The Brother Who Stopped at Kano: Abdullahi dan Fodio and the Conscience of the Jihad

He was the man who wrote the legal handbooks, recited the qasidas, and decided not to follow his army any further when he saw what his young commanders were doing in the name of Islam. Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ was no pamphleteer but the voice that said: this is no longer what we set out from Degel for.

Two Brothers, One Movement

The family portrait begins in the village of Degel, somewhere in Gobir, south of present-day Sokoto, where Usman dan Fodio ﵀ was born in 1754 and where, twelve years later, in 1766, his younger brother Abdullahi was born to the same father, Muhammad Fodio, and the same Fulbe-Toronkawa line. They grew up as brothers in a learned family, since their father was malam, their mother Hauwa was from a Fulbe clan with its own ulama tradition, and their uncle had studied under Jibril ibn Umar in Agadès. They read together, prayed together, studied together, and their intellectual formation was parallel: Maliki fiqh under the same teachers, tasawwuf in the Qadiriyya tariqa, Arabic grammar according to the Ajurrumiyya, tafsir in the classical manner.

But they developed differently. Usman ﵀ became the preacher, the visionary, the man who according to his own writings received a vision in Degel in 1794 or 1795 in which he was, through the intercession of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀, appointed by the Prophet ﷺ as reformer, as mujaddid of his time, and in which he was handed the sayf al-haqq, the sword of truth. This is the charisma moment, the moment when an ordinary teacher became a movement leader.

Abdullahi ﵀ had no part in that vision, and the reason lay in a different cast of mind rather than in absence, since he simply lived in Degel. Abdullahi ﵀ was the writer, the jurist, the systematizer, a man who thought in chapters, not in visions, and who worked with commentaries and super-commentaries, with Maliki fiqh compendia like the Mukhtasar of Khalil ﵀ and the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀, with tafsir works like al-Baydawi ﵀ and al-Qurtubi ﵀. He was what in a more classical Arabic world would be called the faqih-mudarris: the jurist-teacher, the man who builds the legal infrastructure of a movement while another carries the flame.

Both roles were necessary, since no jihad movement in Islamic history has functioned without such a combination: Muhammad ﷺ had his Abu Bakr ﵁ and his 'Umar ﵁, 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri ﵀ had his legal advisers, and the jihad of Shaykh Ahmadu in Masina, of which we shall yet speak, would yield a comparable pair of brothers. In Fodio land, Usman ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀ were that pair.

The Hijra to Gudu

In February 1804 tensions with the Hausa sultan Yunfa of Gobir are running high, since Yunfa has openly threatened the followers of Usman ﵀ and there have been skirmishes around Degel, and so the shehu decides on a hijra, a migration-to-safety, deliberately modeled on the hijra of the Prophet ﷺ from Mecca to Medina in 622. The whole community, ulama, women, children, Fulbe herds, leaves Degel for Gudu, a village a few days’ journey away.

Abdullahi ﵀ is there, and he writes, later, in his Tazyīn al-Waraqāt, with visible emotion about that journey: he describes the dust, the thirst, the elderly who could not walk fast enough, the children who were carried. He describes the moment when his brother was chosen as amir al-muʾminin, as commander of the believers, under a tree in Gudu, and his own bayʿa, his oath of allegiance, to his brother, and the poems he composed along the way, a qasida that begins with the image of the traveler longing for the umma, and a second about the sword of truth that does not rust.

These qasidas are still present in the Sokoto repertoire, since the Tazyīn al-Waraqāt, about which more shortly, preserves them; Abdullahi ﵀ quotes his own poetry at strategic moments in his autobiography to anchor the emotion of an event. This is no vanity but craft, and the early Islamic tradition of the sira, the life-narrative, works the same way: Ibn Ishaq’s Sira of the Prophet ﷺ continually quotes poems by Hassan ibn Thabit ﵁ to carry the emotional weight of events, and Abdullahi ﵀ works in that line.

The Campaigns and the Command

From 1804 to 1807, Abdullahi ﵀ is in the field, commanding an army on the right flank of the jihad, while his nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀, still young, in his early twenties, leads the left flank and the shehu himself holds spiritual command. They fight Yunfa’s army at Tabkin Kwotto in 1804 and win, they march in plundering fashion through Gobir, Kebbi and parts of Zamfara, and they build a coalition of Fulbe clans, recruit Hausa peasants who have had enough of Yunfa’s taxes, and extend their authority steadily.

