The Tragic Fitna

In the preceding article we saw how al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ conducted a long and ultimately futile siege of the French Fort de Médine in the summer of 1857, and how, after Faidherbe relieved the fort in person in September 1857, he reoriented his jihad strategically: away from direct confrontation with the French colonial power, eastward, against the Bambara kingdom of Segu and the Sahelian states that lay beyond it. This article follows the campaigns of 1858 to 1862 in which the Umarian state reached its greatest territorial extent, and in its second half it turns to the tragic fitna of 1862, the inter-Muslim war between the Umarian Tijani state and the Qadiri Massina Imamate of Hamdullahi, a conflict that leaves a deep spiritual unease in Umarian history to this day and that prepared the eventual fall of Umar Tall ﵀ himself.

The Segu Campaign

In the spring of 1859, about a year and a half after the failure at Médine and after the strategic reorientation, Umar Tall ﵀ opened the campaign against the Bambara kingdom of Segu that he had foreseen in its preliminaries as early as 1855. Segu lay on the upper reaches of the Niger, in present-day central Mali, and was the larger and militarily stronger of the two Bambara kingdoms: a capital of several tens of thousands of inhabitants, a long-established political organization under the Massassi dynasty, and an army made up of thousands of horsemen and a large contingent of infantry.

The force the Umarian state put in the field for it was larger still than that of the Kaarta campaign of 1855, by the most common estimate about thirty thousand men: the core corps of talibé fighters with firearms, the Tooroodo, Fulbe and Mandinka militias from across the Umarian state, and additional contingents from Bambouk and Bondou that had joined the jihad state in the preceding years. Umar Tall ﵀ held the supreme command himself, with his son Ahmadu in an increasingly independent position as second-in-command and with Alfa Umar Cherno Baila ﵀ and Tijani Tall ﵀ in other important command posts.

The Fall of Segu

The main phase of the campaign lasted, by the usual reconstruction, about three months: the advance began from Dinguiraye in May and June 1859, in July and August a series of battles against the neighbouring Bambara allies followed, and in early September it came to the decisive battle before the capital itself. The Bambara troops consisted mainly of horsemen with edged weapons and of a smaller contingent of musketeers, and they defended themselves with considerable courage; the fighting was among the heaviest the Umarian jihad had met until then. Firepower, discipline and numbers on the Umarian side nonetheless drove them into a succession of defeats that ended in the fall of Segu on the 9th or 10th of September 1859.

The Massassi king Ali Diarra wished to preserve the honour of his dynasty in his last resistance in the capital, and he fell in a personal sortie against the Umarian troops before the main gate of his palace. The city was then taken street by street, the royal palace on the 11th of September, and the garrison surrendered on the 14th of September. With Segu fell the largest non-Muslim kingdom West Africa had known since Songhai in the Sahara, and the Umarian jihad was noted across West Africa because of it.

The Conquest of the Books

Among the spoils of war that fell into Umarian hands with the capture of the palace was a large collection of Arabic manuscripts, gathered over the centuries by successive Massassi kings, partly out of Bambara conversions to Islam and partly out of trade or gifts from neighbouring Muslim states. Umar Tall ﵀ inspected the collection himself and gave orders to have it brought to Dinguiraye, where it was housed in a library of its own. It included works of broad Islamic importance, among them a number of rare copies of the works of Imam Malik ﵀ and of Imam al-Suyuti ﵀, and for the scholarship of the Umarian state it was a considerable acquisition.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, the conquest of the books was the spiritual high point of the campaign. He saw in it a sign of Allah’s ﷻ goodness, in which his jihad asserted itself not only in territorial expansion but also in the protection of Muslim scholarship. In a Friday sermon in Segu a month later he dwelt on that meaning and compared it with the scholarship that earlier generations had preserved in Timbuktu under the Songhai-Saharan states and that had been lost by degrees after the Moroccan invasion of 1591.

