Hamdullahi: The Caliphate of Seventeen Years and Forty Scholars

In 1818 a lean Fulani cleric from the marshes of Massina raises his staff and declares the jihad, and he declares it not against a non-Muslim empire but against his own coreligionists. What happens in the next forty years is one of the most uncomfortable chapters of West African Islam.

A Man from the Marshes

The inner delta of the Niger in the early nineteenth century is an inland sea that during the rainy season grows to forty thousand square kilometers of waterland, with creeks, paddies of wild rice and sandbanks that disappear underwater in June and reappear in February. Across that water drift long wooden canoes, while on the higher mounds stand round clay houses with thatched roofs, and around those mounds walk the lean, long-horned Fulani cattle, which survive there only because their herders know each year exactly when the pastures will go underwater and when they will emerge again.

This is Massina. And in one of those small mound-villages, Malangal in the Fittouga district, around 1776 a boy is born who will later be called Ahmad ibn Muhammad Lobbo, and who will go down in history as Seku Amadu ﵀, shaykh Ahmad in Fulfulde corruption. His family is pastoral-Fulani, of the Barri clan, partially sedentarized in a land where the river grows around everything. His father dies young, and his mother raises him with emphasis on religious instruction, so that he learns Qur’an under local ulama in Fittouga and later fiqh under Fulani clerics in Djenné itself.

Djenné was at that time, as it had been for five centuries, an Islamic educational center: the great Djenné mosque was there, daily life revolved around madrasas and merchant families, and the Fulani ulama had built a long tradition there of religious instruction within a political context in which they exercised no political authority. Djenné, with its rich Muslim population, paid tribute to the Bambara of Ségou, the great non-Muslim raiding state, and each year Bambara inspectors rode in through the gates to collect their share, while the Djenné ulama paid, grumbled, wrote fatwas they discussed in their own circles, and went on.

Seku Amadu ﵀ did not go on.

The Break with the Kunta and with the Status Quo

By his thirties, Seku Amadu ﵀ has built a reputation as an uncomfortable voice. He has been admitted into the Qadiriyya tariqa by Kunta shaykhs who visit him from the desert, and he corresponds with Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti ﵀ and his sons, the great clerical authorities of the western Sahara, but he rejects the position which the Kunta, and with them the majority of West African ulama, take on the political question.

That position can be summarized as follows: the Fulani Muslims of Massina live under Bambara rule, which is admittedly non-Islamic but which grants them religious freedom, so that they can pray, fast, teach and trade. They pay tribute; that is unpleasant, but it is the price of peace. Jihad against Ségou would be an enormous war, would cost many Fulani lives, and would even in case of success result in uncertain outcomes, and so the conclusion ran: patience, keep studying, write books, teach children, maintain friendly relations with the Timbuktu Arma and with the Moorish caravan traders, and keep their heads down.

That is what the predecessors of Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀ in Timbuktu preached, what Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti ﵀ preached from the Azawad, and what the generation of ulama in Djenné itself believed: a pragmatism that stood in the tradition of al-Hajj Salim Suwari ﵀, the Jakhanke founder from the fifteenth century, even if they did not often cite him by name.

Seku Amadu ﵀ rejected this in increasing terms. He felt that the tribute payment to a non-Muslim raiding state was a form of dhul, of humiliation, that Allah ﷻ ought not to expect of Muslims, and he felt that the compromises which Djenné merchants made with Bambara authorities, from participation in Bambara markets where dolo was sold to providing military service to Bambara faamas when demanded and even marriages with non-Muslim families, were collective fisq, a normalization of moral decay. He felt, above all, that the Kunta shaykhs in Timbuktu allowed their own status as a wealthy trading family to take precedence over their responsibility as ulama to lead the community toward a just shariʿa government.

These were heavy accusations, and they were exchanged in correspondence preserved to this day, among the Fulfulde and Arabic manuscripts that the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu still holds. The reply of Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti ﵀ to Seku Amadu ﵀ from around 1815 contains the line:

Seku Amadu ﵀ was certain.

The Battle of Noukouma, 1818

The actual lead-up to the jihad began when Seku Amadu ﵀ sent a student, Ali Gouro, to teach in a neighboring village, whereupon the local Fulani ruler, Ardo Amadu Gourori, who paid tribute to Ségou, ordered Ali Gouro’s execution as a rebel. Seku Amadu ﵀ regarded this as casus belli, summoned his students, his family clans and the pastoralists of the Fittouga mounds, and in January 1818 assembled some thousand men, largely with spears rather than firearms, on a plain near Noukouma.

