A City Out of the Drought: The Establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate (1809–1817)

Alkalawa was still smouldering, and Usman dan Fodio ﵀ did something few conquerors do: he withdrew from power. Instead of taking the throne of Gobir, he had a new city sketched in the sand, divided the empire in two and gave the pen precedence over the sword. Between 1809 and 1817, almost casually, what would within a single generation become the largest pre-colonial state in sub-Saharan Africa was thus established.

Why Not Sit in Alkalawa

The temptation, in October 1808, was considerable: the walls of Alkalawa lay open, Yunfa was dead, and the palace of Gobir stood empty. A thousand years of royal traditions, the sarauta that goes back to the Hausa Bayajidda sagas, the golden throne rooms, the iron-smith rituals and the courtly musicians with their long trumpets, were beheaded in a single afternoon. For a conqueror in the classical sense this was the moment to walk up the steps, sit upon the cushions, and crown himself.

Dan Fodio ﵀ did not do it, and Muhammad Bello ﵀, who had taken Alkalawa with the point of his own spear, did not do it either. Instead the old capital was not occupied but abandoned, so that it remained a ruin. Today it is an archaeological site, a scattered pottery of shards in the sand of Sokoto State, visited by an occasional historian and not by a court.

Why? Three reasons interlock, and the first is ideological. To take a seat in Alkalawa would mean that the jihad had in effect been a dynastic seizure of power, a replacement of one sarki by another, and that is precisely what dan Fodio ﵀ in his Kitāb al-Farq had denied. The jihad was no usurpation; it was a reform of the wilāyāt, of authority itself, and a new city, founded on virgin ground, underscored that.

The second reason was strategic. Alkalawa lay in the Gobir heartland, among remnants of the Hausa population that would not soon forget its loss, whereas a new capital, somewhat to the south and beyond the old Gobir borders, was easier to defend and did not lay the political axis upon the funeral cloth of a defeated kingdom.

The third reason was juridical, since shari’a does not inherit through conquest. A city that had fallen by jihad was fay’, communal war booty, whereas a new founding could be drawn from the first day as dar al-Islam, with the mosque at the heart, the markets according to the rules, and the Qadi court on the main street.

So Bello ﵀ in 1809 sketched the contours of a city at the confluence of the Sokoto River and the Rima, at approximately 13.06° north, 5.24° east, and he named it Sokoto, after the Fulfulde word sokkugo, “to gather together”. Thus a caliphate took its name from a city that did not yet even exist at the start of the jihad.

The Shehu Sets Himself Aside

Between 1810 and 1812 something happened that even in the warm Fulani historiography is not entirely smoothed over: dan Fodio ﵀ withdrew almost entirely from the daily administration.

He was the Amīr al-Muʾminīn, the Commander of the Faithful; he had raised the flag, and his word had set an army in motion. And now, with the battles won and the flags distributed, he went back to what he had always wanted to do: read, write, teach. He moved from Sokoto to Sifawa, a smaller place a few dozen kilometres away, and afterwards back again. He worked on his Ihya’ al-Sunna, on his Tanbih al-Ikhwan, on Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra; he gave awrad instruction to his muridin, held mawlid sermons, received delegations from Kano and Gwandu, and wrote fatwas when there was a theological question, while the administrative work he visibly transferred.

This was no abdication in the European sense: he remained Amīr al-Muʾminīn, remained the spiritual authority of the caliphate, and his name was mentioned in the khutba of every Friday prayer. But the practical separation between him as shehu and the executive power was, according to Infāq al-Maysūr, formally arranged in 1812, when he appointed two sub-caliphs. His son Muhammad Bello ﵀ received the east: Sokoto itself, with the Hausa core emirates Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Bauchi and Adamawa. His brother Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ received the west: Gwandu as capital, with Kebbi, Nupe, Ilorin and the lower Niger reaches.

Abdullahi ﵀ writes of this himself, with the dry honesty that characterises his Tazyīn al-Waraqāt. He recounts that he had already during the advance on Alkalawa, somewhere in 1807, developed doubts about the discipline of some jihad commanders, who plundered, he writes, in a way that Maliki fiqh did not permit. He wrote a poem, Qasida Tazyīn, in which, in fact within a poem, he takes the decision to withdraw from the active campaign and to go to Kano to consider hijra to the Hijaz; on the way he is overtaken by messengers from his brother dan Fodio ﵀ and asked to return. He returns, but the rift had been opened, and the division into two is, in part, an institutionalisation of that rift, a way to give Abdullahi ﵀ his own domain without having to force him back under a new centre.

