Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800
Nehemia Levtzion
The earliest Arab expeditions in North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries penetrated into the Sahara in two directions, the one from Tripoli toward Fezzan and the other from the Sus in southern Morocco. The Arab expeditions must have made their way on beaten routes along which trade had been moving for some time. Trade across the Sahara was carried by nomad Berbers, who occupied both ends of the Sahara. By the tenth century, Muslim traders from North Africa had their base in the commercial centers of Awdaghust and Tadmekka in the southern Sahara. From these towns, they traded with the capitals of the Sudanic kingdoms of Ghana and Gao.
It appears that the North African traders preferred to have their southern entrepôt in the domains of the Berbers, which they considered as being within Dar al-Islam. These traders might have observed the injunction by Ibn Abi Zayd (d. 996), the authoritative jurist of Qayrawan: “Trade to the territory of the enemy and to the Land of the Sudan is reprehensible.”1 In the following centuries, with the progress of Islam, the boundary between the Berber domains of the Sahara and Bilad al-Sudan (the Land of the Black People) became blurred, and the southern termini of the Saharan trade—Walata and later Timbuktu—had a Muslim population of Berbers and Sudanese.
In the eleventh century, the two capital cities of Ghana and Gao were composed in part of a Muslim town, which was separated from the royal town. Both parties seem to have been rather cautious to expose themselves to the full impact and consequences of unrestricted commercial and social relations between the Muslims and those local people who adhered to their ancestral traditions. This residential separation allowed each group to maintain and practice religious rites that may have been offensive to the other group.
Writing in 1068, the Andalusian geographer al-Bakri was able to gather precious information about Islam in three contemporary African kingdoms—Gao, Takrur, and Ghana. The king of Gao was Muslim and the royal emblems Islamic, but “the common people worshipped idols as did the [other] Sudanese.” Also, pre-Islamic customs persisted. The only-partial acceptance of Islam in Gao is contrasted with the zealous adherence to Islam of the king of Takrur on the Lower Senegal, who compelled his subjects to observe the Islamic law, and carried jihad against his infidel neighbors.2 The Islamic militancy of Takrur was exceptional, whereas Gao represented symbiotic relations between Islam and the traditional religion that were typical of Islam in West Africa.
In Ghana, the Muslims lived under the auspices of a non-Muslim king who invited Muslim traders to the capital and employed literate Muslims in his court. According to the geographer al-Zuhri, writing in 1137, the people of Ghana converted in 1076.3 This must have happened under the influence of the Almoravids, a militant Islamic movement in the southwestern Sahara. In 1154, according to al-Idrisi, Ghana was a Muslim state and was still among the most powerful in the Western Sudan.4 But by the middle of the thirteenth century, the power of Ghana had declined and the political center of gravity shifted southward, where Mali, on the upper reaches of the Niger, emerged as the dominant power. Al-Bakri’s distinction between Muslims and “followers of the king’s religion” (ahl din al-malik), and not between Muslims and local people, suggests that not all the Muslims in Ghana were foreigners. Al-Bakri referred to the Banu Naghmarata, “merchants who export gold to other countries.” These were traders who were part of a commercial network that extended from the towns of the Sahel to the sources of the gold in the south. They opened routes among friendly non-Muslim people. When the traders “enter their country the inhabitants treat them with respect and step out of their way.”5
Muslims established new trading centers, which by the end of the fifteenth century reached the fringes of the forest. They created a “commercial diaspora,” with a common religion, a lingua franca, and a common legal system, the Sharia, a personal, extraterritorial divinely ordained law, that added to the mutual trust among merchants. Conversion to Islam became necessary for those who wished to join the commercial network. The first stage in the spread of Islam in West Africa was therefore the dispersion of Muslims. The next phase began when Muslim clerics began to communicate with the host kings. Another text of al-Bakri presents an account of such an encounter that brought about the Islamization of a West African king:
The king of Malal is known as al-Musulmani. He is thus called because his country became afflicted with drought one year following another; the inhabitants prayed for rain, sacrificing cattle till they had exterminated almost all of them, but the drought and the misery only increased. The king had as his guest a Muslim who used to read the Quran and was acquainted with the Sunna. To this man the king complained of the calamities that assailed him and his people. The man said: “O king, if you believed in God (who is exalted) and testified that He is One, and testified as to the prophetic mission of Muhammad (God bless him and give him peace), and if you accepted all the religious laws of Islam, I would pray for your deliverance from your plight and that God’s mercy would envelop all the people of your country, and that your enemies and adversaries would envy you on that account.” Thus he continued to press the king until the latter accepted Islam and became a sincere Muslim. The man made him recite from the Quran some easy passages and taught him religious obligations and practices which no one may be excused from knowing. Then the Muslim made him wait till the eve of the following Friday, when he ordered him to purify himself by a complete ablution, and clothed him in a cotton garment which he had. The two of them came out toward a mound of earth, and there the Muslim stood praying while the king, standing at his right side, imitated him. Thus they prayed for a part of the night, the Muslim reciting invocations and the king saying “Amen.” The dawn had just started to break when God caused abundant rain to descend upon them. So the king ordered the idols to be broken and expelled the sorcerers from his country. He and his descendants after him as well as his nobles were sincerely attached to Islam, while the common people of his kingdom remained polytheists. Since then their rulers have been given the title of al-Musulmani.6
The Muslim divine succeeded in winning over the king by demonstrating the omnipotence of the great Allah. Praying to Allah saved the kingdom in a situation where all sacrifices performed by the local priests had failed.
Al-Bakri’s account, like other traditions, emphasizes the role of the rulers as early recipients of Islamic influence, and therefore also the importance of kingdoms in the process of Islamization. Indeed, Islam did not penetrate into segmentary societies even when and where Muslim traders and clerics were present. Kings sought supernatural aid from external religious experts, because in the process of state-building they experienced situations of uncertainties and strain, like competition over the chieftaincy, fear of plots, wars with other states, and the responsibility for the welfare of the whole community. By contrast, the common people, even when integrated into the new states, did not undergo radical social and economic changes that called for a readjustment of religious life. Their way of life remained harmonized with the rhythm of the traditional religion: its fertility rites, ancestor worship, and the supplication of the deities.
This argument may be related to Robin Horton’s theory of conversion, according to which the peasant who lives in his own community is likely to be taken up by the cult of the lesser spirits, whereas his ritual approach to the Supreme Being is intermittent and of marginal importance. On the other hand, kings and other officeholders, by being directly involved in long-distance trade or by interaction with merchants and interstate diplomacy, were opened to the wider world, beyond their own microcosms. They were cultivating and simultaneously performing the cults of communal and dynastic guardian spirits and the cult of the Supreme Being. For the latter, they drew selectively from Islam. Thus, the religious life of the rulers was the product of the adaptation of a unified cosmology and ritual organization, and imams that directed the rituals for the chiefs were part of the court, like the priests of the other cults.7 In al-Bakri’s account, the Muslim cleric taught the king of Mali only those religious obligations and practices that no one may be excused from knowing. Hence, the king was instructed only with the rudiments of Islam and was not heavily burdened from the beginning with the obligations of prescriptive Islam.
In Malal and, as noted above, Gao, only the king, his family, and entourage accepted Islam, whereas the commoners remained loyal to their ancestral religions. Situated between the majority of their pagan subjects and an influential Muslim minority, kings adopted a middle position between Islam and the traditional religion. They behaved as Muslims in some situations but followed traditional customs on other occasions. They patronized Muslim religious experts but referred also to traditional priests and shrines. From this middle position, dynasties and individual kings, in given historical circumstances, could develop greater commitment to Islam or fall back upon ancestral religion. This may be demonstrated by following the development of Islam in Mali from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries.
Malinke chiefs had come under Islamic influence before the time of Sunjata, founder of the empire of Mali.8 Sunjata, a great hunter and magician, fought against Sumanguru, the king of Soso, another powerful magician. Though a nominal Muslim, he turned to the traditional religion for support, to the particularistic spirit of the nation, rather than to the universalistic appeal of Islam. Two centuries later, Sonni Ali, who made the small kingdom of Songhay into a large empire, behaved in a similar way. Kings like Sunjata and Sonni ʿAli, founders of empires, are the heroes of the national traditions, whereas the exploits of their Muslim successors—Mansa Musa of Mali and Askiya Muhammad of Songhay—were recorded by the Arabic sources.
