Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀

The younger brother who wrote the legal handbooks and halted halfway through the march on Alkalawa, because what he saw his young commanders doing in the name of jihad was no longer what he had left Degel for.

Life

He was born in 1766 in Degel, twelve years after his brother Usman ﵀. Same father, Muhammad Fodio; same mother, Hauwa; same Torodbe-Fulbe lineage. They read together, prayed together, and studied under the same teachers of Maliki fiqh (the Mukhtasar of Khalil ﵀, the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀), tafsir in the classical manner, Arabic grammar according to the Ajurrumiyya, and tasawwuf in the Qadiriyya.

They developed differently. Usman ﵀ became the visionary, the man who around 1794-95 received in a vision of the Prophet ﷺ the sayf al-haqq, the sword of truth. Abdullahi was absent from that vision, and the absence was one of temperament rather than of circumstance: he thought in chapters, not in visions. He was the faqih-mudarris, the jurist-teacher.

At the hijra to Gudu in February 1804 he was thirty-eight. In his autobiography Tazyīn al-Waraqāt he describes the journey itself, the dust, the thirst, the elders who could not walk fast enough, and the moment in which he gave his brother bay’a under a tree at Gudu. From 1804 to 1807 he stood in the field as commander of the right flank, while his young nephew Muhammad Bello ﵀ led the left.

In 1807, on the way to the decisive assault on Alkalawa, he turned back. He reached Kano, four hundred kilometers from Gudu and just taken by the jihad forces, and stayed there. The Tazyīn is explicit about the reason: he had seen commanders during the latest campaign distribute booty unequally, treat Muslims as kuffar whenever it suited them, and seize women who under shariʿa were not to be seized. He writes that he considered abandoning the jihad to make hijra to Mecca and devote his life to prayer and study.

His brother managed to persuade him to return, on condition that he would receive his own sector. That sector became Gwandu, one hundred kilometers southwest of Sokoto, and from 1808 onward he was emir there. For twenty years he built at 12.69°N and 4.60°E a jurist-driven Islamic administration. He died in 1828 (some sources give 1829) in Gwandu, sixty-two years old.

Faith and culture

Abdullahi ﵀ was, according to Hunwick’s catalogue, between fifty and sixty works in size, one of the most prolific ulama West Africa has ever produced. His Diya al-Hukkām fīmā la-hum wa ʿalayhim min al-aḥkām is the standard administrative-law handbook of Sokoto: a systematic Maliki treatment of the rights and duties of the Amir al-Muʾminin, of Qadis, of witnesses, of ḥudud and taʿzir punishments. Its sharpest chapter is the one on booty and prisoners, in which he turns his Kano experience of 1807 into legal norm, since every violation of the Maliki rules around ghanima makes the warrior accountable in the hereafter.

His tafsir Diya al-Ta’wil fi Ma’ani al-Tanzil runs to four volumes, Sabil al-Najat is a handbook for beginning students, and Kitab al-Niyya, on intention as the basis of the shariʿa act, betrays his tasawwuf roots. And he kept composing poetry, in Arabic and Fulfulde, throughout his life; in the Tazyīn he cites his own qasidas at emotional moments, exactly as Ibn Ishaq cites Hassan ibn Thabit ﵁ in the sira.

In Gwandu he founded madrasas, appointed Qadis, and acted personally as jurist in complex matters around the treatment of non-Muslim Nupe and Yoruba populations in vassal emirates. Gwandu became as a result stricter, juridically heavier, and diplomatically less flexible than Sokoto; in short, Gwandu carried the personality of its founder.

Legacy

That he stopped at Kano in 1807 and then wrote an autobiography in which he criticized his own movement makes him unique. The Tazyīn al-Waraqāt, in the modern edition and English translation by Mervyn Hiskett of 1963, is one of the most honest texts in the entire Islamic reform tradition. He speaks openly about commanders who plundered in the name of jihad, about distributions of booty that violated shariʿa rules, and about his own struggles of conscience. In style and seriousness it is comparable to al-Ghazali ﵀'s Munqidh min al-Dalal: a jurist willing to criticize his own position.

