known. Notice, too, how the blessing practices what it wishes: hadalkaagu and hawraar share their opening sound, so the line is easy to carry. In an age when words cross the world in seconds, few blessings are more needed.

The Roads We Walk

Every life leaves home in some way, and a third supplication follows the traveler:

“Hilinkaad marto Eebe ha ka ilaaliyo hagar daamo.”

translation: “On the path you walk, may Allah protect you from treachery and harm.”

A hilin is a path, the kind that exists because feet have traveled the same way many times. The blessing begins with that path, hilinkaad marto, “the path that you travel,” and asks Allah to guard it from hagar daamo: not the dangers of nature, but the snares and deceit that others may set along the way.

What the blessing leaves out is just as telling. It does not ask the young person to stay home, or the road to be short. It accepts that every life must travel and asks only that the road be safe. Today the hilin may run through airports and unfamiliar cities, but the hope is unchanged.

The road also holds open hostility. In a different Somali town, an elderly man made duco for a young man who had helped him:

“Cadawgaaga Eebahay ha ka yeelo caws dab lagu tuuray.”

“May Allah make your enemies like dry grass thrown into a fire.”

To an outsider, the line may sound fierce. To a listener raised close to the land, it is precise. In the Somali oral knowledge passed down to me, cawuus is extremely dry grass that catches fire almost instantly. Anyone who has seen pastureland late in a dry season knows how quickly such grass vanishes once a flame reaches it.

The elder does not ask the young man to fight. He asks Allah to make hostility powerless before him. This is environmental knowledge stored inside a blessing. If the word cawuus fades from everyday speech, the supplication loses more than a word. It loses a picture of the land our elders carried with them.

The Sorrows Elders Pray Away

Some sorrows have no enemy behind them. A fifth supplication reaches for these:

“Cidla iyo ciil Eebahay kaa kori.”

translation: “May Allah lift you above loneliness and anguish.”

Cidla evokes emptiness and desolation, a place with no one in it. Ciil suggests the bitter grief a person carries when hurt cannot be answered. One word belongs to the landscape, the other to the heart, and the blessing joins them, as if to say that an empty place and a wounded spirit are close relatives. Again the sound binds the meaning: cidla, ciil.

Naming loneliness and grief together, the blessing seems to know that one feeds the other. It also completes the first supplication. One elder asks that people become mother and father to a young man wherever he goes; this blessing asks that no one be left in emptiness and grief.

Many young Somalis carry loneliness quietly in new countries, surrounded by people yet far from those who know them. Long before the word “isolation” entered our conversations, this old blessing had already named the wound and asked for its healing.

The Language of Our Mothers and the Signs of Allah

All five of these duco expressions are in Somali, and each holds something translation alone cannot carry: han echoing in hanad, dry grass meeting flame, an empty land hidden inside cidla. They remind us that a language is not merely a tool for speaking. It is a storehouse of what a people has seen, suffered, and hoped.

The Qur’an invites exactly this kind of reflection. Among the signs of Allah, Surah Ar-Rum names the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of our languages and colors, then concludes: “Indeed in that are signs for those of knowledge” (30:22, Sahih International translation).

Explaining this verse, Ibn Kathir lists many peoples and their tongues, from Arabs and Persians to Berbers, Ethiopians, and Kurds, and remarks that only Allah knows the variety of languages spoken among the children of Adam. In its direct meaning, the verse presents human languages as signs of the Creator, recognized by al-‘alimin, those of knowledge.

Beyond that meaning, we offer a reflection of our own: if languages are signs, the knowledge carried within them deserves attention too. An elder who folds dry grass and fire, or a footpath, into a few words of blessing preserves exactly that kind of knowledge.

Arabic holds its own unique place. Allah describes the Qur’an as revealed in Arabic “that you might understand” (12:2). Learning Arabic opens the door to that understanding. And the two languages already meet in Somali: duco comes from the Arabic du’a, and cadaw, “enemy,” from ‘aduww.

In the diaspora, both languages are under pressure. Many children spend their days in the languages of their new homes. Somali can shrink to a language of the kitchen, and Arabic to sounds memorized without meaning. A child may hear an elder’s duco every week and never know what was wished for them.

The remedy begins at home: explain these supplications, write them down, and ask elders what their words mean before those meanings are lost.

Learning Arabic and preserving Somali are not competing loyalties; they open two different doors. Teach your children Arabic, so they can understand the Qur’an in the words in which it was revealed. Teach them Somali, so they can understand the wisdom of their elders, carried in duco about ambition and belonging, wise speech, footpaths, dry grass and fire, loneliness and relief. A child who holds both languages inherits two treasures: the words Allah revealed, and the words with which our elders first taught us to call upon Him.

Abdulhakim A Sheik

Email: [email protected]

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Abdulhakim Sheik is the CEO of Tayo360 and a Minnesota-based software and AI engineer. He holds an Ijazah in the Qur’an from Guidance College in Houston, Texas, and a second Qur’an ijazah from Dr. Rihabi Mohamed Rihabi. He is the author of Understanding Boundaries, a book for children and Book 1 of the Tayo360 Social Development series, and leads the Somali Duco & Wisdom project, which documents and interprets traditional Somali supplications.