But what is happening in the Fulani armies while they fight? That is the question Abdullahi ﵀ would later have the courage to ask, since under the banner of the jihad gathered not only learned warriors with pure motives. There also came Fulani youths who seized upon the war to enlarge their own clan wealth, opportunists who saw a kafir in every peasant the moment the jihad legitimized their plunder, commanders who took slaves from Muslim villages on the pretext that these villages were “syncretistic”, and ranks and command structures based on Fulbe clan solidarity rather than on Islamic communal law.

Abdullahi ﵀ saw it, and he became sick of it: not dramatically or spectacularly sick, but in the slow way a learned man falls ill when day after day he notices that what he had helped to launch is no longer what he had signed up for.

The Refusal at Kano

Here comes the moment that marks Abdullahi ﵀ in history. In 1807 the Fulani armies are marching north for a decisive campaign against Alkalawa, the Gobir capital, where Yunfa waits with his last troops; if Alkalawa falls, Gobir falls, and if Gobir falls, the jihad becomes a completed project.

Abdullahi ﵀ must go along, since he is the right hand, the commander, the brother of the shehu, and his absence would be noticed. But he turns back, arrives in Kano, the city that had just been taken by the jihad fighters, under the emirate of Sulaimanu, and stops there: he goes no further north, but settles in Kano for a period that lasts several months, according to some sources a year.

Why? The Tazyīn al-Waraqāt is explicit: Abdullahi ﵀ writes that in the last campaign he had seen something he could no longer endure. He writes, and this passage must be quoted literally, since it is the heart of his legacy, that some of the jihad commanders, despite the orders of the shehu, had divided the spoils unequally, treated Muslims as kuffar when it suited them, raped women whom under shariʿa they were not permitted to take, and sown fitnah within their own ranks. He writes that he gradually realized that he himself had not spoken sharply enough to stop it, that his legal advice to the commanders had been ignored, that his brother, the shehu, had by now become too ill and too distant to control every action of his deputies, and that the jihad in its spiritual-reformist core was being betrayed by the very people who outwardly accepted it.

He therefore wrote, in Kano, a text that is partly autobiography, partly lament, partly self-criticism and partly self-quest: the Tazyīn al-Waraqāt bi-jamʿ baʿd ma li min al-ashʿar, “The Adornment of the Pages by the Gathering of Some of My Poetry.” He recounts his life up to that point, he quotes his own poems, and he confesses, with remarkable honesty, that he had considered walking away from the jihad to make hijra to Mecca, to devote the rest of his life to prayer and study rather than to commanding young men who would not be corrected.

This was, for an eyewitness and co-architect of a jihad, an extraordinary commitment to honesty, and there are few parallels in the Islamic reform tradition. The Tazyīn is, in this respect, comparable to the Munqidh min al-Dalal of al-Ghazali ﵀, the spiritual autobiography in which that great thinker describes how at the height of his juristic career in Baghdad he left everything behind to rebuild his faith in Damascus and Jerusalem. Abdullahi ﵀ writes from the same tradition: a scholar willing to criticize his own position, a faqih with enough tasawwuf in him to see the gap between the lived jihad and its ideal form.

The shehu heard about it, messengers went back and forth, and in the end Usman ﵀ persuaded his brother not to leave for Mecca but to return to the movement, on one condition: Abdullahi ﵀ would no longer involve himself in the central administration but would receive his own sector, his own emirate, where he could shape his legal and spiritual program without having to bow to Fulbe commanders who ignored him. That sector became Gwandu.

Gwandu: The Western Emirate

Gwandu lies at approximately 12.69° north and 4.60° east, about a hundred kilometers southwest of Sokoto, on the eastern edge of the Rima River valley, and in 1808 it was formally assigned to Abdullahi ﵀ as emir’s seat. The emirate he governed comprised the western vassal emirates: Kebbi, parts of Nupe land, Ilorin (Yoruba territory, later an emirate in its own right), Nikki, and the upper-Niger region including what is today northern Benin and western Niger.

This is an area as large as the Netherlands and Belgium combined, with great ethnic variety, Fulani, Hausa, Kebbi, Zabarma, Nupe, Yoruba groups, and Abdullahi ﵀ had to build an Islamic administration there from scratch. He did so with his characteristic systematism: he founded madrasas, he appointed Qadis, he wrote administrative advice, and he acted personally as jurist in complex matters, for example concerning the treatment of non-Muslim Nupe peasants who fell under the emirate of Ilorin.

And he wrote, since the Gwandu years are the most productive in the life of Abdullahi ﵀, and it is here that he completed his juristic magnum opus.

