Usman dan Fodio ﵀

A Fulani scholar who waited thirty years with the sword and then, when forced, set in motion the largest Islamic state of precolonial Africa.

Life

He was born in the winter of 1754 in Maratta, a village in the sultanate of Gobir, in what is today the border region between Niger and Nigeria. His father, Muhammad Fodio ﵀, was a malam, a scholar-teacher from the Torodbe branch of the Fulani, no longer herders but a scholarly caste, Fulani who had exchanged their herds for the Qur’an and the inkpot. In that house Usman grew up with books, not many, but enough.

From a young age he studied with his father, with his uncle Uthman Binduri ﵀ (tafsir, Qadiri tariqa) and with Abd al-Rahman ibn Hammada ﵀ (hadith, sira). Around 1774 he came to Jibril ibn Umar ﵀, the man who would shape him intellectually. Jibril ﵀ had spent years in Mecca, Medina and Cairo and had encountered the reformist thought of his time, and he wrote takfīr pieces against what he considered corruption in the Hausa courts. Usman took from him the methodical wrath, but would later be more careful with takfīr than his teacher.

Between 1774 and 1804, thirty years, Usman essentially did one thing. He traveled through Gobir, Kebbi and Zamfara as an itinerant wa’iz, he preached, he taught, and in Degel (about 13.03°N, 5.25°E) he built a jama’a: a self-sufficient community of mosque, study circles, fields and internal shari’a adjudication. In these years he wrote Ihya al-Sunnah, Kitab al-Farq and, decisively, Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra.

The relationship with Gobir soured. Under sarki Nafata restrictions came on the jama’a: no new converts, prohibition of the white turban of his followers, curtailment of preaching. Nafata’s son Yunfa, once Usman’s student, became his enemy. On 21 February 1804 Usman left Degel and traveled with his family and several hundred followers northwest to Gudu, where he was proclaimed Amīr al-Muʾminīn and the jihad was formalized. Eight years later, in 1812, he withdrew from government, divided the empire between his son Muhammad Bello ﵀ (Sokoto) and his brother Abdullahi ﵀ (Gwandu) and returned to what he loved most: reading, writing, praying. He died in April 1817 in Sokoto, where his grave is still a pilgrimage site. The line from Degel through Gudu to Sokoto is shorter than 100 kilometers, a minuscule theater in which an empire the size of Western Europe was founded.

Faith and culture

Usman was Qadiri, standing in the silsila of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀, the twelfth-century master from Baghdad, and that gave him a specific posture: first worshipper, then scholar, then only, if it had to be, reformer. His life follows precisely that pattern.

His preaching turned on five themes: the duty of ilm (knowledge, including for women), the prohibition of shirk in its creeping forms (the iskoki cult, non-Qur’anic amulets), the unlawfulness of arbitrary court taxes such as jangali, the duty of the sovereign to just adjudication, and, late in his thinking, the obligation of hijra when the faith can no longer be freely practiced.

He was a poet in Arabic and Fulfulde. His qasidas and madīḥ nabawī about the Prophet ﷺ moved through the villages, learned by heart by the unlettered, so that his movement became not only scholarly but also a song movement, which explains its speed.

Legacy

Dan Fodio ﵀ left a corpus of dozens of works, catalogued in John Hunwick’s Arabic Literature of Africa. The Sokoto Caliphate, which after his death was consolidated by his son Bello ﵀, would last until the British conquest in 1903, almost a century as the largest Islamic empire in Africa after the fall of Songhai.

His most important legacy is not political but intellectual, and it was carried above all by his daughter. Nana Asma’u ﵀ (1793–1864), quadrilingual writer in Arabic, Fulfulde, Hausa and Tamasheq and author of more than sixty works, built the yan taru network: female ulama who traveled from village to village and taught women. That network exists in adapted form to this day in northern Nigeria, and her existence alone refutes the cliché that West African Islam was a male affair.

But the legacy also has shadow. The takfīr doctrine of the Kitab al-Farq, juridically careful but in practice unmanageable, legitimized a war of Muslims against Muslims. Usman himself was cautious in his judgment; his commanders in the heat of battle were not always so. The Fulani-Hausa tension that hardened in the jihad still echoes today in parts of northern Nigeria.

