The Flag at Gudu: The Fulani Jihad and the Price of an Islamic State

On 21 February 1804 a green flag is raised in a village on the north-western frontier of Gobir. Within four years the old Hausa capital Alkalawa lies in ashes, its sarki dead, and a new Islamic empire risen from the dust. This is the story of the Fulani Jihad: a movement that invoked Allah ﷻ, the shari’a and thirty years of frustration, and that simultaneously bears a bitter truth, since it was a war of Muslims against Muslims, justified by takfīr, fought out with musket and sabre, and won with the merciless certainty that only ideological conviction can supply.

Gudu, a Bare Village in the Early Spring

Gudu lies at approximately 12.75° north, 4.50° east. Today it is a hamlet in Sokoto State, a handful of compounds, a mosque that has been rebuilt and rebuilt again, a place no tourist visits, and in February 1804 it was less than that: a few Fulani camps, some scattered mud huts, a spring, a few fields.

It was a flat landscape, here and there a dum palm, here and there an acacia with a flat crown, and the Harmattan had just blown the air full of dust, so that the horizon faded into an orange haze. The nights were chilly, and the days were dry and dusty, yet clear enough to see for kilometres who was approaching.

To this place Usman dan Fodio ﵀ travelled with his jama’a on 10 Dhu al-Qa’da 1218, 21 February 1804. The caravan numbered, according to Fulani sources, several hundred people directly, perhaps six hundred, probably more if the children and servants are counted, and they arrived with what they had been able to load onto their camels and donkeys. It was books, above all, since the shaykh ﵀ never travelled without his small private library; then textiles, tools, food for several weeks, and the weapons they had managed to scrape together, largely spears, archers’ equipment, a few swords, and only a handful of old firearms that had not been fired for years.

Thirty years of preaching had brought them to this point, and now something else had to begin.

The Raising of the Flag

What happened at Gudu has been preserved in Infāq al-Maysūr, the chronicle that Muhammad Bello ﵀, the son of dan Fodio ﵀, would later write, and it is the best account from the inside, written by someone who was present at the events. Bello ﵀ was at his father’s side at that moment about nineteen years old, on his way to becoming the actual military mind of the entire campaign.

At Gudu dan Fodio ﵀ was formally proclaimed by his followers as Amīr al-Muʾminīn, Commander of the Faithful, one of the weightiest titles in the Islamic tradition, originally borne by Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, the second caliph, and since then reserved for the legitimate leader of an Islamic community. That dan Fodio ﵀ accepted it, initially, as he writes in his own works, with reluctance, was a formal declaration that he no longer recognised the political authority of Yunfa’s Gobir, and that a new bay’a, an oath of allegiance, was now owed to him as Islamic leader rather than to the sarki.

This was a legal step with consequences that could no longer be undone, since whoever pledged the bay’a to dan Fodio ﵀ declared by that act the bay’a to Yunfa null and void. For Yunfa this was rebellion, while for the jama’a of dan Fodio ﵀ it was resurrection.

Then the flag was raised, in the Fulani tradition a green banner, since green is the colour of the Prophet ﷺ, the colour that since the Umayyad period had coloured the banners of Muslim armies. It was carried by Muhammad Bello ﵀, or perhaps by Abdullahi ﵀, the brother of dan Fodio ﵀; the sources differ slightly on this point.

The shaykh ﵀ spoke, and what he said precisely has not been preserved word for word, but the gist is clear enough: he declared jihad against Yunfa and against the other Hausa rulers who hindered Muslims in the practice of their faith, and he cited the Qur’anic passages that permitted jihad fi sabil Allah when Muslims were oppressed. He reminded his followers of the hijra of the Prophet ﷺ from Mecca to Medina, of the first bay’a under the tree of Aqaba, of the battle of Badr in which a small army of believers defended their faith against a far larger one. He did not promise them victory, since that belonged to Allah ﷻ, but he promised them the rightness of their cause.

And then the work began.

The Kitab al-Farq: The Legal Architecture of the War

A sword without justification is banditry, and a justification without a sword is only a complaint. The jihad of dan Fodio ﵀ had both, and the legal part, which has to be understood before the battles, is set down in a text that is still controversial: the Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr, “The Book on the Difference Between Muslim and Unbeliever Government”.