The Diya al-Hukkām: A Handbook for Muslim Rulers

Diya al-Hukkām fīmā la-hum wa ʿalayhim min al-aḥkām, “The Light of the Rulers Concerning What Their Rights and Duties Are According to the Law”: the title is difficult and so is the content, since Abdullahi ﵀ was not the kind of jurist who simplified to reach a broad audience, but wrote for other scholars, for Qadis, for emirs with their own legal advisers.

What is in it? A systematic treatment of administrative and criminal law within the Maliki tradition, applied to the specific circumstances of a newly founded Islamic state in Hausaland, with chapters on the rights and duties of the Amir al-Muʾminin, the caliph, on the appointment and dismissal of Qadis, on the requirements for witnesses in court cases, on ḥudud punishments and their conditions, on taʿzir punishments and the discretion of the judge, and on warfare: which wars are jihad and which are not, how spoils must be divided, which captives may be enslaved and which not, and how a treaty with a hostile state must be legally concluded.

This last chapter, spoils and captives, is the place where Abdullahi ﵀ converts his Kano experience into juristic norm, and he is sharp. He states that ghanima, war booty, is legitimate only if strict conditions are met: the war itself must be lawful jihad, the opponent must be non-Muslim (or a legitimately combated apostate state), and the division must take place according to shariʿa with one fifth for the state and four fifths for the warriors. Female captives may not be taken if they are Muslim, Muslim property may not be looted under any pretext whatsoever, and every violation makes the spoils haram and the warrior accountable in the hereafter.

This is, in code form, the lament of the Tazyīn: what Abdullahi ﵀ had painfully witnessed in Kano he sets down here as juristic norm to which every future jihad commander must adhere. It is legislation by experience.

The Diya al-Hukkām became the standard work for the Sokoto Qadis and for the rulers of Gwandu and Sokoto, and it was copied, commented upon and taught, so that as late as the late nineteenth century Kano Qadis were citing it in their judgments. Together with the Tāj al-dīn of al-Maghili ﵀ and the Bayan wujub al-hijra of Usman ﵀ himself, it is one of the three fundamentally juristic texts of Islamic Hausaland, and modern editions exist, including one by the Nigerian scholar Shehu Yamusa.

The Other Work: Commentaries, Poems, Sermons

The Diya is not the only book of Abdullahi ﵀. He wrote a tafsir, a Qur’an commentary called Diya al-Ta’wil fi Ma’ani al-Tanzil, which runs to four volumes and stands in the Maliki commentary tradition, and he wrote Sabil al-Najat, a manual on the basic obligations of a Muslim, intended for beginning students. He wrote dozens of risalas on specific juristic questions, he wrote Kitab al-Niyya, a work on intention as the basis of shariʿa action, deeply rooted in the tasawwuf tradition, and he kept writing poetry, all his life, in Arabic and in Fulfulde.

Added together, his writings come, by estimate, to between fifty and sixty separate works, an oeuvre comparable in scope to the production of al-Suyuti ﵀ or al-Sakhawi ﵀. Not everything has been preserved, and not everything has been published. But there is enough to say that Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ is one of the most prolific Islamic scholars West Africa has ever produced.

The Tension with Sokoto

Here comes a painful theme, since it belongs to the truth about Gwandu: the relationship between Abdullahi ﵀ and his nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀, after the death of the shehu in 1817, was not always cordial. It has been carefully reconstructed by modern historians such as Murray Last and Hamza Muhammad Maishanu from letters, notes in the Tazyīn and from supplementary Gwandu correspondence.

Abdullahi ﵀ was the elder, the uncle, the brother of the shehu, and the most important still-living scholar from the jihad generation, and when the shehu died, part of the ulama expected that Abdullahi ﵀, not Bello ﵀, would become the next caliph. But Bello ﵀ was confirmed. The arguments for Bello ﵀: he was the effective organizer, he had built the new Sokoto, he had written the Infāq, he was closer to the operational center. The arguments that Gwandu circles could have advanced for Abdullahi ﵀: age, intellectual authority, direct bond with the deceased shehu.

There was no open conflict, since Abdullahi ﵀ gave bayʿa to Bello ﵀ and recognized him as Amir al-Muʾminin, but the relationship was uneven and the unevenness hurt. Letters from the first years after 1817 show Abdullahi ﵀ as someone who maintained formal correctness but who clearly operated at a distance. In 1820 or 1821, brief unrest broke out between Sokoto troops and Gwandu troops over a border dispute at Kalambaina, never really a war, but enough to require diplomatic mediation by other emirs, and Abdullahi ﵀ wrote afterward that he was shocked that blood had flowed between mujahidin.