From its center on the upper Niger, Mali expanded into the Sahel. Muslim towns became part of the empire, and Muslim traders traveled over the routes that traversed the empire. Through the control of the Saharan trade and when they performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, the kings of Mali came closer to the wider Muslim world. As the small Malinke kingdom turned into a vast, multiethnic empire, with influential Muslim elements inside and extensive Islamic relations with the outside, its kings moved along an imagined continuum, from attachment to the traditional heritage toward greater commitment to Islam. Mansa Musa (1312–37) was “a pious and righteous man, and made his empire part of the land of Islam.” He built Friday mosques with minarets and instituted the public prayer. He attracted Maliki scholars and was devoted to Islamic studies.9
In 1352–53, during the reign of Mansa Musa’s brother Mansa Sulayman, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited the king’s court and described the celebration of the two great Islamic festivals. The presence of the king made the public prayer an official occasion to which non-Muslims were drawn; in return, the prestige of the new religion was mobilized to exhort loyalty to the ruler. The alliance between kingship and Islam made the latter into an imperial cult. As the Islamic festivals became national feasts, they also accommodated traditional ceremonies. On the two festivals following the afternoon prayer, the sultan sat on the dais, surrounded by army officers, the qadi (the Muslim judge), and the preacher. Dugha the linguist, accompanied by slave girls, played an instrument made of reed with gourds underneath, and recited songs of praise to the king. He was followed by the bards (dyali), dressed as birds in red-beaked masks of feathers. They recited the history of the kingdom and called for the sultan to be remembered by posterity for his good deeds.10
Ibn Battuta regarded this “ridiculous reciting of the poets” among “the vile practices” of the people of Mali. He criticized other practices, too, such as the custom of sprinkling dust and ashes on the head as a sign of respect before the king.11 In eleventh-century Ghana, under a non-Muslim king, only those who followed the king’s religion kneeled down and sprinkled themselves with dust; the Muslims were exempted from this practice and greeted the king by clapping hands.12 In the Islamized empire of Mali, all subjects, Muslims and non-Muslims, had to follow the custom.13 In other words, under non-Muslim rulers, Muslims were not obliged to perform some traditional ceremonial acts, but under Islamized kings, who themselves combined Islamic and traditional elements, pre-Islamic customs had to be accommodated. But Ibn Battuta was also impressed by the way Malian Muslims observed the public prayer on Friday, dressed in white clothes. He also commended their concern for the study of the Quran.14
Mansa Musa visited Cairo on his way to Mecca in 1324, where he was described by an Egyptian official as a pious man, who “strictly observed the prayer, the recitation of the Koran, and the mention of Allah’s name.” But, the same informant added that beautiful daughters of his subjects were brought to Mansa Musa’s bed without marriage, as if these freewomen were slave concubines. When Mansa Musa was told that this was not permitted to Muslims, he asked: “‘Not even to kings?’ ‘Not even to kings,’ was my reply, ask the learned scholars.’ ‘By Allah,’ he said, ‘I did not know that. Now I will renounce it completely.’”15 Shortcomings in the application of the Muslim law were most apparent in marriage customs and sexual behavior.
In the fifteenth century, Mali lost its control over Timbuktu, Jenne, and the other centers of the Sahel, thereby being cut off from direct contact with the trans-Saharan routes and the wider Muslim world. The capital declined and was deserted by the foreign Muslim community. As more ethnic groups escaped the domination of Mali, the kingdom gradually contracted back to its Malinke nucleus and the traditional particularistic spirit of the Malinke nation triumphed over the universal, supratribal appeal of Islam. Muslim divines remained attached to the courts of the successor states of Mali and continued to render religious service to those minor kings, but the latter lost the Islamic zeal and appearance of the fourteenth-century kings of Mali. The Malinke chiefs returned to the middle position between Islam and the traditional religion, with a greater inclination toward the latter. Muslims in the capital of the empire and provincial centers of government rendered religious service to Islamized kings and became integrated into the social and political system of the state. They were pious and observant believers themselves, but had to tolerate the more diluted forms of Islam as practiced by their kings, and even to take part in ceremonies in which pre-Islamic rites were performed. The situation of these Muslims was different from that of Muslims in commercial towns, which were often autonomous. The king of Mali did not enter Diaba, a town of the fiuqahaʾ (jurists), where the qadi was the sole authority. Anyone who entered this town was safe from the king’s oppression and his outrage, and it was called “the town of Allah.”16
Merchants were the carriers of Islam rather than agents of Islamization. Merchants opened routes and exposed isolated societies to external influences, but they were not themselves engaged in the propagation of Islam, which was the work of religious divines. The latter joined the commercial caravans and it was through them that Islam actually left traces along the trade routes. Clerics often abandoned the caravan when a local chief requested their religious services. Clerics followed the merchants to the commercial towns, where they served the Muslim community as imams and teachers. The clerics became integrated into African societies by playing religious, social, and political roles similar to those of traditional priests. Like traditional priests, Muslim clerics were peacemakers, who pleaded for the wrongdoers, and mosques, like the traditional shrines, were considered sanctuaries. Clerics were expected not to interfere in the political competition within African societies, and immunity of life and property was extended to Muslims only as long as they posed no threat to the existing sociopolitical order. Muslims had limited political objectives; they sought to win the favor of the rulers toward the Muslims. A non-Muslim ruler, the eleventh-century king of Ghana, was highly praised “on account of his love of justice and friendship for Muslims.”17
Songhay and Timbuktu
In the middle of the fourteenth century when Ibn Battuta visited Timbuktu, it was still a small town inhabited mainly by the Massufa Berbers.18 There was, however, a community of foreign Muslims in Timbuktu, because Ibn Battuta noted the tombs of two foreigners, the Egyptian Saraj al-Din ibn al-Kuwayk and the Andalusian Abu Ishaq al-Sahili. The former, a merchant from Alexandria, died in Timbuktu in January 1334,19 on his way to Mali to claim a debt of loan from Mansa Musa. In Timbuktu, he was a guest of Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, a poet and architect from Andalusia, who had accompanied Mansa Musa back from the pilgrimage. Abu Ishaq built a magnificent palace for Mansa Musa in the capital and then settled in Timbuktu, where he died in October 1346.20 He must be credited also with the building of the great Friday mosque of Timbuktu, which according to Leo Africanus was built by an Andalusian architect.21 The two chronicles of Timbuktu confirm that this mosque was built by the order of Mansa Musa.22 But, during Ibn Battuta’s visit, Walata was still more important than Timbuktu, and the descendants of Abu Ishaq al-Sahili preferred to live there and not in Timbuktu.23
Mansa Musa encouraged intellectual life in Timbuktu, and sent Malian scholars to study in Fez.24 By the first half of the fifteenth century, the level of scholarship in Timbuktu was such that Sidi Abd al-Rahman al-Tamimi, who came from the Hijaz, realized that the scholars of Timbuktu surpassed him in the knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Sidi Abd al-Rahman himself therefore traveled to Fez to study fiqh before he settled in Timbuktu.25 He became integrated into the scholarly community of Timbuktu, and his descendant Habib served as qadi of Timbuktu from 1468 to 1498.26
The senior scholar in Timbuktu under the rule of Mali was Mobido Muhammad, a native of Kabora, which had been mentioned together with Zagha (Dia) by Ibn Battuta, as two old Muslim towns on the Niger. Kabora was perhaps the most important center of Islamic learning on the Middle Niger, where famous scholars (ʿulamaʾ) who later held positions in Jenne and Timbuktu studied until the sixteenth century. Around the tomb of Mobido Muhammad al-Kabori in Timbuktu “were buried some thirty men of Kabora, all scholars and men of piety.” Two prominent white scholars of Timbuktu, ʿUmar ibn Muhammad Aqit and Sidi Yahya, also studied with Modibo Muhammad al-Kabori.27 Under the rule of Mali, the imams of the Friday mosque were Sudanese. After the Tuareg conquest of Timbuktu in 1433, scholars from the oases of the northern Sahara replaced Sudanese scholars as imams of the Friday mosque. It was about the same time that the Sankore scholars, members of three Sanhaja families, who had migrated from Walata, became prominent in Timbuktu.28
Even a source as hostile to Sonni Ali as Taʾrikh al-Sudan admits that, notwithstanding Sonni Ali’s persecution of the scholars of Timbuktu, “he acknowledged their eminence, saying: without the ʿulamaʾ the world would be no good.’ He did favors to other ʿulamaʾ, and respected them.”29 The ʿulamaʾ favored by Sonni Ali were the descendants of scholars who had come from the northern Sahara and beyond, who unlike the Sanhaja of the southern Sahara, had no relations with the Tuareg, Sonni ʿAli’s enemies. Except for his violent encounter with the Sankore scholars, Sonni Ali was a typical Islamized king of the western Sudan. Sonni Ali combined elements of Islam with beliefs and practices of the Songhay traditional religion, and was greatly respected as the magician-king. He observed the fast of Ramadan and gave abundant gifts to mosques, but he also worshipped idols, sacrificed animals to trees and stones, and sought the advice and help of traditional diviners and sorcerers. He pronounced the shahada (the Islamic confession of faith), without understanding its meaning. He prayed but was careless in observing the correct time of the prayers.
