The Shaykh From Degel: Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and the Long Road to Gudu

He was born in a village that today almost no one can still point out on a map. He died as the spiritual father of the largest pre-colonial Islamic empire in Africa. Between these two points lay a life of reading, walking, preaching and waiting. This is the road of Usman dan Fodio ﵀: scholar, poet, Qadiri, Fulani, and ultimately, against his will and yet inevitably, revolutionary.

Maratta, Winter 1754

Maratta lay in the sultanate of Gobir, high in northern Hausaland, close to what is today the border between Niger and Nigeria: a cluster of round mud houses with roofs of grass, a single Friday mosque of rammed earth, and around it fields of millet and sorghum and, further off, the pastures where the herds grazed. In the winter of 1754, in some sources 1753, a son was born in that village to Muhammad Fodio ﵀ and his wife Hauwa.

They named him Usman. In Fulfulde he would later be called Shehu, the shaykh, while in the writings of his opponents he became dan Fodio, the son of Fodio, after his father, who was himself a modest but respected scholar. Fodio is a Fulfulde title for someone who teaches the Islamic sciences, and Usman was thus born in a house where books breathed: not many books, since more lay beyond their means, but enough.

His family belonged to the Torodbe, a particular branch of the Fulani. The Fulani, in Fulfulde Fulɓe, in Hausa Fulani, in French Peul, are one of the oldest and most far-flung peoples of West Africa, and their pastoral clans run from the Senegal valley to Lake Chad, an arc of nearly five thousand kilometres. But the Torodbe were no longer herders; they had become a scholarly caste, Fulani who one or two generations earlier had exchanged their herds for the Qur’an, for the inkpot, for the modest standing of the travelling teacher.

This was his inheritance, and it consisted of a line of reading, of praying, of teaching, and of never feeling entirely at home among the ruling Hausa aristocracy of Gobir, with no nobility, power or wealth attached to it. For although the Fulani had lived there for generations, they were still outsiders, tolerated rather than embraced, useful without belonging to the city’s core.

A Boy Who Ate Books

The first teacher’s hand Usman knew was that of his father, Muhammad Fodio ﵀, and the path he walked was the classical one of the Islamic learning tradition. First the Qur’an is memorised, letter by letter, verse by verse, until the child knows the whole mus’haf by heart; then comes the grammar of Arabic, nahw and sarf, because without grammar one cannot read a text accurately enough to derive a legal ruling from it; then tafsir, the exegesis of the Qur’an; then hadith; then fiqh, jurisprudence, in the case of the West African tradition the Maliki school; then tawhid, the doctrine of the unity of Allah ﷻ; and once all that is solid, only then the more refined disciplines: logic, rhetoric, tasawwuf, poetry.

Usman proved to be an extraordinary student, who memorised quickly, understood more quickly still, and asked the questions that his teachers sometimes had to think about for a moment before they answered. By the age of fourteen, tradition relates, he had memorised the entire Qur’an and had worked through the basic works of Maliki fiqh.

His father was not his only teacher, since in the Fulani tradition a serious student travelled from one shaykh to another, sometimes over great distances, to learn from each the discipline in which that master excelled. So the young Usman travelled through Gobir, Kebbi and Zamfara, with shorter and longer stays, with study circles under the gao trees, and with nights in which oil lamps burned in clay huts while he worked through a complicated chapter of the Mukhtasar of Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀ together with other students.

Three teachers must be mentioned separately, because they shaped his intellectual backbone.

His uncle, Uthman Binduri ﵀, taught him tafsir and brought him deeper into the thought of the Qadiriyya tariqa, the Sufi order to which their Torodbe line belonged; from Binduri he learned patience, quiet discipline, and the habit of speaking only when the thought is finished.

A second teacher, Abd al-Rahman ibn Hammada ﵀, taught him hadith and the finer points of the sira, the prophetic biography, and from him he learned the strict textual method, the habit of testing every report against its chain of transmitters before he would build a legal article on it.

The third teacher calls for the most thorough discussion, because his influence would push Usman’s life in a direction that the young shaykh himself did not yet foresee. That teacher was named Jibril ibn Umar ﵀.

