Foundation of the Jihad

In the previous article we followed al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ through his West African years of return: the stay in Sokoto under Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, the working years in Fouta Djallon where he built up his military power and his Tijani network, and the political blueprint that he set down step by step in the Rimah. We saw how the tension with the Almami of Fouta Djallon brought him in 1849 or early 1850 to decide on a move to the settlement of Dinguiraye in the northeastern part of present-day Guinea, and how in the months that followed he completed the logistical and the spiritual preparation for that move. This article follows him at his arrival in Dinguiraye in 1850 or 1851, at the remaking of that village into the first working base of a jihad state, and at the proclamation of the jihad in 1852, which carried the West African Muslim world into a new phase of spiritual and political movement.

The choice of Dinguiraye in historical perspective

Dinguiraye was an unremarkable Mandinka village of a few hundred inhabitants, and the choice of Umar Tall ﵀ raised it to a place in West African history that its local chiefs in 1850 had not foreseen. In the decades that followed, the name Dinguiraye became synonymous throughout West Africa with the Umarian jihad enterprise, and even after the eventual fall of the jihad state it remained a point of reference for the Muslim communities standing in the Umarian tradition. Today, in the twenty-first century, Dinguiraye is still an important Muslim town in northern Guinea, with a large Tijaniyya zawiya that goes back directly to the mosque Umar Tall ﵀ founded there, and with an annual mawlid celebration in which the Tooroodo-Tijani tradition of the nineteenth century is carried forward to the present day.

For an understanding of the original choice it matters to hold on to the fact that a scholar such as Umar Tall ﵀ could not know in 1850 what place his settlement would take in history, and that in his own eyes the decision was first and foremost practical and strategic; its historical significance came to it only by degrees. It is a distinction that West African historiography sometimes underrates, for the tendency exists to read events backward as though the protagonist already knew the end, whereas the actual decision was taken within a far narrower field of view.

The arrival in Dinguiraye

In the second half of 1850, or possibly in the early spring of 1851, Umar Tall ﵀ left the settlement near Timbo in Fouta Djallon with his community and moved to Dinguiraye, in an exodus of roughly two thousand persons: families, students, military followers and servants, with the whole stock of weapons, manuscripts and household equipment that traveled with them. The road ran through mountainous forest between Timbo and Dinguiraye and took, according to tradition, about three weeks, with breaks for periods of rest and for the obligatory five daily prayers.

In Dinguiraye, which in 1850 was a small Mandinka village of a few hundred inhabitants under a local Sarakole chief, Umar Tall ﵀ was received on the basis of the negotiations that Abu Bakr Diouri ﵀ had conducted in the preceding months. The chief, whose own position had until then rested on the patronage of the neighboring Bambara states, agreed to the settlement of the Tooroodo community in exchange for the spiritual status that the presence of an international Tijani khalifa would confer on his village, and for the protection that Tooroodo military power could offer his people. The understanding was mixed, but it was enough to make the first phase of settlement possible.

The establishment of the new center

In the first months after their arrival, Umar Tall ﵀ and his immediate associates set up the new center, physically as well as spiritually, with an eye to the jihad state they meant to build. A new mosque rose that considerably surpassed the local Sarakole mosque in size and that served at once as central prayer hall and as zawiya for the Tijani community. A quarter was laid out for the Tooroodo families as an extension of the old village, following the usual Tooroodo street plan in which the scholarly families live close to the mosque. A workshop for weapons production and for the smithy was built, and out of it grew a military-industrial complex on a scale that was unusual in nineteenth-century West Africa. And a row of storehouses was put up for the storage of food, ammunition and trade goods, managed in an organized fashion under the direction of Abu Bakr Diouri ﵀ as chief quartermaster.

At the heart of the settlement a separate lodging was arranged for Umar Tall ﵀ himself, not a palace but a simple scholar’s residence in which he could work, teach his closest students and receive his visitors. It was an Umarian Aïn Madhi, in which he carried on the spiritual example of his former teacher Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ in a West African adaptation.