Dan Fodio ﵀ had written this text earlier, probably in the 1790s, though the exact dating is contested, but it became in the jihad years the foundational manifesto of the movement. Its question is simple and terrible, since it asks when a government that calls itself Islamic is in fact non-Islamic, when a ruler loses his status as legitimate Muslim authority, and when the duty of obedience, which Muslims in principle owe their rulers, is reversed into the duty of resistance.

The answer the Kitāb al-Farq gives is systematic. A government becomes wilāyāt ahl al-kufr, an unbelieving government, if it does not apply shari’a; if it levies taxes not founded in fiqh; if it carries out arbitrary executions, confiscates Muslim property, coerces Muslim women; if it maintains non-Islamic rituals at court and persecutes Muslims who break with them; and, this being the sharpest line, if it impedes or forbids the open profession of the faith.

Dan Fodio ﵀ enumerates these criteria, and then, cautiously but unmistakably, projects them onto the Hausa sarauta. The sarkis of Gobir, Kano, Katsina, Zaria, the rest, meet these criteria in several respects: they levy jangali that has no Maliki basis, they maintain a court culture in which iskoki rituals are practised alongside Islamic ones, and they force the jama’a of dan Fodio ﵀ into withdrawal and persecute its members. So their authority is, in legal terms rather than in name, no legitimate Islamic authority.

This is the crucial step. The Kitāb al-Farq is not an explicit takfīr declaration against the Hausa sarkis as individual Muslims, since dan Fodio ﵀ is too cautious for that: he declares the authority invalid, not necessarily the person. But the consequence is in practice the same, since against such authority jihad is not only permitted; it is obligatory.

Later generations would often not preserve this nuance. In the heat of war, on the lips of less learned wa’iz-preachers who had read the Kitāb al-Farq poorly or not at all, the takfīr against authority quickly became takfīr against the Hausa population itself, so that Hausa Muslims were treated in some villages as murtaddun, as apostates, their property confiscated, their children made slaves. This was not what dan Fodio ﵀ had legally written down, but it was what happened on the ground.

This must be said directly. The Fulani jihad was in its doctrinal structure a war against holders of authority; in its practical execution it often became a war against populations. And the Hausa populations against whom it was waged were themselves already Muslim, often not as strict in doctrine as dan Fodio ﵀ wished, but Muslim in name and in prayer. This was no war against unbelievers but, in the sharpest terms, a jihad of Muslims against Muslims, built on a takfīr doctrine that, however legally founded, in execution ran through layers of self-deception and violence.

Whoever speaks about the Fulani jihad without naming this truth speaks with half a mouth.

Tabkin Kwotto: The Turning-Point Battle

The flag was raised, the Amīr al-Muʾminīn appointed, the jihad declared, and Yunfa let no season pass. He sent an army from Alkalawa to the south-west to crush the jama’a before it could establish itself, and on 21 June 1804 the movement fought its first pitched battle, at Tabkin Kwotto, “the Lake of Kwotto”, near what would later become Gwandu. The Hijri date the tradition attaches to this battle, 26 Rabi’ al-Akhir 1219, converts to August and cannot be reconciled with a summer engagement, so the Gregorian dating is the more reliable one here.

The Gobir cavalry was professional, since the Hausa sarkis had maintained cavalry units since the fifteenth century, with Arabian horses from the trans-Saharan trade, with armour of locally forged iron, with command structures that were generations old, and against them stood a movement that barely deserved the name of an army.

The Gobir army attacked, in combination with troops from Kebbi. The ratio was, according to Fulani sources, roughly one to ten to the disadvantage of the jama’a; Infāq gives 20,000 Hausa fighters against 2,000 Fulani, a ratio that is no doubt rhetorically inflated but which conveys the overall underdog position.

And the Fulani won.

How that was possible admits of several explanations, and all are probably partly correct. The Fulani fighters were more lightly armed, more mobile, and they fought in terrain, semi-wooded, with water close by, that suited their infantry-with-archers tactics better than the Gobir cavalry; they had morale on their side, since this was now literally a struggle for survival. They had a du’a from their shaykh ﵀, who according to tradition had prayed at the battlefield that night for victory, and, perhaps most importantly, they had a field commander, Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, who knew how to cut tactical knots where the broader jama’a would have hesitated.