This was no conflict of the kind fought between European crown princes, with armies marching against each other and blood relatives falling by each other’s swords; but the tension between Sokoto and Gwandu smoulders from that moment on through every generation of the caliphate. Abdullahi ﵀ dies in 1829, twelve years after his brother, on post in Gwandu, and to his death he writes critical treatises that later Sokoto scholars receive with mixed feelings.

The Flag System as Constitution

What Bello ﵀ and his father had devised was, juridically speaking, more a federation than a unitary state. It bore the name khilafa, caliphate, but it functioned through an old Islamic instrument that took on a new, ingenious form in Hausaland: the bay’a tied to a tuta, a flag.

The procedure ran as follows. A Fulani scholar or jihad commander, such as Sulaimanu, a Kano Fulbe who had studied for years in Gwandu, travelled to Sokoto. He knelt before dan Fodio ﵀, or later before Bello ﵀, and pledged the bay’a: the oath of allegiance, word for word, according to the formula transmitted in the Islamic tradition since the time of the Prophet ﷺ. He swore obedience in what is good and resistance to what is evil, and he then received from the hands of the shehu or the caliph a green flag, a written wathiqa, a flag-grant document, and a formal mandate to wage jihad in his region, to establish an emirate, and subsequently to govern it in the name of Sokoto.

Thus arose, between 1804 and 1817, the great emirates that would form the federation. Kano under Sulaimanu, succeeded in 1819 by Ibrahim Dabo, whose dynasty rules to this very day. Katsina under Umaru Dallaji and his Sullubawa clan. Zaria, the old Zazzau, under Mallam Musa of the Mallawa Fulani. Bauchi under the scholar Yakubu ﵀, whose emirate stretched from the Plateau highlands to the Benue River. Gombe under Buba Yero, who expanded into the Gongola valley. Adamawa under Modibo Adama, a Yola Fulbe who carried the flag across the Faro and Benue rivers and founded an emirate that today still spans the border between Nigeria and Cameroon. Ilorin, the southernmost emirate, under the Yoruba-Fulbe cleric Alimi, whose sons Abdussalami and Shitta would break apart the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo and Islamise the northern frontier of Yorubaland. Nupe under Mallam Dendo and his sons, around the Niger bend. Hadejia on the north-eastern frontier, where Sambo Digimsa and later the notorious Buhari guarded the unstable border with Bornu.

By 1817, the year in which dan Fodio ﵀ died, the federation counted at least thirteen major emirates and a dozen smaller ones. Together they covered an area from the Niger bend in the west to the Mandara Mountains in the east, from the Sahel in the north to deep into the subtropical savannah in the south. The Infāq al-Maysūr and the later Rauḍ al-Jinān of Gidado dan Laima give lists with the names of the emirs and the dates of their installation.

This system was elegant because it made expansion faster and cheaper than a central army could have done, and it was vulnerable because it carried from the start the same tension that all federations carry: emirs who became locally sovereign, who kept internal taxation, who waged their own wars, and who were tied to the centre only through bay’a loyalty, zakat deliveries and correspondence. That this system stood until 1903, the British conquest, is testimony to its flexibility, and that the British then literally took it over as the basis for their indirect rule and continue to build on it the northern administrative geography of Nigeria today is testimony to its deep root.

Ten Million Subjects, More or Less

How many people actually lived under this flag? The honest answer is that we do not know precisely, and that anyone who names an exact figure is selling certainty where there is none. But the historiographical estimates run, for nineteenth-century Sokoto at its peak, between roughly seven and ten million inhabitants, and Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, the two historians whose work in Slow Death for Slavery (1993) and Transformations in Slavery (2011) has set the standard frame, place the middle of that estimate around 1850 at nine to ten million.

