The Sultan Who Wrote: Muhammad Bello and the Administrative Consolidation of Sokoto

His father had lit the fire and his uncle had drafted the laws; to Muhammad Bello ﵀ fell the hardest task: turning a jihad movement into a functioning caliphate, with inkwell and sword at once. He did it for thirty years, and he did it largely with his pen.

A Son Who Had to Succeed His Father

Usman dan Fodio ﵀ died in 1817 in Sifawa, fewer than ten years after his army had defeated the Hausa ruler Yunfa at Alkalawa and the Sokoto Caliphate had become a fact. The shehu left behind something that had never been attempted in West Africa before: a literate, legally founded, Fulbe-led state stretching from Gwandu in the west to Adamawa in the east, well over a thousand kilometers across Hausaland.

Inheriting such a state, however, is not the same as governing it. The shehu had been a prophet-like figure, mujaddid, renewer, the man who, according to his own writings, had been initiated by the Prophet ﷺ in visions into the task of reforming Islam in Hausaland, while his son Muhammad Bello ﵀, born in 1781 in Degel, had to do something far more mundane. He had to do the daily work: keep emirs in line, build ribats, set up tax systems, conduct correspondence, suppress revolts, settle theological debates. He had to turn the flame into a house.

Unlike many successors in history, he was prepared for it, since Bello ﵀ had already led commands under his father, had led campaigns against Gobir, and had founded the city of Sokoto itself in 1809, literally a city sketched into the sand, at the confluence of the Sokoto and the Rima rivers, at 13.06° north and 5.24° east. And he had already been writing: he completed the Infāq al-Maysūr fī Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr, his chronicle of the jihad, in 1812, when he was thirty-three and his father was still alive. A son who documents his own movement while his father is still preaching is a son who knows that history must be written before the eyewitnesses die.

The Infāq al-Maysūr: The Source We Still Read Today

That book deserves a pause, since without the Infāq al-Maysūr our knowledge of the Fulani jihad and the early Sokoto Caliphate would be poor. Bello ﵀ wrote it in Arabic, in the learned style of Hausaland, with sentences that build upon themselves, embedded quotations from Qur’an and Hadith, poetry interwoven with prose, and lists of cities and chiefs and ulama in meticulous enumeration.

The title itself is a program. Infāq al-Maysūr means something like “The Spent Wealth” or “The Easy Expenditure”, a reference to the Qur’anic term for what the believer spends in the way of Allah ﷻ, while Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr, “History of the Lands of Takrur”, uses the old geographic label by which the Arabic world had designated West Africa south of the Sahara since al-Bakri in the eleventh century. Bello ﵀ thus deliberately places his father’s movement within a long, Arabic-literate historical frame, and says, between the lines, that this is not a local, tribal incident but a chapter in the history of Islamic civilization.

The book offers three things. First, a chronicle of the jihad itself: the sermons of Degel, the hijra to Gudu in 1804, the battles at Tabkin Kwotto and Alkalawa, the campaigns against Gobir, Katsina, Kano. Second, a geography and ethnography of Hausaland and surrounding regions, including the Fulani migration patterns, the Kanem-Bornu borders, the seven original Hausa states and the seven banza (“bastard”) states. Third, a legal justification: why this jihad was lawful, against whom it was directed, and which Maliki doctrines of takfīr and hijra underpinned it.

Bello ﵀ is a careful narrator but not an impartial one, since he is the son of the shehu and writes for an audience that must continue to accept the legitimacy of the caliphate. His chronicle minimizes the conflicts within the Fulani coalition, exaggerates the theological excesses of Yunfa, and presents the campaigns against Gobir as reactive when in fact they were often preventive. Modern historians like Murray Last and Mervyn Hiskett use Bello’s text as a primary source but read it against the Bornu correspondence and the Tazyīn al-Waraqāt of his uncle Abdullahi ﵀ to obtain a more balanced picture. Yet the Infāq remains indispensable, since without it an entire interior view of the movement would be missing.

