as al-Timbuktāwī, in 1813. Aḥmad al-Timbuktāwī was a Fulbe cleric from Timbuktu, as his name indicates, who performed the pilgrimage in the first decade of the nineteenth century. On his return home in 1813, he had occasion to observe the religious practices of the black African community in Tunis, which consisted primarily of enslaved individuals from south of the Sahara who were identified according to the towns and places from which they had been dispatched across the Sahara, such as Kano, Katsina, Timbuktu, and Borno. These identifications do not allow a determination of whether they had been Muslims before their enslavement, but as far as al-Timbuktāwī was concerned, they were not practicing Islam in a manner that met his approval. His comments, therefore, provide a perspective on how Muslims, especially Fulbe, viewed society in sub-Saharan Africa and thereby justified jihād. In his opinion, the blacks of Tunis were involved in spirit-possession cults, known as bori in Hausa, which warranted their enslavement (plate 8). He considered bori a form of religious practice that violated the tenets of Islam. On the basis of what he saw in Tunis, he asserted that:
The it is disobedient to be silent on fitna [dissension] because that is among matters that require fulfilling conditions of al-’amr bi’al-maʿarūf [ordering what is good and forbidding what is evil] since that is plain polytheism, and resisting polytheism is a jihād, and jihād is incumbent even if it causes self-destruction or destruction of the wealth.47
Consequently, al-Timbuktāwī believed that the blacks of Tunis were rightly enslaved (plate 9).48 Adhering to similar ideas, ʿUthmān dan Fodio in turn inspired a generation and more to oppose bori, and although bori were never eliminated, as al-Timbuktāwī and ʿUthmān dan Fodio might have wished, a Muslim state based on Sharīʿa law was established.
The jihād movement provides the context for analyzing how political change in West Africa mirrored the Atlantic world. One of the legitimizing claims for the necessity of jihād was that political authorities were engaged in what was considered illegal enslavement and, in addition, were selling Muslims into the transatlantic slave trade. The complaints came to a peak in 1804 when the government of Gobir ordered the seizure of followers of ʿAbd al-Salām, one of ʿUthmān dan Fodio’s most fervent disciples, and thereby directly challenged the freedom of dan Fodio’s followers. The government of Gobir alleged that many of those who were seized were slaves who had fled their masters, but from the perspective of the nascent jihād movement, the followers were Muslims whose freeborn status was assumed, although it is impossible to know whether this was true. The thin line between claims of freedom on the basis of adherence to Islam and status at birth were interpreted to the benefit of the claimant; it was the responsibility of slave masters to establish otherwise. As the scholarly literature on the jihād movement makes clear, slavery was a factor in discussions of religion and ideology and pervaded the standards of resistance and aims at reform. When ʿUthmān dan Fodio declared jihād in 1804, he could not have known about developments in Brazil and the Caribbean, and surely he could not have known that in the same year Haiti became an independent state. Nonetheless, there was deep concern among the Muslim intellectual and political leadership about the fact that enslaved Muslims were being sold through Oyo to the Bight of Benin for sale to Europeans, and that some of them actually were sent to St. Domingue because of the French trade at Porto Novo and the commercial involvement of Pierre Tamata as an agent for French merchants, as discussed previously.