That is, whichever estimate one takes, an enormous number for a pre-colonial African state. Songhai at its peak in the sixteenth century and Mali under Mansa Musa in the fourteenth presumably also numbered millions, but no modern historian places them above five million, while the Ashanti empire in the same nineteenth century counted one to three million, Zululand under Shaka a few hundred thousand, and Abyssinia under Tewodros perhaps four to five million. In a time when most African states numbered between 500,000 and three million people, Sokoto, simply by its demographic size, stood in a class apart.

The population was not ethnically homogeneous, since the Fulbe formed the ruling elite but not the majority, while the Hausa population was numerically dominant in the countryside and in the old cities. In addition there lived in the empire Kanuri in the east, Yoruba Muslims in Ilorin, Nupe in the south-west, and Gwari, Plateau groups, Chamba, Mumuye and Mandara peoples: dozens of languages and dozens of ethnic groups, held together by Islam as a shared institutional language and by Arabic as administrative language.

It was a state the size of France and Germany combined, with a population that was more than twice that of the United States at the same moment, governed in Arabic by a Fulbe elite that itself spoke Fulfulde, over a majority that spoke Hausa, united in one legal system that had been imported from Maliki Andalus via Timbuktu. This is a polity that commands respect, also, and precisely, when one does not talk away its dark sides.

The Kitab al-Farq as Constitution

An empire of this size needs a constitution, explicit or implicit, and Sokoto had an explicit one, or rather a library that together functioned as a constitution.

The core work was still the Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr of dan Fodio ﵀, “The Book on the Difference Between Muslim and Unbeliever Government”, discussed earlier as an indictment against Yunfa. After 1809 it became something else: a negative constitutional document that described what an Islamic government must not do, and thus, by mirror image, what it must do. It ruled out arbitrary taxes beyond zakat, jizya and kharaj, jurisprudence beyond shari’a, court rituals mixed with non-Islamic elements, the enslavement of Muslims by Muslims, the persecution of ulama, and sarauta titles that drew Islamic authority to themselves.

Alongside the Kitāb al-Farq stood the Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra ʿalā al-ʿIbād, the 1806 text by dan Fodio ﵀ that set out the obligation of hijra from a dar al-kufr region juridically. This text supplied the legitimation for the jihad exodus itself and was read in the caliphate as proof that the founding of Sokoto, literally as hijra destination, had been an Islamic duty, not an adventurous conquest.

Alongside this circulated the manuals of Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀ (the Mukhtasar as Maliki reference), of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ (the Risala as elementary legal handbook), and the fifteenth-century fatwas of al-Maghili ﵀, who had advised the Songhai sultan Askia Muhammad two centuries earlier and whose texts were used in Sokoto as direct jurisprudential precedents.

And then there were the works of Bello ﵀ himself. The Infāq al-Maysūr, completed around 1812, served as historical and juridical self-justification, while the Diya’ al-Hukkām of Abdullahi ﵀, “Light for the Rulers”, was a governance guide for emirs, and the poetry and didactic works of Nana Asma’u ﵀ in Fulfulde, Hausa and Arabic circulated alongside them. She would, after her father’s death, become a scholastic authority in her own right, whose works were disseminated by her brother Bello ﵀ as official state texts.

Together these books formed what Murray Last in his standard work The Sokoto Caliphate (1967) called “a theocratic constitution by accumulation”. No single document was the constitution; the whole library was.

The Waziri and his Inkpot

A state is not governed by books, but by officials, and Bello ﵀ built up in Sokoto an administrative structure that, for its time and region, was strikingly professional.

At the centre stood the Waziri, the grand vizier. Under the Shaykh the role had been informal, held above all by his brother Abdullahi ﵀; Bello ﵀ made it a formal office and gave it in 1817 to Gidado dan Laima. He was the right hand of Bello ﵀ in correspondence with the emirs, he supervised zakat revenues, he formulated fatwas, and he maintained the scholarly networks with Egypt and the Hijaz. The Rauḍ al-Jinān of Gidado dan Laima, whom Bello ﵀ appointed as his first waziri in 1817, describes the duties of the waziri in detail: raʾīs al-kuttāb (head of scribes), ṣāḥib al-barīd (responsible for correspondence), muḥāsib al-zakāt (auditor of zakat revenues).

Beneath the waziri stood the Galadima, a Hausa term that dan Fodio ﵀ and Bello ﵀ had deliberately retained from the old sarauta vocabulary, since not everything from before the jihad had to go. The Galadima was a kind of second minister, responsible for a specific geographical portfolio, often the northern border regions.