The battle lasted a day, in which the Gobir cavalry broke on the Fulani archer lines, their commanders fled, and the remainder of the army was scattered.

For the jama’a Tabkin Kwotto was the sign that Allah ﷻ had not abandoned them, that the jihad was legitimate and would be continued, and followers who had still hesitated streamed in, while lesser rulers in Zamfara and Kebbi, who had long balanced on the fence, now openly declared themselves for the shaykh ﵀.

Politically the victory was even more important than militarily, since Tabkin Kwotto changed the jama’a from a threatened refugee movement into a recognised, strategically relevant power, and from that moment on the Hausa sarkis were on the defensive.

Tsuntua: The Disaster Before the Walls of Alkalawa

Victory brought the temptation that victories usually bring, and the jama’a gave in to it. Still in the same year it turned on Alkalawa itself, the walled capital of Gobir, and in November 1804 attempted what it was not yet able to do: take a city. The movement had grown in villages and in open country; it had no siege equipment, no experience of walls, no time to starve a city out, and the assault was thrown back from the ramparts.

What came next came too quickly. Abdullahi ﵀ marched out again shortly after the failed assault, this time against the Tuareg allies Yunfa had drawn to himself, and at Tsuntua, a village just outside the walls of Alkalawa, his force was caught and broken.

The horsemen the jama’a now faced, Gobir cavalry reinforced by Tuareg, met a force exhausted by the assault and with no cover on open ground, and it became a slaughter.

The Fulani sources themselves acknowledge it. Muhammad Bello ﵀ writes in Infāq al-Maysūr that the movement lost 2000 of its followers at Tsuntua, an enormous figure in proportion to the jama’a, which could perhaps field only a few thousand fighting men. Among the dead were some two hundred men noted for their learning and their memorisation, and whether all of them held the entire Qur’an by heart the tradition leaves open, but the loss was almost unbearable for the Fulani tradition symbolically, since there were students of dan Fodio ﵀ among them, eminent talaba, men who had copied his books. The Chief Justice Muhammadu Sambo ﵀ and the Standard-Bearer Sa’adu are named in particular.

In other movements Tsuntua would have been the end. A defeat of this scale, this early, with such losses, ought to have made the jama’a fall apart, and yet it did not fall apart, and that is owed to two factors.

First, the ideological conviction was firm enough that a defeat was not seen as a sign of disapproval from Allah ﷻ, but as a trial that Muslims had endured throughout jihad history, as at the battle of Uhud, which ended in defeat and was yet followed by further victories.

Second, the organisational structure of the jama’a was, thanks to thirty years of quiet building, deeply rooted in village communities over a wide area. Tsuntua was one battle, and the jama’a was no army but a movement. Its core did not sit in one place: villages in Zamfara, in Kebbi, further away in Adamawa, had long been prepared for the moment when they would have to undertake the hijra or join the struggle.

Dan Fodio ﵀ himself, according to his own writings, worked above all on his pen during those months. He wrote Wathīqat Ahl al-Sudān, a circular letter to the followers, in which he placed the defeat in the larger legal and spiritual framework; he left Abdullahi ﵀ and Bello ﵀ to hold the field as the actual military leaders; and he reorganised.

Alkalawa held, and the city the jama’a could not take in November 1804 would not fall for another four years.

The Wave Movement: Emir Appointments and the Flag That Spread

In the years 1804 to 1808 something remarkable took place. The jama’a was not a centrally led army that moved as a single block through Hausaland but, just as the movement had been built under thirty years of preaching, a network of local nodes, and in every node a Fulani figure stood ready who would be formally appointed by the shaykh ﵀ as amīr, as emir, over a region.

Dan Fodio ﵀ issued “flags”: literal green flags, plus written bay’a documents, plus a legal mandate. A Fulani scholar who had long preached in Kano, Ibrahim Dabo, Mallam Jamo, would receive the flag and begin in his region an uprising against the Hausa sarki of Kano, while Buba Yero would take up the flag in Gombe, Usman Nagwamatse in Kontagora, and Modibo Adama in Fumbina, the future Adamawa.

