as Hayatu, a direct descendant of ʿUthmān dan Fodio, rallied to Mahdism and claimed legitimacy as the leader of the Mahdist cause there. Mahdist resistance to the colonial occupation in the Sokoto Caliphate in the early twentieth century proved particularly threatening until the Mahdists were crushed at Satiru, near Sokoto, in 1906.9 Hence the tradition of jihād that began with the Prophet Muhammad intensified first in West Africa, and its influence was spread through migration and propagation of the ṣūfī message of the Qādiriyya. In turn, the Qādiriyya presaged the Tījāniyya movement of al-Ḥājj ‘Umar and the Mahdiyya of the Nile and its subsequent offshoots to the west as far as Lake Chad and beyond.
MAP 1.1. The Jihād States in the Atlantic World, 1850.
Source: Henry B. Lovejoy, African Diaspora Maps.
Many Muslim jurists have characterized jihād as an obligation of all believers. As ʿUthmān dan Fodio established in his Bayān wujūb al hijra ʿalā ’l-ʿibād (The exposition of obligation of emigration upon the servants of God), based on references to the interpretations of earlier Muslim scholars, jihād was defined as an effort to confront impure acts or objects of disapprobation through the use of the heart, the tongue, the hands, and military action. John Ralph Willis has characterized these four manifestations of jihād as follows:
The jihād of the heart was directed against the flesh, called by the Sufis the “carnal soul.” It was to be accomplished by fighting temptation through purification of the soul. The jihād of the tongue and hands was undertaken in fulfilment of the Qurʾānic injunction to command the good and forbid the bad. And the jihād of the sword was concerned exclusively with combating unbelievers and enemies of the faith by open warfare.10
The reflections of ʿUthmān dan Fodio in his commitment to jihād were based on these distinctions. He was preoccupied with the personal purification of the soul and with prescriptions that upheld good behavior and condemned what was considered to be immoral. His call for jihād fi sabīl Allāh (jihād in the path of Allah) through military confrontation and conquest was a last resort, not the sole aim of his dedication to Islam. Moreover, his commitment was based initially on withdrawal and the avoidance of confrontation, which in the classic interpretation of Islam was the hijra, in imitation of the Prophet’s withdrawal from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. As Willis has explained, “Turning one’s mind from evil and things temporal was hijra of the heart. Withdrawal of verbal or physical support for actions forbidden by Qurʾān, Sunna, or Ijma’ realized hijra of the tongue and hands.” The Sunna refers to the social and legal customs and practices of the Muslim community, while Ijma’ is the consensus of the Muslim community, especially jurists, on religious issues. Finally, jihād of the sword only followed after Muslims removed themselves from the world of unbelievers and those who would harm Islam, explicitly because of the threat against their survival as a community. As is clear, the doctrines of jihād were revivalist, calling for a return to the customs and actions of the Prophet and rejecting reforms and changes that deviated from the original traditions of Islam.
An understanding of the jihād movement during the age of revolutions is relevant to contemporary politics in West Africa, particularly the uprising in northern Mali and southern Algeria in 2012–13 and the reign of terror in Nigeria perpetrated by Boko Haram since 2002. However the long tradition of jihād is assessed, its impact in terms of consolidating Islamic governance continues to this day, including efforts at the establishment of Sharīʿa jurisdiction in northern Nigeria and the inclusion of all countries in West Africa in the Islamic fold of nations today, even if there are many Christians in Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone, as well as Muslims. The spread of the al-Qaeda movement in Mali and southern Algeria and the role of Boko Haram in Niger and Nigeria demonstrate the continued power of jihād. But there is a fundamental difference between the nature of jihād as discussed in this book and the contemporary manifestation of jihād by Islamists associated with Boko Haram. Whereas the jihād of the past was associated with the ṣūfī brotherhoods, particularly the Qādiriyya, the contemporary movement is salafi, which is associated with literal, strict, and puritanical approaches to Islam and is in line with the anti-ṣūfī tradition of Wahhābism. This history can be recognized as a major theme in historical change in West Africa since the eighteenth century, when radical, Islamic forms of government, society, and law evolved as a parallel movement to the age of revolution in Europe and the Americas of Hobsbawm and Genovese.
Islam in West Africa and the Context of Jihād
One of the reasons that Africa is usually not included in a conceptualization of the Atlantic world arises from a failure to appreciate the long history of Islam in Africa, other than the region along the shores of the Mediterranean and the desert oases of the northern Sahara. A false division is thereby thrust on Africa that sees the Sahara Desert as a divide between the Mediterranean and “black” Africa, as is forcefully argued by Ann McDougall, among others. According to McDougall, the people who inhabited the Sahara might identify with communities south of the Sahara, in North Africa, or in the Sahara itself.11 I have argued elsewhere that the “desert-side economy” was characterized by the flow of people between the Sahara and the savanna, as well as trade into and across the Sahara.12 In the Muslim context, the region south of the Sahara was identified as the Bilād al-Sūdān, the land of the blacks, but it was long recognized that the major states of the region, from Ghana in the eleventh century to Mali in the fourteenth century to Songhay in the sixteenth century, were Muslim states, as confirmed by the allegiance of the ruling aristocracies of these states to Islam. Kanem, in the Lake Chad region, and its successor state of Borno were identified with Islam; its ruling dynasty, the Sayfawa, was recognized as Muslim for a thousand years until its final demise in the nineteenth century during the era of jihād. The Senegal River valley was solidly Muslim from the eleventh century, while the Hausa states between the Niger River and Lake Chad were Muslim by the thirteenth century, if not earlier. Paulo F. de Moraes Farias has documented the long-standing interactions across the Sahara from Andalusia in what is now Spain to the Niger River valley, as reflected in Arabic texts, archaeological artifacts, and inscriptions on tombstones.13 Even the so-called non-Muslim Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta, located between the Niger and the Senegal Rivers, have been mistakenly associated with “paganism” because the ruling elites were warriors who violated many of the precepts of Islam, but many Muslims, especially merchants, resided there, and to some extent the term “Bambara” was used conveniently to justify the enslavement of people from these states, whether or not they were Muslims.
The antiquity of Islam in West Africa and its persuasive influence are not in question, therefore, which raises a number of issues of interpretation and misinterpretation that are sometimes to be found in the scholarship of historians who are not specialists in West Africa and even more frequently in public discourse that treats Islam as if it were a recent introduction. One false conception relates to the idea of conversion: that somehow the people there converted to Islam at various times when in fact people had been Muslims for generations. When this mistake is applied to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, it takes on a peculiar meaning, as if Islam were a new introduction, although the Gambia River societies had been associated with the broader Muslim world since the incorporation of the valley into the Mali Empire in the fourteenth century.14 It is true that people did convert to Islam during this period, but the way in which conversion is often used as a descriptive term suggests that Islam was a foreign, alien religion of recent intrusion. Nothing could be further from the historical context, however. When the reference to conversion is made, moreover, there is usually no documented proof that individuals actually became Muslims through conversion. References to contemporary European accounts that assess the religion of local societies at the time have to be treated with caution. There certainly were people along the Atlantic coast who were not Muslim, but the identification of people and places as “Mandingo,” Jolof/Wolof,