The Bambara sent a much larger army under the command of the Ségou faama Da Monson, with the support of Ardo Amadu Gourori, so that the battle of Noukouma on 21 March 1818 should by every rational expectation have been a bloodbath: the men of Seku Amadu ﵀, predominantly inexperienced and lightly armed, against seasoned Bambara cavalry.

It became the opposite, because the Bambara underestimated their opponents, attacked too early, ran into a marshy field where their horses got bogged down, and were dispersed in a counterattack. Da Monson lost, according to Tarikh al-Fattash manuscripts compiled under the later regime, several hundred horsemen, and Ardo Amadu Gourori was killed, while the losses on the side of Seku Amadu ﵀ were small. It looked, in the eyes of his followers, like a signum, a confirmation that Allah ﷻ favored their cause.

Within six months of Noukouma, Seku Amadu ﵀ controlled most of the inner delta. Djenné fell without siege, since the city’s population opened the gates, glad to be rid of the Bambara tribute, and Mopti, Tenenkou and Dia chose his side one by one, so that by 1820 Massina was effectively an autonomous Islamic state.

And Seku Amadu ﵀ did something none of the earlier West African Muslim rulers had done: he refused to live in Djenné.

A City by Decree

Djenné, he said, was contaminated by too much trade, too much music, too many old customs and too many contacts with the non-Muslim Bambara hinterland. He wanted a new capital, built from the ground up, in a place that belonged only to the new state, and he wanted to name it such that its name itself would be a prayer: Hamdullahi, “Praise to Allah ﷻ.”

He chose a location at approximately 14.16° north, 4.54° west, a slightly elevated plain on the southeastern edge of the inner delta, about twenty kilometers southeast of Mopti, at safe distance from Djenné. In 1820 construction began, and what rose there was a city that was dictated rather than one that grew organically.

Whoever visited Hamdullahi in its prime, as some French travelers did later in the 1850s, described a square city with straight streets, walls of rammed clay, four main gates on the cardinal directions, a great central mosque, a palace for the amir al-mu’minin deliberately kept simple, and around the walls neatly ordered quarters for ulama, craftsmen and administrators. Markets in which dolo was sold, music in the streets, women outside without covering, tobacco, public indecency: none of these had a place there.

The city was a physical manifestation of an administrative philosophy, since Seku Amadu ﵀ wanted no compromise with the old Sahel pattern of religious-ethnic plurality but a pure Muslim society under strict shariʿa rule, and if existing cities failed to deliver what he sought, he would build a new one.

The Council of Forty

The institutional innovation of Hamdullahi was the majlis, the council of forty scholars. This was not a classical shura in the sense of loose advisory to a ruler but a formal organ of state with legislative, judicial and executive powers, in which forty ulama, chosen from all regions of the new realm and with varying specializations in fiqh, tafsir, kalam and adab, met regularly under the chairmanship of Seku Amadu ﵀ himself.

The majlis decided on new legislation, rendered judgment in important cases, controlled the state treasury and appointed Qadis for the regions, and, perhaps most remarkable of all, it could call the amir al-mu’minin himself to account. Several surviving majlis documents from the 1830s show that Seku Amadu ﵀ was regularly questioned about his own decisions, about gifts he received and about the handling of conquest spoils, and according to tradition he said more than once:

This was, within Islamic governance history, a fairly exceptional institutional form, since nowhere earlier in West Africa, whether in Mali, in Songhai, in Kano under Rumfa or in Sokoto under dan Fodio, had an amir al-mu’minin formally placed himself under a collective of forty scholars. Modern historians such as Amadou Hampaté Bâ, himself a Fulani Muslim and very sympathetic to the legacy of Seku Amadu ﵀, and more recently Amir Syed and Andrea Brigaglia, have described the majlis of Hamdullahi as “the most consultative Islamic state form of nineteenth-century West Africa”, or even as “an embryonic republican element in a monarchical form”.

That admiration is not unwarranted, but it must be balanced with what the majlis actually carried out.

Strict Application: What That Meant in Practice

The Hamdullahi state implemented shariʿa, in the Maliki reading, in a manner strict even by nineteenth-century Maghrebi standards, and it pays to be concrete.