He matters because he shows that West Africa around 1800 had an indigenous ulama of world class, a Torodbe-Fulani scholar who had grown up in his own soil rather than an imported scholarship.

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Uncertainties:

The birth year 1754 is the most current, although some sources give 1753 (15 Safar 1167). The exact coordinates of historical Maratta and Degel are uncertain, and the identifications rest on modern local tradition. Sources vary on the number of followers who left Degel at the hijra, from a few hundred to more than a thousand, and “several hundred” stands here as a cautious lower bound. The year of the visionary Prophetic investiture is given as 1794 by some and as 1795 by others, and both dates circulate.

Sources

• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Ihya al-Sunnah wa-ikhmād al-Bidʿa, Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr and Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra ʿalā al-ʿIbād: his own works on which the biography rests, with Ihya al-Sunnah as the principal work finished before 1793 (Last, p. 9), Kitāb al-Farq with its charges against the government of the Hausa states (Last, p. lxviii) and Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra as the work in which the duty of hijra is set out (Last, p. 46; Hiskett, p. 119).
• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr (1812): the date of the hijra to Gudu, 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218, Tuesday 21 February 1804, as quoted in Last, p. 23.
• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Tazyīn al-Waraqāt: his account of the flight from Gobir to Gudu and of his brother’s teachers, as quoted in Sulaiman, pp. 33, 190.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. lxviii, lxxiii, 3, 5–7, 9, 12, 23–24, 41–42, 46, 60, 113.
  • pp. lxxiii, 3, 5–7, 9, 12: the birth at Maratta in Gobir on Sunday 15 December 1754 and the move to Degel; the Toronkawa as a scholarly caste; the teachers Uthman Binduri ﵀ and Jibril ibn Umar ﵀, whose strict definition of a Muslim the Shehu ﵀ did not adopt; the start of his preaching around 1774, the years 1774–1786 from Degel in Kebbi and Gobir and then five years in Zamfara; Ihya al-Sunnah alongside long poems in Fulfulde; Nafata’s proclamation against preaching, conversion and the turban, and Yunfa as a former student or visitor of Degel.
  • pp. 23–24, 46: the hijra from Degel to Gudu on 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218, Tuesday 21 February 1804, thirty miles as the crow flies; his election as Imam of the community with the bay’a of first Abdullahi ﵀ and then Bello ﵀; the titles Amīr al-Muʾminīn and Khalifa.
  • pp. 41–42, 60, 113: the division of 1812, the west for Abdullahi ﵀ and the east for Bello ﵀, with Gwandu becoming Abdullahi’s ﵀ seat only after the Shehu’s ﵀ death; the death in Sokoto on Sunday 20 April 1817, aged 62, and Sokoto as the major place of pilgrimage in Hausaland and capital of the largest state in West Africa.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 14, 16, 40–41, 48, 62–63, 66, 119, 143.
  • pp. 16, 40–41, 48: the Toronkawa who gradually exchanged nomadism for scholarship; Jibril ibn Umar ﵀ who taught that disobedience to the shariʿa amounts to unbelief, and the Shehu ﵀ who rejected that radicalism despite his veneration for his teacher; Nafata’s restrictive laws.
  • pp. 14, 62–63, 66, 119, 143: the Qadiriyya of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀ from the twelfth century, of which the Shehu ﵀ was a faithful adherent; the vision of 1208/1794 in which he was girded with the Sword of Truth; Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra as the central work on the duty of hijra; his condemnation of the cattle tax jangali; the British conquest of 1903 that ended the caliphate after almost a hundred years.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 33, 122, 190–191, 277, 281–283.
  • pp. 33, 122, 190–191, 277, 281–283: the birth in 1168/1754 and the teachers according to Abdullahi ﵀; the restraint in takfir, since it is not for us to suspect the faith of any Muslim; the hijra of 21 February 1804, the flag of the Amīr al-Muʾminīn and the Bayān some years after the start of the jihad; the death on 20 April 1817; the Shehu’s ﵀ insistence on the education of women and Nana Asma’u ﵀ as a teacher whose poems are still heard all over Nigeria.
• Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet and Islamic Leader, Frank Cass, London 1989, pp. 52, 98: the 'yan taru as the pupils of Asma’u ﵀ and their descendants, and her lasting inspiration for the women of the 'yan taru to this day.