The City Drawn Out of Nothing

Sokoto as Bello ﵀ found it, or rather as he raised it from the ground, was in 1809 nothing that could be called a city: on that spot along the Rima River there were low houses of dried clay, there were Fulani encampments, and there were zongos, trade quarters, where caravans from Kano or Agadès rested briefly. Bello ﵀ chose that place deliberately, since it lies at a strategic crossroads: far enough from Gobir to be safe, close enough to the Niger Bend for trade, and with sufficient water sources to sustain a growing population.

He had walls drawn, ten kilometers in circumference, seven gates, each with a Fulani name; he had the masallacin juma’a, the Friday mosque, built, with room for thousands of worshippers; and he had the palace, gidan shehu, later gidan sarki, erected, with a courtyard for audiences and a private chamber for study. And he established what is perhaps his most important institution, though the least visible: a chancery, with secretaries who exercised muragabah over correspondence, copyists who multiplied outgoing letters and archived incoming ones, and a library that preserved Qur’an codices, the tafsir works of al-Qurtubi ﵀ and al-Baghawi ﵀, the Maliki handbooks of Khalil ﵀ and Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀, and the writings of the shehu himself.

All of this, for a city raised from the ground only in 1809, is a stunning pace, and within a generation Sokoto would be the intellectual capital of West Africa. Timbuktu still lived, the libraries of the Aqit family were still there and the Tarikh al-Sudan was being copied, but Timbuktu was a city of legacy, a city living on its sixteenth-century glow, while Sokoto was a working center, a place where new texts were produced and where jurists wrote on contemporary matters: a living heart, not a museum.

The Ribats: Frontier Towns for Defense and Scholarship

One of the most thoughtful policy instruments of Bello ﵀ was the ribats, frontier towns that were both military outposts and religious learning centers. The word ribat has a long history in the Islamic world, since it refers to the fortified monasteries along the early borders of the Maghreb and al-Andalus, places where warriors and sufis lived together, where prayer and vigilance coexisted, and Bello ﵀ revived the concept for his own borders.

He founded several: Sifawa, where his father had died, was expanded into a ribat with a garrison and madrasa; Wurno, northeast of Sokoto, became a second residence where Bello ﵀ himself often stayed to be closer to the Gobir border; and Gandi, Dange, Kware, Salame and Chimmola were all smaller frontier settlements that combined Fulani warriors, Hausa craftsmen and scholars. The logic was twofold: first military, since a ribat keeps a frontier in check without a permanent army having to be maintained in the field, and second cultural, since a ribat makes Fulbe settlements durable in regions where the Fulani had previously roamed as nomads. The jihad thus took root in the soil; it became territorial, dug in.

This had consequences that Bello ﵀ may not have fully foreseen, since the ribats drew Fulani populations toward specific cores and left the intervening regions relatively Hausa-dominant, so that the caliphate became a patchwork: Fulbe elites in the cities and ribats, Hausa majorities in the countryside, and an enslaved population, about which more shortly, on the plantations and in the households. This ethnic-social stratification was not intended by the shehu, who in principle preached ummah brotherhood, but it was the pragmatic outcome of the consolidation policy of Bello ﵀, and a hundred years later the British under Lugard would discover this patchwork and base their “indirect rule” upon it.

The Correspondence: A Hundred Letters, Twenty Emirs

If Sokoto under Bello ﵀ did one thing well that had been rare in West Africa before, it was written governance. Around a hundred letters in the hand of Bello ﵀ have survived, some in the archive of the Sultan of Sokoto, others in regional emirate archives, still others in the collections of North African and Egyptian libraries where caravan copies once arrived, and modern editions, such as those by Bobboyi and Yamusa in Nigeria and by Hunwick in the Arabic Literature of Africa project, make these letters accessible.

Whoever reads a few of them sees a ruler governing his realm through ink: he writes to the emir of Kano about tax remittances and the correct application of zakat on herds, he writes to the emir of Bauchi about a dispute over slave prices, he writes to Yakubu of Bauchi himself, a learned emir, almost a kindred spirit, on a theological issue concerning the making of amulets, and he writes to the emir of Zaria about border conflicts with Katsina. He sends fatwas, risalas, personal admonitions and formal decrees, all in the same clear, accessible Maliki Arabic.