The growth of the community

In the year that followed the settlement, that is to say in 1851 and the first months of 1852, the Umarian community in Dinguiraye grew strikingly fast. Reports that an international Tijani khalifa had founded a Tooroodo community traveled along the usual caravan routes and with the pilgrim-traders who passed through the region in these years, and from Fouta Toro, from Fouta Djallon, from Kaarta, from Bondou and from more distant Tooroodo and Fulbe communities smaller and larger groups of emigrants came to Dinguiraye in answer to Umar Tall’s ﵀ repeated call to the hijra. In the course of 1851 the community grew from its original two thousand to about five thousand persons, and by the end of 1852 it would, on the estimate of French colonial reporting from Saint-Louis, have grown to about ten thousand persons.

That growth forced Umar Tall ﵀ and his closest associates into a considerable administrative expansion: new settlements around Dinguiraye for those still to arrive, a more broadly organized Shariʿa justice, and a professionalized administration for the collection of zakat and for the distribution of landholdings among the new families. The work was done under Umar Tall’s ﵀ direction, with the practical execution divided among his immediate associates and with the spiritual guidance in his own hands.

The administration of Dinguiraye

The administration built up in Dinguiraye in those first years showed what Umar Tall’s ﵀ years of preparation had produced. Shariʿa justice lay with a chief qadi whom Umar Tall ﵀ appointed personally and who referred appeal cases back to him, with under him a corps of local qadis for the original population of Dinguiraye and for the emigrated Tooroodo and Fulbe communities. The zakat was collected by designated officials who registered the annual amounts in each settlement and forwarded the proceeds to the central treasury in Dinguiraye. The coordination of the whole rested with a council of Umar Tall’s ﵀ closest associates, which met fortnightly in the central mosque to discuss affairs of state.

This was not merely a military power under a spiritual leader but a real form of state, coherent and effective enough to offer its inhabitants an ordered and spiritually directed community. For the emigrants from Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon, who in their parental communities had lived under a mixture of Shariʿa and customary law, the pure Shariʿa legal order in Dinguiraye demanded some acclimatization at first, but the majority of them accepted it as an improvement on the old order.

The military expansion

Alongside the administration, Umar Tall ﵀ in these months also enlarged his military power considerably. He raised the pace of the firearms supply through Mauritanian and Senegambian traders, he increased weapons production in his smithy, and he ordered his fighting force so that a standing corps of several thousand professional fighters could be distinguished from a larger contingent of militias that could be raised at a full mobilization. The corps of professional fighters, called talibé after a local Tooroodo-Mandinka usage, was trained in scholarly formation and in the handling of arms at once, and it formed a scholarly-military elite corps that in the years that followed would be the bearing force of the jihad operations.

By the end of 1852 the armament of that corps comprised, on the estimate of French colonial observers, about two thousand European firearms of varying provenance, a considerable number of locally produced forged muskets of lesser quality, and a stock of ammunition and gunpowder sufficient for a campaign of several years. No such power existed anywhere else in nineteenth-century West Africa, and combined with the spiritual discipline of the Tijani tarīqa it formed a formidable threat to the neighboring non-Muslim states and to the French colonial presence that was beginning to build up out of Saint-Louis.

The difficulties of the first phase

The first months in Dinguiraye did not pass without the usual difficulties that a large group of emigrants meets in a new environment. The local food supply was not equipped for the sudden rise in population, so that provisions had to be brought in from Fouta Djallon and from neighboring Mandinka villages to cover the need. The climate of Dinguiraye, whose annual rainy season brought pronounced malaria seasons, demanded of the emigrants a period of acclimatization in which a number of them succumbed to the common tropical diseases. And the local Mandinka population, although its chiefly leadership had consented, stood mixed in practice toward the influx of Tooroodo emigrants; in a number of cases small frictions arose that Umar Tall ﵀ had to settle personally by diplomatic means.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally these first months demanded considerable administrative attention. He visited the neighboring Mandinka villages repeatedly to address the chiefs and to take away their concerns about the Umarian presence by spiritual and political means. His visits met with considerable regard in the local communities and enabled him to strengthen the Umarian presence in the region step by step; in the years that followed it would grow into broad acceptance within the Mandinka community.