Sonni ʿAli therefore was not different from most West African kings, who maintained a middle position between Islam and the traditional religion, but he encountered different historical circumstances. His successful military exploits brought him to rule over regions that had been under stronger Islamic influence. It was the political confrontation with the representatives of Islam, and not the deficiency in the practice of Islam, that brought about takfir, the declaration of Sonni Ali as an infidel. Since the early days of Islam, it was the consensus (ijmaʿ) of the scholars of Islam to avoid such declarations, so that those who proclaimed themselves Muslims by making the profession of the faith could not be anathematized. It was on the basis of this consensus that West African kings were not challenged as infidels. The legal and doctrinal justification to the declaration against Sonni ʿAli, against the general consensus, was provided by Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Karim al-Maghili.
Shortly after Sonni ʿAli’s mysterious death, his son was overthrown by Askiya Muhammad, a senior commander in Sonni ʿAli’s army. He entered into an alliance with the ʿulamaʾ of Timbuktu and with chiefs and governors of the more Islamized western provinces. A new balance was achieved between those provinces west of the Niger bend and Songhay proper, down the river, which remained strongly traditional and had hardly been affected by Islam. Askiya Muhammad made Islam one of the central pillars of the state and cultivated close relations with the scholars of Timbuktu. Shortly after his accession, he went to Mecca on pilgrimage. On the way he visited Egypt, where he met Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti. Al-Suyuti introduced Askiya Muhammad to the ʿAbbasid caliph in Egypt. The caliph invested Askiya Muhammad with the title of caliph. In Egypt, Askiya Muhammad “learned from him [al-Suyuti] what is lawful and what is forbidden, … and benefitted from his advice and admonitions.”30
Our sources suggest that Askiya Muhammad sought the advice of al-Suyuti and al-Maghili in matters of state. But these remained theoretical exhortations, because from what we know about Songhay under Askiya Muhammad and his successor, little was done in practice to reform the empire in line with Islamic political theory. The scholars of Timbuktu were less demanding, and were satisfied with their privileged position. They praised the askiya for his love of scholars and for his humility before the scholars and his generosity to them. The court ceremonies and the protocol were adjusted to accommodate Muslim scholars. Sharifs were permitted to sit with the askiya on his dais, and only they and other scholars could eat with the askiya.
In 1498, Askiya Muhammad appointed Mahmud ibn ʿUmar Aqit as qadi. Mahmud ibn ʿUmar was succeeded by his three sons, who held office until the end of the sixteenth century. The transfer of the office of qadi to the Aqit family marked the growing influence of the Sankore Sanhaja scholars, led by members of the Aqit family. The qadi Mahmud b. ʿUmar asserted his independence in Timbuktu to the extent that he sent away Askiya Muhammad’s messengers and prevented them from carrying out the askiya’s orders.31 The qadi Muhmad b. ʿUmar behaved as mentor of Askiya Muhammad who requested the qadi to save him the fire of hell, by guiding him in the right way.32 There were also tensions in the next generation, between Askiya Dawud, son of Askiya Muhammad, and the qadi al-ʿAqib, son of the qadi Mahmud. Once, following an exchange of unworthy words, the qadi refused to see the askiya, who was made to wait before the qadi’s home for a long time before being given permission to enter. The askiya humiliated himself before the qadi until the latter was reconciled. The character of the qadi al-ʿAqib and his attitude toward the askiya and his officials were described by his nephew Ahmad Baba: “He was of stout heart, bold in the mighty affairs that others shrink from, courageous in dealing with the sultan and those under him. He had many confrontations with them and they would be submissive and obedient to him in every matter. If he saw anything he disapproved of, he would suspend his activities as qadi and hold himself aloof. Then they would conciliate him until he returned.”33
There were other ʿulamaʾ who fitted better to the traditional role of Muslim divines in a Sudanic state, as intimate advisers, whose relations with the rulers were devoid of the tensions between the askiyas and the qadis. These clerics prayed for the ruler and recruited supernatural powers to protect him and his kingdom.34 These clerics received grants of land and charters of privilege. Such documents were known as hurma in Songhay, mahram in Bornu, both meaning “sanctity,” “immunity,” or “inviolability.”
Askiya Muhammad was deposed by his son Musa in 1528. During the civil war that followed between Askiya Musa and his brothers, the qadi Mahmud b. ʿUmar sought to bring about a reconciliation, but Askiya Musa refused. A provincial governor who had taken arms against Askiya Musa sought sanctuary in the house of the qadi of Timbuktu. Askiya Musa ordered to seize him at the qadi’s house.35 Askiya Musa’s defiance of the qadi’s intercession was a departure from the accepted norms of political conduct, a sign of unmitigated rule of violence, seemingly unconcerned even for its own legitimacy. The period of illegitimate despotism came to an end with the accession of Askiya Ismaʿil in 1537. He set free his father Askiya Muhammad, who in return ceremonially invested Askiya Ismail with the insignia he had received in Cairo from the Abbasid caliph: green gown, green cape, white turban, and an Arabian sword.
Askiya Dawud, the last ruler in the line of Askiya Muhammad’s sons, ruled for thirty-three years (1549–82). As a prince, he received a good Islamic education, and even as king he continued to study with a shaykh, who came to the palace every morning. He exceeded his father in his generosity to Muslim scholars. He gave his daughters in marriage to scholars and merchants.36 Whenever Askiya Dawud passed near Timbuktu, the merchants of Timbuktu came out to greet him in his camp outside the city. But the askiya went in person to visit the qadi at his home, and then proceeded to pray at the great mosque.37
When one of the scholars of Timbuktu visited Askiya Dawud in his palace, he was shocked by the persistence of pre-Islamic practices at the court. “I was amazed,” the scholar said, “when I came in, and I thought you were mad, despicable and a fool, when I saw the people carry dust on their heads.” The askiya laughed and replied, “No, I was not mad myself, and I am reasonable, but I am the head of sinful and haughty madmen and I therefor made myself mad to frighten them so that they would not act unjustly toward the Muslims.”38 Even a devoted Muslim like Askiya Dawud was unable to relieve the monarchy of its pre-Islamic heritage.
After Askiya Dawud’s death in 1582, scholars and merchants of Timbuktu became involved in succession disputes among the Songhay princes. When one of these princes gave up his right to the throne and wished to retire to Timbuktu to become a student of the Islamic sciences, his wish was rejected and he was detained because the commanders of the army thought that if the prince resided in Timbuktu, officials and princes on visits to Timbuktu would be suspected of intriguing with him. In 1588, when the governor of Timbuktu and the Tuareg chief supported a rebellious prince, the merchants of Timbuktu also supported the rebel; they donated gold to the prince, and the imams prayed for him. Following the defeat of the prince by the reigning askiya, the political supporters—namely, the governor of Timbuktu and the Tuareg chief—were executed; the scholars and merchants, however, were pardoned, because they were not considered a political threat. Referring to a certain merchant, the askiya said: “He is a poor trader of no importance and not to be worried about.”39
In the middle of the sixteenth century there were 150 or 180 Quranic schools in Timbuktu.40 They formed the broad basis for the higher levels of learning in all the branches of the Islamic sciences. Students studied a subject with the scholar best known for his authority in that field. By the end of the century, scholarship in Timbuktu was highly regarded, and during Ahmad Baba’s exile in Marrakesh (1594—1607), leading scholars of the Maghrib, including the qadis of Fez and Meknes and the mufti of Marrakesh, came to hear his lessons.