Jibril ibn Umar and the Fire Beneath the Text

Jibril ibn Umar ﵀ was no ordinary scholar but a man who had performed the Hajj twice and had spent years in Medina, Mecca and Cairo. His company there was not that of dusty footnote writers but that of the fiercest reformist ulama of the eighteenth century. In the Hijaz he had encountered the thinking of the Wahhabi movement that was then flowering there, and in Cairo he had seen the circles in which scholars spoke of tajdid, of renewal, of returning to the sources.

Jibril ﵀ came back to Hausaland with a pen like a sword and a voice that would not be muffled, and he wrote takfīr tracts against what he regarded as corrupted practices in the Hausa courts: the drinking of millet beer at court, the cult of the iskoki, the traditional spirits, which was still maintained alongside Islamic rituals, magical amulets that were in fact shirk, taxation that had no legal basis in fiqh, and marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims without the proper formalities.

Jibril ﵀ wrote it all out, substantiated, cited, precisely, and he wrote with fire, since he was the first in Hausaland to speak the plain language that would become his: that this world, as its people knew it, was not Islamic as it should be, that something must change, and that if it could not be done peacefully, then otherwise.

Usman arrived at Jibril ﵀ around 1774, when he was about twenty, and he probably stayed for somewhat more than a year; that time was short, but decisive. What Jibril ﵀ gave him was not only knowledge but a categorical way of looking, one in which a scholar analysed the world around him and formed a fatwa about it. In that way of looking, a scholar did not shrink from the consequences of his own conclusions.

Later, Usman ﵀ would write about his teacher with a mixture of gratitude and cautious distance, and he would say, in a famous passage, that Jibril ﵀ had been too strict in some takfīr judgments, that he had been too quick to put fellow Muslims out of the community. Usman ﵀ himself would be more patient, for half a lifetime, but the spark that Jibril ﵀ had kindled in him was inextinguishable, and it would smoulder until it flared up again in the autumn of 1803.

The Qadiri Silsila

The spiritual line in which Usman ﵀ placed himself deserves a closer look here, because without it his whole later project is incomprehensible.

Usman ﵀ was a Qadiri; that is to say, he belonged to the Sufi order of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀, the twelfth-century master from Baghdad whose tariqa had spread like a tree with many branches across the entire Islamic world, from Baghdad to Syria, to Cairo, to the Maghreb, to Timbuktu, and from Timbuktu through the trade routes to Hausaland and further south-east.

A silsila, a chain of transmission, links a disciple via his shaykh, and that shaykh’s shaykh, and so on, ultimately back to the founder of the order and through him to the Prophet ﷺ himself. Usman ﵀ could trace his own silsila back three or four generations in Hausaland, and via his teachers in Agades and earlier via North African shuyukh ultimately back to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀.

This was no idle family tree but a spiritual genealogy. When Usman ﵀ later performed dhikr, when he recited his wird, when he initiated his disciples, he did so not on personal authority but as a link in a chain that, if the transmission was sound, ran all the way back to the mantle of the Prophet ﷺ.

More than that, the Qadiriyya gave Usman ﵀ a specific posture towards the political. The Qadiri tradition was historically not the most activist, in contrast to, for instance, certain branches of the Tijaniyya or the late nineteenth-century Mahdist movements; a Qadiri was first a worshipper, then a scholar, and only then, if it had to be, a reformer. The life of Usman ﵀ follows precisely that pattern: thirty years of praying, writing and preaching, and only then, and only because he was forced to, the step to armed uprising.

Whoever wishes to depict dan Fodio ﵀ as a perpetual jihad-preacher reads him wrongly, since he was first and foremost a murshid, a spiritual guide, who only after thirty years of patience raised his flag.

The Shaykh in the Villages

Between 1774 and 1804, thirty years, Usman ﵀ essentially did one thing: he travelled and he preached. He became, in the Fulani tradition, a roving wa’iz, a preacher, who travelled from village to village, gave lectures and taught women, and that last point was remarkable, since his sisters and later his daughter Nana Asma’u ﵀ would build up a women’s learning community that had almost no precedents in West Africa. He copied books, he recounted mirabilia about the Prophet ﷺ and the early community, and step by step he let a spiritual movement grow around himself.

His base became Degel, a village in Gobir, at approximately 13.03° north and 5.25° east, and here his jama’a, his community, would consolidate into a kind of self-sufficient Muslim settlement, with a mosque, with study circles, with fields worked by his followers, and with its own internal jurisprudence. Usman ﵀ was also a judge, as a scholar in the Maliki tradition, and he was increasingly asked to settle disputes between Muslims according to fiqh, instead of according to the mixed customary-law systems of the Hausa courts.