In this way the jihad spread like a wave rather than like an army, since each flag was a local revolution, and the central Amīr al-Muʾminīn, dan Fodio ﵀ himself, was no field marshal but a murshid, an issuer of legitimation. He remained in or near Gudu, then later in Sifawa, then in Sokoto, where he wrote letters, gave counsel and prayed.

It is a form of organisation that, in modern literature, is sometimes designated by the term “flag-jihad”, and it has a particular quality: it spread the movement faster than a traditional military campaign could have, but it carried at the same time the seed of future internal fragmentation. The emirate territories became in essence autonomous, since they formally recognised the khalīfa of Sokoto while functioning in practice largely on their own, and this structure would last well into the nineteenth century, until the British conquest of 1903 took over the entire federation under colonial rule and then, ironically, retained that same emir structure, now as indirect rule.

Alkalawa: The Fall of the Capital

Back in the core triangle Gobir-Kebbi-Zamfara the war reached its climax in 1808. Alkalawa, the capital of Gobir, lay at approximately 13.2° north, 5.5° east, a walled city which, like most large Hausa cities, lay within ten or twenty kilometres of water, with a royal compound, with quarters for the Ulama, for the merchants, for the slaves, for the lands.

After Tabkin Kwotto Yunfa had withdrawn into Alkalawa. He had sought contact with Borno in the east, the centuries-old Kanem-Borno sultanate, and requested military aid against the Fulani, and Mai Ahmad, the Sayfawa ruler, had sent what he could send, but Borno was itself weakened in those years and could not put a decisive army into the field.

During 1805–1807 the Fulani encircled Alkalawa step by step; they besieged it in phases, they withdrew when they had to, they came back. The city weakened through food shortages, through the cutting of its supply routes, through the loss of the smaller Gobir villages that supplied it, so that for the defenders every harvest became harder to bring in, while for the attackers, settled in the landscape, time grew in their favour.

In October 1808, according to Infāq al-Maysūr on 3 Shaban 1223, which corresponds roughly to 24 September/1 October 1808, the decisive attack was launched. Bello ﵀ himself led the Fulani troops, and after days of siege the walls were stormed, breached, crossed.

Yunfa fought, according to the sources, personally to the end, and he died with his weapon in his hand. His fingers, which had been taken from him after the pistol incident, would no longer have hindered him in this final struggle.

The slaughter at Alkalawa was extensive, and here we must be honest, since the Fulani sources themselves, varying in tone, are not silent about the number of dead. The entire royal court was killed or captured, male defenders of the city who did not surrender were put to the sword, and women and children were largely placed in slavery, for here, within the legitimised framework of the jihad doctrine, the rule applied that women and children of a defeated enemy could be made raqīq if the enemy men had been killed.

This sounds harsh, and it is also exactly how, according to the transmitted fiqh, it went, since Maliki fiqh, on the authority of the great jurists of the school, permitted this treatment in the case of a legitimate jihad against recognised enemies, and the Fulani commanders applied it as the classical texts had set it out.

But looking back, the question must not be avoided of whether the Hausa of Gobir belonged in this legal category, since they were, most of them, Muslims: they had professed the shahada and they had performed the salah. The takfīr reasoning that had made them legitimate jihad targets was, however legally constructed in the Kitāb al-Farq, in its working out a process that declared as enemies people whom we today would without hesitation consider fellow believers.

The fall of Alkalawa was celebrated by the jihad movement as a triumph, since Yunfa was dead and Gobir was defeated, so that the old system of the Hausa sarauta had ceased to exist in Gobir and on the ruins a new order would be built.

But in the smoke of Alkalawa something heavier hung, since an empire that begins with the destruction of another Islamic capital, with the slave markets that would follow in the coming weeks, with the thousands of Hausa women incorporated into Fulani households, carries those founding conditions with it, and they would not be cleansed in a single generation.

The Battlefield Beyond the Battle

There is another side to the jihad that must not be missed, since it shows something of what the movement did try to be.

In the conquered regions the jama’a immediately established a new administrative order. Qadis were appointed, scholars from the circle around dan Fodio ﵀ or related Fulani ulama, courts were erected and shari’a-based jurisprudence restored; the markets were reopened, albeit under controlled conditions; zakat was levied according to Maliki criteria instead of the old jangali system; mosques were erected or renovated, and study circles were started.