And there was a deeper theme, since Abdullahi ﵀ was, from Kano 1807 onward, always a jurist of strictness who felt that the jihad had drifted too far from its original pure ideals, while Bello ﵀, by contrast, was more pragmatic: he accepted compromises in administrative practice, he negotiated with the slaveholding economy, he sent Clapperton trade openings. For Abdullahi ﵀ this was going too far with the world; for Bello ﵀, the strictness of Abdullahi ﵀ was untenable in daily administration.

We are reconstructing this from fragments, and we must not exaggerate: the two men loved each other, as emerges from their letters, and they respected each other. But they did not agree on how the jihad should be consolidated after its military victory, and that disagreement became a structural tension between Sokoto and Gwandu that would outlive them both.

Gwandu After Abdullahi

Abdullahi ﵀ died in 1828 or 1829, the sources differing on the exact date, in Gwandu, at sixty-two, and his grave is still there, a place of pilgrimage for students and scholars. His son Muhammad Buhari ﵀ succeeded him as emir of Gwandu, and the dynasty of Gwandu emirs remained the western pillar of the caliphate until the British colonization in 1903 and ceremonially still exists: the current emir of Gwandu is a direct descendant.

The specific cultural identity of Gwandu, as Abdullahi ﵀ shaped it, remained recognizable: Gwandu was stricter than Sokoto, leaned more heavily on legal scholarship and less on diplomatic flexibility, and produced, in the decades after Abdullahi ﵀, more Qadis and fewer military commanders. This suited its founder, since every community carries something of the personality of its founder, and Gwandu carried the personality of a conscientious jurist.

The Internal Corrector

Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, a figure unknown to many readers, deserves this much attention for two reasons.

First, because a mature relationship with Islamic history requires seeing how the ulama criticized their own movements from within. The Islamic tradition is not only a tradition of victories but also a tradition of honest self-examination, of jurists who had the courage to write against their own movement, of reformers who saw that their reform itself needed reforming. Abdullahi ﵀ is an example of this, the internal corrector rather than the external critic, and that role has been needed in every Islamic civilization and exists today, both in North Africa and in the Dutch mosques where discussions on fiqh, gender and governance are taking place.

Second, because this heritage must not be reduced to a single kind of story. There is a triumphant story, in which West African rulers governed empires, West African scholars wrote masterpieces, and West African civilization at its height was internationally recognized, and that story is true and important. But there is also a story of conscience-struggle, of jurists who refused to participate, of brothers who criticized each other’s projects, of holy movements that ran into their own excesses, and that story is just as true and just as important. Abdullahi ﵀ stands in that second tradition.

The West Africans who were carried across the Atlantic, wherever they came from, from Gwandu, from Sokoto, from Kano, from Ilorin, from the bend of the Volta, carried both legacies with them: some had come into contact with the jihad, while others were carried out of it by slavery before its writings reached them. The salafiyya and madhhab discussions conducted today among Muslims of West African descent are the continuation of a centuries-old internal debate within West African Islam, and Abdullahi ﵀ is in that debate, even where his name goes unrecognized.

After the Founders

Abdullahi ﵀ died in 1828 and his nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀ died in 1837, and with them the generation of jihad founders left the stage. What followed, in the decades 1830-1860, was the Sokoto Caliphate at its zenith: an empire of thirty emirates, ten to fifteen million subjects, internationally recognized, economically diversified, culturally productive, and at the same time already showing the cracks that in 1903 would lead to its fall under British colonial firepower, a high point that carried its glow and its fragility together.

