The Saber and the Rosary: The Jihad of Umar Tall ﵀ and the Rending of the Tariqas

Between 1852 and 1864, a Toucouleur scholar with a Tijani wird in his memory and rifles from Saint-Louis in his baggage marches across West Africa. He conquers Bambara cities and Muslim cities alike, he kills as many coreligionists as he does pagans, and he dies in a cave beneath a mountain. His name is Umar Tall ﵀, and his legacy divides the West African ummah to this day.

A Boy from Futa Toro

His beginning lies in Futa Toro, along the middle course of the Senegal River, in present-day northern Senegal, somewhere around 1794 or 1797, since the sources differ. The village is Halwar, near the city of Podor, and the people are Toucouleur, or Tukulor as the French sources will call them: a Fulani-speaking group strongly Islamic-literate, with generations of clerics in nearly every family. In Futa Toro an Islamic imamat had ruled since 1776, founded by Sulayman Bal in the first of the West African jihads of the modern era, before Usman dan Fodio ﵀ in Sokoto and before Seku Amadu ﵀ in Massina.

The boy we know today as Umar was born as Umar ibn Said ibn Usman, son of Saidu Tall, a Fulani cleric of average but respectable reputation. He was the seventh or eighth child, a latecomer, small of stature, but according to tradition extraordinarily quick at learning, so that by the age of fourteen he had completed the Qur’an and by the age of twenty he traveled through Futa Jallon and Futa Bundu to study fiqh and tafsir under the great clerics of the upper Senegal.

And around 1825 he begins the journey that will fundamentally change him: the Hajj. But his Hajj is not one journey; it is a five-year odyssey that takes him through Sokoto, through Bornu, through Egypt, to the Hijaz, and that, on his return, will have made him a different man.

The Long Road to Mecca

The route of Umar Tall to Mecca between 1825 and 1830 is documented only fragmentarily in the Rimāh Hizb al-Rahīm, his own later handbook of the Tijaniyya, but from his correspondence and from hagiographic sources of his followers we can report the main points.

First comes Futa Jallon, where he studies further under the Fulbe ulama of Timbo and Labé, and then the road runs eastward through the savanna of present-day Burkina Faso to the Hausa city-states. In Sokoto, the capital of the caliphate that Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had founded twenty years earlier, he stays for several years; he meets there Muhammadu Bello ﵀, the second amir al-mu’minin of Sokoto, and is received with great honor. A marriage is arranged, since Umar Tall ﵀ marries a daughter of Bello ﵀, by which he forms not only spiritual but also genealogical ties with the Sokoto Caliphate.

From Sokoto he travels further eastward through Bornu and the Lake Chad basin to the upper Nile valley, and via Nubia he reaches Egypt. In Cairo he visits the great mosques and libraries, and though he does not study at al-Azhar he admires the scholars there, after which he performs the Hajj, sometime in the years 1828 or 1829.

The crucial moment of the journey takes place in Medina. There, already initiated into the Tijaniyya tariqa in West Africa, he becomes the disciple of Muhammad al-Ghali al-Fasi ﵀, a Maghrebi shaykh then residing in Medina as representative of the silsila of Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀. The Tijaniyya was then a relatively young Sufi order, founded around 1782 by al-Tijani ﵀ (died 1815) in the Algerian Sahara and later led from Fez, with three core practices: the wird (daily prayer litany with specific adhkar), the wazifa (group recitation), and the hadra al-jum’a (Friday Tijani gathering). Its most distinctive doctrine was that Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ claimed to have received instruction directly from the Prophet ﷺ in waking state, and that his wird had been authorized by the Prophet ﷺ himself, which made the Tijaniyya, in the eyes of its followers, hierarchically superior to all earlier tariqas, including the centuries-old Qadiriyya which had dominated in West Africa since the fourteenth century.

Al-Ghali ﵀ appointed Umar Tall ﵀ as khalifa of the Tijaniyya for bilad al-sudan, the entire Black African domain. This was no ceremonial function, since it meant that Umar Tall ﵀ was the highest Tijani authority for West Africa and that he had the right to initiate others, to found zaouias, to declare jihad on behalf of the tariqa.

This is a crucial moment, because the Tijani khalifa title would be for Umar Tall ﵀ not only a spiritual position but the legitimation of everything he would later do.

Back via Sokoto, and the Founding of Dinguiraye

Around 1830 Umar Tall ﵀ leaves Mecca for the journey back to West Africa. The return route again passes through Sokoto, where he stays for an extended time, according to some sources seven years. In this period (1830-1837) he writes his most important theoretical work, the Rimāh Hizb al-Rahīm 'ala Nuhur Hizb al-Rajim, “The Lances of the Army of the Merciful upon the Throats of the Army of the Cursed”. The title is not subtle.