For jurisprudence there stood at every level an Alkali, a Hausa adaptation of the Arabic Qadi. The Qadi of Sokoto was the highest judge, an appeal in last instance; beneath him stood emirate-Qadis in Kano, Katsina, Zaria, and so on, and beneath them again district-Qadis in smaller towns and villages. They applied Maliki law, with reference back to Mukhtasar, Risala and local fatwa collections, and legal cases were recorded in writing, a practice that was rare in pre-colonial West Africa, so that a part of these sijillat, judicial registers, has been preserved in the archives of Kano and Sokoto.

The taxation structure was Maliki-classical. Zakat was levied on Muslims, on herds (jangali), agriculture (ushr, a tenth) and trade goods, while jizya was the poll tax on non-Muslim subjects who enjoyed protection as dhimmi, and kharaj the land tax on land that had previously been non-Muslim and now fell under Islamic government. In addition there were tolls on the great caravan routes, particularly the north-south route from Agades to Kano and the west-east route from Timbuktu to Bornu, and state monopolies on certain goods such as salt from Bilma and kola from Borgu.

It was, with all its limitations, a functioning fiscal system. European travellers such as Hugh Clapperton in 1824 and Heinrich Barth in the 1850s wrote of it with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. Barth travelled through the caliphate between 1851 and 1854 and devoted in his Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (1857) page after page to the Sokoto administration, and he notes that the market of Kano was “the largest in all of Sudan”, larger and better ordered than what he had seen in North African cities of comparable size.

The Shadow That Must Not Be Wiped Away

At this chapter history demands honesty, because the Sokoto Caliphate was a slave society: not a society with some slaves at the margin, but a slave society in the definition of Moses Finley and Paul Lovejoy, a state in which slave labour is a structural economic pillar, in which the slave population in large parts of the empire makes up thirty per cent or more of the total population, and in which the reproduction of the system, by war, by purchase and by birth in slavery, is a continuous state task.

The Maliki fiqh, as applied by dan Fodio ﵀ and Bello ﵀, permitted the slave trade and slaveholding provided certain conditions were met. Muslims could not be enslaved; slaves had to be treated humanely, could not be separated from their children below a certain age, had to be cared for in illness, had a right to one day of rest per week, and could buy their freedom through mukataba or be released by ʿitq as a pious act. The ʿaqida of the shehu was clear: a Muslim owner who broke these rules committed sin.

But what was legitimate within the legal framework was meanwhile carried out on an industrial scale. The campaigns against non-Muslim populations, and “non-Muslim” was in Sokoto practice an elastic category, produced thousands of slaves annually, while the southern frontier zones, what one called the dar al-harb edges, stood permanently under ghazwa pressure: the Cross River peoples, the Plateau pagans (Angas, Berom, Jukun remnants), the Mumuye and Bata in Adamawa, and the Gwari to the south of Zaria. Each dry season cavalry units rode out from Bauchi, from Adamawa and from Yola on slave raid, and they brought back hundreds to thousands of captives, who were sold on the markets of Kano, Sokoto, Yola and Ilorin.

Where did these slaves go? There were three routes. First, within the caliphate itself: plantations around Kano (indigo, grain, cotton), plantations around Sokoto, household slaves in the elite compounds, and sarkin dogarai, slave soldiers in the armies of the emirs. Second, north and trans-Saharan: caravans via Agades, Ghat and Murzuq to Tripoli, Tunis and Cairo, along an old route, centuries old, that in Sokoto times reached precisely a peak because European abolition of the Atlantic trade made the Saharan route relatively more attractive for North African buyers. Third, southwards, via Aro-Chukwu, Bonny and Lagos, to the Atlantic coast. This route had already been active before 1809, via Hausa intermediaries and Yoruba networks; it diminished in the nineteenth century, but disappeared entirely only in the 1860s–70s. Hundreds of thousands of West Africans who reached Suriname, Trinidad, Curaçao, Brazil and Haiti came from regions that during their youth stood under Sokoto influence or had been carried off by Sokoto-affiliated raids: not directly from Sokoto itself, since the great dhimma regions produced few Atlantic slaves, but from the edges, from Adamawa, from the Nupe-Yoruba border, from the Benue valley.