At that time, intellectual life in Timbuktu was influenced by Egyptian scholars, with whom scholars from Timbuktu studied when they visited Cairo on their way to Mecca. It is significant that almost all these Egyptian scholars were Shafiʿis, with whom the Maliki scholars of Timbuktu must have studied subjects like hadith (Hadith), tafsir (Quran exegesis), and mysticism, rather than jurisprudence, which one learned with scholars of one’s own school of law. Al-Suyuti boasted that scores of his books had been taken to the land of Takrur, as Egyptians called Bilad al-Sudan at that time.41 Thus the scholars of Timbuktu had wider exposure than the parochial Maliki scholars of Morocco. Indeed, Ahmad Baba complained that Moroccan scholars were concerned only with the study of Maliki handbooks such as the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd and the Mukhtasar of Khalil.42
On two issues that were central to West African Muslims—namely, the use of amulets and coexistence with non-Muslims—the scholars of Timbuktu accepted the advice of the more sophisticated Egyptian al-Suyuti than the admonitions of the zealous Maghribi reformer Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Karim al-Maghili. Whereas al-Suyuti saw no harm in the manufacture of amulets, provided there was nothing reprehensible in them, al-Maghili was against any trade in amulets. Al-Suyuti gave license to some forms of association with non-Muslims, whereas al-Maghili insisted that between Muslims and infidels there was only jihad.43
Sufism was brought to Timbuktu from the Maghrib and the northern Sahara in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, the leading scholars of Timbuktu, on their way to Mecca, sought the blessing and guidance of Muhammad al-Bakri (d. 1545), the Egyptian poet and mystic. It is significant that, like al-Bakri and other Egyptian sufis of the sixteenth century, those of Timbuktu were also not affiliated to any sufi brotherhood (tariqa).44
It seems that much of the wealth of the scholars of Timbuktu came from gifts by the askiyas and by the city’s merchants. Donations by the askiya were in gold or in the form of grants of land with slaves to cultivate them.45 Members of scholars’ families were sometimes important merchants.46 An individual might spend the first part of his life as a merchant before retiring to scholarship.47 Scholars of Timbuktu referred to as saints and ascetics were known to have been quite wealthy.48 Commerce seems to have been problematic to mystics. Sidi Yahya al-Tadilsi, the patron-saint of Timbuktu, not wanting to depend on donations, became engaged in commerce; gradually, he was deprived of his nightly visionary encounters with the Prophet. “Look,” says the author of Taʾrikh al-Sudan, “to the misfortune caused by business, even though the blessed shaykh had been extremely heedful of what is forbidden in transactions.”49
Timbuktu was a city of commerce and scholarship. The scholars of Timbuktu were spokesmen of the trading community of the city, which benefited commercially from being part of the Songhay empire. Even legal opinions were influenced by commercial interests; there was, for instance, Ahmad Baba’s ruling on the lawfulness of tobacco because Timbuktu was an important center for the tobacco trade.
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Following the Moroccan conquest in 1591, the people of Timbuktu, under the leadership of the qadi, first adopted a policy of passive submission and noncooperation with the conquering army. The ʿulamaʾ and the merchants were called on to provide slaves for the construction of the fort (qasaba). The shurafaʾ (believed to be descendents of the prophet Muhammad) led popular discontent and two of them were publicly executed. Timbuktu, after having been autonomous, became the seat of a military government. The presence of the occupying force disturbed life in a city of commerce and scholarship and led to unrest and disobedience of the civilian population, led by merchants and fuqahaʾ. The pasha and his troops resorted to harsh disciplinary measures, when all conventions were broken. People deposited their valuables in the houses of the fuqahaʾ, which in the past had been considered immune and sanctuary, but the pasha ordered the arrest of the leading fuqaha and let his soldiers pillage their houses and to take away what had been deposited there. Seventy prominent fuqahaʾ were deported in chains to Marrakesh, among them the qadi ʿUmar and Ahmad Baba. The fuqahaʾ were under arrest in Marrakesh for two years, and the qadi ʿUmar died in prison. Even after their release in May 1596, the fuqaha were not allowed to return to Timbuktu. Only Ahmad Baba returned, after almost twenty years in exile.
After the exile of the fuqahaʾ, according to the author of Taʾrikh al-Sudan, Timbuktu “became a body without a soul.”50 The line of qadis from the Aqit family that had held office for about a century was replaced by qadis from other families, but they did not enjoy the authority and prestige of their sixteenth-century predecessors.
During the seventeenth century, the elite of Timbuktu was made up of the arma, the descendants of the Moroccan conquerors, who held military and political power. The elite of the civilian population were the merchants and the ulama. Under the rule of Songhay, the ʿulamaʾ had served as spokesmen for the merchants and other sectors of the civil population; they acted as intermediaries with the political authorities. But under the rule of the arma, the political influence of the merchants increased, because the merchants contributed to defray the cost of military operations to secure the Niger waterway and other routes to Timbuktu. The merchants no longer needed the ʿulamaʾ as intermediaries.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the impoverished mercantile community of Timbuktu was no longer able to support a large, specialized, scholarly community. Scholars left Timbuktu and the city went into a period of intellectual decline. Lesser scholars, known as alfas, earned their living as traders and artisans, mainly weavers and tailors.
The suffering of the people of Timbuktu increased as the struggle for power among the Moroccan military commanders intensified. The supply of food from the inner delta was cut off as the routes were intercepted by Fulbe and Tuareg. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the pashalik of Timbuktu was in total eclipse. About 1770, the Tuareg took possession of Gao, and in 1787 they entered Timbuktu and abolished the office of the pasha. Not only was military and political ascendancy taken over by the nomads of the southern Sahara; spiritual leadership, too, passed to the clerics of the southern Sahara. The harshness of the nomads was mitigated by the clerics, whose religious prestige also carried political influence, reaching its peak with the revivalist movement led by Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729–1811).
Linked by the Niger waterway to Timbuktu, Jenne developed as a distribution center for trade to the south. Merchants from the Sahara and North Africa extended their business from Timbuktu to Jenne. Their agents were Juula, who carried the trade to the sources of gold and kola in the Akan forest (chapter 4).
In Jenne, deep in the world of the Mandingue, Islam gained ground slowly. Pre-Islamic customs persisted there until the end of the fifteenth century, when a pious Juula came to Jenne from the south and destroyed the house of the idols that the people continued to worship.51 Clerics and scholars in Jenne—all Soninke and Mandingue—were highly respected by the rulers of Jenne, who sought their blessings.52
Between Jenne and Timbuktu, the Fulbe pastoralists of Massina, though they remained attached to magical-religious rites and observances to secure the prosperity of their cattle, became exposed to Islamic influences. Clans of Muslim clerics rendered religious services to the Fulbe chiefs, who gradually adopted Muslim names and began to practice some Islamic rites. There had been no signs to suggest that under the leadership of these Fulbe clerics a theocratic state would be established through jihad in Massina.
The Bambara state of Segu was established in the first half of the eighteenth century by Biton Kulibali, who forced greater centralization to overcome older egalitarian patterns of Bambara communal life. He was supported by Muslim merchants and clerics, but was careful to maintain the balance between traditional and Islamic elements.
It was customary for chiefs to send their sons to study with a Muslim cleric as part of their princely education. Though they were not meant to become Muslims, some of them did, and even turned scholars. A qadi of Jenne in the second half of the sixteenth century was “from among the sons of the chiefs of Kala. He withdrew from authority and became a scholar.”53 In this way, Bakary, the son of Biton Kulibali, became a Muslim. When he succeeded his father (c. 1755), the prospects of a growing Islamic influence at the court was unacceptable to the ton-dyon, the core of Biton’s supporters, and Bakary was deposed and killed.