One pattern stands out: Bello ﵀ governs with authority but rarely with menace, and his letters do not sound like commands from a despot but like advice from an older brother who also possesses authority. This is no accident, since Sokoto’s flag system, by which the caliphate recognized its vassal emirs through a formal bay’a and the handing over of a tuta, a flag, created a federation more than a centralized state. Bello ﵀ had no standing army he could send to Kano or Ilorin to enforce his commands; he had authority, dependent on respect, dependent on his position as son of the shehu and as a literate equal of his emirs, and maintaining that authority required continuous correspondence, not one letter a year but a stream.

And where correspondence failed, the sword came, but always after the word; that is the governing style of Bello ﵀ summed up in one sentence.

The Epistolary War with al-Kanemi

Now comes an uncomfortable part, since honesty requires it: the Sokoto Caliphate was not recognized by all Muslims in the region, and in fact it was openly opposed by one of the most respected Muslim scholars of West Africa at the time. His name was Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi ﵀, the shaykh who from 1808 onward became the effective ruler of the old Sultanate of Bornu, east of Hausaland, around Lake Chad.

The context is important, since Bornu was not a pagan realm but an Islamic sultanate since the eleventh century, with a mai, sultan, from the Sayfawa dynasty, with a long tradition of Maliki fiqh, with its own ulama, with a calendar aligned with that of the umma. When the Fulani jihad spread from Sokoto into Bornu in 1808 and Fulani warriors plundered the Bornu capital Birni Gazargamu, this was experienced by the Bornu elite as an attack of Muslims upon Muslims, and al-Kanemi ﵀, who came from the Kanembu aristocracy and had studied in Fez and Medina, reorganized the Bornu army, drove out the Fulani, and eventually founded a new capital, Kukawa, of which he became the de facto ruler while the Sayfawa mai remained a ceremonial figure.

And then the correspondence began. Al-Kanemi ﵀ first wrote, around 1810-1813, to the shehu Usman dan Fodio ﵀ himself, and later, after 1817, he continued with Muhammad Bello ﵀. The tone was sharp but documented.

Bello ﵀ replied, arguing that the Bornu elite mixed Islamic practices with pre-Islamic traditions, for example around the inauguration of the mai, around certain court rituals, around fiscal practices that he labeled un-Islamic. He cited fatwas of al-Maghili ﵀ from the fifteenth century that had viewed such mixings as grounds for takfīr, he pointed to the enslavement of Muslims by Muslims, which under Maliki law was impermissible, and he accused Bornu fighters of carrying off Fulani Muslim women as slave women.

Al-Kanemi ﵀ replied again, and his counterarguments are intellectually impressive; in some respects they won the debate. He argued that ritual irregularities did not justify takfīr as long as the arkan al-iman, the pillars of faith, were intact, he pointed out that the Fulani themselves, before the jihad, had tolerated identical court practices under the Hausa kings, and he accused Sokoto of tribal aggression cloaked in Islamic banner, Fulbe expansion clothed in the language of jihad.

This is the truth that must not be papered over: the Sokoto Caliphate had a serious, learned, Muslim opponent who refused to acknowledge that it was waging a jihad. That controversy was never resolved, since Bornu remained independent of Sokoto, the war between the two simmered on, and both shaykhs died without settling their dispute. Al-Kanemi ﵀ died in 1837, the same year as Bello ﵀, and their correspondence has been preserved in several manuscripts, including the collection known among Bornu historians as the Risala and among modern publishers as Letters of al-Kanemi.

For whoever deals honestly with this history: the jihad of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ was an authentic reform movement that liberated thousands of Hausa peasants from predatory rulers, that anchored Maliki law in Hausaland, that expanded literacy, and it was also a Fulbe takeover of power justified with theological tools, and one explicitly rejected by another great Muslim scholar. Both things are true, and whoever denies one is lying about the facts.

