Idris Alooma ﵀
The Mai who wrote a letter to Istanbul, had Tripoli supply musketeers, and built a capital on Lake Chad whose walls would not fall until 1808.
Life
Idris ibn Ali ﵀, called by history Idris Alooma after his birth region of Alo (or Alau) south of Lake Chad, became Mai of Kanem-Bornu around 1564. His accession followed a period of weakening in which the Sayfawa dynasty had lost its grip on the trade routes and on the Sao population in the south, so that he inherited a kingdom with a glorious past and a vulnerable present.
His reign was recorded in unprecedented detail by his imam and secretary, Ahmad ibn Fartua, in three works of which the Ghazawāt Barnū (The Conquests of Bornu) and the Kitāb Ghazawāt Kānim (The Conquests of Kanem) are the most important. These chronicles, written in classical Arabic, with exact dates, campaign routes and troop strengths, make Idris Alooma ﵀ one of the best-documented African rulers of the sixteenth century.
Between 1571 and 1579 he performed the hajj, and on the way to Mecca and back he established diplomatic contacts. He later sent an embassy to Murad III in Istanbul, five thousand kilometers of diplomacy by way of Cairo, an exchange that led to the supply of Ottoman musketeers (tufakchis) from the garrisons of Tripoli and Fezzan. With this small but technologically superior corps the military balance in the Chad basin changed. He campaigned against the Sao, the Kwararafa, the Tubu and Kanem rebels, and restored control over the Fezzan axis toward North Africa.
His capital Ngazargamu, laid out on the Yobe River in what is today the extreme northeast of Nigeria, became under him a walled city with a brick mosque, a court of justice, and quarters for scholars and merchants. He died in 1596, on campaign or shortly after, and his son Muhammad succeeded him.
Faith and culture
Idris Alooma ﵀ was a Mai, a ruler with older, pre-Islamic dynastic rights going back to the Zaghawa line of Kanem, and at the same time a sincere Muslim. That combination shaped his policy. Where he could, he pushed Islamic law forward without undermining dynastic legitimacy. He replaced the old Sao customary courts with qadi courts based on Maliki fiqh, built mosques in conquered cities and obliged local leaders to attend the Friday prayer, and he had public indecency prosecuted.
At the same time he realized that he led a mixed population. The Kanembu peasant class in the heart of Bornu was largely Muslim, while the peripheries, the Sao villages, the Tubu camps and the Kwararafa border regions, were so to varying degrees. His jihads against these peripheries are presented by Ibn Fartua in religious terms, but they were at the same time wars of territorial consolidation.
His hajj was no side issue. He built a pilgrim house in Mecca for Bornu pilgrims, comparable to the waqf institutions that Mansa Musa once founded. In Ngazargamu he had Arabic manuscripts copied and invited jurists from Cairo and Medina to teach at his court.
Legacy
Kanem-Bornu under Idris Alooma ﵀ is the proof that a Sahelian state could compete with the established Islamic powers of the Mediterranean world, not by imitating those powers, but by selectively inserting technology (muskets, gunpowder), diplomacy (Istanbul), and juridical infrastructure (the qadi system) into an existing dynastic structure.
The Ghazawāt Barnū of Ibn Fartua is, together with the Diwan of the Sultans of Bornu, the basic source for the entire Kanem-Bornu historiography. It shows that African Islamic states produced their own administrative and literary traditions, not derived from North African models but developed in parallel with them.
The walls of Ngazargamu that he built held out until 1808, when the Fulani jihad of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ overran the city and burned it down. That it took two hundred years before anything brought down those walls says something about the durability of what he left behind.
Kanem-Bornu is also one of the states from which, in the nineteenth century after the fall of Ngazargamu, enslaved people were shipped by way of the Bight of Benin to Bahia and the Caribbean. The Bornu those deportees left behind was a state with a classical Arabic chronicle tradition, a diplomatic post in Istanbul, and a juridical infrastructure four centuries old.
This was a ruler who looked at his map not only as a local field, but as a Mediterranean-Saharan chessboard.
Uncertainties:
The starting date of his reign varies between 1564, 1569 and 1571 depending on the source. The exact year of the hajj is uncertain, and falls somewhere between 1571 and 1579. The year of death 1596 is the assumed one, although some sources name 1603 instead.
Sources
- Ahmad ibn Fartua, Ghazawāt Barnū (the Kitāb fī shaʾn sulṭān Idrīs, printed in Kano in 1932) and Kitāb Ghazawāt Kānim: the sixteenth-century chronicles of the campaigns of Idris Alooma ﵀, listed as Kitāb fī shaʾn sulṭān Idrīs in the bibliography of Last, p. 254, and cited for the title Amir al-muʾminin of the sultans of Bornu in Last, p. 47.
- Diwan of the sultans of Bornu, the later king list: named in the biography, not in the library.
- Ottoman and Moroccan archival material on the embassies from Bornu: the bay’a said to have been signed by Mai Idris Alooma ﵀ to Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur and al-Mansur’s letters to him, in Hunwick, pp. 293–294, 296; the correspondence of the Sayfawa mais with Egypt, Turkey and Morocco (al-Hajj 1983) and the Ottoman documents of 1576–1578 (Martin 1969), in Hunwick, pp. 379, 384.
- John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. 289–290, 293–294, 296, 327, 379, 384.
- pp. 289–290 (Leo Africanus, document 1): the reign of Mai Idris Alooma ﵀ from 1564 to 1596; the Sao as the non-Muslim groups west and south of Lake Chad whom he spent much energy trying to subdue; Bornu bordering the Fezzan in the north; the Kanuri dynasty that traced its origin to Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan; horses from Barbary merchants in exchange for slaves.
- pp. 293–294, 296 (document 2): the letters of Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur, probably addressed to Mai Idris Alooma ﵀, with the call to fight the idol worshippers, and the bay’a attributed to him.
- p. 327 (Anonymous Spaniard, document 4): the king of Bornu, at the time of the Moroccan conquest of Songhay Idris Alooma ﵀, who with the arms of defeated Turks who entered his service had armed about five hundred musketeers.
- pp. 379, 384: the literature on the diplomacy of the Sayfawa mais and on Mai Idris and the Ottoman Turks in 1576–1578.
- Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. 40, 47, 151, 254: the sultans of Bornu who had styled themselves Amir al-muʾminin for four centuries before Sokoto, with Ibn Fartua as sixteenth-century witness; the fall of Birnin Gazargamu in 1808 and the booty the vizier Gidado collected there for the caliph.
- 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. 11: Birnin Gazargamu as one of the leading seats of learning of the central Sudan before the jihad.
- Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, p. 30: Alooma ﵀ of Bornu who, like Askia Muhammad ﵀ and Muhammad Bello ﵀, released his Muslim prisoners of war and kept only unbelievers as slaves.
- João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1993, pp. 95, 97: the Bornus who came ashore in the New World as slaves in great numbers and who, with the Hausas and Nupes, had embraced Islam before coming to Brazil.