Ngolo Diara, a former slave of Biton Kulibali, seized power and established a new dynasty in Segu. Ngolo had spent some years in Jenne with an important Muslim cleric and was influenced by Islam, but he was also steeped in the Bambara traditions. He had been appointed by Biton Kulibali to the office of the “guardian of the four cults of Segu,” one of the principal posts of the Segu state, and Ngolo retained this position after Biton’s death. It was in the central shrine that he gathered the warriors in his move to seize power.54 Ngolo skillfully maintained the balance between traditionalism and Islam. Muslim clerics extended their religious services at his court and the Muslim trading communities enjoyed the protection of the Bambara state. Though Ngolo followed Islamic customs, he also remained the great priest of the protecting idols.55
As subjects of the Islamized empires of Mali and Songhay, the Bambara had hardly been influenced by Islam, and might have even exhibited a tendency to resist Islam. But when Bambara clans became themselves involved in the process of state-building, their chiefs became exposed to Islamic influence. As ruling dynasties, the Kulibali and the Diara became culturally differentiated from the peasants, though they shared with them most practices and beliefs. Through chiefly courts, where Islamic rituals were held, Islamic elements penetrated also the culture of the common Bambara, including the celebration of Islamic festivals as national feasts.56 The Bambara worship Ngalla (Allah), but because they have a sense of impurity, they call on the help of Muslim clerics to approach him.57
Mungo Park, who visited Segu in 1796 during the reign of Mansong Ngolo’s, was impressed by the influence of Muslims at the court of Segu. Mansong, he said, “would willingly have admitted me into his presence at Sego; but was apprehensive he might not be able to protect me against the blind and inveterate malice of the Moorish inhabitants.”58 In the rival Bambara state of Kaarta, Mungo Park observed that “the disciples of Mahomet composed nearly one half of the army,” and therefore “the mosques were very crowded” when the whole army gathered into the capital. Mungo Park, however, recognized the persistence of pre-Islamic beliefs and practices, saying: “Those Negroes, together with the ceremonial part of the Mahomedan religion, retain all their ancient superstitions and even drink strong liquors.”59
The Maraka were Soninke that came to live among the Malinke and the Bambara, whose language they adopted. Bambara or Bobo that converted to Islam became identified as Maraka.60 Whereas, during the age of the great empires, Islam had been mainly an urban phenomenon, restricted to merchants and scholars, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Muslims made inroads into the countryside and won adherents among peasants and fishermen, who until then had hardly been influenced by Islam.
In the midst of the general sense of insecurity, caused by the violence generated by the demand for slaves, Muslims traveled as traders or pilgrims, and in pursuit of learning. Though there were cases of Muslims who were captured and sold as slaves, Muslims were generally immune and safe. They were protected by the reverence for their supernatural powers and found hospitality among fellow Muslims in the commercial communities that developed along the trade routes.
Muslims among the Bambara are known as Maraka, and they consist of two groups: one is made up of those early Soninke Muslims who claim to have migrated from Wagadugu (i.e., old Ghana); the other group were Bambara who had converted to Islam and assumed the identity of Maraka.
In the eighteenth century, when there was an abundant supply of slaves, the Maraka owned more slaves for farming than did the Bambara. Whereas Bambara peasants owned a few slaves who worked in the field together with members of the household, the Maraka owned many slaves who worked in the fields under the supervision of a foreman, himself a slave. The Maraka master was then able to follow his commercial or clerical pursuits. Slave farming became the economic basis for Islamic scholarship. The most elaborated tradition of rural scholarship was developed by the Jakhanke, about whom more will be said in the next chapter.
Islam in the Senegambia during the Eighteenth Century
Islam in the area of present-day Senegal was always somewhat different from other parts of Bilad al-Sudan; it resembled more the Sahara and the Maghrib, particularly in the role of holymen (marabouts). This might be explained by the continuous habitation in the western parts of the Sahara, from Morocco to the Senegal River, where the ocean’s influence moderates the harsh desert conditions. In the central parts of the Sahara, on the other hand, the nomads lived only in oases, separated by stretches of inhabitable desert. It was therefore on the lower Senegal River that contacts between the Saharan nomads and black sedentaries were more intensive.
Indeed, in the eleventh century the recently converted Juddala nomads reached the land of the black sedentaries of the Senegal valley, and this might explain the Islamic militancy in Takrur, as described by al-Bakri. Its king, War-Jabi, who pursued an Islamic militant policy, died in 1040, about the time Abdallah ibn Yasin first arrived in the southern Sahara. “When ʿAbdallah ibn Yasin saw that the Juddala turned away from him, and followed their own passions, he wanted to leave them, and to go to live among the Sudanese, who had already adopted Islam.” By that time, therefore, the teaching of Islam had found a fertile ground in Takrur. Labi, son of War Jabi, was an ally of the Almoravids.61
Writing in 1286, Ibn Saʿid first noted the distinction between the sedentary Tokolor and the nomad Fulbe, saying that the people of Takrur “are divided into two sections; a section who have become sedentary and live in towns, and a section who are nomads in the open country.”62 Beyond that, there is no information about Takrur, or Futa Toro, as the area is known, except for oral traditions that are difficult to interpret. But toward the end of the fifteenth century, Portuguese sources and the chronicles of Timbuktu converge to throw light on a process of state-building led by a Fulbe warrior by the name of Tengella. He first created a Fulbe state in the Futa Jallon and then moved farther north to Futa Toro. In 1512, after Tengella had been defeated and killed by a Songhay army, the conquest of the Futa Toro was accomplished by his son Koli Tengella, who created the Deniankobe dynasty of Futa Toro.63
According to the author of Tarikh al-Sudan, a seventeenth-century scholar from Timbuktu, the descendants of Koli Tengella were considered to be good Muslims as the rulers of Mali. Of Koli’s second son he says that he was “equal in justice of Mansa Musa of Mali,” and of his contemporary Samba Lam, Koli’s grandson, who ruled in the first half of the seventeenth century, al-Saʿdi says that he “pursued justice and prohibited iniquity.”64 But the Torodbe, the clerics of Futa Toro, viewed the Deniankobe as warrior chiefs. At the interface of the Sahara and the Senegal valley, warriors were in confrontation with Muslim clerics.
The term Torodbe, as the clerics of Futa Toro were known, covered persons of diverse social status and ethnic origin. They spoke Fulfulde and embraced customs of the pastoral Fulbe, but they were sedentaries, and not necessarily of Fulbe origin. The maxim “Torodbe is a beggar” associated them with the mendicant activities of Muslim clerics and students, who lived on charity. The openness of the Torodbe society is expressed in another maxim: if a fisherman pursues learning he becomes a Torodo. In Futa Toro, learning among the Torodbe was at a lower level compared with the scholarship of their Toronkawa brethren, whom we meet later in this chapter in Hausaland. The Torodbe of Futa Toro were an integral part of the peasant society, unlike the Toronkawa of Hausaland, who separated themselves from both the Fulbe pastoralists and the Hausa-speaking peasants. Though the Toronkawa lived in rural enclaves, they cultivated an urban tradition of learning.
The symbiotic relations between the Deniankobe and the Torodbe had first been disturbed in 1673, when the Torodbe joined the militant movement of Nasir al-Din that spilled over from the southern Sahara to the Futa Toro. This jihad was defeated by a coalition of the Deniankobe and the Arab warrior tribes of the Sahara. The nomads of the Sahara, north of the Senegal river, continued during the eighteenth century to disturb life in the Futa Toro. The Torodbe rose again in the 1770s against the Deniankobe that had failed to stop the nomads’ raids. This uprising developed into a jihad movement that overthrew the Deniankobe and created an Islamic imamate in the Futa Toro.
Oral traditions connected the history of the Wolof to the Almoravids through the founding king of Jolof, who is said to have been a descendant of Abu Bakr b. ʿUmar.65 The Grand Jolof was one of the great Muslim states in medieval West Africa. It was for some time a tributary of Mali, but because its marginal position and its own direct commercial relations with the Sahara, Jolof was autonomous culturally and economically. The kingdom of Jolof disintegrated in the sixteenth century under the impact of the Atlantic trade. Kayor, which had been part of Jolof, emerged as the most powerful state of the Wolof, due to its favorable position on the coast and the benefits it derived from the trade with the Europeans. Intensive commercial activities and a process of political centralization enhanced the position of Muslims in Kayor. Early in its history, the son and successor of the first independent king (damel) of Kayor, became known as “the clerical Damel.” He refrained from drinking alcohol and preferred the companionship of clerics. But Islam remained marginal in Kayor, and the growing influence of the Muslims in the court was counterbalanced by the tyeddo, the core of the damel’s military power, and by the griots, the custodians of the traditional heritage.
European visitors since the middle of the fifteenth century were impressed by the role of Muslims in the courts of the Wolof chiefs as secretaries, counselors, and divines. They described the Wolof chiefs as Muslims who observed the prayers, but added that “they render it almost unrecognizable with a multitude of omissions and additions.”66 It is significant, however, that neither in the European sources nor in the oral traditions is there any account of a viable traditional African religion among the Wolof. Oral traditions know no other religion than Islam from the dawn of Wolof history. It seems that most vestiges of organized traditional religion were eliminated under the influence of Islam. Minor cults survived only among women and castes. Muslim clerics took over functions of the traditional priests, and even magic became the prerogative of Muslim clerics.67
Most of the clerics In the Wolof courts were of foreign origin—Znaga or Arabs from the Sahara, Tokolor from Futa Toro, and Mandingue-speaking from Mali. The Wolof rulers kept the clerics as an isolated community, not permitted to marry into families of the nobility. Sons of the nobility who took too seriously their Quranic studies and became disciples of a cleric or married his daughter lost whatever rights they might have had to political office. The political and military elite were a warrior class for whom drinking alcohol became a symbol of belonging. We have already referred to the tensions and confrontation between clerics and warriors. The growing influence of the Muslims in the court was counterbalanced by the tyeddo. For the military and political elite, conversion to Islam implied joining the clerical community and change of vocation and lifestyle. The Wolof chiefs therefore rejected demands by Muslim militants to convert.