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Sources

• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Tazyīn al-Waraqāt, the autobiography with his own poems, edited and translated by Mervyn Hiskett (Ibadan 1963): the source for the hijra, the bayʿa at Gudu, the battle of Tabkin Kwotto, the complaint about the worldliness of the fighters and the departure for Kano; the collection is dated 1228/1813, as quoted in Last, pp. xxix, 208.
• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām, the handbook for rulers and judges, written in Kano at the request of the community there, as quoted in Hiskett, p. 98.
• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr, the chronicle of the jihad on which the dating of the hijra and of the fall of Alkalawa rests, as quoted in Last, pp. 23, 39.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xxix, 3–4, 6–7, 10, 23–24, 38–39, 41–43, 64, 66, 70, 153, 196, 208, 241, 243.
  • pp. 3–4, 6–7: the birth of the Shaykh ﵀ at Maratta in Gobir on 15 December 1754 and the family’s move to Degel; his father Muhammad Fodiye ﵀ and his mother Hawwa ﵀ from the learned branch of the family; Abdullahi ﵀ as the younger brother who came to study under him around 1193/1779 and visited Jibril ibn ʿUmar ﵀ in Adar with him around 1200/1786.
  • pp. 10, 23–24: the mystical experience of mid-1208 (early 1794) in which the Shaykh ﵀ was invested with the sword of truth; the hijra to Gudu, thirty miles from Degel, on 10 Dhu’l-Qaʿda 1218 (21 February 1804) according to Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀; the election of the Shaykh ﵀ as Imam, with the homage given first by Abdullahi ﵀ and then by Bello ﵀.
  • pp. 38–39: the Alkalawa campaign of 1807, on which Abdullahi ﵀ left the army and went with five companions to Kano, intending Mecca; the Kano community that kept him there and for which he wrote the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām; the fall of Alkalawa on 3 October 1808.
  • pp. 41–43, 64, 66: the division of administration in 1812 (1227) between Abdullahi ﵀ (the west) and Bello ﵀ (the east); Bodinga as his residence and Gwandu as his seat only after the death of the Shaykh ﵀; his hope of the caliphate; the west with the Niger valley down to Nupe and Dendi, later Ilorin and Liptako; the closed gates of Sokoto in 1817 and his treatise on the imamate; his accusation in the Tazyīn against the new community bent on rule, booty and rank.
  • pp. 70, 153, 196: Kalembaina near Gwandu as the stronghold of the followers of ʿAbd al-Salam, besieged by Abdullahi ﵀ for two years and taken with the combined forces of Bello ﵀; the capture as the reconciliation of nephew and uncle, after which Abdullahi ﵀ handed his robes to the vizier Gidado ﵀; his son Muhammad writing in 1829 as Amir al-gharb, Emir of the West.
  • pp. xxix, 208, 241, 243: the death of Abdullahi ﵀ in 1829/1245; the Tazyīn dated 1228/1813 and the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām around 1221; the bibliography of his works with Sabīl al-Najāt and al-Niyyāt.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 17, 66–67, 88, 96–98, 105, 107–108, 113–115, 141.
  • pp. 17, 66–67: the birth of the Shehu ﵀ at Maratta on 29 Safar 1168 (15 December 1754); the vision of 1208/1794 from his own Wird, with the green robe, the turban and the sword of truth from the hand of ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀; the Arabic version by Abdullahi ﵀ of his brother’s Qadiriyya ode, dated Rabiʿ al-awwal 1212 (1797).
  • pp. 88, 96–98, 141: Abdullahi ﵀ as commander of the Muslim forces at Tabkin Kwotto; the fall of Alkalawa in Shaʿban 1223 (October 1808) after nearly two years of encirclement; the plundering forays that undermined morale and his departure in Shaʿban 1222 (October 1807) intending Mecca; his halt in Kano and the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām as one of the chief sources of law in the caliphate; Sulaimanu as the first Fulani emir of Kano (1807–1819).
  • pp. 105, 107–108: his bitter verses against the worldliness of his associates; the division of 1812 into a western and an eastern half; his rejection of the takfir of rebel Muslims, against the view of the Shehu ﵀ and Bello ﵀.
  • pp. 113–115: the closed city gates of 1817 and the estrangement of almost a year; the battle of Kalembina in 1820 and the reconciliation at which Abdullahi ﵀ dismounted and gave his cloak to Gidado ﵀; his withdrawal into teaching and authorship until his death in 1245/1829; the death of Bello ﵀ in 1253/1837 at the age of fifty-six.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 49–50, 190, 210, 222, 224, 226.
  • pp. 49–50: the curriculum of fiqh, from al-Akhdari ﵀ to the Mukhtasar of Khalil ﵀, and of tafsir with the Jalalayn and al-Baydawi ﵀, to which the Ḍiyāʾ al-Taʾwīl of Abdullahi ﵀ was later added.
  • pp. 190, 210, 222, 224, 226: the hijra on 10 Dhu’l-Qaʿda 1218 (Tuesday 21 February 1804) and the battle of Tabkin Kwatto on 12 Rabiʿ al-awwal 1219 (21 June 1804) under his command, in the words of Abdullahi ﵀ himself; his reflection in the Tazyīn on the indiscipline of the army and his departure from the jihad towards the east and the pilgrimage; the Kano community that kept him there, the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām that became the manual of government throughout the caliphate, and his return to Gwandu.
• R. A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies, Humanities Press, New York 1971 (Ibadan History Series), p. 65: the successive emirs of Gwandu, Abdullahi ﵀ (died around 1828), Muhammad Wani (1828–1832) and Khalil (1832–1858).