The Administrative Organization after Segu

After the capture of Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ turned in the months that followed to the administrative ordering of the conquered territory, which gave the Umarian state a considerably larger geographical compass than it had had in the preceding years. He appointed his son Ahmadu governor over the Segu territory as a whole, with the charge of introducing the Shariʿa legal order step by step among a Bambara population that was for the most part not yet Islamized. In every larger settlement of the conquered territory he had a mosque built, and he sent Tooroodo teachers to the local villages to teach the Bambara young the Quran. Zakat collection was instituted in an organized form, and the spoils of war were divided among the fighters according to the conventions of fiqh.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally this phase was the passage from direct military campaigning to the stabilization of a jihad state that had become markedly larger, and he spent about a year in Segu with administrative work, scholarly labour and the spiritual guidance of Islamization. It was quiet work, the jihad in its consolidation, before the tragic Massina fitna followed in the years after.

Toward Massina

After the fall of Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ stood before the choice of his next expansion. The Bambara population of the Segu territory had to be brought to Islam step by step and taken into the Umarian state, and his administrative ordering in the months that followed served that end. But the strategic expansion that came next in his deliberations lay eastward, at the Massina Imamate on the middle reaches of the Niger, where Ahmad III ﵀ held the spiritual and political leadership of a Muslim state guided by the Qadiriyya.

The choice was spiritually delicate. Massina was not a non-Muslim state as Segu and Kaarta had been, and it therefore fell outside the legal ground on which Umar Tall ﵀ had justified his earlier jihad operations. At the same time the Qadiri presence of Massina stood in a fundamental relation to the Umarian Tijani presence, a relation that would flare up with great sensitivity in the years that followed, and Massina had taken a political stance during the Segu campaign that in the Umarian reading had become unacceptable. From both questions, and from the second in particular, the fitna would take its form.

The Mande Allies of Segu

One consequence of the campaign of 1859 carried weight in the wider West African political order: the treatment of the Mandinka and Soninke allies of Segu. Over many years the Massassi kings had built an alliance with neighbouring Mande communities that knew themselves threatened in their own position by Umarian expansion, and those allies had placed their troops under Massassi command in the run-up to the campaign. For the Umarian strategists this meant that they were fighting not merely the Massassi kingdom but a broad Mande coalition, and that a settled outcome would also require the submission of the allies themselves.

In the months after the fall of Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ therefore conducted a broad diplomatic campaign among the Mande leaders, in which he put them before the choice between voluntary submission to Umarian sovereignty and continued resistance with armed confrontation as its consequence. The majority of the Mande leaders chose voluntary submission and were taken administratively into the Umarian state in the months that followed. A smaller minority continued their resistance and were subdued in the course of 1860 in a series of smaller military campaigns.

The Massina Imamate

The Massina Imamate had been founded in 1818 by Ahmadu Lobbo ﵀, a Fulbe scholar from the Maasina communities on the middle reaches of the Niger, in a jihad that resembled the Umarian undertaking but had taken place about half a century earlier. Ahmadu Lobbo ﵀ brought Massina under a state guided by the Shariʿa, in the Qadiri tradition that had been current among the West African Fulbe communities since Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀, and he left behind a polity that carried the Fulbe-Massina interior both in its administration and in its spiritual discipline.

In 1859, the year in which Umar Tall ﵀ took Segu, Massina stood under the leadership of Ahmad III ﵀, a grandson of Ahmadu Lobbo ﵀, still in his early years as imam. Ahmad III ﵀ was a scholar of stature in his own right, trained in the Qadiri tradition and in the Maliki fiqh of the Massina Imamate, and he governed his state effectively from within, though his relation to the growing Umarian state remained uncertain. He received the reports of the fall of Segu in 1859 with considerable concern, for he understood that Umarian expansion threatened to draw Massina too into its sphere of influence.