In the eighteenth century, in the aftermath of the failure of the first jihad, in an attempt at reconciliation, clerics were given, for the first time, territorial chieftaincies. The royal family also sought to cement its relations with the clergy through political marriages. It was expected that by involving the clergy in the political life, the danger of another religious insurgency would be avoided. But in the 1770s, following a successful jihad in the Futa Toro, Wolof cleric collaborated with the militants. They were severely punished, and even sold into slavery, which was a violation of the clerical immunity.
Confrontation with the militant Islamic movements changed political perceptions toward Islam. Whereas earlier European accounts referred to the Wolof as Muslims, later European travelers, from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, say that the Wolof were Muslims but their rulers were “pagans.” It has been only since the end of the nineteenth century that the whole Wolof society converted to Islam.
Further south from Futa Toro and the Wolof, the Portuguese, followed by other Europeans, sailed up the Gambia River, where they were impressed by the number of Muslims on the Gambia. Their numbers increased with the intensification of the Atlantic trade. In 1621, Jobson described Muslim traders on the Gambia who had “free recourse through all places,” even in times of war.68 These were the Jakhanke, who represented the western extension of the Mandingue-speaking trade system. In 1698, Andre Brue found the Jakhanke “confederated in a way that they formed a republic, … [with] a considerable town called Conjour, built of stone, where the greatest merchants live, serves as the capital of the marabouts’ republic.”69 The near-contemporary author of Tarikh al-Fattash confirmed that Conjour was autonomous “under the authority of the qadi and the ʿulamaʾ. No warrior may enter the town, and no tyrant has ever lived there.”70
The founders of the Mandingue states on the Gambia migrated from the territories of the empire of Mali. They were accompanied by clerics, who played roles similar to those in other states. The Muslim traders on the Gambia carried the slave trade in response to a growing demand by the Europeans on the coast. They controlled also the supply of firearms, bought from the Europeans, which made them an asset but also a potential threat to the rulers.
Islam in Kanem and Bornu
An early trans-Saharan route connected Tripoli on the Mediterranean with Lake Chad in Bilad al-Sudan. Kanem emerged as one of the earliest African kingdoms on the northeastern corner of Lake Chad. Its founders were the Zaghawa nomads of the central Sahara. In the middle of the tenth century, the Egyptian al-Muhallabi described the religion of the Zaghawa in Kanem as divine kingship: “They exalt their king and worship him instead of Allah. They imagine that he does not eat any food. He has unlimited authority over his subjects. Their religion is the worship of kings, for they believe that they bring life and death, sickness and health.”71
Traits of divine kingship survived at the court of the mai (the title of the kings of Kanem and Bornu) long after their conversion to Islam. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta reports that the king of Bornu “does not appear to the people and does not address them except from behind a curtain.”72
Kanem became Muslim at the beginning of the twelfth century. Its Saifawa dynasty claimed descent from the legendary Arab hero Sayf b. Dhi Yazan.73 By the thirteenth century, Islam gained almost universal adherence in Kanem. Its king was “well known for his religious warfare and charitable acts, … [with] scholars around him.”74 In the first half of the thirteenth century, the king of Kanem went on pilgrimage; he also built a madrasa in Cairo for students from Kanem.75 About the same time, a devout Muslim king broke with tradition, as recounted in a sixteenth-century chronicle in Arabic: “In the possession of the Saifawa there was a certain thing wrapped up and hidden away, whereon depended their victory in war. It was called Mune and no one dared to open it. Then the sultan Dunama son of Dabale wished to break it open. His people warned him, but he refused to listen to them. He opened it, and whatever was inside flew away.”76 Traditions suggest that this breach of tradition alienated the Bulala clan, of more traditionalist disposition, and in the hostilities that followed, the Saifawa were forced to abandon Kanem on the northeastern corner of Lake Chad. They resettled in Bornu, on the southwestern corner of Lake Chad, in the middle of the fourteenth century. But the Saifawa consolidated their hold over the new country only toward the end of the fifteenth century, with the establishment of the capital at N’Gazargamu.
This was during the reign of ʿAli Ghaji b. Dunama (1476–1503), who is remembered as an exemplary Muslim, a contemporary of other reformist rulers in Bilad al-Sudan, like Rumfa of Kano and Askiya Muhammad of Songhay. He was also the first ruler of Bornu who assumed the title of caliph. The claim to the caliphate might have been in response to a similar claim by Askiya Muhammad. Ali Ghaji visited Cairo on his way to Mecca in 1484 and met Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti. It is likely that it was al-Suyuti who obtained the title of caliph from the Abbasid caliph in Cairo.
The Bornu caliphate reached its peak under Mai Idris Alawma (1570–1603), when all the state dignitaries were Muslims and the capital N’Gazargamu was an important center for Islamic learning. Qadis, imams, and teachers were granted privileges and were exempted from taxation. The Shariʿa was considered the law of the state, which is said to have been imposed on the whole population.77
Until the sixteenth century, Kanem and Bornu expanded only northward, along the Saharan routes. Bornu did not expand to the lands south of Lake Chad, which were reserved as a hunting ground for slaves. But following the Ottoman annexation of Fezzan in 1577, Bornu turned south because northward expansion was blocked.
About the same time, late in the sixteenth century, the state of Bagirmi emerged in a region that had formerly been raided for slaves. The rulers of Bagirmi became Islamized, but, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Barth commented on Bagirmi: “Their adoption of Islam is very recent, and the greater part of them may, even at the present day, with more justice be called pagans than Mohammedans.”78
The mai of Bornu generously supported scholars and attracted students from far and wide. Scholars from Bornu went to study at Al-Azhar in Cairo, where the madrasa that had been established in the thirteenth century was still in existence in the eighteenth century. The mai issued mahram to encourage the integration of Muslims of different ethnic origins: Fulbe from Hausaland, Tubu from the central Sahara, and North Africans. These privileges gave these foreigners the sense of belonging to Bornu society and a stake in the political economy of Bornu. By the end of the eighteenth century, Islam was deeply rooted in everyday life of the ordinary man, affecting him from the naming ceremony to his funeral.79 This was admitted even by Muhammad Bello: “Islam was widespread not only among the rulers and ministers, but also among the local people. Indeed there are not to be found in these countries ordinary people more scrupulous than they in reciting the Quran and reading it and memorizing it and writing it out.”80
But even in Bornu, perhaps the most Islamized of all African states, pre-Islamic elements persisted. The most damaging criticism of the contemporary scene was by a Kanuri scholar Muhammad b. al-Hajj Abd al-Rahman al-Barnawi (d. 1755), known as Hajirmai. He accused the rulers of Bornu of being tyrants and corrupt, and of imposing illegal taxation; the rich, he said, hoarded food at times of famine in the hope of profit; and judges and governors he charged with accepting gifts. There also were allegations of human sacrifices at the time of the annual flood in the River Komadugu Yobe, and of libations of milk from a black cow before the annual repairs to the city wall.81 These accusations were echoed by Muhammad Bello as a pretext for the jihad against Bornu: “Their rulers and chiefs have places to which they ride, and where they offer sacrifices and then pour the blood on the gates of their towns. … They also perform rites to the river.”82 ʿUlamaʾ who collaborated with the rulers of Bornu were criticized by radical scholars, who withdrew from the centers of political power to establish autonomous religious communities. But even they received mahrams to encourage and sustain the development of Islamic learning in these enclaves of rural scholarship, known as mallamati. These communities jealously guarded their autonomy and maintained minimal communications with the state. The mallamati were in fact sufi communities in rural enclaves that performed mystical exercises, including retreats in the bush. Like their contemporary sufis in Timbuktu, they claimed no tariqa affiliation.83
Islam in Hausaland before the Jihad
In the whole corpus of Arabic sources for West African history, there is but one reference to the Hausa states; this lone exception is that of Ibn Battuta, who mentioned Gobir (Kubar) as one of the destinations for the export of the copper of Takedda.84 Because Arab geographers were acquainted only with those regions of Bilad al-Sudan that had commercial relations with North Africa, it follows that Hausaland was not directly connected to the Saharan trade. This is confirmed by the Kano Chronicle, our principal source for the development of Islam in Hausaland.85 According to the chronicle, it was only in the middle of the fifteenth century that salt caravans came from Air (Asben) in the north and kola caravans came from Gonja in the southwest.