The geographic strategic position

Dinguiraye lay at a junction that gave Umar Tall ﵀ a considerable strategic advantage for what was to follow. To the north stretched the Sahelian plains in which the Bambara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta held their political grip and which would form the main targets of the jihad. To the west lay the mountainous territories of Fouta Djallon, which he had come to know thoroughly in his preceding years and which could offer a natural refuge in case of a retreat. To the south lay the Mandinka territories where his first expansion campaigns would take place and where the local Muslim minorities were spiritually bound to his movement. To the east, finally, lay the upper reaches of the Niger, where the jihad state would seek its next expansion after the capture of Kaarta.

The position thus gave him at once access to his main targets, a safe route of retreat, room to expand southward and a zone of expansion for later in the east. For a strategic thinker of his caliber that was an unmistakable advantage, and he made use of it in the years that followed with the deliberateness that marked all his work. The choice of Dinguiraye over other possible settlement sites belongs among the best-considered strategic decisions of his life, and it gave his work the room in which it could reach its full development.

The proclamation of the jihad

In the late spring or the early summer of 1852, on a date the sources do not unambiguously fix and which David Robinson, after careful reconstruction, places in the summer of that year, Umar Tall ﵀ proclaimed in the central mosque of Dinguiraye, in a formal Friday sermon, the jihad against the non-Muslim states of the upper reaches of the Senegal and the Niger. It was the announcement out of which eleven years of military campaigns followed, campaigns that would find their tragic end in 1862 in the misfortune of the Massina fitna and in 1864 in his death near Bandiagara.

The proclamation itself, so far as it has been preserved in later copies by his closest associates, comprised a number of central elements. First, it confirmed Umar Tall’s ﵀ status as imam and as leader of the community under the spiritual authority of the Tijaniyya, with his Aïn Madhi ijaza as the ground of legitimacy. Second, it named the Bambara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta and the neighboring non-Muslim states as the direct targets, with the legal argument that their continuing slave trade against Muslim populations justified beyond doubt the Shariʿa grounds for an armed jihad. Third, it called on all Muslims in the territories between the Atlantic coast and the Niger to join the jihad state or, if for whatever reason they could not join, to carry the cause of the jihad spiritually in their own communities.

The assembly in the mosque

The assembly in which the proclamation was pronounced took place in the central mosque of Dinguiraye, on a Friday in July or August 1852, in the presence of several thousand Muslims who had gathered from Dinguiraye itself and from the neighboring settlements. After the usual Friday prayer Umar Tall ﵀ ascended the minbar and opened his address with the customary Quran citations with which a Friday sermon begins, followed by a worked-out discussion of the prophetic example in the passage from Mecca to Medina and in the Medinan phase of open armed struggle. He then formally announced the state of jihad for the community under his leadership, and he called on everyone present to renew his bayʿa to the cause to which he had already bound himself by joining the Umarian community.

The assembled crowd answered the call with a communal affirmation that rang rhythmically from thousands of throats at once, and the customary Tooroodo takbir was pronounced together and made the whole mosque resound. It was not only a political but also a spiritual act, in which the community affirmed its loyalty to the cause as one.