His preaching had a handful of core themes that he would work out in dozens of works over thirty years.

First, the obligation of ilm, of knowledge. Every Muslim, man or woman, is obliged to know the basic principles of his faith, and the reason is not that knowledge is a luxury but that faith without knowledge ceases to be faith; it becomes custom, or superstition, or social pressure. Usman ﵀ was radical on this point: he taught women, he defended the right of women to learn, and he even had Hausa translations made of Arabic religious poetry so that the unlettered could at least take some part. In the Hausa courts, where the traditional elite saw the knowledge of the ulama largely as their own privilege, this was already a form of quiet opposition.

Second, the prohibition of shirk, of polytheism, in all its creeping forms: the iskoki cult, the amulets that did not consist of Qur’anic verses, the visits to priests who made predictions, the offerings to rocks, to trees, to river spirits. Dan Fodio ﵀ did not accuse the Hausa elite of open apostasy, since that was the style of Jibril ﵀ rather than his own; he held instead that they were maintaining a “mixture”, a syncretism, that was unsustainable in the long run.

Third, the justness of taxation. Hausa rulers levied a range of tolls and dues for which there was no Maliki legal basis, and jangali, the tax on herds, was particularly a sticking point: it was levied on Fulani herders without clear fiqh justification, often arbitrarily, often in ways that amounted to systematic extortion of the Fulani nomads. Dan Fodio ﵀ protested against this as a jurist rather than as a Fulani nationalist: a zakah is obligatory, whereas an arbitrary court tax is not permitted.

Fourth, the duty of the ruler to be a just judge. Here he followed the Tāj al-dīn of al-Maghili ﵀ and the broader Islamic “mirror for princes” tradition: a ruler who did not apply shari’a, who appointed Qadis on the basis of cronyism rather than competence, who sold lawsuits, was unfit in that respect.

Fifth, and cautiously, the duty of hijra, which he would only make explicit late, in his Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra. If a Muslim lives in a country in which he cannot freely practise his faith, in which he is persecuted for his convictions, in which the ruler prevents him from carrying out his duties, then migration to a land where he can do so is a religious obligation, a wajib rather than a choice.

Four Works That Shaped a World

The writings of Usman ﵀ deserve a longer pause, since they are the framework on which the entire later Sokoto state was built, and a generation of jurists, his brother Abdullahi ﵀, his son Muhammad Bello ﵀, his son-in-law Gidado dan Laima ﵀ and countless students, would in the nineteenth century continue to fall back on these texts.

Ihya al-Sunnah wa-ikhmād al-Bidʿa, “The Reviving of the Sunna and the Extinguishing of Innovation”, is a systematic text in which dan Fodio ﵀ catalogues what he regards as bid’a in Hausa practice, and the correct Maliki practice that stands opposed to it. The work is not aggressive; it is methodical, balanced, with room for nuance, in fact a handbook for a reformist shaykh. It opens with the proposition, in paraphrase, that the restoration of the sunna is no novelty but a return: “Whoever revives the Sunna when it has been extinguished, deserves the reward of a hundred martyrs.”

Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra ʿalā al-ʿIbād, “Exposition of the Obligation of Hijra Upon the Servants”, is the legal foundation of the movement that would erupt after 1804, since here dan Fodio ﵀ sets out, step by step, when hijra becomes a religious obligation and when not, when a Muslim may wait and when he must depart. He cites Qur’an 4:97: “Was the earth of Allah ﷻ not wide enough for you to migrate within it?” He cites hadith, he cites early Maliki authorities, and then, cautiously, he draws the conclusion through to the Hausa lands of his own time.

Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr, “The Book on the Difference Between the Authority of the Muslims and the Authority of the Unbelievers”, is the most political of the four: the text in which dan Fodio ﵀ enumerates the criteria an Islamic government must meet, and by which a non-Islamic government may be recognised. It is also, and here we must be honest, the text on which later takfīr judgments against the Hausa sarauta were built, and how heavily that text would later weigh would become clear in time.