The Gaskiya: Poetry in Two Languages

Bello ﵀ was, besides a statesman, a poet. He wrote in Arabic and in Fulfulde, his mother tongue, and part of his poetry is referenced within the Sokoto tradition under the collective name Gaskiya (“truth”), though this term has later been used more broadly for the entire Fulfulde corpus of the dan Fodio family.

He wrote qasidas in honor of the Prophet ﷺ, in the tradition of the Burdah of al-Busiri ﵀, didactic poems on tawhid and on Maliki fiqh, intended for students of his madrasa, and personal laments, for example on the death of the twin son of his sister Nana Asmaʾu ﵀, a poem in which the statesman’s fire briefly steps aside for human grief. He wrote political poetry in which he admonishes emirs or celebrates victories, and tabshir poems, consolation poems for believers in difficult times, which were read aloud in mosques after the Friday prayer.

His sister Nana Asmaʾu ﵀ was, incidentally, herself a poet of international stature, and together brother and sister formed a cultural center of gravity that West Africa had not seen since Ahmad Baba ﵀ in Timbuktu. The yan-taru of Nana Asmaʾu ﵀, her network of female teachers who instructed women village by village, was an educational project far ahead of its time, and one that would not have been possible without the logistical protection of her brother Bello ﵀.

The poetry of Bello ﵀ has not yet been fully translated into European languages; parts have been made accessible in English by Hiskett, by Mukhtar Bunza, by Ibrahim Sulaiman. For the madrasa networks in Kano, Zaria, Yola and Gombe, however, it remains a daily presence, quoted in tafsir lessons, sung in mawlid celebrations, recited in the Fulfulde that Bello ﵀ himself spoke.

Campaigns, Revolts, the Slow Burn

The reign of Bello ﵀ was not peaceful, since he campaigned continuously: the Gobir remnants under various successors of Yunfa kept invading the north of the caliphate, in 1818 they defeated Bello ﵀ at a battle and he had to retreat temporarily, and in 1826 he personally led a great expedition against Gobir, in which the final defeat of the last Gobir ruler was sealed. He campaigned against the Kebbi rulers, against remnants of the Zamfara sultanate, against Nupe revolts in the south, while the eastern border with Bornu remained, as said, a smoldering crisis.

At the same time, he had to manage internal tensions. Between Sokoto and Gwandu, the western branch of the caliphate, under his uncle Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, discomfort grew, about which more is said elsewhere. Conflicts arose among emirs, Kano versus Katsina over territory, Bauchi versus Adamawa over the treatment of non-Muslim populations, Zaria internally over succession, and Bello ﵀ mediated, redistributed, punished and rewarded, becoming a kind of Islamic federal arbiter.

And he carried the burden of the slaveholding character of his caliphate, and this must be said honestly: Sokoto, despite its reform rhetoric, ran an economy that depended substantially on slave labor. The campaigns against non-Muslim populations, Kurfi, Kebbi villages, southern Gwari, parts of the Jos Plateau peoples, continually produced new slaves, plantations around Kano, Zaria and Sokoto itself were worked by slaves, and the jangali tax on herds, the zakat on grain, and the slave trade formed the three economic pillars of the caliphate. Historians like Paul Lovejoy have calculated that by the mid-nineteenth century the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in Africa, with millions of unfree people, and Bello ﵀ was aware of this and defended the practice within Maliki limits: non-Muslims in dar al-harb could be enslaved, Muslims could not; mistreatment was forbidden, manumission was meritorious. But the institution itself was not put up for question, and whoever speaks of Bello ﵀ without mentioning this economic reality tells half a story.

The Gaze of a European Stranger

Something remarkable happened in 1824. A Scotsman named Hugh Clapperton, an officer in the British Navy and member of an expedition that had traveled south from Tripoli, reached Sokoto, and Bello ﵀ received him personally, spoke with him in Arabic through an interpreter, and questioned him on European politics, on Napoleon, on the relations between England and France, on naval technology. Clapperton’s Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa (1829) is an invaluable foreign view of the court of Bello ﵀.

