Revolution had a sweeping impact in Europe and the Americas, the Sokoto jihād had repercussions across West Africa as far as the Nile River.55 Sokoto was preoccupied with spreading the jihād and providing the intellectual inspiration and tactical training for future jihād participants, many of whom came to Sokoto for training and education. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one such cleric, who joined the Tījāniyya brotherhood in Mecca when he was on pilgrimage and subsequently returned to sub-Saharan Africa via Borno and then settled in Sokoto as the leader of the Tījāniyya.56 Hence, there was a strong tradition of such learned leadership. As the book market of the Sahel shows, scholars in the western Bilād al-Sūdān would have read some of Sokoto’s works just as the dan Fodios read Algerian and Songhai texts.57 The book trade establishes clearly the intellectual background of the jihād movement, which involves a long written debate, just as the age of revolutions did in Europe and the Americas.
According to Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, at the time of the consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate, west central Africa was already a dominant source of slaves for the Americas. This fact is crucial in recognizing the caliphate’s self-imposed withdrawal and failure to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, despite price incentives in the interior of West Africa that could have resulted in the supply of many more slaves than was the case. The relatively high rate of slave resistance near and onboard slave ships in the Senegambia ports in the eighteenth century may have had an influence on the reluctance of European slave ships to visit the area.58 Such resistance reinforces the argument here with respect to the influence of Islam on commercial patterns. The consolidation of Islam, ironically, at first increased the number of enslaved West Africans sent to the Americas, especially to Bahia and Cuba. These conclusions confirm some of the arguments suggested in this book that the history of the diaspora has to start in Africa, not in the Americas, especially with regard to resistance and efforts to establish reconstituted social, religious, and cultural manifestations.
2
THE ORIGINS OF JIHĀD IN WEST AFRICA
The chronology of the jihād movement spans a period of almost two hundred years, from the end of the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. Although the focus of this book is on the same era as the age of revolutions from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, this chapter provides an overview of the main events of the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century. The idea of jihād was rooted in the confrontation of established political authority through the purification of Islamic practice and the imposition of governments that were forcefully committed to governance on the basis of Islamic law and tradition. Dedication to holy war and adherence to orthodoxy were not new, but the pattern of change that was determined through self-proclaimed jihād and the ways in which orthodoxy was interpreted through allegiance to the ṣūfī brotherhood of the Qādiriyya were unique and hence the reason that it is possible to refer to a jihād movement.
The major features of the historical trajectory of jihād are well established and are outlined in table 2.1, which is included here for purposes of reference and as a means of guiding readers through the necessary detail that has to be included as one means of demonstrating that the jihād movement was comparable in scale and impact to the age of revolutions of Europe and the Americas. The spread of jihād in West Africa occurred well after the collapse of the Muslim empire of Songhay in 1591–92 and the subsequent period that was perceived by many Muslim scholars as a century of political decadence and the emergence of military elites that dominated the numerous small states of the western Bilād al-Sūdān. The dispersed commercial diaspora of Muslim merchants and various centers of Islamic learning across West Africa sustained a vision of a more unified community, however. That vision ultimately brought forth a political movement.
The jihād movement can be traced to the campaigns of Awbek Ashfaga, better known as Nāṣir al-Dīn (protector of the faith), in the western Sahara, who allied various clerical factions of nomads (zawāyā) against militarized nomadic clans, particularly the Banī Ḥasan Arabs who had migrated to the region. Rather than confront the Banī Ḥasan directly, Nāṣir al-Dīn launched a campaign against the states of the Senegal River valley in the 1670s, which he proclaimed was a jihād. He successfully conquered the states of Waalo, Fuuta Toro, Kajoor, and Jolof, but the movement was stopped by Nāṣir al-Dīn’s death in 1674, and the old order was virtually reestablished by 1677. Nonetheless, as Boubacar Barry has argued,
Nāsir al-Dīn’s movement was an attempt to regulate political and social life according to the teachings of the sharī’a (Islamic law) in its purest orthodox form, by putting an end to the arbitrary power of the Hasaniyya warriors and establishing a Muslim theocracy. The proclamation of a djihād [sic] in the kingdoms of the river valley was motivated by both economic and religious considerations, to conquer the trade in grains and slaves and to convert the peoples and purify the practice of Islam.1
Hence the idea of jihād and revolutionary change first emerged with Nāṣir al-Dīn in the Senegal River and was associated with the religious communities that were ṣūfī and associated with the Qādiriyya brotherhood, which emphasized piety and obedience to the authority of the religious community.
Rudolph Ware has argued that the Qurʾānic schools became striking symbols of Muslim identity and powerful channels for political expression in Senegambia. Because Muslim scholars traveled widely, Ware has characterized them as “walking Qu’rans” whose epistemological embodiment gave expression to classical Islamic frameworks of learning and knowledge.2 The center of learning at the grand mosque of Pire in Saniakhor attracted many students who later went on to political careers, including Mālik Si, the founder of Fuuta Bundu, and ʿAbd Qādir Kane, who led the clerical revolution in Fuuta Toro in 1776. The descendants of Demba Fall pursued his work in propagating Islamic learning and teaching the Muslim leadership that waged jihād in Fuuta Toro and elsewhere.3 Besides the Fall family, other families, in particularly the Cisse, also studied at Pire. One of the Cisse of Pire, Tafsīr Abdou Cisse, was the muqaddam (spiritual guide) of Mālik Si. The grand mosque of Pire-Gourèye was virtually a university.4 Another center at Koki, also founded in the seventeenth century by clerics, had close relations with the king of Kajoor. Pire and Koki dominated Muslim intellectual life throughout the eighteenth century, as students and teachers from many clerical lineages traveled to these towns to study. Koki was in Ndiambour and even opened branch schools at Koki-Kad, Koki-Dakhar, and Koki-Gouy in the neighboring province of Mbacol. In fact, there were such centers of learning at all the major mosques in West Africa, such as the ones at Timbuktu, Agades, Katsina, Yandoto, and elsewhere. The mud-brick mosque at Jenne was particularly impressive (plate 4).
TABLE 2.1. The Jihād Movement in West Africa: Major Events, Places, and Personalities, ca. 1670–1850
In the 1690s some refugees from Nāṣir al-Dīn’s movement settled in Gajaaga and the area further upstream along the Senegal, where under the leadership of Mālik Si they established the Muslim state of Fuuta Bundu near the gold fields of Buré; upon Mālik Si’s death, leadership passed to his son Bubu Mālik Si.5 Thus the idea of Islamic-inspired political reform and military conquest developed as a powerful tradition in West Africa, in particular under the leadership of the Muslim clerical class of Torodbe, whose members were of diverse origin but who identified with the Fulbe pastoralists who dominated cattle herding in the Senegal River region and elsewhere. The Torodbe clerical families inhabited their own communities, zawāyā, which were scattered along the Senegal River, especially in the central parts of the flood plain. The Torodbe had strong links with Kajoor and the religious centers
