a new capital at Thilogne, the jihād entered a period of expansion that lasted for twenty years. He clearly had strong support in the royal court of Fuuta Bundu, and his reputation in Kajoor, especially at Koki, was very great. He negotiated a settlement with the Denyanke dynasty that conferred virtual autonomy on the former ruling elite but confined their territory to the eastern periphery of the Senegal flood plain. Abdul Kader then set out to redistribute land to the supporters of the jihād, founded some thirty to forty mosques, and appointed judges and teachers for the villages. In 1785 Abdul Kader negotiated a commercial treaty with the French that generated an annual tribute. In 1786 a major offensive was launched against the Trarza Maures, and between 1789 and 1791 garrison villages were established at the fords of the Senegal to prevent further incursions by the Maures. By this time Abdul Kader was clearly invoking allegiance to jihād as justification for state policies.15 By 1790 Abdul Kader was able to use his influence in the lower Senegal valley to secure support in Waalo, Jolof, and Kajoor. He subsequently also obtained the recognition of Khasso in 1796, so that the jihād state of Fuuta Toro controlled the Senegal valley from Fuuta Bundu in the east to the Atlantic shores in the west.
However, Fuuta Toro suffered a crushing defeat in Kajoor in late 1796 at the battle of Bunguye, which reasserted the independence of the Wolof states. Abdul Kader was captured and held prisoner for several months before being allowed to return to Fuuta Toro. Waalo, in turn, revoked its allegiance to Fuuta Toro. The Islamic center at Koki became embroiled in the struggle promoted by the jihād in Fuuta Toro, and its scholarly reputation suffered as a result.16 In 1797 Fuuta Jalon intervened in a succession crisis in Fuuta Bundu after the execution of Almami Sega Gaye. Subsequent difficulties with Fuuta Bundu and Khasso further reduced Fuuta Toro hegemony, and in 1807 Abdul Kader was killed in battle against Fuuta Bundu, which had secured the support of the Bambara state of Kaarta. Thereafter the jihād was effectively undermined, and French influence along the Senegal River steadily extended further into the interior.17
Nonetheless, by the end of the eighteenth century the jihād movement was clearly established from the Senegal River valley in the north to the highlands of Fuuta Jalon and the coastal zone to the south, but with somewhat mixed results. Jihād had become fully associated with the Fulbe, particularly with the scholarly and religious elite who were spread across the savanna and the Sahel of West Africa because of the transhumance migration patterns of the cattle herders and the elite who owned the cattle. The Muslim and learned leadership was allied with and often related to the clan heads who managed the cattle herds that traversed West Africa. Ethnically related pastoralists, who were variously known as Peul, Ful, Fulbe, Fula, or Fulani depending on their location in West Africa and spoke a shared language, Fulfulde, became particularly influential in the jihād movement. As the jihād of Mahdī Fatta in Moria demonstrates, the idea of jihād also appealed to other Muslims, although in his case jihād was not successful. Perhaps because Fatta’s uprising was linked to what amounted to a slave revolt in Moria, the supernatural powers that he claimed protected him from death were openly challenged, and his appeal was undermined when it was proved that he had no such powers.18
Ethnicity played a significant role in all the successful jihād movements. Except for the jihād in Moria, Fulbe/Fulani were involved in all the jihāds from the 1690s to the middle of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize here that the jihād movement was not an ethnic phenomenon. Muslims came from many different ethnic backgrounds and included the merchants of the extensive Muslim commercial networks that linked West Africa in a common economic market. The Qādirī shaykh Sīdī al-Mukhtār was not Fulbe, nor was Jibrīl ibn ʿUmar, one of ʿUthmān dan Fodio’s teachers.19 Those Fulbe who were well learned in the classic scriptures of Islam and were fluent in Arabic were of the Torodbe clan, whose members were not pastoral nomads. In many cases they were able to appeal to pastoral Fulbe and in the process secure their commitment to an aggressive Muslim agenda. In the central Bilād al-Sūdān the Fulbe were known by the Hausa term “Fulani,” and their ethnic allegiance was fundamental to the consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate.