This was, however stained by the manner of conquest, a real governance project: not simply a transfer of power from one dynasty to another but an attempt to build up an Islamically regulated state in a region where such states, since the fall of Songhai in 1591, had existed only in fragmentary form. The Qur’an school became a primary social institution, the kitab, the book, became a central symbol of the new government, and the texts of dan Fodio ﵀ were multiplied and disseminated.

For Muslim women of the conquered regions the situation was ambiguous, since many were placed in slavery, but for Muslim women who belonged to the jama’a itself, and for free-born women in the new regions, access to education was greater than under the old sarauta. Nana Asma’u ﵀ built up a network of female scholars and female study circles, the jaji women, who carried Islamic knowledge from village to village, a perceptible, almost unique achievement in the Islamic world of that time.

The moral complexity is therefore real in every direction, since the same movement that oppressed women as war booty emancipated other women as bearers of scholarship, and it was, like every great historical movement, not one thing.

A Movement in a Small Triangle

The distances deserve a moment of attention. From Degel, at 13.03° N, 5.25° E, to Gudu, at 12.75° N, 4.50° E, is a distance of about 60 kilometres to the north-west; from Gudu to Tabkin Kwotto is another 100 kilometres or so further west into Kebbi territory; and from there the line runs back, eastward, in a wide arc to Alkalawa at 13.2° N, 5.5° E.

The total theatre of the Fulani jihad, the heart region without the satellite emirates, covers no more than 200 to 300 kilometres in either direction, an area that today amounts to a substantial car drive, and in 1804–1808 an area in which whole kingdoms went to their knees and a new world was established.

This is the peculiarity of pre-colonial African history: it plays out in what are in absolute terms limited spaces, but it plays out with an intensity, a stake, a theological depth, that is as mature as what was occurring in Europe in those years, with the Napoleonic wars spinning in the background. The world of dan Fodio ﵀ and Yunfa is no miniature of “larger” European world events but a fully fledged history of its own, with its own demands, its own prices.

The Jama’a Structure as Lasting Inheritance

Before the closing images, one aspect that distinguished the Fulani jihad as a movement from many other military uprisings in West African history calls for a brief pause: the jama’a structure itself.

A jama’a, as dan Fodio ﵀ used the word, is more than “community” in the ordinary sense. It is a voluntary community bound by religious dedication, in which the shaykh is the spiritual centre and the members commit themselves to mutual support, to teaching, to upholding shari’a, and, when it must be, to armed defence of one another.

This model had existed before 1804, both in other Sufi orders and in earlier Fulani reform movements (Karamoko Alfa’s movement in Futa Jallon in 1725, Sulayman Bal’s movement in Futa Toro in 1776). What set the jama’a of dan Fodio ﵀ apart was the scale and the textual richness, since it had a whole library behind it, a dynastic structure of sons, brothers and sons-in-law, and the network of poets who included the unlettered; and it had, after 1808, a state.

That state was Sokoto, and its founding is a story of its own, but the jama’a structure that underlies it would continue to exist long after the political centre had lost its lustre. Today, in northern Nigeria, in parts of Niger, in northern Cameroon and as far as Mali, Shehu followers still live, people who trace their silsila back to dan Fodio ﵀, Yan Shehu, whose religious identity is inseparably bound to that green flag of 1804. This is no museum time but a living tradition.

The Heart of the Matter

One thing must be said once more clearly.

The Fulani jihad was no war against unbelievers but a war between Muslim groups, justified by a doctrine of takfīr against the authority of another Muslim group. It was juridically carefully constructed by dan Fodio ﵀ in the Kitāb al-Farq, and it was in practice, inevitably, more brutally executed than its legal frameworks intended. It brought a real reform with it, better jurisprudence, higher scholarship, more systematic governance, and it also brought blood, slavery, and structural hatred between Fulani and Hausa that echoes into our own time in parts of northern Nigeria.

This is no judgement on dan Fodio ﵀ as a person, since he was, by all available signs, a man of integrity, learned, devout; it is a judgement on what a jihad movement, even under such leadership, does once it touches arms. No holy cause can wage war on itself clean, and every cause, once armed, carries the weight of what is done in its name.