Nūr al-Albāb, Kitab al-Wird, Iḥyā al-Sunnah and countless shorter risalat and poems supplement the corpus. His brother Abdullahi ﵀ later maintained that dan Fodio ﵀ wrote in total more than a hundred works, which is probably a rounding upwards, while the corpus that can be studied today, catalogued by the Arabic Literature of Africa bibliography of John Hunwick and his collaborators, contains dozens of authentically attributed works, in Arabic, in Fulfulde and in Hausa-ajami, Hausa in Arabic script.

His daughter Nana Asma’u ﵀ is, incidentally, one of the most remarkable figures in this whole history. She learned from her father and from her brother Bello ﵀, and she would in her own life produce more than sixty works, in Arabic, Fulfulde, Hausa and Tamasheq, a quadrilingual oeuvre that by its mere existence refutes the cliché that West African Islam was a male affair.

The Poetry That Breathed

One thing must not be forgotten: dan Fodio ﵀ was also a poet, and a great one, who wrote in Arabic and in Fulfulde, and who wrote at length, in the classical qasida form and in madīḥ nabawī, devotional poetry for the Prophet ﷺ.

In a predominantly oral culture, poetry was the vehicle by which knowledge moved through the population, since someone who could not read could learn a qasida by heart if he had heard it a few times from a reciter. The ideas that dan Fodio ﵀ set out in his juridical works for ulama, he simultaneously packaged in poems for the unlearned believer, and so a question on shirk, a warning against the iskoki, a song of praise for the Prophet ﷺ, a call to hijra, travelled from village to village in the form one could remember.

This is how his movement grew: not only as a scholarly network of Qadis and talaba, students, but as a song movement, a preachers’ movement, a movement to which unlettered Fulani herders and Hausa peasants could attach themselves without ever having read a line of Arabic, because the lines of the qasidas by Usman ﵀ were lodged in their heads.

The Courts of Gobir: A Relationship That Soured

Gobir in the late eighteenth century was still a high northern Hausa sultanate, one of the seven classical Hausa bakwai, and it was successively ruled by sarkis who took their distance from the movement of dan Fodio ﵀, first lightly irritated, then alarmed, then hostile.

Sarki Bawa Jan Gwarzo, who ruled until 1790, still maintained relatively cordial relations with the shaykh; according to the chronicles he invited dan Fodio ﵀ to a mukhtafil, a formal meeting, and allowed him to preach in Gobir. There is even a tradition, how historical remains open, that Bawa offered dan Fodio ﵀ a gift and that the shaykh asked instead for five concessions: freedom to preach, freedom of movement for Muslims, the right of Fulani to wear turbans without persecution, the abolition of certain taxes on Muslims, and the release of prisoners detained solely on account of their faith. Bawa is said to have agreed.

But after Bawa came worse sarkis, and two in particular would embitter the life of dan Fodio ﵀.

Sarki Nafata, who came to power around 1796, was clearly alarmed by the growing shaykh-movement, and he issued orders: no new converts were to join the jama’a of dan Fodio ﵀; whoever was already a jama’a member could remain, while his children could not be born into it again; the wearing of specific jama’a dress, the white turban that distinguished the Usman followers, was forbidden; and open preaching was restricted.

These were not small restrictions, since they struck at the core of what a shaykh could do, and they touched on the hijra text that dan Fodio ﵀ was already writing.

But it was Nafata’s successor, his son Sarki Yunfa, who would complete the breach. Yunfa had in a sense himself been a pupil of dan Fodio ﵀, since the shaykh had taught the young prince and had probably hoped that his accession in 1801 or 1802 would bring a new opening, but the opposite happened. Yunfa felt the political threat of a scholarly community in his land that was growing beyond his control, and he decided to eliminate it.

The Misfired Pistol

The detailed passage comes from Infāq al-Maysūr, the later chronicle of Muhammad Bello ﵀, and from the Raud al-Jinān of Abdullahi ﵀, which together give the picture, naturally from a Fulani perspective.

Yunfa summoned dan Fodio ﵀ to the court at Alkalawa, the Gobir capital, and the conversation went badly. At one moment, and the sources suggest that the shaykh had spoken incautiously about a recent military action of Yunfa’s against a group of Muslims, Yunfa drew a pistol, a makkariya in Hausa, a firearm that in this period had reached the Hausa courts in small numbers via the trans-Saharan trade.

He pointed it at dan Fodio ﵀ and pulled the trigger, but the pistol exploded in Yunfa’s own hand; the charge blew back, and while the sarki lost three fingers, dan Fodio ﵀ remained unharmed.

