of tradition and hence was preoccupied with analyzing whether the conditions for jihād were present. The signs were discussed, events and motives were justified through reference to tradition, and a template for jihād was mythologized. There were recognizable building blocks that had to be in place, most especially conditions in which Muslims were being oppressed and were forced into a retreat where war was initially justified as defensive and unavoidable. Indeed, when such conditions prevailed in the Hausa state of Gobir and elsewhere, Muslims flocked to the camp of ʿUthmān dan Fodio and his supporters, which was established at Degel in the 1790s. By following the events and statements of the jihād leadership, it is possible to discern what it took to undertake a jihād and how the movement benefited from an association with earlier jihāds, particularly in West Africa, that led to the establishment of three Muslim states, all dominated by Muslims who were also considered to be ethnically Fulbe. The tradition of jihād as developed in West Africa from Fuuta Bundu to Sokoto had a common feature in that the leadership was Fulbe, and this tradition continued. The same was true in the establishment of the Hamdullahi Caliphate, which initially was under Sokoto. Al-Ḥājj ‘Umar himself, being Fulbe, had pretensions to succeed Muhammad Bello as caliph of Sokoto upon Bello’s death. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was married to Bello’s daughter, but the succession went to Bello’s brother. Even the Mahdist state of the Nilotic Sudan relied heavily on the Fulbe, who were known in the Nilotic Sudan as Fellata and formed the backbone of the Mahdist military. With the assassination of the Mahdi, the succession passed to Abdallahi, who was the head of the military.
This ethnic compatibility between the Fulbe leadership and the Muslim intellectuals of diverse backgrounds, combined with the success of jihād across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, facilitated the spread of ideas and justification through the rigors of Islamic scholarship. Indeed, the migration of young men who wished to be employed in armies or to study under teachers who were attached to the mosques of the principal towns was a major factor in consolidating the appeal of jihād and reform. This movement of students overlapped with commercial travel, and the distribution of slaves through long-distance trade meant that all the Muslim regions of sub-Saharan Africa were well integrated. This can be seen in the surviving biographical accounts of Muslims who somehow ended up in slavery despite the efforts to prevent such fateful loss of freedom. In general, trade and marketing were organized in a way that promoted regional integration. In the western parts of West Africa, Muslims who were identified as Juula and who spoke the same language (Malinke) were closely linked to the Qādiriyya. They controlled long-distance trade, with outposts from Senegambia as far east as the Hausa cities and Borno. A similar Hausa commercial diaspora radiated outward from the central cities of the Hausa states and later the Sokoto Caliphate, particularly Kano, Zaria, and Katsina, but in the case of this commercial system, the language of trade was Hausa. The network extended to the middle Volta basin and Asante, to the Yoruba coast of the Bight of Benin, and eastward as far as Wadai. Both Juula and Hausa merchant networks were linked across the Sahara and hence were tied to the extensions of trade from Morocco, whose immigrants to sub-Saharan Africa known as shurfa (Hausa: Sharifai) claimed to be direct descendants of the Prophet, whether or not the reality substantiated their claims. This overlapping series of networks also connected with the Ottoman domains from Algiers to the Hijaz and even the Jellaba merchants of the Nile River valley and the trade of Wadai and Darfur.
Specifically, the commercial interior of West Africa was controlled by Muslim merchants who operated along trade routes between dispersed towns where there were communities with which they identified.40 These dispersed networks have sometimes been referred to as “commercial diasporas,” following the lead of Philip Curtin and Abner Cohen.41 The concept of diaspora is used to describe the social organization of the merchants who formed the layers of commercial networks that dominated the trade from the interior to the coast of West Africa. Traders operated over considerable distances and relied on agents and partners who were resident in towns and cities along the trade routes that were often far from the homelands of the merchants. The two principal diasporas included the “Juula” (also Dyula), which means “merchant” in the languages of the Manding, and the “Hausa,” which was centered in the central Bilād al-Sūdān. Both ethnic terms reflected the use of a common commercial language, either the Juula dialect of Malinke or Hausa, as well as identification with Islam. This structure of trade became particularly significant after the Moroccan invasion of the Songhay Empire in 1591–92 and the ending of the hegemonic Muslim state that encompassed much of West Africa from Senegambia to the Hausa cities of the central Bilād al-Sūdān. In the absence of a centralized state, these commercial networks, which constituted a complex diaspora, assumed the function of connecting the many towns and cities into an interlocking grid that relied on Islam as a unifying ideology.