The lesson is double. First, the West African Islamic tradition is mature enough, intellectually strong enough, to face its own peaks and its own dark places. It does not have to be defended against outsiders by pretending that it was without blemish, since it was the work of human beings, great and damaged at the same time.

Second, takfīr is a word to fear, since the scholars who use it decide over life and death. Dan Fodio ﵀ was cautious, but his followers, and their followers, were not always so. To this day takfīr movements appear in the Muslim world that have no dan Fodio ﵀ as intellectual foundation, that merely lay a xenophobia with an Islamic veneer over it. The lesson of 1804 is that takfīr as a weapon, even when theologically constructed by the most careful shaykh, gets out of control in practice, and that lesson is 220 years old and still relevant.

From Flag to State

Alkalawa has fallen, the last sarki of Gobir lies in his own palace rubble, and the flag stands where it stands.

But a flag is not a state, and the next question, which dan Fodio ﵀ would have to answer in the years that followed, is how to make of a successful jihad a durable Islamic government: how to keep the flag emirs under central authority, how to apply justice to the free Fulani herders, to the conquered Hausa peasants, to the slaves, to the non-Muslim border communities that now belonged to an Islamic state, and how to levy taxes, dispense justice and establish education.

It is, in short, the question of how to build Sokoto.

In 1809 the city was founded that would lend its name to the entire project, and its story, the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest pre-colonial Islamic empire in Africa, is a story of its own.

