NAIROBI, Kenya – A moderate Islamist cleric was sworn in Saturday as Somalia’s new president, a widely popular choice that could mark a turning point for the troubled Horn of Africa nation.

Sheik Sharif Ahmed, who led a federation of Islamic courts that briefly ruled southern Somalia in 2006, is a former schoolteacher who’s respected by Western officials and ordinary Somalis alike. Analysts say he might be the leader best equipped to unite Somalia’s fractious mix of clans, warlords and Islamist insurgents.

The boyish-looking Ahmed, who’s in his 40s, takes over a country where the United Nations says more than 3 million people – half the population – need urgent humanitarian aid. The interim government also is under threat from a powerful Islamist group known as al Shabaab, which is on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist groups and controls much of southern Somalia.

Ahmed immediately pledged to negotiate with the insurgents, a sharp departure from his predecessor, Abdullahi Yusuf, whose stubborn refusal to open talks with rivals lost him the support of African and Western countries that are bankrolling Somalia’s long – and so far fruitless – peace process. The septuagenarian Yusuf, a secular warlord-turned-politician, resigned in December, forcing Saturday’s parliamentary vote on a new president.

With hardly anywhere in Somalia safe for the government, Ahmed was selected by parliamentarians meeting in neighboring Djibouti. He won handily after two rounds of voting that the U.N. special representative for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, praised as “open and transparent,” and news of his selection prompted cheers in the streets of Mogadishu.

“He’s the most popular leader in Somalia and the best person for this position and time,” said Ali Said, director of the Center for Peace and Democracy, an independent Somali civic group operating in exile in Kenya. “His Islamist background is important.”

Ahmed’s selection capped a remarkable political comeback. The Libya-educated lawyer and scion of a powerful Somali clan is credited with restoring law and order in the six months that the Islamic courts controlled chronically violent Mogadishu.

Ahmed favored a moderate form of Islamic religious law, but he was eventually sidelined by hard-liners within the Islamic courts. In late 2006 he fled to Djibouti while neighboring Ethiopia, with U.S. backing, invaded Somalia to drive the Islamists from power.