The Family Ties between the Two States

What made the fitna more tragic still was the dense family network that had arisen in the preceding generation between Tooroodo émigrés in Massina and Massina Fulbe families. In the course of the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s many Tooroodo households had left Fouta Toro for Massina, before Umar Tall’s ﵀ own call to the hijra, and there they had built their new communities amid a welcoming reception, in which marriages with the local Fulbe population bound the two communities to each other. For the war that came this meant that fighters on both sides would face blood relatives, and that the fitna would be felt down into the ordinary families of both parties.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally that tie was a spiritually aggravating circumstance, to which he gave ample attention in his Friday sermons in the run-up to the campaign. He acknowledged that the fitna would place the ordinary families of both parties in a tragic position, and he asked his followers to spare the local families as much as they could in their fighting, with particular regard for women, children and non-combatant men on both sides of the confrontation.

The Diplomatic Exchange

In the winter months of 1859 into 1860 a correspondence was conducted between Umar Tall ﵀ and Ahmad III ﵀ in which they examined the spiritual and political form of their relationship. The letters, so far as they are preserved in later copies, show a conversation between two West African Muslim leaders who each acknowledged the spiritual authority of the other from his own position, but who ran into thorough differences as soon as the proper form of that relationship was at issue.

Umar Tall ﵀ asked Ahmad III ﵀ in his letters for a formal Massina recognition of Umarian state sovereignty, within a spiritual cooperation in which the two states would unite in one Muslim undertaking under the spiritual leadership of the Tijaniyya. Ahmad III ﵀ answered that in his Qadiri tradition he could not let himself be placed under Tijani sovereignty without damaging Massina’s own spiritual identity, and that he recognized the Umarian state as a neighbouring Muslim sovereignty of equal standing but did not wish to bind himself to it in a subordinate position. The exchange came to a standstill, and in the course of 1860 the first signs of an armed confrontation became visible on both sides.

The Ulama Debates of 1860–1861

In 1860 and 1861, while the conflict was heading toward an armed confrontation, the ulama debated its legal grounds throughout West Africa. In Hamdullahi, Ahmad III ﵀ requested fatwas from the established Massina scholars, and they ruled in a majority opinion that the Massina position, in its refusal of the extradition, was legally defensible on the grounds of the protection doctrines of Maliki fiqh. In Dinguiraye and in Segu, Umar Tall ﵀ had comparable consultations carried out, and the Umarian ʿulamāʾ ruled in their majority that the Umarian position, in its demand for the extradition, was legally defensible on the grounds of the sovereignty doctrines that ought to take precedence in such cases.

In Sokoto, in Fouta Djallon and in Fouta Toro the same considerations came up in scholarly assemblies, and there opinions diverged more widely than in the immediate Umarian or Massina circles. The scholars of the Sokoto Qadiri tradition inclined toward a Massina-friendly reading, while the scholars of the Tooroodo-Tijani presence in Fouta Toro inclined toward an Umarian-friendly one. The debates reflected the wider spiritual division between the Qadiri and the Tijani traditions in West Africa, and they showed that the legal grounds for the war lay mixed, without an unambiguous outcome that both traditions would accept.

The Extradition of the Bambara Leaders

Besides the impasse over the questions of sovereignty, an exceedingly sensitive spiritual exchange ran between the Umarian state and Massina in 1860 and 1861 around one particular case, and it was that case which became the direct occasion of the armed confrontation. In the chaos of the Segu campaign of 1859 a number of Bambara leaders of the Massassi clan had escaped to Massina territory, where Ahmad III ﵀ granted them asylum under the customary Massina conventions of political refugee protection. Umar Tall ﵀ demanded their extradition in a correspondence, with the legal argument that as non-Muslim fugitives they could not be brought under the protection of a Muslim state in ordinary Maliki fiqh without that state itself coming to stand in an unlawful position.

Ahmad III ﵀ refused the extradition, on the grounds of Massina’s own legal traditions and on the grounds of his judgment that the Bambara leaders had by then accepted Islam in a formal manner that bound them to Massina sovereignty. Umar Tall ﵀ held that answer to be legally unacceptable and a direct challenge to Umarian sovereignty, and in the second half of 1861 he began the preparations for an armed campaign against Massina. It was a tragic outcome of an inter-Muslim conflict that neither leader had wished, but in which the positions had risen so far apart that a peaceful end no longer stood open.