The Rimāh is a Tijani handbook in two parts. The first part treats the practice of the wird, the Tijani dhikr and the spiritual hierarchy of the tariqa, while the second part, and this is where it becomes controversial, is largely a defense of the superiority of the Tijaniyya over the Qadiriyya. Umar Tall ﵀ argues, with quotations from the Jawahir al-Ma’ani of al-Tijani ﵀, that whoever has once received the Tijani wird may not return to another tariqa; that the spiritual rank of a Tijani initiate is higher than that of a Qadiri initiate even when the latter has a thousand times more study; and that the mediation of al-Tijani ﵀ between the Muslim and the Prophet ﷺ is more direct than any other shaykh can offer.

For Qadiri ulama, and the great Kunta clan of the western Sahara, the spiritual heirs of the Qadiriyya in West Africa, were Qadiri by background, these claims were unswallowable. They saw in the Rimāh not a spiritual handbook but a program of religious usurpation. Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀ of Timbuktu would later write that the Rimāh of Umar Tall ﵀ “was the first stone that struck at the old solidarity of the West African ummah.”

This is no exaggeration, since the Tijani-Qadiri tension that Umar Tall ﵀ activated exists in West Africa to this day: no longer violent, but firm, and in Senegal, in Mali and in northern Nigeria it shows in the architecture of mosques, in the networks of zaouias and in the genealogies of the shaykhs. Umar Tall ﵀ was the man who sharpened the point of contention.

Around 1837 he leaves Sokoto, travels westward, back to his own world, and settles first in Futa Jallon, where around 1840 in Jegunko he founds a Tijani zaouia and begins to initiate disciples on a large scale. His reputation as shaykh, the Tijani khalifa, the man who had given bay’a under al-Ghali ﵀ in Medina, the son-in-law of Bello ﵀, the author of the Rimāh, turns his center into a place of pilgrimage.

In 1848 he moves to a new location, strategically chosen: Dinguiraye, at approximately 11.3° north and 10.72° west, in the highlands of present-day northeastern Guinea. Dinguiraye is built as fortress, as educational center and as recruiting base, and by 1850 Umar Tall ﵀ has here a community of several thousand followers, Fulani, Toucouleur, Soninke and Mandinka, actively trained in arms. And in 1852 he declares the jihad.

The Military Innovation: Rifles from Saint-Louis

Before we describe the campaigns, we must emphasize one dimension of the warfare of Umar Tall ﵀, because it explains his successes. Umar Tall ﵀ waged his jihad with firearms, in great numbers, and he obtained those firearms, via intermediaries, from French trading posts on the Senegal River.

Saint-Louis, the French fort at the mouth of the Senegal, was in quiet expansion in the 1850s. French traders sold rifles at good prices, primarily fusils de traite, simple muzzle-loading rifles, to interior rulers and to clerical-military leaders such as Umar Tall ﵀. The colonial authorities knew this and tolerated it, since some of them saw the jihad of Umar Tall ﵀ against the Bambara of Ségou as geopolitically advantageous, as it would weaken their Bambara rival.

This is an uncomfortable truth. In his own writings Umar Tall ﵀ presents his jihad as a pure struggle for Islam, but the logistical fact is that his crucial weapons supply came to him via French merchants. He was, whether he wanted to be or not, embedded in a pre-colonial economic system in which French traders could bet on the profit margin of his campaigns. When Louis Faidherbe became governor of Senegal in 1854 and began to pursue a harder anti-Umar course, this would change, but the first campaigns (1852-1855) were made possible in part by French rifles.

The combination was new in this region. Cannons or cavalry alone had shaped the Sahel, but a coordinated jihad movement with thousands of rifles, tightly organized in religious terms, was a military formula to which Bambara faamas and Fulani ardos had no answer.

First Campaign: Tamba and Kaarta, 1852-1855

The jihad begins in September 1852 with an attack on the Bambara villages of Tamba, south of Dinguiraye. These are non-Muslim communities, so that the campaign fits classically within the jihad framework, and Tamba falls quickly.

Then Umar Tall ﵀ turns northwest, against Kaarta, the smaller of the two Bambara states. The Kaarta faamas, the Massassi-Coulibalys, do not have the military capacity to field firearms on the same scale, and in four years (1855-1859) Umar Tall ﵀ conquers all of Kaarta. The capital Nioro falls in 1855, the faama is killed, and the population is forced to convert or flee. Whoever converted became Muslim “under the sword”, so that in one generation a predominantly non-Muslim region became predominantly Toucouleur-led Muslim.