Tobacco and chewing tobacco were forbidden, with corporal punishment for traders who continued to sell, and music, both instrument and song outside of religious context, was forbidden as well. Griot traditions, in which Mandé and Fulani societies passed down their genealogies and their poetry, were suppressed, so that griots had either to restrict themselves to religious praise songs or to abandon their office, and that was, in a society in which griots were the living library, a cultural rupture of great significance.

Women had to cover themselves in public, with strict interpretation of hijab, which was, for Fulani women, who had a tradition of facial painting, jewelry and open conduct in the marketplace, an intrusive change, and for Soninke and Mandinka women within the Hamdullahi borders even more intrusive. The majlis sent its own muhtasibs, market inspectors, through the streets to monitor clothing.

Alcohol, primarily dolo, sorghum beer, which the Bambara population in the border areas continued to brew, was forbidden, and lordships that refused to consent to the ban could be treated as murtaddun, while villages that refused to accept Islam, usually mixed Bobo or Soninke villages with an older pre-Islamic layer, were dealt with militarily. Not every campaign was a “jihad against non-Muslims”, since many of the internal campaigns were against villages whose inhabitants called themselves Muslim but whose practices were judged insufficiently pure by Hamdullahi ulama.

Some of those campaigns led to enslavements, and this must be honestly said: Hamdullahi too had a slavery economy. The state, like Ségou around the corner, made use of slaves captured in campaigns for agricultural labor on state estates, for household service, and incidentally for sale. The difference with the Bambara raiding state was not that Hamdullahi abstained from taking slaves, but that Hamdullahi laid out legal frameworks for who could be taken as slave: non-Muslims and murtaddun could be taken, free Muslims could not, and in practice the line of course lay in the interpretation of who qualified as murtadd, which was a political decision.

The Great Correspondence: Hamdullahi versus Timbuktu

Hamdullahi had from the beginning an ideological opponent in Timbuktu, where the Kunta shaykhs had established their intellectual authority and where, from 1847 onward, Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀ acted as head of the Qadiriyya zaouia of Timbuktu. Al-Bakkai ﵀ (c. 1803-1865) was a brilliant jurist, a profound Sufi and a man of unyielding courage, and it was he who in 1853-1854 protected the German traveler Heinrich Barth in Timbuktu against assassination attempts, purely on the basis of the duty of hospitality, even against the will of the local Arma commanders.

Al-Bakkai ﵀ and Seku Amadu ﵀ wrote to each other for twenty years, and the letters are partly preserved, partly via secondary copies in private collections. Their content was a continuous juristic and spiritual contest over the question of who was the rightful amir al-mu’minin of West Africa, since al-Bakkai ﵀ did not recognize that Seku Amadu ﵀ was entitled to that title. Seku Amadu ﵀ in turn denied that the Kunta, as a trading family without political responsibility, had the right to judge his jihad.

In one of the most famous letters al-Bakkai ﵀ writes, and Seku Amadu ﵀ replies, according to manuscripts preserved in Boutilimit:

This is no petty quarrel between rival persons but the fundamental question of Islamic political theology in West Africa: who has the right to wage war in the name of religion, and what is the responsibility of an ulama class that chooses silence over action? Both men, al-Bakkai ﵀ and Seku Amadu ﵀, had valid arguments, and neither could convince the other, so that when Umar Tall ﵀ appeared from the west on the horizon, it was precisely this disunity that would weaken them both.

The Tarikh al-Fattash and the Construction of Legitimacy

A side branch we must touch upon, because it has recently received much academic attention, is the text Tarikh al-Fattash, a chronicle traditionally attributed to Mahmud Kati, a sixteenth-century Timbuktu scholar, and considered one of the two great primary sources of West African Islam, alongside the Tarikh al-Sudan.

Modern research, particularly the work of Mauro Nobili (Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith, 2020) and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, has made it plausible that the version of the Tarikh al-Fattash which has come down to us was largely edited in the Hamdullahi period, and indeed by Nuh al-Tahir, a cleric in the service of the court of Seku Amadu ﵀. Nobili argues that certain passages, in particular a prophecy in which the coming of a twelfth caliph from Massina is foretold, were added afterwards to give the rule of Seku Amadu ﵀ the aura of an old fulfillment, already foretold by the great sixteenth-century ulama.

This was, if the modern reading is correct, a careful act of historical construction, since the Hamdullahi state needed legitimacy that went further than military victory and needed a text that could say: “We are not beginning something new here; we are completing something long since announced.” The old Tarikh was rewritten, supplemented, equipped at strategic points with prophecies, and presented as the authentic chronicle, and that is, in the Islamic historiography of pre-modern states, not unique, but it is a warning for modern readers, because the “primary sources” we use are sometimes already pamphlets of the regime we are trying to study.