Clapperton saw a sultan who read and wrote Arabic, who understood geographic maps, who asked him whether England would support Bornu against Sokoto (Clapperton refused to intervene politically), and who showed him books from his library. He saw a city in which the markets were regulated, in which women, at least the Muslim women of the Fulani elite, lived within purdah but in which the aristocratic women such as Nana Asmaʾu ﵀ were certainly intellectually active. He saw mosques full, madrasas full, slave caravans heading north; he saw, in other words, a functioning Islamic state in the heart of Africa.

Clapperton returned with letters from Bello ﵀ to King George IV, in which Bello ﵀ asked for British diplomatic relations and for the supply of Sokoto with books, medicines and firearms in exchange for trade access. London responded slowly, and Clapperton died two years later in the Fulani camps near Sokoto, exhausted by dysentery, buried at Jungavi with the blessing of Bello ﵀. The diplomatic opening came to nothing; only a quarter of a century later would British colonial interests seriously approach Hausaland, and then under entirely different terms.

But the episode is important, since it shows that the Sokoto of Bello ﵀ was not the isolated interior that nineteenth-century European descriptions often made it out to be. Bello ﵀ knew about Napoleon, he knew that England was great, and he knew that African coastal states were under increasing European pressure, and he tried, in his own way, to choose a diplomatic position for his realm. That Europe did not respond is Europe’s tragedy rather than Sokoto’s failure.

Death in Wurno, the Legacy in the Pen

Muhammad Bello ﵀ died on 25 October 1837 in Wurno, the ribat he himself had founded. He was fifty-six, and his reign had lasted twenty years, almost as long as that of his father during the jihad itself and the brief caliphate period combined. He left behind a consolidated caliphate, thirty vassal emirates, a stable capital, a functioning chancery, an intellectual tradition that would feed his successors for generations to come, and he also left behind a network of unresolved tensions: Bornu, Gwandu, the slavery question, the growing technological gap with a Europe that was industrializing.

His grave lies in Wurno, his books in Sokoto, his poems on the lips of talibes in Kano. He was the sultan who wrote, the man who turned a movement into a state without betraying the movement, and, in an age when most heads of state in West Africa governed illiterate, a scholar of international stature, while at the same time he was the ruler of a realm that ran on slave labor and treated other Muslims as apostates.

That is the real Bello ﵀: mature, complicated, historical, a statesman in the full Islamic tradition rather than a saint or a tyrant, with all the light and all the shadow that such a notion permits.

The Uncle at Gwandu

While Bello ﵀ ruled from Sokoto, his uncle Abdullahi ﵀ was building his own project on the other side of the caliphate: Gwandu, the western emirate, was officially subordinate to Sokoto but in practice semi-autonomous, and Abdullahi ﵀ was, unlike his nephew Bello ﵀, a scholar of the doubting kind, a man who had helped launch the jihad project but who, once success had been established, began to write about what had gone wrong internally.

His autobiography Tazyīn al-Waraqāt is one of the most honest texts in the entire Islamic reform tradition, since he speaks openly about commanders who plundered in the name of the jihad, about distribution of spoils that violated Islamic rules, and about his own decision not to follow the advancing armies all the way to Alkalawa.