This must be said directly. The roots of the African presence in the Caribbean lie in part in the wars that were waged under this green flag, and the jihad that Maliki scholars described as righteous has, through many intermediate links and along many other types of perpetrators, also brought people into the holds of ships. This is no indictment of dan Fodio ﵀ personally: he condemned Atlantic slavery explicitly, and wrote that Muslims must never deliver their fellow believers to Christian buyers. It is, however, a fact that the economy that flourished under his political legacy was a slave-holding economy, and that the demographic pressure that the raids towards the south caused brought people into the hands of Atlantic buyers.

Lovejoy’s figure, that in the second half of the nineteenth century the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the two or three largest slave societies in the world, alongside the American South and Brazil, is a figure that demands historical maturity, holding the pride in the scholarship of dan Fodio ﵀ and the wound of what happened in his realm, both at once.

April 1817: The Shehu Dies

Usman dan Fodio ﵀ died on approximately 3 Jumada al-Thaniya 1232, the beginning of April 1817, in Sifawa, after his health had gradually worsened over the last two years. The Rauḍ al-Jinān of Gidado describes how in his final months he was barely able to write any longer, how Bello ﵀ and Nana Asma’u ﵀ sat at his bedside, and how he had the dhikr on his lips to the end.

He was buried in Sokoto, not in Sifawa, so that the founder of the empire was buried in the city he had had founded but where he had himself barely lived. His grave, the Hubbare, still lies today in the heart of Sokoto, a place of pilgrimage for Yan Shehu from all over northern Nigeria, Niger, northern Cameroon and Mali and, via the diaspora, from London, New York and Amsterdam. It is a simple grave in a whitewashed qubba, with a Qur’an reciter who reads through daily and with pilgrims who perform tahlil; no monument, but a resting place.

Bello ﵀ pledged the bay’a as second caliph, and the transition went smoothly, without Abbasid fratricide, without Umayyad putsch, and without doubt in Sokoto itself. But in Gwandu, Abdullahi ﵀ waited. He had not stood in Sokoto to witness his brother’s death; he had not come to the funeral in the first weeks. Only later in 1817 was the formal relationship between Sokoto and Gwandu restored, when Abdullahi ﵀ acknowledged Bello ﵀ as Amīr al-Muʾminīn and Bello ﵀ acknowledged the autonomy of Abdullahi ﵀ over the western domain. The brother-nephew situation, in which Abdullahi ﵀ was older than Bello ﵀ but Bello ﵀ was the son of the shehu and thus dynastically the principal heir, was resolved to the extent that each retained his own sphere. The scars remained.

The Greatest State of Africa

One thing remains to be established soberly before this chapter closes. By 1817, eight years after Sokoto had been sketched in the sand as a city, the caliphate covered approximately 400,000 square kilometres, larger than present-day Germany, and it counted thirteen great emirates and many smaller ones. It had a combined population that by mid-century would reach nine to ten million, more than any other sub-Saharan African state at that moment, and it had a written administration, codified jurisprudence, a federal constitution by accumulation of texts, a diplomatic position reaching to Istanbul and Cairo, and a library of which parts had been copied as far as Rabat, Fes and Medina.

Was it “the largest pre-colonial state of Africa”? That depends on what one measures, since in absolute area Songhai in the sixteenth century was larger, in duration the Ethiopian empire was older, and in military striking power the Mahdist state in Sudan and Shaka’s Zululand of their times were impressive. But in the combination of area, population, administrative literacy, economic complexity and legal institutionalisation, Sokoto in its nineteenth-century form stands alone, and that is what Last, Hiskett, Lovejoy, Bobboyi and contemporary historiography, Nigerian and Western, broadly confirm.

This, then, is also part of what nineteenth-century West Africa bequeathed: not only villages and rituals and stories, but a polity that in its time belonged to the largest in the world. That it went unmentioned in so many schools is a colonial blindness that must now be undone. That Bello ﵀ in 1824 spoke with Clapperton in Arabic about Napoleon, about British naval policy and about world trade routes is no exotic detail, but evidence of a political maturity that must come to be taken as much for granted as the maturity of the France of Louis XIV or the Ottoman Empire of Süleyman.

