Muhammad Bello ﵀

His father had lit the fire; the hardest task fell to him. He turned a jihad movement into a functioning caliphate, with inkpot and sword at once, and he did it largely with his pen.

Life

He was born in 1781 in Degel as the son of Usman dan Fodio ﵀. He grew up in the midst of the jama’a his father was building, a child who learned at the study circles under the trees, who heard the poets recite around him, who saw the elders come to have lawsuits settled according to Maliki fiqh. He knew the jihad not as an event but as a lifelong process in which he himself was raised.

At the hijra to Gudu in 1804 he was twenty-three. From the very first year he held command: at the catastrophe of Tsuntua in 1804 (where, according to his own later Infāq, the jama’a lost two thousand followers, including fourteen ḥuffāẓ), at the turning point of Tabkin Kwotto, and at the conquest of Alkalawa in 1808. In 1809 he literally drew a city in the sand at the confluence of the Sokoto and Rima: walls of ten kilometers in circumference, seven gates, a Friday mosque, a palace, a chancery, a library. Thus Sokoto became a capital, and the chancery and library he installed there made it the working intellectual heart of West Africa, Timbuktu having become by then a city of legacy.

In 1812, when his father withdrew from daily government, Bello ﵀ completed a book that would become as important as the city he built: Infāq al-Maysūr fī Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr. He was then thirty-three. A son who documents his own movement while his father is still alive knows that history must be written before the eyewitnesses die.

In 1817 his father designated him, and not his uncle Abdullahi ﵀ as part of the ulama had expected, as the second Amīr al-Muʾminīn. He reigned for twenty years. On 25 October 1837 he died in Wurno, the ribāṭ he had founded himself, fifty-six years old. His uncle Abdullahi ﵀, who held the western pillar of the empire at Gwandu and with whom the tension never quite disappeared, had died nine years earlier; his counterpart al-Kanemi ﵀ of Bornu died the same year. Thus the entire jihad generation left the stage within twelve months.

Faith and culture

Bello ﵀ was in everything the heir of his father’s Maliki-Qadiri tradition, but where Usman ﵀ was a visionary and preacher, Bello ﵀ was an administrator and chronicler. He governed through ink: roughly a hundred letters from his hand have been preserved, edited by Bobboyi, Yamusa and others in Nigeria and catalogued in Hunwick’s Arabic Literature of Africa. He wrote to the emir of Kano about zakat on herds, to Yakubu of Bauchi about amulets, to Zaria about border conflicts, and his tone is that of an older brother with authority, rarely that of a despot.

He built a network of ribāṭs, among them Sifawa, Wurno, Gandi, Dange, Kware and Salame, that were both military outposts and centers of learning, a revival of the classical Maghreb concept for Hausaland. This bound Fulbe communities territorially together and, unintentionally, laid out the ethnic-social patchwork on which the British would build their indirect rule a century later.

He was a poet in Arabic and Fulfulde, writing qasidas in honor of the Prophet ﷺ in the tradition of al-Busiri’s Burdah, didactic poems on tawhid and fiqh, and personal laments at family deaths. His sister Nana Asma’u ﵀ was herself a poet of international stature; together brother and sister formed a cultural center of gravity that West Africa had not had since Ahmad Baba ﵀ in Timbuktu.

Legacy

His greatest textual legacy is the Infāq al-Maysūr. Without this work our knowledge of the Fulani jihad would be impoverished; modern historians like Murray Last and Mervyn Hiskett use it as a primary source, read against the Tazyīn al-Waraqāt of his uncle Abdullahi ﵀ and against the Bornu correspondence.

And that Bornu correspondence is where we must be honest. Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi ﵀, scholar, trained in Fez and Medina, effective ruler of Bornu from 1808, refused to recognize the Sokoto Caliphate as a legitimate jihad. His letters, first to Usman ﵀ and later to Bello ﵀, posed the sharpest theological question put to the movement: on what Maliki basis does your takfīr against fellow Muslims rest, whose mosques stand, whose Qadis render verdicts, whose Qur’an schools teach? Bello ﵀ replied with references to al-Maghili ﵀'s fifteenth-century fatwas and to ritual irregularities at the Bornu court, and al-Kanemi ﵀ answered that ritual irregularities do not justify takfīr as long as the arkan al-iman are intact, accusing Sokoto in the same breath of tribal Fulbe expansion under the Islamic banner. The debate was never settled. A serious, learned Muslim opponent who refused to acknowledge that Sokoto was waging a jihad is no detail.

