meanings of jihād, as described by Willis, concern purification, including the purging of evil among Muslims.25 Indeed, the jihād movement, which is the subject of this book, often targeted governments that were at least nominally Muslim, but that proponents of violent jihād considered lax in their commitment to Islam, often tolerating practices that were sometimes considered unorthodox, such as the use of amulets, as condemned in the teachings of Sīdī al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī. The arbitrary incursions of warrior elites who were known locally as ceddo in Senegambia, as well as the Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta, were pervasive. The Hausa governments and even the Sayfawa dynasty of Borno were also subject to criticism, although these governments often claimed allegiance to Islam and usually supported the Muslim scholarly community, even being educated by it. As I will discuss later, one of the most serious grievances was the failure of governments to protect the status of freeborn Muslims and otherwise allow Muslims to congregate more publicly, as the Qādiriyya brotherhood was increasingly advocating under the spiritual leadership of al-Kuntī.
Slave Resistance, the Age of Revolutions, and Islamic West Africa
The question of the resistance of slaves is at the heart of the social and cultural history of slavery. Specifically, historians have been preoccupied with a comparison of resistance among the different European colonies in the Americas, with a particular focus on the significance of revolt in St. Domingue and the establishment of the revolutionary state of Haiti for subsequent events of resistance in the Americas. Undoubtedly, as Hobsbawm characterized the period from 1789 to 1848, an “age of revolution” resulted in “the transformation of the world,” what he referred to as the “dual revolutions,” that is, the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous British Industrial Revolution.26 Although Hobsbawm focused on transformations in northwestern Europe and by extension the global dependencies of Britain and France and the emerging independent countries of Latin America, he was aware of possible reverberations in Africa and elsewhere. However, there is no indication in his work that he appreciated that revolution and transformation might occur largely independent of western Europe, as in the case of the jihād movement of West Africa, and thereby have an impact on shaping the modern world in ways that intersected with the age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas. Moreover, there can be little doubt that forms of resistance to slavery were different before 1793 from those after that date, the separation being marked by the revolutionary events in St. Domingue and the establishment of independent Haiti, as Genovese first suggested.27 Their pioneering insights have shaped historical discourse for the past half century. Genovese’s analysis of the changing nature of slave resistance has resonance in Africa through the impact of the British abolition movement and the founding of Sierra Leone, although he did not venture to explore these implications. The intersections of the ages of revolution in Africa and the Atlantic world have yet to be explored. This chapter is intended to demonstrate the ways in which West Africa did and did not fit into the pattern elsewhere, as suggested by Hobsbawm and Genovese.
Despite the significance of the dual revolutions of industrializing Britain and political change in France that helped shape the world, Hobsbawm was mistaken in thinking that “the Islamic states were convulsed by crisis; [and] Africa lay open to direct conquest” in the period 1789–1848.28 Hobsbawm may have been correct for the Ottoman state during the Napoleonic era and the resulting reform in Egypt, as well as the British conquest of Islamic areas of India, but his observations do not extend to West Africa. Rather, Africa did not lie open to “direct conquest,” at least not before the French conquest of Ottoman Algeria in 1830–47 and its continued occupation of St. Louis and Gorée, although direct conquest of the Senegal River valley occurred only after 1854. The British blockade of the West African coast after 1808 may have shaken the coastal states of Africa, but it had virtually no impact in the interior other than to reinforce the goals of the Islamic jihād movement in isolating Africa from the Atlantic world of slavery without undermining slavery itself. In southern Africa the Great Trek of the Boers after 1834 was a response to British policies of abolishing slavery and efforts to govern an unwilling settler population, not conquest. Although Genovese recognized the importance of Muslim resistance to slavery and the Malês uprising in Bahia in 1835, he did not notice a similar uprising among the Muslim Yoruba in the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1831–32 at virtually the same time or the connections between Yoruba resistance in Cuba in the 1830s and events in West Africa arising from the jihād movement.29
The arguments in this book are directed at Eric Hobsbawm and Eugene Genovese largely in symbolic fashion, not because they neglected the scholarship of the jihād movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which they did, but because their enormous contributions to an understanding of the age of revolutions have achieved a level of orthodoxy that overshadows the wealth of scholarship on a missing component of that era. The scholarship on the age of revolutions has evolved greatly since Hobsbawm and Genovese published their pioneering works half a century ago. Among the many studies that have broadened the conception of the Atlantic world to include Africa, one can highlight the various biographical studies, such as James Sweet’s account of Domingoes Álvares, African healing, and the intellectual history of the Atlantic world and Walter Hawthorne’s examination of the links between the upper Guinea coast and northeastern Brazil, which serve as models for a transatlantic perspective.30 Most especially, Jane Landers offers new insights on the shaping of an Atlantic world that attempts to integrate the West African backgrounds of people who were associated with the development of an Atlantic-wide “creole” society. As Landers has argued, biographical accounts provide “a prism through which to examine the active participation of Africans and their descendants in the age of Atlantic revolutions.”31 Landers demonstrates that such stories “make possible a more complex understanding of the traditional narratives and popular views of the Age of Revolutions, and demonstrate their active political and philosophical engagement in the most important events of their day.”32 Following the approach of these scholars, this study also relies heavily on biographical accounts.
The historiography of slavery during the age of revolutions has recognized influences emanating from Africa in shaping slave society in the Americas, although this was not a concern of Hobsbawm, whose age of revolutions focused on social and economic change in Europe and the Americas in a way that had little room for influences originating in Africa. Yoruba influence in particular is a feature of the African diaspora that emerged in the nineteenth century, particularly in Cuba and Brazil, but also in Sierra Leone and Trinidad because of the extension of British abolitionist policies to those states. Although Genovese’s insight into the importance of St. Domingue as a turning point from rebellion as a form of resistance to one of revolution fits neatly into Hobsbawm’s paradigm, Genovese’s understanding of African influences was seriously flawed. There can be no argument about the importance of both scholars in understanding revolutionary change or the importance of St. Domingue in that process, but their contributions ignored the Atlantic world of Africa.33 Despite the limitations that can be identified, both Hobsbawm and Genovese can be credited with influencing the study of slave resistance as a part of the age of revolutions, and here my intention is to place jihād in West Africa in this context.
My aim, therefore, is to extend the discussion of the age of revolutions beyond Hobsbawm’s identification of a twofold industrial and political transformation and Genovese’s recognition of the St. Domingue uprising as a turning point from rebellion to revolution to ask how Africa fitted into their paradigms. The consolidation of a field of research that focuses on the Atlantic, especially the black Atlantic, has neglected issues of how the regions of Africa that interacted with the Atlantic world helped shape developments. Although we recognize the development of ethnic-based “nations” in the Americas and distinguish between African-born populations and creole/mulatto/mestizo societies that variously emerged in Brazil, the Caribbean, mainland Hispanic America, and North America, there has been a neglect of how the processes of change that were unleashed by the expansion of slavery in the Americas altered the course of history in Africa. The challenge of this book goes beyond Hobsbawm and Genovese to address the field of Atlantic studies. My intention is to elaborate on the contributions of Paul Gilroy, Ira Berlin, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Jane