For the Fulani tradition this was a karamah, a divine protection of the shaykh, a sign that Allah ﷻ had preserved him from his enemies, while for Yunfa it was a humiliation that only deepened his hatred. He let dan Fodio ﵀ go, since he could hardly do otherwise at that moment, but he plotted revenge, and his next move would unleash war.

Historically it cannot be confirmed whether the pistol really exploded in this way, or whether popular tradition later inflated a faulty weapon into a miracle. But that there was an attempt on his life is recorded in several independent sources: Yunfa wanted dan Fodio ﵀ dead, and dan Fodio ﵀ knew it.

The Winter of 1803–1804

Back in Degel, the shaykh began the preparations he had never wished to make. He wrote to Yunfa, in a letter that has been preserved, and offered a compromise: leave us in peace, we will leave Gobir, we will withdraw. Yunfa refused.

In the winter of 1803–1804 Yunfa began small military actions against villages that belonged to the jama’a; people were taken prisoner, property was confiscated, and the threat became concrete.

In those months dan Fodio ﵀ wrote feverishly on the Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra, and he sent murasala, circular letters, to his followers throughout Gobir, Kebbi and Zamfara, and further out to Kano, Katsina, Zaria and Bauchi, in which he explained what hijra was, when it became obligatory, and where it must lead. His language became, for the first time in thirty years, openly political, though it stopped short of a takfīr against the sarkis, which he would never formally pronounce himself; it was a firm statement: this land, under this ruler, is no longer a place where a Muslim can safely practise his faith.

On 12 February 1804, after Yunfa had had a group of jama’a members from the village of Gimbana led as prisoners through Degel itself, a carefully chosen provocation, the shaykh decided that the moment had come, and he gave the order to his followers to make ready for departure.

On 21 February 1804, 10 Dhu al-Qa’da 1218 in the Islamic calendar, Usman dan Fodio ﵀ left Degel. He set out with his family, his brother Abdullahi ﵀, his son Muhammad Bello ﵀, his daughter Asma’u ﵀, his immediate disciples and a growing procession of followers north-west to a place called Gudu, at approximately 12.75° north, 4.50° east, a village with a few trees and fields where little had ever happened before.

There, in Gudu, he would raise the flag, and there the jihad would be formally proclaimed, since a movement that had waited thirty years could no longer wait.

The Shape of a Life

Forty-nine years old he was when he left Degel, no longer young and not old, a man on the boundary between mature wisdom and approaching old age, with three decades of quiet preaching behind him and a short, fierce, decisive period before him.

It is important to see this shape. Usman dan Fodio ﵀ did not spend half his life fighting; he spent almost his entire adult life not fighting. He read, he taught, he composed poetry, he prayed, and he kept patience where Jibril ﵀ in his younger years had nearly persuaded him not to. His own political deed, the moment at which he indeed took up arms, fills no more than eight years of his existence, and even then he was rarely on the front line himself; his brother Abdullahi ﵀ and his son Bello ﵀ did most of the military work.

What he did do was supply the frame of reference: the texts, the silsila, the poetry that had crept into people’s heads, the moral authority that had been attached to him after Yunfa’s pistol exploded, and the vision of an Islamic state in which shari’a ruled, in which scholars were appointed because they were learned and not because they were good courtiers, in which taxes were lawful and not arbitrary, in which dhimmi protection applied and was not withdrawn whenever it suited politically.

He lived for thirteen more years after raising the flag. He would witness the establishment of Sokoto as capital, and he would see his son Bello ﵀ grow into the Amīr al-Muʾminīn of an empire that stretched from the Niger bend to deep into what is today Cameroon. In 1812 he would formally withdraw from the daily administration, divide the empire between Bello ﵀ (Sokoto, the eastern part) and Abdullahi ﵀ (Gwandu, the western part), and return to what he liked to do most: read, write, pray.

He died in April 1817 in Sokoto, and his grave is still there, today one of the most important places of pilgrimage in the north of Nigeria, a place where hundreds of thousands of Muslims pass through each year to pray at the tomb of the man who founded the largest Islamic state in pre-colonial Africa.

What Dan Fodio Left Behind

The life of dan Fodio ﵀ is important for several reasons.