Then there is slavery. Despite reformist rhetoric, the Sokoto economy ran significantly on slave labor. Campaigns against non-Muslim populations continually produced new slaves; plantations around Kano, Zaria and Sokoto were worked by the unfree. Paul Lovejoy has calculated that by the mid-nineteenth century the caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in Africa. Bello ﵀ defended the practice within Maliki bounds; he did not call it into question.

That is the real Bello ﵀: scholar-statesman, brilliant organizer, international enough to interrogate Hugh Clapperton in 1824 about Napoleon and England, and sovereign of an empire that ran on unfree labor and could treat fellow Muslims as apostates.

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Uncertainties:

The founding of Sokoto in 1809 is generally accepted, although some sources give 1808 or 1810. The figure of about a hundred letters is a rough estimate that depends on how subcollections are counted, and the dating of the individual al-Kanemi and Bello letters remains disputed. Lovejoy’s “millions of unfree” is a peak estimate for the late nineteenth century rather than a figure specific to Bello ﵀'s reign.

Sources

• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr fī Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr (dated Tuesday 10 November 1812; text C. E. J. Whitting, London 1951): the chronicle from which the losses at Tsuntua, the fall of Alkalawa and the letters of al-Kanemi ﵀ derive, used by Last as the most detailed and factual account of the jihad (Last, pp. xxx–xxxi).
• The correspondence between al-Kanemi ﵀ and Sokoto: the letters of al-Kanemi ﵀ as quoted in the Infāq and summarised by Hiskett, pp. 109–110.
• Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa (1829): his stay in Sokoto in 1824 as the guest of the vizier Gidado ﵀, as quoted in Boyd, p. 54.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xxx–xxxi, 5, 32, 39, 41–42, 64, 66, 75, 77, 81.
  • pp. 5, 32, 39: Bello ﵀ as the son of the Shehu ﵀ by the daughter of a local scholar; Tsuntua with two thousand dead, two hundred of whom knew the Qur’an by heart, while Bello ﵀ was sick; the fall of Alkalawa on 3 October 1808.
  • pp. 41–42, 64, 66: the decision in the autumn of 1809 to make Sokoto his headquarters and the walled town where the Rima and the Sokoto meet; the division of 1812 with the east for Bello ﵀; the succession of 1817, with Abdullahi ﵀ before closed gates and the election of Bello ﵀ that passed without a struggle.
  • pp. 75, 77, 81: the ribats on the frontier, Lajinge, Shinaka, Kware, Bakura and Gandi, and his fortified camps up to Wurno; the death on 26 October 1837 after seven months of illness, aged 56.
• 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, 113, 115.
  • pp. 109–110: al-Kanemi ﵀ as the virtual ruler of Bornu who chided the Fulani for attacking fellow Muslims; the correspondence from about 1810 to 1812, with the Bornu argument that lapses are no ground for takfir and the Sokoto argument that Bornu had aided the unbelievers.
  • pp. 113, 115: Bello ﵀ (born c. 1781, died 1837) as the first son to succeed the Shehu ﵀; his ribats, the settling of nomads and the administrative system that shaped the empire.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 219, 226: Tsuntsuwa with more than two thousand dead, including about two hundred huffaz; Bello ﵀ in command at the fall of Alkalawa, where Yunfa was slain.
• Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet and Islamic Leader, Frank Cass, London 1989, pp. 25, 54, 107: the building of the Sokoto ribat from 1809, with a wall two kilometres long and four metres high; Clapperton as the guest of Gidado ﵀ in 1824; Bello’s ﵀ takhmis on the Burda of al-Busiri ﵀.
• 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. 24, 70, 271: Tabkin Kwotto between April and June 1804 as the turning point; the death of al-Kanemi ﵀ in 1837; the graves of the caliphs at Wurno.