Up to this point the story is relatively straightforward: a jihad against a non-Muslim Bambara state, with forced conversion as a result, uncomfortable by twenty-first-century standards but defensible within the classical Islamic juristic frameworks of the time. It becomes more complicated from 1860 onward.

The Fall of Ségou, 1861: A Bambara State Falls

In March 1861 the army of Umar Tall ﵀ reaches Ségou-Koro, the capital of the great Bambara state of which Biton Coulibaly had once been the founder. The Bambara faama Ali Diara tries to organize one last resistance, but the battle of Woyowayanko in February 1861 destroys his army, and on 10 March 1861 Ségou-Koro capitulates. Umar Tall ﵀ has the bolis and the traditional religious objects of the Bambara state collected, hundreds of altar figures, power objects and komo masks, and symbolically burned in a great pyre before the mosque.

Ségou is Islamized, or more precisely: the Bambara elites who did not convert were replaced. Much of the Mandé population fled southward, and the Bambara language and culture continued to exist locally and would later resurface, but as a state form Ségou as a Bambara kingdom is over with the fall of 1861.

Up to this point the jihad of Umar Tall ﵀ is conceptually coherent: he has overthrown two great non-Muslim states and imposed Islam, so that a classical Maliki jurist could still defend him. What follows shook that legal basis.

The Invasion of Massina, 1862: Muslim against Muslim

In the spring of 1862 Umar Tall ﵀ turns his army northeastward, with Hamdullahi as his target, the caliphate of Amadu Amadu, grandson of Seku Amadu ﵀.

Hamdullahi was an Islamic state, built on jihad foundations, with a sharia regime, Qur’an schools and a majlis of forty scholars, and it was one of the most intentionally-Islamic polities of nineteenth-century Africa.

The justification of Umar Tall ﵀ for the attack on Hamdullahi was twofold. First, Amadu Amadu had, according to the reading of Umar Tall ﵀, given aid to the fleeing Bambara of Ségou, in particular by offering asylum to the fleeing Ségou faama Ali Diara, which made him, in the eyes of Umar Tall ﵀, a nasir al-kafirin, a helper of unbelievers, and thus himself worthy of jihad status. Second, and more broadly, Umar Tall ﵀ regarded the Qadiriyya orientation of the Hamdullahi ulama, their alliance with the Kunta and their bond with al-Bakkai ﵀ in Timbuktu, as a spiritual shortcoming correctable under Tijani leadership.

Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀ responded from Timbuktu with one of the most powerful fatwas of nineteenth-century West African history. He declared the attack of Umar Tall ﵀ on Hamdullahi haram, declared Umar Tall ﵀ himself baghi, a rebel waging war beyond the limits of the sharia, and called upon all Muslims of the Sahel to resist him. He wrote to Umar Tall ﵀ personally, in letters preserved partly in Arabic, partly in Fulfulde:

Umar Tall ﵀ replied, according to copies preserved in the Ségou archives, with a justification on the basis of Maliki fiqh: Amadu Amadu had disqualified himself as amir al-mu’minin through his support for the Bambara, so Hamdullahi was no longer a legitimate Islamic state, so attacking it was not Muslim-on-Muslim fitna.

This was juristically stretching to the limit. The siege and fall of Hamdullahi in May 1862, with the killing of Amadu Amadu, the plundering of the majlis archives and the burning of the library of Seku Amadu ﵀, were the realization of that stretching. Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀ called it, without exaggeration, “the blackest hour in five centuries of Sahel Islam.”

Here we must pause, since the jihad of Umar Tall ﵀ had now destroyed more Islamic cities than non-Islamic ones. Hamdullahi was more Islamic than Sokoto, driven by the same jihad tradition, and the only reason to wage war against it was tariqa politics and succession politics dressed up as juristic correction. Whether this is accepted as Islamically legitimate depends on which jurist one follows: the Kunta ulama and their Qadiri heirs to this day say no, the Tijani line that Umar Tall ﵀ built up usually says yes, but with growing discomfort, and modern West African Islamic historiography, increasingly, answers with open criticism of both sides.

The Fall of Umar Tall: Bandiagara, 1864

The occupation of Hamdullahi could not be sustained by Umar Tall ﵀. The Fulani population of Massina rose in revolt under the leadership of Bâ Lobbo, a cousin of Amadu Amadu, while al-Bakkai ﵀ provided fatwas and network support. In 1863 al-Bakkai ﵀ formed a formal alliance between Massina insurgents, Kunta troops from the Azawad and remaining Ségou Bambara, and Umar Tall ﵀ was driven back.

