the Tījāniyya rather than the Qādiriyya, as the previous jihāds had been. By the 1850s much of West Africa had been consolidated into one of the jihād states, and their influence extended throughout West Africa and beyond. The conquest of Hamdullahi created a caliphate of the Tījāniyya and also further consolidated Fulbe/Fulani aristocratic rule.
The model of reformed Islamic rule that Sokoto imposed, which was retained and modified under colonial rule, was based on a form of government that owed inspiration to ṣūfī brotherhoods or ṭarīqa, first the Qādiriyya, then, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Tijāniyya, and by the end of the century, the Mahdiyya as well. The level and extent of Islamic scholarship on which this movement and its reverberations were based is well documented and has already undergone considerable analysis, as reflected in the bibliographic references to literature in Arabic that has been compiled by John Hunwick and his associates into a massive index of primary source materials in Arabic and other languages written in ajami (Arabic script). The extent of such documentary materials is best epitomized by the enormous libraries of Timbuktu. From the writings of Aḥmad Bābā and his associates in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century onward, it is clear that the Muslim scholars and clerics of West Africa were fully aware of transatlantic slavery and had developed a response to what for some appeared to be an attractive means of making money. The resulting limitations on Muslim involvement in trade with Europeans, that is, Christians, effectively undermined the participation of Muslim regions in the sale of slaves to the Americas, although participation was not entirely eliminated. Muslims were nonetheless sold to the Americas, but the circumstances under which they were sold are very important and instructive. Muslims were indeed taken as slaves across the Atlantic, which demonstrates that some of the enslaved did come from areas of Muslim influence and control, but proportionately, the numbers were relatively few, as is argued in chapter 5, and there was strong resistance to more serious involvement that was effectively enforced, as can be seen by the extent to which West Africa supplied relatively fewer slaves to the Americas than west central Africa.
The triumvirate of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi, and his son Muhammad Bello should be included in the list of major figures of the age of revolutions, comparable in terms of the significance of their leadership to that of William Wilberforce and Simón Bolívar. The dan Fodio triumvirate inspired jihād and provided unbroken leadership from the outbreak of hostilities with the government of Gobir in 1804 to the death of Muhammad Bello in 1837. The scholarly tradition associated with the jihād movement and the great outpouring of literary masterpieces in law, government, history, and mysticism, including poetry, is noteworthy. The three leading intellectuals of the Sokoto jihād, ʿUthmān dan Fodio, Abdullahi dan Fodio, and Muhammad Bello, composed numerous pamphlets, treatises, legal opinions, and other texts in the course of their lives.77 ʿUthmān dan Fodio died in 1817, his brother in 1828, and his son in 1837. The outpouring of literary texts is astonishing. In fact, it should be considered the product of a leadership of four, since the Shehu’s only daughter, Nana Asma’u (1793–1864), also wrote extensively.78 Nana was married to Gidado Junaidu al-Bukhārī, himself a prolific writer who held the title waziri under the Shehu and along with Muhammad Bello and Abdullahi formed the inner chamber of government and military leadership, planning the consolidation of the Islamic state and the perpetuation of a permanent state of jihād that was directed from the emirates and the numerous subemirates that constituted the caliphate. Gidado’s library provided the documentation for Last’s initial study of the Sokoto Caliphate.79 This commitment to written texts also included many scholars in Kano and the other emirate capitals, as well as the pilgrims who came to Sokoto, especially after the death of the Shehu in 1817 and the construction of the mausoleum in his honor (plate 12).
Indeed, the rapidity with which jihād spread throughout West Africa after 1804 indicates that ʿUthmān dan Fodio, at least, was already widely respected and successfully could issue flags of leadership and authority for dozens of jihād leaders to undertake revolutionary action in their specific areas. Thus all the Hausa governments were overthrown, although a number of the exiled aristocracies established enclaves of political authority based on walled cities and cavalries in new locations from which the military campaigns of the caliphate could not dislodge them. These enclaves were found at Maradi, Tsibiri, the Ningi hills, and the Jos Pleateau, among other places. Because of this resistance, towns had to be walled; the walls of Kano were particularly impressive (plate 13). In addition, frontier fortifications had to be maintained that were encouraged by Muhammad Bello, such as the fortified town (ribāṭ) that he founded at Wurno, north of Sokoto (plate 14). Hence, for Sokoto, there was a period of consolidation after the tawaye rebellions, and the exiled governments of Gobir and Katsina at Maradi, Tsibiri, and Konya continued to be a problem. The tawaye after the death of ʿUthmān dan Fodio and the continuing inroads of Maradi and Gobir raised issues of national security, the result of which was the construction of numerous ribāṭ throughout the hinterland of Sokoto and near all the major cities of the caliphate. Clapperton provides invaluable information on several of these, including Fanisau, near Kano, which he had also visited in 1824. He provides considerable information on the ribāṭ at Magaria, which was later replaced by Wurno, both located in the Rima River valley northeast of Sokoto.80 According to Last, “The establishing of ribats was an extension of Bello’s own practice of living in fortified camps, first at Karindaye, then at Magaria and finally at Wurno where he had his own ribat.”81 Magaria, Wurno, and Karindaye were located on the eastern edge of the Rima valley, Magaria a short distance northeast of Wurno and Karindaye southwest of Wurno. Of the other major ribāṭ, Silame was established on the frontier against Kebbi, standing on a ridge where the Rima River runs in a narrow valley between high escarpments.82
Hence the jihād movement was never completely successful in conquering West Africa, and the campaigns to subdue enclaves of resistance and opposition to conversion to Islam lasted the whole of the nineteenth century. This was also the case in the areas of Fuuta Toro, Fuuta Bundu, and Fuuta Jalon and in the emergence of the Caliphate of Hamdullahi after 1817. The two independent states of Kaarta and Segu, controlled by the military, waged annual war on the surrounding regions, including the Muslim states of the Senegal valley. After 1837, however, al-Hājj ‘Umar subdued the middle Niger basin from the borders of Fuuta Jalon to the western emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate. Virtually all the interior of West Africa had come under the authority of states established through jihād, thereby reflecting the full impact of the movement. The subsequent respect and deference paid to ʿUthmān dan Fodio, Abdullahi, and Bello are widely acknowledged. All scholarly authorities, including texts written in Arabic and Hausa, attribute intellectual and spiritual leadership to the three, and particularly to the Shehu.
Implications of the Jihād Movement
The long-term implications of the jihād movement are clear. As Last has observed, jihād altered the course of West African history:
The Islamic reform movement in West Africa gave rise to the largest unitary state in nineteenth-century Africa [i.e., the Sokoto Caliphate]. It inspired a literature greater in quantity and higher in learning than any previously seen south of the Sahara. It laid down conditions for generating one of the most productive indigenous economies in West Africa in the later nineteenth century. Indeed, the movement is as central to West African history as is, for example, the French Revolution to Europe.83
The timing and direction of West African reformist thought paralleled the European world. According to Last, there is a need to “examine the underlying causes of these changes and the ways by which they might have affected West Africa.”84 Moreover, I argue, the events in Africa must be incorporated into conceptions of the Atlantic world during the age of revolutions; however, the extent to which the events in West Africa shaped or did not shape the Americas and Europe and the ways in which the age of revolutions affected the jihād movement are debatable. As I argue here, the transatlantic world and Islamic West Africa were autonomous, largely disentangled in ways that helped define the Atlantic world.