Islam had first been introduced less than a century earlier, at the time of Yaji, king of Kano (1349–1385), when Wangara traders and clerics came from Mali in the west. “When they came they ordered the Sarki to observe the times of prayer, and he complied. … The Sarki ordered every town in the country of Kano to observe the times of prayer. … A mosque was built beneath the sacred tree facing east, and prayers were made at the five appointed times in it.” The chief priest was opposed to the prayer, “and when the Muslims after praying had gone home, he would come with his men and defile the whole mosque and cover it with filth. The Muslim prayed and the Chief of the Pagans was struck blind together with all the pagans who were present at the defilement.” The custodians of the traditional religion were defeated on their own ground by a superior magical power. The efficacy of the new religion was tested when the Muslims brought victory to Yeji, the king of Kano, over his most forceful enemy. But when Yeji’s son Kanajeji (1390–1410) failed to win a war, he turned back to the traditional priest, who promised his help if the king restored the rites that his father had abandoned. Kanajeji complied, and the traditional priest secured victory over the enemies. Islam temporarily lost ground.
The second generation reverted to the traditional religion, but the third generation turned over completely to Islam. In Kano, as in other African states, kings’ sons received elementary Quranic instruction. A few of them went beyond what was expected from princes and became sincere Muslims. Umaru, son of Kanajeji (1410–21), was a pupil of the son of one of the Wangarawa who had come in the time of Yaji. When he became king of Kano, his friend Abu Bakr left Kano for Bornu, where he remained eleven years. On his return to Kano, finding ʿUmaru still king of Kano, he said to him: “O ʿUmaru, you still like the fickle dame who has played you false.” He preached to him about the next world, its pains and punishments, and reviled this world and everything in it. Umaru said: “I accept your admonition.” He called together all the people of Kano and said to them: “This high estate is a trap for the erring: I wash my hands of it.” Then he resigned and went away with his friend. He spent the rest of his life in regret for his actions while he had been king. This tradition, once again, demonstrates the built-in contradiction between being a warrior chief and being a Muslim.
The coming of Islam to Kano coincided with the shift of the Saifawa dynasty from Kanem to Bornu, where they became close neighbors of the Hausa states. Though the first Muslim clerics came from Mali in the west, it seems that Islamic influence from Bornu was at least as important.
Islamic learning in Hausaland became upgraded with the coming of the Fulani in the middle of the fifteenth century. They were the so-called “settled Fulani,” Torodbe or Toronkawa. They lived in rural enclaves, where they cultivated their tradition of learning. Unlike the urban scholars of Timbuktu, they were not strangers to horsemanship and warfare. They did not render religious services to local rulers and were therefore not involved in non-Islamic ceremonies. They communicated with the rulers, but did not become integrated into the political system. The tensions generated by that mental and physical distance later led to the confrontation and to the jihad.
Islam became integrated into the religious, social, and cultural life of the Hausa without a break with the past. Those who called for a reform were, according to the Kano Chronicle, shurafaʾ, and their leader was ʿAbdur-Rahman. He is later identified in the text with Abdu-Karimi, undoubtedly Abd al-Karim al-Maghili, the North African militant scholar, who left his impact both in Kano and in Songhay. He ordered Rumfa, the king of Kano, to cut the sacred tree under which the original mosque had been built which symbolized the symbiosis of Islam and the remnants of the traditional religion. Muhammad Rumfa was the contemporary of the reformist kings of Songhay, Askiya Muhammad, and Bornu, ʿAli Ghaji.
In Kano, as in Bornu, piety and scholarship among the kings peaked in the second half of the sixteenth century. Ramfa’s son Abu Bakr Kado (1565–73) did nothing but religious offices. He disdained the duties of king. He and all his chiefs spent their time in prayer. He was the king who made the princes learn the Quran. But then the traditional religion surfaced again at the time of Mohammad Zaki (1582–1618), with the appearance of syncretistic practices, such as the veneration of the Dirki, a Quran covered with layers of goatskin. Facing the recurring attacks by the Kworarafa and Katsina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the kings of Kano sought relief in rituals and magic from both “non-Muslim” priests and local Muslim clerics. Kano chiefs vacillated between traditional and Islamic rituals, depending on which promised to produce the best results. The cult of bori spirits was the most common pre-Islamic survival in Hausaland, mainly among women. Bori spirits were given Muslim names, and Muslim jinns (demons) became identified with the bori spirits. Indeed, the fact that the bori spirits became Islamized made it more difficult to eradicate them.
Until the nineteenth century, Katsina, north of Kano, was the most important commercial town in Hausaland. Indeed, the Wangara in Katsina maintained their identity over a period of four hundred years; as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Barth observed that most of the merchants of Katsina were Wangara.86 Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the leaders of the Wangara community of Muslim clerics and traders in Katsina felt strong enough to take over political power, and Muhammad Korau, a cleric, became the king of Katsina. Ibrahim Sura (1493–98), the second Muslim ruler of Katsina after Korau, is referred to by al-Suyuti in a treatise addressed to the kings and sultans of Takrur.87 The general thrust of this treatise indicates that Islam was still relatively a new element in the social and political structure. The Muslim rulers of Katsina were not completely successful in their efforts to turn Katsina into an Islamic state. In the face of strong resistance, they were forced to reach an agreement with the durbi, the priest-chief. The outcome was a sort of dual paramountcy, in which the durbi was responsible for choosing the king. Kingship in Katsina took on the characteristics of a sacred traditional kingship.
The reformer of Islam in Katsina was Ibrahim Maje (1549–66). He ordered implementation of the Shariʿa laws of marriage and threatened to arrest those who transgressed the religious prescriptions. The number of scholars in his time increased considerably. Scholars from Timbuktu, who visited Kano and Katsina on their way to Mecca, taught there for some time and contributed to the growth of local Hausa scholarship. During the seventeenth century, scholarship in Katsina was associated with Muhammad b. al-Sabbagh (fl. 1650), known in Hausaland as Dan Marina. He gathered around him a scholarly community that was well versed in all the branches of Islamic learning. Some members of a self-conscious Muslim intelligentsia were employed at the court, but the leading roles in the administration were held by slaves and eunuchs.
One of the last kings of Katsina before the jihad, Gozo (c. 1795–1801), was closer to Islam than many of his predecessors. He built mosques and supported the Shariʿa, but even he was involved in the worship of traditional deities, because the legitimacy of the dynasty continued to be embedded in the traditional belief system. His actions were those of a ruler who was genuinely torn by a dilemma between two systems of religious beliefs. The slaves of the palace opposed the attempts of Gozo to impose the Shariʿa, and they made his successor Bawa dan Gima a tool in their hands.
Scholars who were alienated from the rulers preferred to live on the periphery of Katsina, in towns within a radius of fifteen kilometers from the capital; there, they enjoyed greater autonomy, and the mosques of these towns attracted more people to pray than those of the larger city. It was from these small towns that the supporters of the jihad of dan Fodio came. The rulers ignored them because of their small numbers and their peripheral location, away from the major centers of the population and political power.
The old town of Yandoto, founded by Wangara traders and clerics, prospered with the growth of trade in kola nuts from the Volta basin in the second half of the eighteenth century. This prosperous Muslim community preferred the status quo and opposed the jihad of ʿUthman dan Fodio.88
Background to the Jihads
The rise of Islamic militancy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a radical departure from earlier patterns of relationship between Muslim clerics and scholars, who had been outside the field of political competition, and chiefs, who though not practicing Muslims were not considered unbelievers. This change came about as a result of several factors.
All the jihad movements were carried by Fulfulde-speaking groups, Fulbe pastoralists under the leadership of Torodbe or Toronkawa scholars. Their role should be viewed in the wider context of the expansion of Islam from town to countryside. It is significant that all leaders of the jihad movements in West Africa came from the countryside and not from commercial or capital towns. The challenge to the marginal role of Islam in African societies could not have come from those who benefited from the existing political order—neither from traders who were protected by the rulers nor from clerics who rendered religious services in the chiefly courts.