The legal argumentation

The legal argumentation with which Umar Tall ﵀ supported his proclamation rested on worked-out passages from his work Rimah and followed the Maliki fiqh tradition as it was generally applied in West Africa, in the works of Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀ and in the commentaries of Imam al-Dasuqi ﵀. It stood on three principal conditions. First, that a Muslim state able to bring its territory under the Shariʿa had the duty to challenge its neighboring states, where it had to do so, to the choice between Islam, submission under jizya or jihad. Second, that whoever began a jihad had to possess military strength and spiritual discipline enough to bring the campaign to a reasonable outcome, a condition that in his own judgment was fulfilled by Umar Tall’s ﵀ years of preparation in Fouta Djallon. Third, that the leader of a jihad had to possess the specific spiritual authority on which he could ground his proclamation, a condition that in his own judgment was fulfilled by his Tijani ijaza.

His closest associates spread this argumentation in a series of Friday sermons in the neighboring Tooroodo and Fulbe communities, and most local scholars accepted it in its complete legal form. To the sceptics who in a number of villages in Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon objected that the Bambara states had already been considerably Islamized in the preceding generation and could no longer be unambiguously counted as non-Muslim, Umar Tall ﵀ and his associates answered with the legal distinction between formal and genuine acceptance of Islam, in a discussion that would return repeatedly in the years that followed.

The effect on West Africa

The proclamation of the jihad in Dinguiraye in 1852 brought the whole Senegambia region and the upper reaches of the Niger into a new tension, and in the months that followed its possible consequences were debated busily in every governing circle of West Africa: in Sokoto, in the capitals of the Bambara kingdoms, in the Almami halls of Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro, in Hamdullahi of the Massina Imamate, and in Saint-Louis, where the French colonial authorities received the reports with considerable concern. For the Bambara states it meant a direct threat of war; for the imamates of Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro a mixture of spiritual approval and military concern; for the Massina Imamate an uncertain relation in which the difference between Tijani and Qadiri presence became a possible source of future conflict; and for the French a new geopolitical factor that made their colonial expansion along the Senegal River unexpectedly more complicated.

In Saint-Louis, Governor Faidherbe, who would take up his office shortly after the proclamation, received detailed reports on the Umarian movement through a broad network of local informants, and he understood at once that an Umarian jihad would touch the French colonial aims in the Senegal valley deeply. He ordered an increased military preparation on the upper reaches of the river, and in the years that followed he planned an expansion of the French forts that would find its culmination in 1857 in the Fort de Médine.

The first military operations

In the second half of 1852 and the beginning of 1853, Umar Tall ﵀ undertook the first military operations of his proclaimed jihad. His targets were not at once the great Bambara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta but the smaller Mandinka states west of Dinguiraye, which had first to be brought under his power before he could measure himself against the principal enemies. The states of Tamba, Bantu and the neighboring Mandinka village confederations were subdued in the winter of 1852–1853 in a series of relatively small campaigns, with considerable success for the Umarian fighters and with losses that remained limited.

The military tactics applied in these campaigns, which would remain the usual form in Umar Tall’s ﵀ jihad state, combined mobile rapid attacks by the professionalized corps of talibé fighters with rifles with the broader support of Tooroodo and Fulbe militias, superior in numbers but of lesser quality in their armament. Against the local Mandinka and Bambara troops, who fought mainly with edged weapons and could develop no comparable firepower, that combination was effective, and it gave the Umarian jihad in its first years a run of victories that kept the morale of his followers high.

The integration of subjected communities

At each subjection of a Mandinka or other local community, Umar Tall ﵀ carried out a standardized process of incorporation in which the local population was taken into the Umarian state spiritually and administratively. The first step was a communal assembly in the local mosque, or, where no such mosque existed, in a temporarily arranged prayer house, in which Umar Tall ﵀ or one of his closest associates addressed the local Muslims with an explanation of the Umarian cause and a call to a formal bayʿa. The second step was the appointment of a local qadi from the Umarian talibé corps, who in the months that followed gave Shariʿa justice a fixed form on the spot. The third step was the assignment of a local garrison unit of a few dozen talibé fighters, who stayed in the community to keep order and to protect it against possible hostile neighboring troops.