The enslavement of freeborn Muslims and their sale to Christians who were involved in the Atlantic trade was of particular concern to Muhammad Bello. Bello specifically condemned the sale of slaves to Oyo, which was clearly articulated in his manifesto and history, Infāq al-Maysūr, which he finished in 1812. In his reference to Oyo, which he called “Yoruba,” he noted, “The people of this country used to receive slaves from this country of ours, and they used to sell them to the aforementioned Christians. I am mentioning this affair so that you will not buy [or sell] a Muslim slave from anyone who brings one there. It is because of this that the calamity is general.”49 The preoccupation with the illegal enslavement of Muslims was clearly expressed in the debate between Muhammad Bello and Muhammad al-Kānimī of Borno (plate 10), as discussed in Infāq al-Maysūr and in an ongoing correspondence between the two rulers for another decade. The failure to resolve the issues in dispute ultimately resulted in war between Sokoto and Borno in 1826–27.50 The debate over the enslavement of Muslims was one of legitimizing the necessity of jihād but did not extend to the enslavement of non-Muslims or of nonbelievers and apostates in general. The issues that Bello and al-Kānimī addressed related to Islamic law and the regulation of the institution of slavery. Far different from the issues behind resistance to slavery in the Americas, the concern in the Sokoto Caliphate was over the nature of the Muslim state and the role of the state in protecting freeborn Muslims. The jihād rapidly overthrew the principal Hausa governments of Gobir, Kebbi, Kano, Katsina, and Zaria by 1808 and then spread to Borno in the east after 180851 and to Nupe in the south by 1810.52 From the central Bilād al-Sūdān the shock waves were sent south into Oyo and Yorubaland after 1817 and especially after Ilorin became an emirate within the Sokoto Caliphate in 1823. The issue of slave or free status preoccupied the jihād leadership.
In accusing the governments of the various Hausa states of enslaving free Muslims and thereby providing slaves for southern export, ʿUthmān dan Fodio encouraged slaves to escape or otherwise assert their Islamic identities.53 Hence the proponents of jihād found justification for their actions in protecting Muslims and thereby directly challenged the authority of all the governments of the region. Many enslaved Muslims took advantage of the jihād to assert their freedom after 1804, often by fleeing to the camps of the jihād armies, where they sought protection. To enforce the Gobir decree, as ʿUthmān dan Fodio complained, “The Sultan of Gobir attacked the Sheikh’s people; they fled, for they were afraid. The Gobir army followed them and captured some and slew others, seizing children and women, and selling them in our midst.”54 It is likely that many of those who were taken prisoner were in fact people who were considered by the Gobir authorities to have escaped from slavery. ʿAbd al-Salām, one of the Shehu’s Hausa supporters, led a raid on the Gobir detachment, freeing the Muslim captives and clearly demonstrating active rebellion against Gobir authority.55 Although it was not always possible to prevent the sale of prisoners who were Muslims, Abdullahi dan Fodio criticized some of his fellow Fulani Muslims in Tazyīn al-waraqāt (1813) as “sellers of free men in the market.”56 This was one of the reasons that he became disillusioned with the jihād and emigrated eastward. He was particularly critical of excess, condemning the extent of concubinage, as well as ostentatious clothing and other displays of wealth.57
The flight of the enslaved to the cause of jihād is most noticeable in the case of Ilorin, probably because of the availability of documentation. The Ilorin garrison, which consisted of Hausa and other slaves from farther north, mutinied in 1817 in a bid by its commander, Afonja, to topple the Oyo government. Afonja lost his life in 1823 when he tried to rein in the jihād.58 As ʿAlī Eisami reported from his own experience, “All the slaves who went to the war, became free; so when the slaves heard these good news, they all ran away.”59 ʿAlī, a Borno slave, was sold to merchants at the coast for sale overseas because his master feared that he would join the Muslims. The jihād continued into the 1820s, and the Muslims offered “liberty to all the Mahometen slaves, and encouraged others to kill their pagan masters and join them.”60 Ilorin became virtually autonomous, which contributed to an ongoing crisis that resulted in the eventual destruction of Oyo in the early 1830s and the incorporation of much of its territory into the caliphate as the Emirate of Ilorin.61 Similarly, in Nupe in 1831, “all runaway slaves are encouraged to join the ranks on condition of receiving their freedom; and they are joined by a vast number from the surrounding country.”62
From the perspective of the caliphate’s leadership, slavery was closely associated with issues of religion and required the recognition of Islamic law. Muslim forces were supposed to inquire into the religious status of slaves; those who had been born free were usually allowed to contact relatives in order to arrange ransom.63