In the context of explaining why jihād began in the far western Bilād al-Sūdān, two underlying factors are significant: first, the organization of Muslim trade in West Africa, and second, the transhumance patterns of the cattle-owning Fulbe. Muslim merchants, craftsmen, and scholars were found in virtually every town in West Africa, providing an interlocking network of communities from Senegambia to Lake Chad. Fulbe cattle herders followed migratory trails that took them from the Senegal River southward into the hills where the Gambia, Senegal, and Niger Rivers begin. The resulting migratory drift of nomads followed north/south transhumance patterns that led to the progressive eastward movement of the Fulbe across West Africa as far as Lake Chad.
The headwaters of the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers and the gold fields of Bambuhu and Buré encompassed a region traversed by cattle nomads whose ethnicity as Fulbe, Ful, and Peul meant an underlying common tie to ecologically based production and marketing. Their language, Fulfulde, was akin to Wolof, and in a certain sense the only difference between Wolof and Fulbe was whether a person owned cattle or not. The reality was far more complex, however, because evidence of the presence of Fulbe existed virtually everywhere in West Africa north of the forest where cattle could be bred. Transhumance migration, whereby herds followed the pattern of the seasons, moving north during the rainy season and toward groundwater or wells for the herds in the dry season, often resulted in a north/south migratory pattern. Herds were taken to pastures and sources of water rather than being watered and fed in restricted spaces. The owners of the herds were powerful men who also controlled settled slave plantations where grain could be secured and where herds could be pastured during the dry season, thereby fertilizing fields and increasing crop production.
An initial explanation for the spread of the Fulbe across West Africa is both religious and ecological, in which people from the Senegal River valley moved across West Africa, filling a niche in the economy through specialization in pastoralism. Islam and ethnicity were factors in the formation of a diaspora conception of identity as Fulbe, Fulani, Pula, Ful, and Fula who spoke a common language, Fulfulde. As reflected in the names Fuuta Bundu, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro, the prefix Fuuta indicates the ethnic association with Fulbe. Since the sixteenth century, at least, the Fulbe had been considered Muslims, with the exception, according to Aḥmad Bābā of “a certain section of the Fulbe south of Jenne.”20 The Toronkawa clan, in particular, was associated with Islamic learning and with sedentary communities that provided an anchor to the migratory patterns of the pastoralists. The Toronkawa, affiliated with the Qādiriyya ṣūfī brotherhood, was one of a number of clans who built their influence and authority on the basis of belonging to the Qādiriyya brotherhood. The Kunta and the Saghanughu were two other such clans: the Kunta were centered on Timbuktu and the region to the northwest, and the Saghanughu were scattered in communities throughout the region of the upper Niger. The Kunta were ethnically Arab by descent, while the Saghanughu were Soninke in origin, as was al-Ḥājj Sālim Suwari; however, by the seventeenth century the Saghanughu and other Jakhanke were often considered Mandinke, as in the case of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, who came from Bouka in the Tinkisso River valley, one of the tributaries of the Niger River, approximately twenty kilometers south of Dinguiraye, which was also on the Tinkisso.21
The enforced travels of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu provide an insight into the age of jihād in what is sometimes called “greater Senegambia,” which includes Fuuta Jalon and its borderlands to the south and east of the highlands. In his Kitāb al-ṣalāt, written in Jamaica around 1820, Kabā Saghanughu reveals the range of knowledge of the literate elite of West Africa (plate 6). Indeed, Kabā’s association with the Saghanughu connects him with one of the most scholarly families in the western Bilād al-Sūdān.22 He had studied the basic subjects, the Qur’ān, Ḥadīth, and fiqh, and referred to the Ṣaḥīḥs of Muslim and Bukhārī, both books on ḥadīth, and to the anonymous commentary Kitāb al-Munabbihāt. He also cited Shaykh Bābā al-Fakiru, who seems to have been one of his teachers, besides his uncle, Mohammed Batoul.23 The style of scholarship to which Kabā was exposed was the standard education taught