This standardized approach gave the Umarian expansion an administrative uniformity uncommon in the West African military enterprises of his time, and it enabled the jihad state to consolidate its grip on the conquered territories quickly. As the state expanded further the approach was refined, but the basic structure developed in Dinguiraye remained recognizable in it.

Spiritual discipline in wartime

What was remarkable about the Umarian jihad was the strict spiritual discipline that Umar Tall ﵀ demanded of his fighters in wartime as well, and that set his power apart from the ordinary West African military operations of his time. The five daily prayers were performed among the Umarian troops under all circumstances, with designated students acting as imam for the communal prayer in each division; the Tijani dhikr was done together in the evening hours, with the Wazifa and the Hailala in their complete form; and the Friday prayer was held in a hall assembly arranged for it, with Friday sermons that Umar Tall ﵀ gave himself when he was present in the camp.

For the prisoners who fell into Umarian hands in these campaigns a treatment grounded in the Shariʿa applied: Muslim prisoners were released at once, non-Muslim prisoners were handled according to the conventions of Maliki fiqh, and for women and children a separate arrangement held in which the local mosque leaders had a supervisory role. Although the enforcement of these rules did not always fully succeed in the chaos of wartime, its consistency was remarkable, and it gave the Umarian jihad a moral authority in West African estimation that the ordinary Bambara or Mandinka campaigns of his time did not possess.

The influx of emigrants

The reports of the successful first campaigns and of the state that had been built at Dinguiraye spread through the whole of West Africa in 1853 and 1854, and they set a growing movement of emigration in motion in the Tooroodo and Fulbe communities of Fouta Toro and Fouta Djallon. Whole villages, or substantial parts of them, decided in these years to move their families, their herds and their craftsmen to Dinguiraye, and the population of the Umarian state grew in these months from a few tens of thousands to about fifty thousand persons by the end of 1854. The emigrants were received in an organized manner by the Umarian administration and housed in new settlements around Dinguiraye, where they were allotted landholdings, taken into the communal prayers and initiated into the Tijani discipline.

For the original Mandinka inhabitants of Dinguiraye and the neighboring villages that influx meant a deep change in their community. They were absorbed into a Tooroodo-Fulbe majority in which their own cultural customs were reshaped within a Tijani context, and they underwent a spiritual transition that in most cases was accepted by their chiefs but that in a number of cases led to quiet tensions. Umar Tall ﵀ undertook Tijani initiations among the Mandinka population in these months to bind the community together spiritually, and he largely succeeded in accomplishing the transition peacefully.

Toward the campaigns of 1855

By the spring of 1855 the Umarian jihad had consolidated its first phase: a geographic base of its own in Dinguiraye and in the neighboring Mandinka territories, a military power of some tens of thousands of men of whom a large part was armed with firearms, an administration that effectively managed the revenues from the conquered territories and from the zakat of the mother community, and a spiritual discipline that kept the morale of the followers high. Umar Tall ﵀ stood ready for the next phase of his work, namely the direct confrontation with the Bambara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta and with the French colonial presence that was expanding out of Saint-Louis.

To that second phase, and to the campaigns waged in 1855 and afterward against Bambara Kaarta and against the French Fort de Médine in the year 1857, the next article turns its attention. In this article we have seen how the foundation of the jihad state was laid at Dinguiraye in 1850 or 1851, how the community grew to a considerable size in its first two years, how the jihad was proclaimed in 1852, and how in the winter that followed the first military operations against the smaller Mandinka states were carried out with success. The foundation was there, and what was built on it in the years that followed would rearrange the West African Muslim world.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 214–252.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 212–254.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 248–294.
• John Hanson, Migration, Jihad, and Muslim Authority in West Africa, Indiana University Press (1996), pp. 86–124.
• Yves Person, Samori: une révolution dyula, tome I, IFAN-Dakar (1968), pp. 124–168.
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press (1998), pp. 208–256.
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 134–168.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim, critical edition Madina Ly-Tall, Dakar (1985), pp. 48–96.