We discuss this not to unmask Hamdullahi but because honest history must also name the formation of historical narratives. Nobili’s and Mathee’s research is not hostile to Seku Amadu ﵀; they merely show how his dynasty had a library strategy alongside its military strategy.

The Death of Seku Amadu, the Succession, and the Weakness That Followed

Seku Amadu ﵀ died in 1845, after a reign of twenty-seven years, and his son Ahmad ibn Amadu succeeded him, rewarded with the throne but also with a legacy of internal unrest, external tensions and an unresolved power struggle with Timbuktu. Ahmad ibn Amadu would reign until 1853, and thereafter his son, Amadu Amadu (Ahmad ibn Ahmad), as the third and last amir al-mu’minin of Hamdullahi.

The successions were not smooth, since the majlis that Seku Amadu ﵀ had so carefully built lost its sharpness under his successors, and the forty scholars became a more loyal, younger, more accommodating company. The strict law remained on the books but was applied with more tact, certainly in the great cities, so that tobacco reappeared on some markets and the griots came back hesitantly.

This is a familiar pattern, in which a founder builds a system held together only by his personal authority, while his successors inherit the system but not that authority, so that they become milder, out of weakness rather than wisdom. By 1860 Hamdullahi was institutionally still recognizable as the state Seku Amadu ﵀ had founded, but its internal cohesion was wearing thin.

And on the western horizon something was gathering that Hamdullahi would not survive.

The Invasion of Umar Tall and the Fall, 1862

Omar Saidou Tall, al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, was a Toucouleur Fulani from Futa Toro, Tijani khalifa, conqueror of Kaarta and Ségou, and from 1862 onward the unstoppable jihad leader whose life and conquests are told in detail elsewhere, so that here only what he did with Hamdullahi is recounted.

In March 1862, after the fall of Ségou, Umar Tall ﵀ turned against Hamdullahi, with the juristic justification that Amadu Amadu had, according to the reading of Umar Tall ﵀, helped the Bambara resisters of Ségou and had in doing so allied himself with non-Muslims against a lawful jihad. Hamdullahi thus became, in the eyes of Umar Tall ﵀, a depraved state that had fallen away from its own jihad roots.

Ahmad al-Bakkai ﵀ of Timbuktu, who had quarreled with Seku Amadu ﵀ for twenty years, now, ironically, took Hamdullahi’s side. Al-Bakkai ﵀ wrote blazing fatwas against Umar Tall ﵀, publicly declared him a heretic, and dispatched Arabic zaouia networks to organize the resistance against him, and his argument ran that Seku Amadu ﵀ may have made mistakes but that Hamdullahi was an Islamic polity, so that a Muslim amir al-mu’minin who attacks another Muslim amir al-mu’minin commits fitna, and fitna, said al-Bakkai ﵀ with appeal to the Qur’an, was worse than killing.

Umar Tall ﵀ was not to be persuaded, and in May 1862 he laid siege to Hamdullahi. The Fulani majlis, which had once been the institutional wonder of Islamic state form in West Africa, could no longer raise an army that could withstand his veterans, and Amadu Amadu fell in battle, a son of twenty, killed in the defense of his great-grandfather’s city. The city was taken and sacked, the mosque was desecrated by the assault, books were burned or stolen, and the majlis archives, forty years of consultative decision-making, were largely lost.

In 1864 Hamdullahi was retaken in a final uprising, but soon afterward put down again by Ahmadu Sékou, the son of Umar Tall ﵀, and the city was razed to the ground. What remains of it today is a mound with a few clay heaps and a memorial; the capital of the most consultative Islamic state of nineteenth-century West Africa no longer exists.

A Scar and a Monument

It is worth pausing on what happened here in forty years. A lean Fulani cleric from a marsh mound declared the jihad in 1818, defeated the Bambara against all expectations, built a pure-Islamic capital and ruled through forty scholars, and his state flourished for twenty-seven years, after which his sons and grandsons inherited a weakening version, until in 1862 everything was destroyed, not by unbelievers but by another Muslim jihad leader who felt that even Hamdullahi was not pure enough.