The Spiritual Embarrassment

For the whole West African Muslim world the war that was drawing near was a spiritual embarrassment, and it placed the Muslim undertaking in nineteenth-century West Africa before a fundamental challenge. In Sokoto, Sultan Ahmadu Atiku ﵀ expressed his concern about the confrontation in a letter to Umar Tall ﵀ and asked him to seek a peaceful end. In Fouta Djallon and in Fouta Toro the legal grounds of the Umarian campaign were discussed at length in scholarly assemblies, with differences of opinion between scholars who defended the Umarian position and scholars who held the Massina position to be legally in the right. For the ordinary Muslim population in both states it was a spiritual trial whose end was uncertain and which would seriously threaten the shared Muslim unity.

The Last Attempt at Mediation

In the early spring of 1862, before the Umarian troops set out, one more attempt at mediation was made. Sultan Ahmadu Atiku ﵀ of Sokoto addressed both Dinguiraye and Hamdullahi through a formal delegation of Sokoto scholars with the call for a peaceful end to the conflict, and that delegation travelled to both capitals in March and April 1862 and held lengthy talks with Umar Tall ﵀ and with Ahmad III ﵀, in search of a common ground on which the two positions could be brought together in a spiritual compromise.

Both parties received the efforts with respect and with serious attention, but they brought forth no peaceful end. The foundations of the conflict, as they had been laid down in the legal positions of the preceding years, had grown on both sides to a point from which neither could withdraw without loss of face. In May 1862 the delegation returned empty-handed, and Sultan Ahmadu Atiku ﵀ received the news of the armed confrontation ahead with a spiritual distress that he voiced in his own Friday sermons in Sokoto. For the West African Muslim world the failure of the mediation confirmed that the conflict could no longer find a shared form and that it would have to be fought out in its tragic form.

The Attack on Hamdullahi

In the spring of 1862, Umar Tall ﵀ opened the campaign against Hamdullahi, the capital of the Massina Imamate, with a force of about thirty thousand men and with the declared aim of taking the Massina state into Umarian sovereignty. The advance led through the middle-Niger territories, and the Massina troops under Ahmad III ﵀ in person offered resistance with a courage and a personal readiness for sacrifice in which the spiritual tradition of the Massina Imamate was recognizable.

The decisive battle was fought on the 17th or 18th of May 1862 before the city wall of Hamdullahi, and in it the Massina troops, despite their courageous resistance, were defeated by the Umarian superiority in force. Ahmad III ﵀ fell in that battle in a personal sortie against the Umarian troops, an end that gave a martyr’s death to a Muslim leader who had defended his state against another Muslim state in a conflict that could have no true victor. Hamdullahi fell to the Umarian troops on the 19th or 20th of May, and Massina was taken into a nominal Umarian sovereignty.

The Fighting before Hamdullahi

The fighting before Hamdullahi is preserved in separate accounts in both Umarian and Massina sources, and it showed the war as the heaviest of Umar Tall’s ﵀ campaigns. The Massina troops consisted mainly of Fulbe horsemen and of an organized contingent of musketeers, and they fought with the declared readiness of a community defending its spiritual identity; in the first two days of fighting they inflicted considerable losses on the Umarian troops. Ahmad III ﵀ led several sorties from the city wall himself, and in this last phase of his life he showed a personal courage that has been kept in lasting memory in West African Muslim tradition.

On the third day of the fighting, on the 17th of May 1862 by the most usual reconstruction, Ahmad III ﵀ undertook a last sortie with his most trusted companions, and in it he met a martyr’s death. He fell in combat before the main gate of Hamdullahi with the sword in his hand and the takbir on his lips, in a manner that has grown in the Massina tradition into a spiritually venerable memory. His companions drew his body within the walls, and he was buried with the proper rites in the central mosque of Hamdullahi before the city was taken by the Umarian troops in the days that followed.

