First prize for a child in Somalia: An AK-47

A typical prize for a children's contest might be a backpack, a lunchbox or maybe some toys.

Over the weekend, a Somali radio station run by the Shabab, the most powerful Islamist militant group in the war-ravaged country, held an awards ceremony to honor children who were experts at Shabab trivia and at reciting the Koran. The prizes? Fully automatic assault rifles and live hand grenades.

The contest itself was held during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, and featured questions that the Shabab seemed to think every child should know, like which war was Sheik Timajilic (a famous Shabab warrior) killed in?

Without a functioning central government, Somalia has some of the lowest schooling rates in the world, and many Somali children are more familiar with rifles than rulers. Contestants in the Shabab quiz included children from all across Shabab-controlled areas of Somalia, most of the southern third of the country. The children competed live on air from the many radio stations nationwide that the Shabab control.

On Sunday, the awards were handed out at a ceremony held at the Andalus radio station in Elasha Biyaha, a small town near Mogadishu, the capital. (Andalus was the part of Spain seized by the Arabs in the Middle Ages.) The first- and second-place winners won AK-47 assault rifles, some money and Islamic books. The third-place winner was given two hand grenades. The contestants were 10 to 17 years old.

It was not clear how exactly the sponsors determined the winners - or the choice of prizes. But at the awards ceremony, Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, who is widely considered a moderate Shabab leader, proudly said, "Children should use one hand for education and the other for a gun to defend Islam," according to Somali accounts of the event.

The Shabab and other militant Islamist groups in Somalia have become famous for their zeal in enforcing their strict interpretation of Islamic purity. Last year, the Shabab outlawed school bells in a southern Somalia town after deciding that they sounded too much like church bells. The Shabab have also banned bras, gold teeth, dancing and soccer, deeming them un-Islamic, and barred many Western aid groups, even though Somalia is suffering from a famine and tens of thousands of people have already starved to death.

Another militant Somali group, Hizbul Islam, ordered radio stations to stop playing music, which forced broadcasters to eliminate even the faintest suggestion of harmonious sounds from their daily programming. Some stations substituted the musical introductions to news broadcasts with the sounds of gunshots, engine roars, car horns and animal grunts.

Somalia has subsisted without a functioning central government for two decades. The country is now fragmented into various zones of loose control, with Islamist groups, clan militias, regional administrations and a very weak, internationally supported central government battling one another.