The new Muslim leaders articulated the grievances of the peasants. In Hausaland, ʿUthman dan Fodio criticized the rulers for killing people, violating their honor, and devouring their wealth. He declared that “to make war upon the oppressor is obligatory by assent.”89 ʿUthman’s son, the sultan Muhammad Bello, evoked the wrath of Allah over “the amir (ruler) who draws his sustenance from the people but does not bother to treat them justly.”90
The expansion of Islam to the countryside widened the popular basis for religious teaching and preaching. The dissemination of the knowledge of Islam to the illiterate peasants and herdsmen could have been only in the vernacular languages. Parallel to the transformation of Islam as a popular religion and as a political force, Muslim societies gradually developed a pious literature. The oldest known written texts in Fulfulde date from the second part of the eighteenth century. These poems were written by reformers who sought to reach people of all walks of life. Poems, easily committed to memory and therefore an excellent pedagogical device, became a major vehicle for teaching and preaching (chapters 19 and 23). Vernacular poems were disseminated in handwritten copies among groups of Muslim literati and were then recited in public.91
ʿAbdallah dan Fodio described the role of the vernacular verse: “Then we rose up with the Shaykh, helping him in his mission work for religion. He traveled for that purpose to the east and west, calling people to the religion of God by his preaching and his qasidas [poems] in ʿajami [the vernacular], and destroying customs contrary to Muslim law.”92 When the shaykh saw that his community was ready for the jihad, “he began to incite them to arms … and he set this in verse in his non-Arabic Qadiri poem (qasida ʿajamiyya qadiriyya).” This mystical verse had a hypnotic effect upon devotees on the eve of the jihad.93
Muhammad Tukur (d. 1817), a companion of Dan Fodio, composed poems in Fulfulde and in Hausa. One of his poems, “Bringers of Good Tidings,” is said to have had such an impact that on the day it was composed, possibly in 1789, “forty persons repented and entered the Sunna of the Prophet.”94 Islamic vernacular literature appeared also—about the same time, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—in East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. Everywhere mystical verse was the earliest and most widespread literary genre. This, one may argue, is because all over the Muslim world there were renewal movements in the eighteenth century, which developed out of restructured and reformed sufi brotherhoods. As already mentioned, there were sufi ideas and practices in Timbuktu and Hausaland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but there is no evidence of sufi brotherhoods in West Africa before the eighteenth century.
The Qadiriyya brotherhood had first been introduced into the Sahara probably at the end of the fifteenth century. But the Qadiriyya had been loosely organized and rather ineffective until its resurgence, in the second half of the eighteenth century, under the leadership of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti. He skillfully used his religious prestige to acquire wealth and political influence, as individuals and tribal factions sought his patronage. He reinforced the dependency of these clients by fostering the spiritual chains of the Qadiriyya. His emissaries spread the new branch, known as Qadiriyya-Mukhtariyya, in the Sahara, the Sahel, and as far as Futa Jallon. Sidi al-Mukhtar did not advocate militant jihad, and his son and grandson opposed the jihad of Shaykh Ahmad of Massina and that of Al-Hajj ʿUmar. But Sidi al-Mukhtar, the nonmilitant sufi, supported the jihad of ʿUthman dan Fodio: “It was he, according to what we hear, who roused the people to follow what Shaykh ʿUthman said.”95
In ʿUthman’s own career, mystical experiences were of great significance. In 1794, he had a mystical encounter with ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani, who girded him with the “Sword of Truth” to draw against the enemies of Allah. Ten years later, in another visionary encounter, ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani instructed Uthman dan Fodio to perform the pilgrimage to Degel, which was the last stage before the jihad.96
1. Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, in Levtzion and Hopkins 1981, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (hereafter, Corpus), 55.
2. al-Bakri, in Corpus, 77.
3. al-Zuhri, in Corpus, 98.
4. al-Idrisi, in Corpus, 109.
5. al-Bakri, in Corpus, 81–82.
6. Ibid., 82–83.
7. Horton 1975, 374–75.
8. Ibn Khaldun, in Corpus, 322–23.
9. al-Umari, in Corpus, 261; Ta’rikh al-Sudan (hereafter TS) text 7/translation 13.
10. Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 292–93.
11. Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 296–97.
12. al-Bakri, in Corpus, 80.
13. Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 292. Ibn Juzayy, to whom Ibn Battuta dictated his story, added at that point that an ambassador from Mansa Sulayman followed the custom back home and sprinkled dust on his head before the Moroccan sultan. Ibn Khaldun (ibid., 342) also describes the sprinkling of dust by a Malian mission before the Moroccan sultan.
14. Ibn Battuta, ibid., 296.
15. al-Umari, ibid., 268.
16. Ta’rikh al-Fattash (hereafter, TF), text 179/translation 314.
17. al-Bakri, in Corpus, 79.
18. Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 299.
19. For this date, see Ibn Hajar al-Asklani, in Corpus, 358.
20. For this date, see al-Maqqari, in Corpus, 321.
21. Leo Africanus 1956, ii, 467.
22. TS 66/91; see also TF 32/56.
23. Ibn Khaldun, in Corpus, 334.
24. TS 67/92.
25. TF 51/83–84.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 47–48/78; TS text 16, 28, 61/translation 29, 78, 99–100; Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 287.
28. TS 21/36–37.
29. Ibid., 67/109.
30. al-Ifrani, 75–76.
31. Ibid., 60/116
32. TF 61/117.
33. Baba 1931–32, 218; Hunwick 1996, 186.
34. Hunwick 1996, 181n.
35. TS 83–84/139–40; cf. Hunwick 1996, 190–91.
36. Hunwick 1996, 182; TS 83/138, 109/178; TF 118/216–17.
37. TF 110/202–3.
38. TF 114/209–10.
39. TS 122–30/196–208; the quotation is 129/205.
40. TF 180/315–16.
41. Sartain 1971, 194.
42. Baba 1931–32, 114.
43. Hunwick 1970, 29–30.
44. Levtzion 1997, 153–54.
45. TS 34/55; TF 107, 109/198, 201.
46. Tadhkirat al-Nisyan (hereafter TN) 87/141; TS 254/389.
47. Baba 1931–32, 344; TS 39/64.
48. TS 34/56; TF 212–13/222–24.
49. TS, 50–51/82–83.
50. TF 175/308.
51. TS 17–18/31.
52. Ibid., 18/31–32; Hunwick 1996, 187–88.
53. TS 19/34.
54. Roberts 1975, 43.
55. Ibid.
56. Tauxier 1927, 186–92.
57. Ibid., 186–92.
58. Park 1928, 200.
59. Ibid., 195.
60. Gallais 1967, 109–14.
61. al-Bakri, in Corpus, 73, 77; Ibn Abi Zar, in Corpus, 239.
62. Ibn Said, in Corpus, 184.
63. Boulegue 1987, 155–60.
64. TS 77/128.
65. Boulegue 1987, 33–35.
66. Colvin 1974, 593, quoting Durand in 1802, whose report she found at the archives of AOF, Dakar. See also Boulegue 1987, 98.
67. This is convincingly argued by Colvin 1974.
68. Jobson 1932, 17–18, 84, 106.
69. Labat 1728, iii, 335, 371, 338.
70. TF 179–80/314–15.
71. Quoted by Yaqut in Corpus, 171.
72. Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 302.
73. K. al-Istibsar, in Corpus, 138; Ibn Saʿid, ibid., 188.
74. Ibn Saʿid, in Corpus, 188.
75. al-Maqrizi, in Corpus, 353.
76. Palmer 1936, 184.
77. Ibn Fartuwa 1926, 12–13, 20, 33.
78. Barth 1857, ii, 561.
79. Lavers 1971, 39.
80. Bello 1951.
81. Lavers 1971, 39–42; Bivar and Hiskett, 1/12.
83. Lavers 1971, 32–34.
84. Ibn Battuta, in Corpus, 302.
85. The Kano Chronicle, in Palmer 1928, iii, 104–15.
86. Barth 1857, ii, 82.
87. See text in Tanbih al-Ikhwan, in Palmer 1914, 407–14.
88. See Bello 1951, 104, on the mallams of Yandoto.
89. ʿUthman dan Fodio 1961, 241.
90. Muhammad Bello 1921, 80.
91. Sow 1966, 12–16; Seydou 1973, 184; Hiskett 1957, passim; Brenner and Last 1985, 434.
92. Abdallah dan Fodio 1963, 85.
93. Ibid., 105.
94. Haafkens 1983, 412; Hiskett 1975, 32.
95. Abdallah dan Fodio 1963, 104.
96. Martin 1976, 20; Hiskett 1973, 66.
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