This is, as was said at the beginning, one of the most uncomfortable chapters of West African Islam, and it is uncomfortable because it tests a common tendency to frame jihad as unambiguously positive. Seku Amadu ﵀ waged jihad against the Bambara, against non-Muslims, and that fits within a classical Islamic justification, but he also waged jihad against Fulani villages and Djenné merchants and mixed Muslim communities he judged impure, and that is juristically much harder to justify, while he himself became, two generations later, the victim of a jihad waged on the same premise: “you as Muslim are not pure enough”.

What remains of Hamdullahi is not the city, which lies in ruins, but the juristic and institutional experiment: the majlis of forty, the attempt to apply shariʿa strictly in a pluriform Sahel society, and the confrontation with the limits of that strictness. Modern Fulani Muslims, in Mali, Senegal and Niger as well as in the diaspora, still often refer to Seku Amadu ﵀ as their intellectual forefather, and that is justified, but the critics within his own time, al-Bakkai ﵀, the Kunta shaykhs and the Jakhanke heirs of Suwari ﵀, also deserve a continuing hearing. The Islamic tradition is not monolithic, since it has always had internal voices of moderation and of purity, of peace and of arms, and Hamdullahi is a zone in which both voices spoke loudly at the same time and in which the voice of arms won, until it in turn was drowned out by a harder voice of arms.

Here lies the lesson. Admiration for the West African Islamic heritage may not be naive; it must also know the scars. Hamdullahi is a scar and a monument, both at once.

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Sources

• Tarikh al-Fattash, attributed to Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀, in the version reworked by Nuh ibn al-Tahir (manuscript C): the prophecy of the twelfth caliph from Masina and the claim of Seku Amadu ﵀ to the “twenty-four tribes”, as discussed in Gomez, pp. 177–178, 184, and in Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 45–46.
• 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.
• Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, “Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tarikh al-fattash”, History in Africa 42 (2015), and Mauro Nobili, Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith (2020): the attribution of manuscript C to Nuh ibn al-Tahir in the 1820s, as discussed in Gomez, p. 422.
• Amadou Hampaté Bâ and Jacques Daget, L’Empire peul du Macina (Paris 1955; The Hague 1962), the standard work behind the modern descriptions of Hamdullahi, as cited in Last, p. 44, and in Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 45.
• 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. 45–47.
  • pp. 45–46: the forged opening chapter of the Tarikh al-Fattash, circulated in the early nineteenth century to present Shaykh Ahmad Lobbo ﵀ of Masina as the twelfth “true caliph”; Nuh ibn al-Tahir, disciple of al-Mukhtar al-Kunti ﵀ and president of the Council of Forty, as its author; the prophecy attributed to al-Suyuti ﵀ of a caliph Ahmad from Sebera; the council that demanded the abolition of the servile status of the occupational castes and the Shaykh ﵀ who refused.
  • p. 47: 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.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 177–178, 184, 422.
  • pp. 177–178: manuscript C as a nineteenth-century forgery by Alfa Nuh ibn al-Tahir; Shehu Amadu Lobbo ﵀ (d. 1260/1845), ruler of Masina from his capital Hamdullahi, as the last of the twelve caliphs; the campaign to weave the prophecy into as many copies as possible and to destroy copies not so emended.
  • pp. 184, 422: the claim of Amadu Lobbo ﵀ to the twenty-four tribes; the research of Nobili and Mathee, which attributes manuscript C to Nuh ibn al-Tahir in the 1820s, and Gomez’s position that only manuscript C is forged.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), p. xxxi: Seku Ahmadu ﵀ as founder of the Islamic state of Hamdallahi in Masina, who revived the old claims to the Sorko as bondsmen; as late as 1873 “Zanj” were still being sold as slaves.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xli, 43–44, 47, 232.
  • pp. 43–44, 47: the Muslims of Masina who declared a caliphate of their own, with the dispute over allegiance to Sokoto lasting until about 1838; Shaykh Ahmad ﵀ who in his correspondence refused to acknowledge the caliphate of Sokoto and called himself Amir al-muʾminin, as the Masina documents also style him; later also Ahmad ibn ʿUmar at Segu.
  • pp. xli, 232: the death of al-Hajj Umar ﵀ in 1864, which was concealed, and his son Ahmad as governor of Segu from about 1862; the books of law and statecraft by the Shaykh ﵀, ʿAbdullahi ﵀ and Bello ﵀ that became the standard texts for the new caliphates of Masina and Segu.
• 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. 176–177: al-Hajj 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, in the essay by Sylviane A. Diouf.