El Hadj Umar Tall ﵀

The Tijani khalifa who returned from Medina with a mandate to reform all of West Africa, and ended by destroying more Muslim states than pagan ones.

Life

Umar ibn Sa’id Tall ﵀ is born around 1794 in Halwar, a village in Futa Toro on the Senegal River. He is Toucouleur, a Fulani subgroup, from a scholarly family that traces its Islamic lines far back. Futa Toro had been an Islamic almamate since the 1770s, a small theocratic experiment that, decades before Usman dan Fodio ﵀, stood at the cradle of the West African jihad tradition.

In 1828, about 34 years old, he sets out on hajj. The journey to Mecca would normally take two years; for him it becomes a formation of nearly a decade. In Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, he joins the Tijaniyya tariqa, a Sufi order founded by Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ in Fez at the end of the eighteenth century. His teacher is Muhammad al-Ghali, a direct disciple of al-Tijani ﵀ himself, and al-Ghali appoints him in 1830 as khalifa of the Tijaniyya for all of West Africa, a position of exceptional weight. He returns via Cairo, Bornu and Sokoto. In Sokoto he marries Maryam, the daughter of Muhammad Bello, the son and successor of Usman dan Fodio ﵀; he stays for years, teaches, writes.

On his return to Futa Toro in the 1840s he meets resistance from the sitting Qadiri-almamy elite. He moves in 1848 to Dinguiraye, in the mountainous Futa Jallon region (present-day Guinea), and founds a walled military-religious center there, where he recruits talibé followers, students who are at the same time soldiers.

In 1852 he proclaims jihad. His first targets are the non-Islamic Tamba and Kaarta states, and they fall. Then in 1861 he turns against the great Bambara empire of Ségou, which is polytheistic, so that the jihad is juridically defensible. Ségou falls. But Ségou stands in loose alliance with the Massina Imamate under Ahmad III (grandson of Seku Amadu ﵀), and Umar Tall ﵀ confronts Hamdullahi militarily. Here lies the rupture: Hamdullahi is a Muslim state. In 1862 it is conquered, Ahmad III killed, the city plundered.

Al-Bakkai ﵀ of Timbuktu, head of the Kunta-Qadiriyya, writes him a furious excommunication letter. Umar replies. The correspondence, which has been preserved, is one of the sharpest intra-Muslim debates of the nineteenth-century Sahel.

In 1864 a revolt breaks out in Massina. Umar Tall ﵀ is surrounded in a cave near Bandiagara, at the foot of the Dogon cliffs, and there he dies. His body is never publicly displayed.

Faith and culture

Umar Tall ﵀ is a Tijani to the bone. The Tijaniyya distinguishes itself from the older Qadiriyya by the claim of direct transmission through a vision: al-Tijani ﵀ is said to have personally received in Fez from the Prophet ﷺ the Ṭarīqa Muḥammadiyya, above all other tariqas. That claim is internal to the order, but it produces tension with other Sufi families, particularly the Kunta-Qadiriyya.

His main work Rimāḥ Ḥizb al-Raḥīm 'alā Nuḥūr Ḥizb al-Rajīm (The Spears of the Community of the Merciful against the Throats of the Community of the Damned), Rimāḥ for short, is an extensive Tijani manual that is read everywhere the order takes hold. It is a work of spiritual pedagogy, not of political ideology, and it remains popular long after his death.

His political theology, however, is expansive. He argues that a Muslim state that is not Tijani is not in the full sense rightly guided. Al-Bakkai ﵀ rejects this without compromise: the umma cannot be demarcated along tariqa lines, and whoever demarcates it so, says al-Bakkai, makes himself guilty of bagy, unlawful revolt against Muslim authority, so that his bloodshed is unjust.

Legacy

His military legacy is paradoxical. The Toucouleur state that he and his sons founded, stretching from Dinguiraye to Ségou to the edge of Timbuktu, was the largest Islamic political entity in West Africa between 1860 and the French conquest of the 1890s. At the same time his jihad brought more destruction to Muslim-administered cities (Hamdullahi, parts of Massina) than to non-Islamic regions: the Bambara elite of Ségou was a relatively limited target, while Hamdullahi he destroyed thoroughly. An honest historical judgment must name this.