In the spring of 1864 the alliance besieged Umar Tall ﵀ himself in the Dogon cliffs near Bandiagara, in a stronghold called Déguembéré (also Degembere). In a cave in that cliff Umar Tall ﵀ took shelter with a small bodyguard, and then, on a day in February or March 1864, the precise date being 12 February according to some sources and 4 March according to others, a munitions store in the cave exploded. An accident, or a sabotage; the sources differ. Umar Tall ﵀ was killed, his body was never recovered, and the explosion had partially collapsed the cave.

So died the great jihad leader, in a cave beneath a mountain rather than in a glorious battle or in visible victory, by a flame he probably had not foreseen himself.

His son Ahmadu Sékou inherited the position of khalifa, settled in Ségou, and held the remaining Toucouleur state together for thirty years, until the French under Louis Archinard would eventually drive him out in 1893. But that belongs to the next phase of the story, the French conquest.

Two Heads, One Lesson

The connection between Seku Amadu ﵀ and Umar Tall ﵀ deserves attention here. Both were Fulani clerics, both declared jihad against non-Muslim states, and both built Islamic shariʿa regimes. Both died at a riper age, Seku Amadu ﵀ naturally in his bed in Hamdullahi and Umar Tall ﵀ in a cave by an explosion, and both left behind a state that would end within a generation.

And both felt that the other did not go far enough.

Seku Amadu ﵀ felt that the Kunta ulama of Timbuktu were too lax, and Umar Tall ﵀ felt that Hamdullahi itself was too lax, since each subsequent jihad leader found the previous one insufficiently pure. This is, sociologically, a classical dynamic: when a religious-political movement is defined by purity, every next generation must prove itself more pure than the previous one, and the endpoint of that dynamic is continual fragmentation rather than rest, until an external force comes that overcomes everyone at once.

That external force, French and British colonial expansion, sits already on the horizon at this moment. While Umar Tall ﵀ besieges Hamdullahi in 1862, Louis Faidherbe in Saint-Louis is already taking the first steps for the French advance inland, and while Ahmadu Sékou tries to consolidate his father’s empire in Ségou, in London the contours of what would become the Royal Niger Company are already being sketched. The next chapter is not a Muslim-against-Muslim jihad but the colonial hammer that will crush them both.

The Rimāh as Source and as Burden

One book we must hold for one more moment, because it is the primary source from the hand of Umar Tall ﵀ himself that has come down to us: the Rimāh Hizb al-Rahīm. Written in Sokoto in the 1830s, later copied and disseminated in Tijani zaouias, it is read to this day in Tijani circles in Senegal, Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, and the modern translation by John Ralph Willis (1989) has made the work accessible to outsiders.

Whoever reads the Rimāh discovers a dual character. The spiritual chapters are penetrating, sometimes lyrical, on the necessity of nearness to Allah ﷻ, on the role of the shaykh as mirror, on the danger of spiritual self-intoxication, and whoever reads the work as Sufi text finds valuable passages. The polemical chapters, the Tijani supremacy claims and the harsh words against the Qadiriyya, are sharper than we today find comfortable, but it is precisely in that tension that the figure of Umar Tall ﵀ lies: a true Sufi teacher and a sectarian tariqa guardian at the same time.

This is a reminder that a person is not one thing. Umar Tall ﵀ was a scholar, about which there is no doubt, and he was a Sufi, about which there is just as little. He waged a jihad that according to many in his own time and in the present day exceeded what justice allowed, and that too is true. Whoever canonizes him as hero or condemns him as fanatic misses the duality, since the Islamic tradition has room for critical veneration, and the ulama have for centuries acknowledged that even great masters made mistakes. Umar Tall ﵀ deserves that critical veneration: as a man of great knowledge, of sincere spirituality, and of political decisions that cost many Muslim lives without uniting the umma as he had hoped.

This can be said without undermining Islam itself. On the contrary, precisely an honest engagement with its history strengthens it, since a tradition that can discuss the men of its past with both respect and criticism is a tradition that lives, while a tradition that knows only saints stiffens.