He shows that the Islamisation of West Africa did not stop after Timbuktu, after Askia Muhammad or after al-Maghili ﵀; it went on, became deeper, became more emphatic, and ultimately produced, in the generation of dan Fodio ﵀, its own indigenous ulama of world class. Dan Fodio ﵀ was no imported scholar from the Maghreb but a Hausa-Fulani-Torodbe who had grown up in his own soil and who took the step towards a mature, independent West African fiqh tradition.

He shows that patience is part of the jihad: thirty years of quiet preaching, of books, of poetry, of refusing to take the path of armed uprising when it would have been too soon, is also a form of struggle. When today young people, in frustration with the world, allow themselves to be carried along by anyone who wants to react quickly and harshly, the way dan Fodio ﵀ lived is a corrective.

He also shows that the jihad he ultimately had to lead became a Muslim-against-Muslim war, justified by a takfīr doctrine that had both theological grounding and was very dangerous. Dan Fodio ﵀ himself was cautious with takfīr; his followers, in the heat of war and the enthusiasm of victory, would not all be so.

His life was therefore not clean but real, as the life of every adult who tries to live his faith in a difficult country is real.

Here the Bayān breaks off and the flag is about to be raised. The caravan leaves Degel: six hundred followers, probably more, the shaykh himself on his camel, the brothers, the sons, the wives, the disciples, a small, exiled people on its way to a village where it had never lived before, and which in two weeks would begin to build an empire that would rule for another century.

Degel is behind them, Gudu lies before them, and the history of West Africa is about to begin again.