The Sultan Who Wrote

The shehu is buried, Bello ﵀ rules, Sokoto grows, and in the chancery the paperwork begins that for the next thirty years will hold the empire together. It is now up to Bello ﵀ to show what it means to convert a jihad movement into a functioning caliphate, and he will do it with his pen, with his ribats, with his hundred letters to emirs, and with a correspondence with al-Kanemi ﵀ that, as we will see, calls into question the theological foundation of the entire enterprise. He will do it as a statesman, as a historian, as a poet and, where it must be, as a field commander. The sultan who wrote.

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Sources

• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr, completed in 1812 (1227) as the official account of the jihad, with the list of the first emirs, as quoted in Last, pp. xxxi, 54, 208.
• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Tazyīn al-Waraqāt, the source for his departure from the army for Kano in 1807 and for his complaint about the worldliness of the community, as quoted in Last, pp. xxix, 65–66; Hiskett, p. 98.
• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām, the manual of government that gained authority throughout the caliphate and defines the task of the vizier, as quoted in Last, p. 47; Hiskett, p. 98; Sulaiman, p. 226; Adeleye, pp. 47–48.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr, with the purpose of Muslim government and the offices of vizier, judge, chief of police and tax collector, as quoted in Last, p. 57; Hiskett, pp. 106, 138.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra ʿalā al-ʿIbād, dated November 1806 and the principal work of the years after the jihad, as quoted in Last, p. 46; Hiskett, p. 119; Adeleye, p. 47.
• Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, the replies to Askia Muhammad, in 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, quoted by Bello ﵀ in the Infāq; on the debt of the Shehu ﵀ to al-Maghili ﵀ also Hiskett, p. 120.
• Hugh Clapperton, the journals of his stay in Sokoto in 1824 as the guest of Gidado ﵀, as quoted in Last, p. 153; Adeleye, p. 120; Boyd, p. 54.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xxix, xxxi, 39, 41–44, 46–47, 51, 53–54, 57–58, 60, 64–66, 148–149, 153, 208.
  • pp. 39, 41–44: Alkalawa not wholly destroyed and given an administrator the year after its fall; Sokoto as the headquarters of Bello ﵀ from the autumn of 1809, walled above the confluence of the Rima and the Sokoto; the move of the Shaykh ﵀ to Sifawa in 1809 or 1810; the division of 1812 (1227), with Abdullahi ﵀ still living at Bodinga, Gwandu becoming his seat only after the death of the Shaykh ﵀, both remaining viziers and Abdullahi ﵀ hoping for the caliphate; the west with the Niger valley down to Nupe and Dendi, later Ilorin and Liptako; the east with Zamfara, Katsina, Kano, Daura, Bauchi, Gombe, Katagum and East Bornu, plus Zaria, Hadejia and Adamawa; Masina declaring a caliphate of its own.
  • pp. 46–47, 51, 53–54, 57–58: the titles Amīr al-Muʾminīn and Khalīfa and the Bayān of November 1806; the argument from the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām with which Masina rejected the caliphate of Sokoto; the cattle tax jangali officially called zakat or jizya; the flags with which leaders were sent home and which made them nuwwab or emirs, with Abdullahi ﵀ and Bello ﵀ as intermediaries; the list of 1812 by Bello ﵀ with Umar Dallaji, Sulaiman, Yaʿqub ﵀ and Buba Yero, and the fuller list of Gidado ﵀ with Musa, Dagimsa and Adama; the offices of the Kitāb al-Farq and the ban on royal titles; the eleven books and the Thursday nights at Sifawa.
  • pp. xxix, xxxi, 60, 64–66, 208: the Infāq dated 10 November 1812; the Shaykh ﵀ who moved to Sokoto around 1815 and died there on Sunday 20 April 1817, aged sixty-two, Sokoto being the chief place of pilgrimage; Abdullahi ﵀ who came from Bodinga and found the gates closed, and his treatise on the imamate; his seclusion since Kano 1807 and the friction with Bello ﵀; the smooth election of Bello ﵀; the death of Abdullahi ﵀ in 1829/1245.