The structure of trade and marketing provided economic linkages over a wide area and was centered on a commercial diaspora that depended for its operation on connections that nurtured an intellectual, scholarly, and religious hierarchy steeped, to a greater or lesser degree, in Islamic learning. For its functioning, the commercial system depended on the maintenance of links among communities based on kinship, personal friendships, and religious instruction, as well as business partnerships. The urban-centered commercial structure was matched by a rural structure based on transhumance migration and management of livestock and sedentary settlements of plantations and farms on which slaves worked. The jihād movement thus brought together a range of Muslims whose identities crossed ethnic boundaries and required knowledge of and fluency in more than one language, one of which was Arabic for the intellectual elite. All men had to have attended Qurʾānic school as boys and had to be more or less literate. They were expected to attend mosque on Fridays and to engage in communal prayers that highlighted this emphasis on literacy, the acquisition of knowledge, and travel, explicitly encouraged by the tenets of Islam that sanctified pilgrimage to Mecca and the many centers of learning along the routes to the Hijaz.
An example of the interlocking commercial and religious connections across West Africa can be gleaned from the biography of Abū Bakr al-Siddīq, who was born in Timbuktu around 1790 and was brought up in Jenne, farther south on the Niger River. Abū Bakr’s life story is known from his autobiography and other documents that came to light in Jamaica, where he became associated with R. R. Madden, special magistrate at the time of the British emancipation of slaves in 1834.42 Abū Bakr’s father, Kara Mūsā, who traced his ancestry to Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qādir, was of shurfa descent, that is, someone who claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet, which in turn traces his origin to Morocco. The family had been prominent among the Muslim learned class in West Africa for generations. Kara Mūsā was considered tafsīr (a West African grammatical corruption of mufassir, a scholar who specialized in Qu’ranic exegesis) and was a prominent merchant. Abū Bakr received his early education in Jenne and at age nine began an extended tour of Muslim centers in West Africa, first at the Juula town of Kong and then at Bouna, where, according to Ivor Wilks, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥajj Muhammad al-Watarawi presided over a community of scholars drawn from many parts of the western Bilād al-Sūdān. Indeed, Abū Bakr’s teachers included not only al-Watarawi but also Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir Sankari from Fuuta Jalon, Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf from Fuuta Toro, and Ibrāhīm ibn Abī al-Ḥasan of Silla, who was originally from Dyara, an important Soninke center near Nioro, north of modern Bamako. Moreover, Abū Bakr’s mother, Ḥafsah, who was known as Nagode (Hausa: “I am thankful”), was from Katsina but also had family in Borno. Her father, Muhammad Tafsīr, had been on pilgrimage to Mecca, and he and her brothers were involved in trade with Borno and the middle Volta basin and Asante. Abū Bakr’s trade with his father-in-law, Muhammad Tafsīr, included gold, as well as horses, donkeys, mules, and silks that had been imported from Egypt, and although Abū Bakr does not mention them, kola nuts were almost certainly sent to Katsina as well. Thus Abū Bakr was associated with the intellectual and commercial diaspora that stretched from Senegambia to Lake Chad in the eighteenth century.43
As Abū Bakr’s account demonstrates, the interior trade of the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān constituted a diversified regional commerce that was to a large extent ecologically determined, and goods imported via the Atlantic and the Sahara supplemented this regional trade of West Africa.44 The variety
