| From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century a series of jihad movements occurred in West Africa that led to the creation of a number of Islamic states and transformed the presence of Islam in the region. Most of these jihads involved rebellions by nomadic tribesmen against nominally Islamic rulers who held to traditional African concepts of divine kingship, mixing rituals of pagan origin with symbols derived from Islam. The leadership of these movements usually came from the literate class of ulama — scholars, teachers, and students — who had studied with Sufi masters locally or had acquired their reformist ideas in Mecca and Medina. Their followers were Fulani cattleherders moving south in search of pasture, who resented taxes imposed on them by the Hausa kings, joined by disgruntled peasants, runaway slaves, and other outcasts. Ibrahim Musa (Karamoko Alfa d. 1751), a Fulani torodbe (scholar), waged a struggle against the local rulers. This resulted in the creation of the state of Futa Jallon in the uplands of Senegambia. The jihad movement (which Ibrahim Musa’s descendants exploited to capture slaves for export and work in plantations) spread to Futa Toro in the Senegal River valley. Here torodbes formed an independent Islamic state, before merging with the local elites prior to the French conquest. The most famous of the West African jihad leaders was Uthman Dan Fodio (1754–1817) a mallam (religious scholar) from a well-established family of scholars in the independent Hausa kingdom of Gobir. After attacking the king for mixing Islamic and pagan practices, Dan Fodio followed the classical Muhammadan scenario of making the hijra beyond the borders of the kingdom, before waging jihad against the king and other Hausa rulers in the name of a purified Islam. His preaching conveyed a powerful message of social justice in the classic manner of Muhammad, mixing theological attacks on idolatry with denunciations of illegal taxes, equestration of property, compulsory military service, and the enslavement of Muslims. By 1808 the movement had overthrown most of the Hausa kingdoms; in the next two decades it expanded to include most of what is now northern Nigeria and the northern Cameroons. In 1817 Dan Fodio retired to a life of reading, writing, and contemplation, leaving the empire to his son Muhammad Belo, who became the Sultan of Sokoto — the most powerful Muslim emirate in what eventually became the British colony of Nigeria. |