  • pp. 148–149, 153: Abdullahi ﵀ as senior vizier in the Qur’anic sense of helper; Gidado dan Laima ﵀ as the first vizier under Bello ﵀ (1817–1842) and founder of the line; the robes Abdullahi ﵀ handed him after Kalembaina; Clapperton eight months in the care of Gidado ﵀.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 14, 98–100, 106, 110–111, 113, 119–120, 138–139, 141–143, 150.
  • pp. 98–100, 110–111, 113: the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām as a chief source of law; the flag-bearers Mallam Dendo in Nupe, Buba Yero in Gombe and Yakubu ﵀ in Bauchi, and Zaria, Hadejia and Adamawa under Fulani emirs; the division of 1812 with Gwandu as the seat of Abdullahi ﵀; the move of 1809 from Gwandu to Sifawa near the new city of Bello ﵀; six years at Sifawa until 1815, in which Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀ carried the routine business after 1812 and Gidado dan Laima ﵀ served as intermediary; the closed gates and the estrangement of almost a year.
  • pp. 106, 119–120, 138–139: the purpose of Muslim government in the Kitāb al-Farq and the Tabbat hakika of 1809 against bribery and the sale of offices; the Bayān as a work of the years after the jihad; the debt to al-Maghili ﵀; the vizier who wakes the ruler, the judge, the chief of police and the tax collector; Gidado ﵀ as vizier of Bello ﵀ after Abdullahi ﵀ as vizier during the jihad; the chief judge Abubakar Ladan ﵀ at Sifawa.
  • pp. 14, 141–143, 150: the emirs’ yearly tribute from taxes and booty, in effect the profits of slave raiding; the Hausa titles such as Galadima that survived; zakat, kharaj and jizya on the classical model and the jangali that lived on under another name; the move of 1815 to Sabon Gari outside the walls of Sokoto, the death on 20 April 1817 and the burial in Sokoto; the British conquest of 1903.
• 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. 3, 25, 28, 30–31, 34, 36, 45–48, 57, 120.
  • pp. 3, 25, 28, 30–31, 34, 36: an area of some 250,000 square miles; Sokoto built by Bello ﵀ in 1809 and Wurno as a later second capital; the flags as tokens of authority; Hadejia under Bi-Abdur and then his brother Muhammad Sambo Digimsa; Gombe, Bauchi and Adamawa under Buba Yero, Yaʿqub ﵀ and Adam; the western emirates under Gwandu from 1812 and Mallam Dendo arriving in Nupe about 1810; Ilorin with Afonja, Alimi ﵀ and, after his death around 1823, his son Abd al-Salam with a flag from Gwandu.
  • pp. 45–48, 57, 120: the retention of titles such as Galadima; Suleiman as emir of Kano and the first emirs who knew the Shaykh ﵀ personally; the Ḍiyāʾ as a constitutional digest; the division of about 1812, the vizier as the link with the emirates and the homage of Abdullahi ﵀ to Bello ﵀ after an initial quarrel; Ibrahim Dabo in Kano around 1819; Clapperton received in Sokoto in 1824, with the commercial agreement and the letter of Bello ﵀ to George IV.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 226, 244, 277, 282: Bello ﵀ in command at Alkalawa and the Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥukkām as the manual of government of the whole caliphate; the division between the two viziers and the Shehu ﵀ teaching and writing at Sifawa; the death on 20 April 1817 after thirteen years of caliphate; Asma’u ﵀ as teacher and political voice.
• Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet and Islamic Leader, Frank Cass, London 1989, pp. 25, 27, 29–30, 54: the ribat of Sokoto that Bello ﵀ built in 1809 with the captives of Alkalawa and the division as Asma’u ﵀ described it; the writing years at Sifawa; the move to Sokoto in 1815 and the death in the night of 21 April 1817 according to Asma’u ﵀; Clapperton as the guest of Gidado ﵀ in 1824 and Bello ﵀ at forty-four.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 30, 53–55: Bello ﵀ releasing Muslim prisoners; the caliphate that lasted a hundred years; the survivors of the jihad who ended in Brazil, Trinidad and Cuba; Ilorin under the caliph of Sokoto and the prisoners of war deported to the Americas, with Bahia absorbing some eight thousand Africans a year.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, p. 345: the plantations of the caliphate of Sokoto with slaves settled in villages of their own.