His spiritual legacy outweighs his political. The Tijaniyya that he anchored in West Africa, through his talibés, through the Rimāḥ, through his sons Ahmadu Seku and Tijani, is today the dominant tariqa of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and parts of Nigeria. It is Tijani mosques and Tijani family traditions that nineteenth-century Senegambia deportees took with them to Bahia, Trinidad and Suriname, so that the line which Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ began in Fez was drawn on, by Umar Tall ﵀, to the far side of the Atlantic world. Wherever the Jawharat al-Kamāl is recited today or the Tijani wird read, he is the link in that line.

Sources for his life are rich: his own Rimāḥ and letters, the Infāq al-Maysūr of Muhammad Bello on the broader jihad movement (written before Umar’s own campaigns but relevant to the intellectual milieu), the chronicle of his secretary Mohammed Alfa, the al-Bakkai correspondence, and French colonial reports.

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Uncertainties: The birth year varies in the sources between 1794 and 1797. The exact circumstances of his death in the Bandiagara cave are not unambiguous, and both an explosion and exhaustion under siege have been proposed. The precise date of al-Bakkai’s first excommunication letter is uncertain, either 1862 or 1863. The relationship between his political jihad and his Tijani spiritual teaching remains the subject of modern academic debate.

Sources

• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Rimāḥ Ḥizb al-Raḥīm ʿalā Nuḥūr Ḥizb al-Rajīm: his main work, dated 1261/1845 in the manuscript list and printed in Cairo in 1345 AH, from which the Tijanis inferred that Bello ﵀ adhered to their order, as recorded in Last, pp. 216, 253; his letter on visiting the tomb of the Shehu ﵀ and his Suyūf al-Saʿīd on the Tijaniyya, finished in Sokoto in March 1837, as discussed in Last, p. 218.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayān mā waqaʿa: his justification of the war against the amir of Masina Ahmad ibn Ahmad, grandson of Shaykh Ahmad Lobbo ﵀, in which he turns the arguments of al-Maghili ﵀ against his adversary, as discussed in Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 47.
• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr (1812), his history of the jihad movement, as cited in Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 47.
• Correspondence with Ahmad al-Bakkai al-Kunti ﵀ of Timbuktu (1862–1863), the chronicle of his secretary Mohammed Alfa and the French colonial reports of the Senegal colony (Faidherbe): named in the biography, not in the library.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xl–xli, 47, 216, 218, 253.
  • pp. xl–xli: Umar ﵀ who was in Medina in April 1829, was appointed muqaddam of the Tijaniyya for the western Sudan in Mecca and Medina and then stayed in Sokoto for eight years (1830–1838); his marriage to Maryam, daughter of Bello ﵀; his eldest son Ahmad, born in Sokoto around 1833 and governor of Ségou from about 1862; his death in 1864, which there was an attempt to conceal.
  • pp. 47, 216, 218, 253: Ahmad ibn Umar who, like Shaykh Ahmad ﵀ of Masina, styled himself Amir al-muʾminin at Ségou; the Rimāḥ and the Tijani claim on Bello ﵀; the visiting of tombs as an issue at Sokoto in April 1836.
• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, pp. 47, 116: the Bayān mā waqaʿa against Ahmad III of Masina and the use of al-Maghili ﵀ in defence of his own conquests; the dates circa 1794–1864 in the thesis of John Ralph Willis.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, p. 62: the Tijaniyya, founded around 1780 by Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ and spread into Hausaland during the Shehu’s ﵀ lifetime; the older Qadiriyya of ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀ from the twelfth century.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 46–47: Futa Toro as the land of the Muslim Tukulor and Fulani; the Tukulor scholars Sulayman Bal and ʿAbd al-Qadir Kane who established the independent theocracy of Futa Toro in 1776, with Kane as almami.
• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, pp. 99, 168–169, 176–177: the Tukulor as the Muslim, sedentary portion of the Fulbe and the theocracy of 1776 with ʿAbd al-Qadir Kane as first almamy, in the essays of Michael Gomez and Sylviane Diouf; Umar Tall ﵀, born in Futa Toro, who established a vast Tukulor Empire over parts of Senegal, Guinea and Mali and was killed in 1864 in an explosion of his own gunpowder; Futa Toro under French control by 1891.
• 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. 168–169: the French conquest of Ségou in 1890–1891, after which the Amir al-muʾminin Ahmad ibn Shaykh Umar ﵀ fled eastwards with a large party.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, p. 178: Shehu Amadu Lobbo ﵀ (d. 1260/1845) as ruler of Masina from its capital Hamdullahi.