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Sources

• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr, the chronicle of the jihad on which the dating of the hijra rests, as quoted in Last, p. 23.
• Gidado dan Laima ﵀, Rawḍ al-Jinān, the early life of the Shaykh ﵀ by his son-in-law and later vizier, with the requests to Bawa and the miracle traditions around Yunfa, as quoted in Last, p. 3; Hiskett, p. 45; Sulaiman, p. 173.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Iḥyāʾ al-Sunna wa-ikhmād al-Bidʿa, completed before 1793 and moderate in tone, as quoted in Last, p. 9; Hiskett, p. 52.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra ʿalā al-ʿIbād, dated Ramadan 1221 (November 1806) and thus the principal work of the years after the jihad, as quoted in Last, p. 46; Hiskett, p. 119.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr, with the charge against Hausa government and the four offices a ruler must appoint, as quoted in Last, pp. lxviii, 57; Hiskett, p. 106.
• Surat an-Nisa 4:97, was the earth of Allah ﷻ not wide enough to emigrate in it, the Qur’anic basis of the duty of hijra in the Bayān, as quoted in Sulaiman, p. 185.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. lxviii, lxxiii, 3–10, 12–16, 23–24, 41–42, 46, 57, 60, 151.
  • pp. lxxiii, 3–8: the Toronkawa as a scholarly caste; the birth at Maratta in Gobir on Sunday 15 December 1754 as the son of Muhammad Fodiye ﵀, the learned, and Hawwa ﵀, and the move to Degel; two years with Uthman Binduri ﵀ and a year with the rigorous Jibril ibn Umar ﵀, who made a second pilgrimage and returned from Egypt; the beginning of his preaching around 1188/1774 at the age of twenty, from 1774 to 1786 from Degel in Kebbi and Gobir while avoiding the courts, then five years in Zamfara; the meeting with Bawa at Magami in 1788 or 1789 and the five concessions, among them freedom to preach, respect for turban-wearers, the release of prisoners and relief from taxes; Yunfa as a pupil of the Shaykh ﵀.
  • pp. 9–10: the Iḥyāʾ al-Sunna, completed before 1793 and moderate in tone, more than fifty writings against local scholars and the long Fulfulde poems; the vision of mid-1208/1794 in which he was invested with the sword of truth; his asceticism at Degel.
  • pp. 12–16: Nafata’s proclamation against preaching, conversion, turban and veil; the accession of Yunfa around 1216/1801 and his failed attempt at Alkalawa, where the gunpowder backfired; the prisoners of Gimbana freed near Degel; Yunfa’s order to leave Degel and the preparation of the hijra; the Wathīqat ahl al-Sūdān and the pamphlets that Bello ﵀ distributed in Kebbi.
  • pp. 23–24: the hijra from Degel to Gudu, thirty miles away, on 10 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1218 (Tuesday 21 February 1804); the election of the Shaykh ﵀ as Imam, who at fifty was to take no part in the fighting.
  • pp. lxviii, 41–42, 46, 57: the division of 1812 (1227) with the west for Abdullahi ﵀ and the east for Bello ﵀; the titles Amīr al-Muʾminīn and Khalīfa; the Bayān dated November 1806; the charge and the offices of the Kitāb al-Farq; the eleven dated books from the years at Sifawa.
  • pp. 60, 151: the death at Sokoto on Sunday 20 April 1817, aged sixty-two, and Sokoto as the chief place of pilgrimage in Hausaland; Asma’u ﵀ who picked up Tamasheq at Degel and composed in Arabic and Fulfulde.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 15–17, 37–38, 40–42, 45, 48–49, 51–53, 60, 62–63, 66, 70–73, 100, 106, 111, 119, 143, 150.
  • pp. 15–17: the Toronkawa from Futa Toro, by way of Konni and Maratta to Degel, from herdsmen to scholars; the birth on 29 Safar 1168 (15 December 1754); the father who taught him reading, writing and the Qur’an; Fodio as the Fulfulde word for a learned man.
  • pp. 37–42: the curriculum, the Qur’an by heart, then tafsir, sira, fiqh and hadith in the Maliki school; two years with Uthman Binduri ﵀ and the Mukhtaṣar under Muhammad Sambo ﵀; the rigorous Jibril ibn Umar ﵀ and his years among the Wahhabis in Mecca and Medina; the rejection of his radicalism by the Shehu ﵀; the itinerant preaching from about 1774.
  • pp. 45, 48–49: Bawa’s Id assembly, the refused gift, the concessions and the release of Abarshi; Nafata’s restrictive laws; Yunfa’s accession around 1216/1801 and the tradition that the Shehu ﵀ had been his tutor.
  • pp. 51–53, 60, 62–63, 66: more than one hundred works; the Iḥyāʾ before 1793; the vernacular verse in Fulfulde and the Hausa versions by his son Isa ﵀; the silsila through Jibril ﵀ from Egypt; the Qadiriyya of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀ and the Tijaniyya of about 1780; the visions from 1789 and the vision of 1794 with the green robe and the sword of truth.
  • pp. 70–73: Yunfa who came to Degel on foot and later in his palace aimed a musket at the Shehu ﵀ that flashed in the pan; Gimbana; the order into exile and the answer that God’s earth is wide; the departure for Gudu with the library sent ahead and the election as commander at the age of fifty.
  • pp. 100, 106, 111, 119, 143, 150: the division of 1812; the Kitāb al-Farq on the purpose of Muslim government; six years at Sifawa until 1815 with Gidado dan Laima ﵀ as intermediary; the Masāʾil muhimma of 1802 and the Bayān as a work of the years after the jihad; the condemnation of the cattle tax jangali; the death on 20 April 1817, the burial in Sokoto and the tomb as a place of pilgrimage.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 33–34, 42, 122, 173, 178–179, 185, 190–191, 244, 277, 281.
  • pp. 33–34, 42, 122, 281: the birth in 1168/1754 as the son of Muhammad Fodio ﵀ and Hawwa ﵀; the teachers according to Abdullahi ﵀, Biddu al-Kabawi ﵀, Abd ar-Rahman ibn Hammada ﵀ for grammar, Uthman Bidduri ﵀ for the Mukhtaṣar, al-Hajj Muhammad ibn Raj ﵀ for the whole Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhari ﵀; Jibril ﵀ as the teacher who gave him the weapons for the struggle; the rule that no Muslim’s faith is to be suspected; the emphasis on the education of women, with Asma’u ﵀ as the most prominent.
  • pp. 173, 178–179, 190–191, 244, 277: the second meeting with Bawa at Magami in 1788 or 1789 and the requests as Gidado ﵀ recorded them; the vision of 1794; Nafata’s decree, his death in 1217/1803 and the succession of Yunfa; the firearm that, according to Abdullahi ﵀, turned its fire back on Yunfa himself; the hijra on 10 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1218 and the flag of the Amīr al-Muʾminīn; the Bayān some three years after the start of the jihad; the division between Abdullahi ﵀ and Bello ﵀ and the life of teaching and writing at Sifawa; the death on 20 April 1817 after thirteen years of caliphate.