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The Dervish State was an Islamic resistance movement and proto-state that fought British, Italian, and Ethiopian forces in the Horn of Africa for two decades, making it one of the longest anti-colonial struggles in African history. It was founded in 1899 by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, a Somali religious scholar and poet whom the British nicknamed the Mad Mullah, a label that badly underestimated his abilities. Hassan had studied in Mecca and belonged to the Salihiyya Sufi brotherhood, and he returned to Somaliland preaching religious renewal and resistance to Christian colonial encroachment.
The movement drew its strength from the Somali clans of the interior, especially the Dhulbahante and Warsangali, who supplied thousands of mounted spearmen. The Dervishes built a network of stone forts across the arid interior, with their capital eventually established at Taleh, where impressive fortifications still stand. Hassan proved a master of guerrilla warfare, and his forces defeated or eluded four separate British military expeditions between 1901 and 1904. The British suffered a humiliating disaster at Dul Madoba in 1913, when a Dervish force annihilated a colonial constabulary unit, killing its commander, Richard Corfield.
The Dervish struggle was sustained partly by Hassan's extraordinary poetry, which served as propaganda, news, and rallying cry in a society with a rich oral tradition. His poems mocked his enemies, celebrated victories, and called the faithful to resistance, and they were memorized and recited across Somali-speaking lands. The movement also received some support from the Ottoman Empire and later from the German-allied Lij Iyasu of Ethiopia during the First World War, when the Dervishes were recognized as allies and Hassan was styled emir.
The Dervish State finally fell to the technological superiority of the post-war British military. In January and February 1920, the Royal Air Force carried out the first major aerial bombing campaign in Africa, attacking the forts at Taleh and the Dervish concentrations. The ground offensive that followed, combining British, Somaliland, and King's African Rifles troops, overran the strongholds in a matter of weeks. Hassan fled to Ethiopia, where he died of illness in December 1920. The Dervish resistance became a founding legend of Somali nationalism, and Hassan is remembered today as a national hero in Somalia.
Wikipedia: Dervish State (Horn of Africa)
King's College London: The Establishment of the Dervish State
Wiley Online Library: Dervish State, Somalia
Cambridge University Press (Journal of African History): The Mad Mullah and Northern Somalia