After the death of the shehu in 1817 a part of the ulama expected that Abdullahi ﵀, not Bello ﵀, would become the next caliph, since he was older, an uncle, and the highest-ranking intellectual survivor. Bello ﵀ was confirmed, and Abdullahi ﵀ gave bayʿa, but the relationship remained unequal and the inequality hurt. In 1820-21 brief disturbances broke out between Sokoto troops and Gwandu troops at Kalambaina, never a real war but enough to require diplomatic mediation, and Abdullahi ﵀ wrote afterwards that he was shocked that blood had been spilled between mujahidin. The deeper rift, Abdullahi’s juristic strictness set against Bello’s ﵀ administrative pragmatism, became a structural tension between Gwandu and Sokoto that would last until the British colonization in 1903.

He is indispensable because he shows that the Islamic tradition is a tradition not only of victories but also of honest self-criticism. He is the conscience of the jihad from within, not from without. The line that runs from Degel to Gudu, from Gudu to Kano and from Kano to Gwandu is, read geographically, the biography of a struggle of conscience.

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Uncertainties:

• The birth year 1766 is generally accepted, though some sources give 1765.
• The year of death is given as 1828 by some sources and as 1829 by others, and both circulate.
• The length of his stay in Kano in 1807 ranges, depending on the source, from a few months to about a year.
• The Kalambaina disturbance of 1820 or 1821 is documented but obscure, and its dating is approximate.
• The oeuvre size of fifty to sixty works is an estimate from the Hunwick bibliography and varies by attribution.

Sources

• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Tazyīn al-Waraqāt bi-jamʿ baʿd ma li min al-ashʿar (dated October 1813; text and English translation Mervyn Hiskett, Ibadan 1963), Diya al-Hukkām fīmā la-hum wa ʿalayhim min al-aḥkām, Diya al-Ta’wil fi Ma’ani al-Tanzil, Sabil al-Najat and Kitab al-Niyya: his own works on which the biography rests, with Diya al-Hukkām written in Kano around 1807 and Diya al-Ta’wil dated 1227 (Cairo 1961), as listed in Last, pp. xxix, 241–243.
• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr: his nephew’s chronicle, from which the date of the hijra to Gudu, 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218, Tuesday 21 February 1804, is taken, as quoted in Last, p. 23.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xxix, 7, 23–24, 38, 40–42, 64–65, 70, 148, 241–243.
  • pp. 7, 23–24, 40, 148: around 1193/1779 he came to study under his brother; the hijra of 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218 according to Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀; at Gudu he was the first to give the bay’a to the Shehu ﵀, who kept him at his side as senior vizier.
  • pp. 38, 41–42: in 1807, on the way to Alkalawa, he left the army and slipped away with five companions to Kano, intending to reach Mecca; there he was detained, delivered the tafsir during Ramadan and wrote Diya al-Hukkām; the division of 1812 in which he received the west, with Gwandu becoming his seat only after the Shehu’s ﵀ death.
  • pp. 64–65, 70: in 1817 he found the gates of Sokoto closed and three weeks later completed a short book on succession to the imamate; his reclusiveness since Kano and the friction with Bello ﵀; the capture of Kalembaina as the reconciliation between uncle and nephew.
  • pp. xxix, 241–243: the year of his death, 1829/1245, and the list of his works.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 61, 105, 113–115.
  • pp. 61, 105: the Shehu ﵀ initiating his brother into tasawwuf; the verses from the Tazyīn against worldliness, booty and bribery.
  • pp. 113–115: the closed gates of 1817 and almost a year of estrangement; the battle of Kalembina in 1820 and the reconciliation; his withdrawal into teaching and authorship until his death in 1245/1829.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 224, 226: his own words on leaving the army, the request of the people of Kano for a book on governance, and Diya al-Hukkām becoming the manual of government throughout the caliphate.
• 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), p. 65: Abdullahi ﵀ (died c. 1828) as Emir of Gwandu, succeeded by Muhammad Wani (1828–1832).