Career
He wrote the first authoritative study of Dervishes. A recorder and collector of oral history and poetry. The title aw or sheikh generally indicates a man of religion.
Aw Jama is therefore called Sheikh Jama as well.
His formal education was Arabic and Islamic and he became a certified teacher in Hargeisa in 1957. In the early 1960s, Aw Jama moved to Mogadishu to teach and continue to collect the poems of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, known in the West as the Mad Mullah."
Jama has spent some twenty years collecting and transcribing orally transmitted poetry before publishing it in Diiwaanka Sayid Maxamed, edited by Madbacadda Qaranka, Xamar, 1974.
The name "Sayid Maxamed" refers to Sayyid Mohammed Abdulle Hasan. This collection of poetry served as material for interpretation and analysis in his next book, Taariikhdii Daraawiishta iyo Sayid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan, (1895-1921), Wasaaradda Hiddaha iyo Tacliinta Sare, edited by Akadeemiyaha Dhaqanka, Mogadishu, 1976.
In 1979, he published, in Arabic, Muqdishu Madhiha wa Hadhiriha (Mogadishu: Past and present).
In collaboration with Somali historians Mohamed Haji Omar and Ahmed Jimale “Castro,” he wrote Speared from the Spear:Traditional Somali Behaviour in Warfare, published by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1997. On 6 January 2014, Jama Omar Isse died in the neighboring country of Djibouti at the age of 102. Isse had been living in Djibouti since the collapse of Somalia"s central government in 1991 after which the Djibouti government hosted him following widespread of insecurity in Somalia.