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Sources

• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr, the account from within on which the dating of the hijra, the strength of Yunfa’s cavalry and the death toll of Tsuntsua rest, as quoted in Last, pp. 23, 26, 32.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr, the charge against Hausa government and the minimum of offices for a Muslim ruler, as quoted in Last, pp. lxviii, 57; Hiskett, p. 106.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Wathīqat Ahl al-Sūdān, the circular distributed around the hijra which lays down the obligation of an Amīr al-Muʾminīn, as quoted in Last, pp. 16, 46; Sulaiman, pp. 203, 208.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. lxviii, 16, 23–24, 26–28, 31–32, 39, 41, 46, 53–54, 57, 66–67.
  • pp. 16, 23–24, 46: the Wathīqa circulated around the hijra; the hijra to Gudu, thirty miles from Degel, on 10 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1218 (Tuesday 21 February 1804) according to Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀; the election of the Shaykh ﵀ as Imam, with homage first from Abdullahi ﵀ and then from Bello ﵀, his initial reluctance and his fifty years, while the eyewitnesses do not name the title itself; the titles Amīr al-Muʾminīn and Khalīfa.
  • pp. 26–28: Yunfa’s army, not particularly large, with a hundred heavy cavalry according to Bello ﵀; the Muslims outnumbered and relying on their bows, covered by the lake and favoured by wooded ground and higher morale, with the Shaykh ﵀ praying for them; the rout of the Gobirawa on Thursday 21 June 1804; both armies ethnically mixed; the Sullebawa and the emirs of Mafara, Burmi and Donko coming over after Kwotto.
  • pp. 31–32: the Tuareg on Gobir’s side; Alkalawa falling only at the fourth attempt; the counter-attack at Tsuntsua, two miles from the capital, in the Ramadan of December 1804, with about two thousand dead according to Bello ﵀, two hundred of whom knew the Qur’an by heart, among them the Imam Muhammad Sambo ﵀; Bello ﵀ sick and Abdullahi ﵀ wounded; the Bornu contingent said to have stood in Alkalawa in 1808.
  • pp. 39, 41: the fall of Alkalawa on 3 October 1808 and the death of the sultan; the town not wholly destroyed and given an administrator the following year; the fall of Zaria three months later; Sokoto as the headquarters of Bello ﵀ from the autumn of 1809.
  • pp. lxviii, 53–54, 57, 66–67: the leaders from other parts of Hausaland sent home with a flag blessed by the Shaykh ﵀; the list of 1812 by Bello ﵀ with Sulaiman for Kano, Yaʿqub ﵀ for Bauchi and Buba Yero, and the list of Gidado ﵀ with Adama; the charge and the offices of the Kitāb al-Farq; the complaint of Abdullahi ﵀ against the new community down to the sellers of free men in the market; the lawlessness that fell above all on the subjected Hausa.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 14, 73–74, 83, 86–90, 96–97, 99–100, 106, 108, 141.
  • pp. 73–74: the departure for Gudu with the library sent ahead; the act of allegiance at Gudu, with Abdullahi ﵀ among the candidates and the hesitant Shehu ﵀ of fifty who became commander of a rebel army.
  • pp. 83, 86–89: the field commanders Bello ﵀, Abdullahi ﵀, Aliyu Jedo and Namoda; the Gobir cavalry, the Fulani archers and the musketeers of Gobir; the seizure of Matankari and Konni; the Gobir advance of June 1804; Abdullahi ﵀ who chose to fight at Lake Kwotto, the dawn prayer at Gurdam, the flight of the Gobirawa towards noon and Yunfa’s escape down the Rima.
  • pp. 90, 96–97: Tsuntsua in Ramadan 1219 (December 1804) during the investment of Alkalawa, with many well-known scholars among the dead; Fafara as the decisive battle; Alkalawa holding out for nearly two years before three columns stormed it in Shaʿban 1223 (October 1808), Yunfa falling in his palace; the letters to the communities of Katsina, Kano and Daura, their oath of allegiance and the nearness of the Mahdi.
  • pp. 99–100, 141: the flag-bearers Mallam Dendo in Nupe, Buba Yero in Gombe and Yakubu ﵀ in Bauchi; Zaria, Hadejia and Adamawa under Fulani emirs; the division of 1812; the duty of jihad that legitimised the slave harvesting on which the emirates’ economies depended.
  • pp. 14, 106, 108: the women of the defeated Hausa as booty and the rebukes of the Shehu ﵀; the Shehu ﵀ declaring rebel Muslims with pagan allies to be unbelievers, against which Abdullahi ﵀ dissented; the British conquest of 1903.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 190–191, 203, 208, 210–212, 219, 226.
  • pp. 190–191, 203, 208: the hijra on 10 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1218; Yunfa’s letter and the conditions of the Shehu ﵀; the Shehu ﵀ hoisting the flag as Amīr al-Muʾminīn; the Wathīqa as a manifesto in twenty-seven points, with the ban on enslaving free Muslims.
  • pp. 210–212, 219, 226: Tabkin Kwatto on Thursday 12 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 1219 (21 June 1804) under the command of Abdullahi ﵀, with about a hundred armoured Gobirawa against at most twenty horsemen on the Muslim side, in the words of Bello ﵀; the comparison with Badr by Abdullahi ﵀; Tsuntsuwa as the community’s Uhud, with more than two thousand dead including two hundred huffaz, the chief justice and imam Muhammad Sambo ﵀ and the standard-bearer Saʿad; the combined assault on Alkalawa in the fifth year under Bello ﵀, in which Yunfa fell.
• 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), pp. 3, 14, 23–25, 28, 31, 46.
  • pp. 3, 14, 23–25: an area of about 250,000 square miles; the exodus of 21 February 1804 as a hijra; two months of arrivals at Gudu and Yunfa’s rejected peace proposals; the appointment as Amīr al-Muʾminīn with the bayʿa; Matankari, Konni and Tabkin Kwotto between April and June 1804 and the comparison with Badr; the failed storming of Alkalawa late in 1804 and Tsuntsua with two thousand dead; Alwasa; the fall of Alkalawa at the fourth attempt in October 1808; Sokoto built by Bello ﵀ in 1809.
  • pp. 28, 31, 46: the flags as the token of authority of the Shaykh ﵀; the fall of Kano in 1807; Buba Yero, Yaʿqub ﵀ and Adama with flags for Gombe, Bauchi and Adamawa; the first emirs who knew the Shaykh ﵀ personally or had studied under him.
• Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet and Islamic Leader, Frank Cass, London 1989, pp. 13, 23, 51–52: the battle of 21 June 1804 while the Shehu ﵀ stayed at Gudu with the women and children; the order of battle of Bello ﵀ before Alkalawa in 1808 and the death of Yunfa with his bodyguard; the jajis and the yan-taru of Nana Asma’u ﵀.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 44, 53: the theocracy of Karamoko Alfa ﵀ in Futa Jallon in 1725; the caliphate that lasted a hundred years until the British came.