Beginning in the eighteenth century, the modus vivendi between clerics and rulers was seriously disrupted in some regions. The first of these challenges was mounted in the Futa Jalon highlands of modern Guinea, where Fulbe clerics ousted their Mande rulers. Whatever the underlying economic issues, the takeover was justified in religious terms, on the grounds that it was improper for Muslims to submit to the rule ofunbelievers. These claims were extensively formulated in writing, both in Arabic and Pulaar, allowing the message to circulate freely outside as well as within the boundaries of the state.4
The example of Futa Jalon was emulated in the Futa Toro in Senegal, and, most spectacularly, in northern Nigeria, where 'Usman dan Fodio successfully revolted against the kingdom of Gobir and established the Sokoto caliphate which overthrew most of the Hausa kingdoms and expanded beyond.5 In i8i8, Ahmadu Lobbo Bari established a Muslim state in Masina in the Niger Valley.6 In the mid nineteenth century, al Idajj 'Umar Taal launched another holy war from his homeland in the Futa Toro. Repulsed by the encroaching French military, he pushed eastwards, overthrowing the Bamana kingdoms of Kaarta and Segu but also attacking the Muslim state of Masina which the Umarians eventually annexed after a bloody campaign in which 'Umar himself peri shed.7 His contemporary Maba Diakhou established a Muslim state along the Gambia River.8
These movements were interconnected. All of their leaders were Fulbe, even though many of the region’s clerics belonged to other, ethnically and linguistically distinct clerical networks, notably Hausa and Mande/Soninke. Hausa and Mande clerics were closely associated with trade networks that depended on maintaining amicable relations, if not active co operation, with local rulers. The Fulbe diaspora was pastoral rather than mercantile. While Fulbe clerics were sedentary, they were proportionately less urbanised and far less integrated into the political fabric of local states. While some Hausa and Mande clerics expressed sympathy with the jihad movements, others were
4 David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid nineteenth century (Oxford, 1985); David Robinson, 'Revolutions in the Western Sudan’, in Levtzion and Pouwels (eds.), History, pp. 131 52.
5 Mervyn Hiskett, The sword of truth (London, 1973); Murray Last, The Sokoto caliphate (New York, 1967).
6 Bintou Sanankoua, Un empire peul au XIXe siede: La Dina du Massina (Paris, 1990).
7 Robinson, Holy War; John Hanson, Migration, jihad, and Muslim authority in West Africa (Bloomington, 1996).
8 Martin A. Klein, Islam and imperialism in Senegal (Edinburgh, 1968), pp. 63 93.
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Unenthusiastic and even hostile. There was a considerable scholarly polemic for and against jihad, with notable (and politically powerful) Islamic scholars Muliammad al Kaneimi of Bornu and Alimad al Bekkay al Kunti in the Sahara objecting vigorously to the jidahists’ claims.
The explicit aims of the jihads were, first, to ensure the religious credentials of rulers in states with significant Muslim populations; and second, and less consistently, to uphold strict standards of observance of religious conduct within the Muslim population as a whole. Conversion of unbelievers the overwhelming mass of the peasantry in these polities was not a major preoccupation, even in the Sokoto caliphate, the most spectacularly successful of all these movements.9 South western Nigeria constituted a notable excep tion. Jihadists established Muslim rule under the aegis of Sokoto in the Yoruba town of Ilorin in 1817. Other Yoruba towns hosted substantial Muslim minor ities, initially members of Hausa or Fulani merchant and clerical networks, but increasingly Yoruba converts as well.10
World History
