Usman dan Fodio

The Sokoto jihad began as a dispute inside Islam rather than between Islam and anything else. Hausaland in the late eighteenth century was ruled by Muslim kings, and Usman dan Fodio had preached in Gobir under their tolerance for a quarter of a century. His charges against them were legal and specific: that they levied taxes with no basis in the sharia, that they conscripted men unlawfully, that they permitted practices he classed as unbelief alongside the observance of Islam, and that they were now moving against scholars and their communities. The break came in 1804 with a withdrawal, deliberately modelled on the hijra of the Prophet, followed by war. By 1808 most of Hausaland was under the new authority and its emirates were being organised from Sokoto. What made the movement durable was not the fighting but the paperwork.

Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son Muhammad Bello each wrote at length on what a legitimate Islamic government owed its subjects, on the limits of the ruler, and on the conditions under which rebellion was permitted, and those texts became the constitutional literature of the caliphate. The state fell to a British column in 1903. The scholarly lineage did not, and the sultanate of Sokoto remains the senior Muslim office in Nigeria.

He wrote in three languages and for three audiences. Arabic carried the legal and theological work addressed to scholars, including Bayan Wujub al-Hijra ala al-Ibad, which sets out the obligation to withdraw from an unjust ruler, and Ihya al-Sunna wa Ikhmad al-Bid'a, which distinguishes practice he regarded as authentic from practice he regarded as innovation.

Fulfulde and Hausa verse carried the same arguments to people who did not read Arabic, and that verse was meant to be recited and memorised, which is how doctrine actually moved in the region. The output is enormous and much of it has never been printed. Two strands matter beyond the political history. The first is Sufi: he belonged to the Qadiriyya, wrote on the spiritual path, and reported visionary experiences, so the movement cannot be read as a purely legalist purge. The second is the education of women. He argued that a man who leaves his wives and daughters ignorant of their religious obligations wrongs them, and against husbands who prevented them from learning. That position, unusual in its context, is the ground his daughter Nana Asma'u built the Yan Taru teaching network on, and it is the reason the caliphate produced a substantial body of writing by a woman.