The Ummah Divided After 1864

West African Islam, after the death of Umar Tall ﵀ in 1864, is more deeply divided than it had been in five hundred years. The Qadiri line, concentrated around the Kunta and later around the heirs of Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀, holds Timbuktu, parts of Mauritania, Niger and the old Jakhanke regions in Senegambia. The Tijani line, via Umar Tall ﵀ and his sons and via independent Senegalese shaykhs such as Malik Sy ﵀ and later Amadou Bamba ﵀ (who in turn makes it his own), wins Senegal, parts of Mali and the Hausa middle class of northern Nigeria. Other tariqas, the Shadhiliyya, the Sammaniyya and later the Mouridiyya of Bamba ﵀, gain their influence locally.

But while these religious-organizational lines consolidate themselves, the states that could have protected them are breaking away. The Toucouleur empire of Ahmadu Sékou is weak, Sokoto is internally divided, Massina, occupied and re-liberated, is a shadow, and the Hausa city-states function but await a blow. The Samori Touré state in the south, a Muslim community that is not treated separately here but which also exists, will resist the French army for eight years in the 1890s before falling.

And then come the French from the west and the British from the south, simultaneously, with trains, telegraphs and Maxim machine guns, and with them the final act begins.

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Sources

• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Rimah hizb al-rahim ʿala nuhur hizb al-rajim, dated 1261/1845 in the list of manuscripts and printed in Cairo in 1345 AH, as recorded in Last, p. 253; the passage from which the Tijanis inferred that Bello ﵀ adhered to their order, as discussed in Last, p. 216.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Bayan ma waqaʿa, his justification of the war against Ahmad ibn Ahmad of Masina, in which he turns the arguments of al-Maghili ﵀ against his adversary, as discussed in Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 47.
• ʿAli Harazim ﵀, Jawahir al-maʿani, the foundational work of the Tijaniyya on Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀, which the vizier Gidado read to Bello ﵀ and which Bello ﵀ quoted in 1836, as discussed in Last, pp. 209, 216.
• John Ralph Willis, the work on Umar Tall ﵀ named in the article (1989); his doctoral thesis on the doctrinal basis of Umar’s movement (London 1970) is cited in Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 116, with the dates circa 1794–1864.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xl–xli, 46, 209, 216, 218, 253.
  • pp. xl–xli: Umar ﵀ who, after Mecca and Medina, where he stayed in April 1829 and was appointed muqaddam of the Tijaniyya for the western Sudan, remained in Sokoto for some eight years (1830–1838); his marriage to Mariam, daughter of Bello ﵀; his son Ahmad, born in Sokoto around 1833, later governor of Segu and Amir al-muʾminin; the death of Umar ﵀ in 1864, which was concealed.
  • pp. 209, 216, 218: the Jawahir al-maʿani at the court of Bello ﵀; the Tijani claim that Bello ﵀ was a Tijani, based on the Rimah and refuted by the viziers; the letter of Umar ﵀ on visiting the tomb of the Shaykh ﵀, an issue at Sokoto in April 1836.
  • pp. 46, 253: the title Imam in Futa Toro and Futa Jallon, later also used by Samori alongside Amir al-muʾminin; the Rimah with the date 1261 and the Cairo printing of 1345 AH.
• 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, pp. 47, 116.
  • pp. 47, 116: al-Hajj Umar ﵀ using the arguments of al-Maghili ﵀ in defence of his own conquests and turning the reasoning of Ahmad III of Masina against him; Willis on al-Hajj Umar al-Futi ﵀ (circa 1794–1864).
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, p. 62: the Tijaniyya, named after its founder Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀, who started it around 1780 and which reached Hausaland during the lifetime of the Shehu ﵀; the Qadiriyya, founded in the twelfth century by ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 46–47: Futa Toro as the land of the Muslim Tukulor and Fulani; Sulayman Bal and ʿAbd al-Qadir Kane who established the independent theocracy of Futa Toro in 1776.
• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, pp. 168–169, 176–177.
  • pp. 168–169, 176–177: Sulayman Bal at the head of the torodbe movement and ʿAbd al-Qadir Kane as first almamy after Bal’s death in 1776; Umar Tall ﵀, born in Futa Toro, killed in 1864 in an explosion of his own gunpowder after establishing a Tukulor empire over parts of Senegal, Guinea and Mali; Futa Toro under French control by 1891, in the essay by Sylviane A. Diouf.
• 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. 169–170: the overthrow of the Tukulor empire of Segu by the French, after which the Amir al-muʾminin Ahmad ibn Shaykh Umar ﵀ fled eastwards with a large party and settled near Say; his messengers reached Sokoto in 1894.
• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1985, ch. 2, n. 18: Umar ﵀ studying at Timbo in Futa Jallon with ʿAbd al-Karim ibn Ahmad al-Naqil ﵀ and taking the Tijaniyya affiliation from him before he set out on pilgrimage.