---

Sources

• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr fī Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr, the chronicle of the jihad, dated in a Sokoto copy Tuesday 5 Dhu’l-Qaʿda 1227 (10 November 1812), edited by C. E. J. Whitting (London 1951); it also preserves the letters of al-Kanemi ﵀, as described in Last, pp. xxx–xxxi, 208.
• The correspondence between Sokoto and Shaykh Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi ﵀ of Bornu, conducted by the Shehu ﵀, Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀ and transmitted in the Infāq al-Maysūr, as summarised in Hiskett, pp. 109–110.
• Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa (London 1829), and the account of the first journey in Denham and Clapperton, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa (London 1826): the European eyewitness of Sokoto in 1824 and 1826–1827, as quoted in Adeleye, pp. 119–120.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xxx–xxxi, 41–42, 47, 53, 69, 71, 74–75, 77–81, 151–152, 183, 208.
  • pp. xxx–xxxi, 208: the Infāq al-Maysūr as the most detailed and factual chronicle of the jihad, completed in 1812 (1227) after Bello ﵀ had answered al-Kanemi ﵀; the letters of al-Kanemi ﵀ included in it; the official account of the jihad drawn up at the request of al-Kanemi ﵀.
  • pp. 41–42, 183: the decision of Bello ﵀ in the autumn of 1809 to make Sokoto his headquarters and the building of the walled town; the walls, rebuilt around 1818 and about 24 feet high, with originally more than eight gates; the mosque of Bello ﵀ and the houses on the town plan.
  • pp. 47, 53: the flag system, by which leaders from Hausaland were sent home with a flag blessed by the Shaykh ﵀ and became emirs of their own regions, with the viziers Abdullahi ﵀ and Bello ﵀ as intermediaries; the list of lieutenants Bello ﵀ gives in 1812; the title Amir al-muʾminin in the correspondence with al-Kanemi ﵀.
  • pp. 69, 71: the revolts in Kebbi and Gobir of January 1818; the Zamfarawa decisively beaten only in 1822–1823; the forty-seven campaigns of Bello ﵀; the siege of Konya in 1826 witnessed by Clapperton; the peace with Kebbi around 1830 and the battle of Gawakuke in 1836.
  • pp. 74–75, 77–80: the ribats, walled frontier towns modelled on the early Muslim conquests, on the initiative of Bello ﵀; Lajinge, Shinaka and Kware after Gawakuke in March 1836, later Bakura and Gandi; Wurno as his own ribat, where he wished to die and be buried; Silame against Kebbi; walled towns with mosques and schools and the settling of the cattle Fulani; the southern settlements around Sifawa without a major ribat.
  • pp. 81, 151–152: the death of Bello ﵀ after an illness of seven months on 26 October 1837 (25 Rajab 1253), aged fifty-six, born in Dhu’l-Qaʿda 1195 (October–November 1781); the capture of Birnin Gazargamu in 1808 and the vizier Gidado ﵀ who negotiated the truce with al-Kanemi ﵀ and carried the letters.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 109–110, 115, 141, 150.
  • pp. 109–110: the Bornu correspondence: al-Kanemi ﵀ as the virtual ruler of Bornu who chided the Fulani for attacking Muslims; the correspondence that probably began in 1810 and continued until around 1812, conducted in part by Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀; the Sokoto argument that Bornu had aided the unbelieving Habe.
  • pp. 115, 141, 150: the ribats of Bello ﵀, his settlement policy and administrative system and his death in 1253/1837, aged fifty-six, with the empire at its peak; the emirs’ yearly tribute from taxes and booty, in effect the profits of slave raiding; the move of the Shehu ﵀ in 1815 from Sifawa to Sabon Gari outside the walls of Sokoto and his death there on 20 April 1817, buried in Sokoto.
• 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. 70, 119–120.
  • p. 70: the Bornu attacks on Katagum and Hadejia in 1824–1825; the advance of al-Kanemi ﵀ to near Kano in 1826, routed by Yaʿqub of Bauchi while Bello ﵀ was besieging Konya; the death of al-Kanemi ﵀ in 1837.
  • pp. 119–120: the warm welcome of Clapperton in Sokoto in 1824, the commercial agreement and the letter of Bello ﵀ to George IV of 18 April 1824; the second visit of 1826–1827 that turned to hostility when Clapperton was suspected of aiding Bornu with firearms.
• Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet and Islamic Leader, Frank Cass, London 1989, pp. 42–43, 49, 54, 63, 69.
  • pp. 42–43, 49, 54, 63, 69: Bello ﵀ choosing his sister Nana Asmaʾu ﵀ to lead the women of the caliphate and her work in the education of women; Clapperton as the guest of Gidado ﵀ in 1824 and his description of Bello ﵀ as a man of forty-four; the illness of seven months at Wurno and the death on 25 Rajab 1253 (26 October 1837).
• 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, p. 47: Bello ﵀ quoting the rulings of al-Maghili ﵀ in the Infāq in his correspondence with al-Kanemi ﵀, and the Shehu ﵀ declaring al-Kanemi ﵀ an unbeliever in the Taʿlīm al-ikhwān on the authority of al-Maghili ﵀.