The Mourning after the Victory

The end of the battle at Hamdullahi left in Umar Tall ﵀ personally a deep mourning and an inner unrest. The death of a fellow Muslim leader in a conflict that could not be settled unambiguously in law was, for a scholar of his stature, an inner trial, and he spoke of it in his Friday sermons in the months that followed. Of Ahmad III ﵀ he spoke with respect for his spiritual stature and for his personal courage, and he indicated in his preaching that Hamdullahi was not to be celebrated as an Umarian victory but as a tragically necessary end within a shared Muslim world that in its internal division had lost its own leaders.

On the Umarian community the fitna worked through as a diminished morale and a growing internal division. Many Umarian fighters and their families went through an inner crisis in the months after Hamdullahi in which they doubted the rightness of the campaign in their own consciences, and in a number of cases they asked Umar Tall ﵀ personally for clarification of the spiritual meaning of what had happened. Umar Tall ﵀ answered those questions with the eloquence and the spiritual seriousness that marked him in all his work, but the internal unrest in his community persisted and would find its tragic end in the Toucouleur-Massina revolt of late 1863.

The Outcome for Umar Tall ﵀ Personally

In the months after the fall of Hamdullahi, Umar Tall’s ﵀ personal spiritual life knew a heightened intensity, and he worked the fitna through in his own conscience in long hours of seclusion and prayer. His closest companions relate in later tradition that in these months he spent more time in silent prayer than in any preceding jihad year, that he performed the Quran recitation himself more often than usual, and that in his immediate presence he showed a markedly diminished outward fervour. Whoever met him closely in these months saw a man who felt the weight of his life’s work more and more, and who carried the spiritual cost of the Hamdullahi fitna in his own soul in a way he did not put into public words.

In his Friday sermons in this period, however, he spoke undiminished of the spiritual cause of the Umarian jihad, and he called his community to a renewal of the Tijani discipline that might rise above the fitna through a heightened spiritual seriousness. What that preaching accomplished among his followers was a mixed matter, for the inner unrest over the fitna could not be removed by spiritual exhortation alone, and the Massina revolt that followed would show the lasting spiritual and political consequences of the conflict in full.

Toward the Downfall

The years between 1862 and 1864 formed the closing phase of Umar Tall’s ﵀ life’s work, and in them the tragic issue of the Hamdullahi fitna became fully visible. The Massina population, in its Qadiri tradition, would not be brought into Umarian-Tijani sovereignty without resistance and rose in 1863 in a full revolt against the Umarian occupation, after which a long war of attrition followed that would end in 1864 at Bandiagara with Umar Tall’s ﵀ own death. To that last phase, and to the manner in which the eagle of West Africa folded his wings in a cave near Bandiagara, the last article of this cycle devotes its attention.

In this article we have seen how the Umarian jihad took the largest of the Bambara kingdoms at Segu in 1859, how the relation to the Massina Imamate escalated step by step in the following years around the extradition of the Bambara leaders, how Ahmad III ﵀ of Massina met a martyr’s death in May 1862 in the tragic battle before Hamdullahi, and how the outcome of this fitna brought the Umarian community into a spiritual crisis from which the downfall would follow.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 334–376.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 334–376.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 376–426.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 212–256.
• William A. Brown, The Caliphate of Hamdullahi, ca. 1818–1864: A Study in African History and Tradition, University of Wisconsin Press (1969), pp. 124–198.
• Bintou Sanankoua, Un empire peul au XIXe siècle: La Diina du Maasina, Karthala (1990), pp. 156–214.
• Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Jacques Daget, L’Empire peul du Macina, IFAN-Mouton (1962), pp. 256–314 [for the Massina side of the conflict].
• Yves Person, Samori: une révolution dyula, tome I, IFAN-Dakar (1968), pp. 168–212.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma Waqaʿa and additional writings on the Hamdullahi fitna; French translation Mahibou-Triaud, Éditions du CNRS (1983), pp. 88–168.