Muslims around the world strive to imitate the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ every day, but few can truly claim to resemble the drama of his struggle for Islam, body and soul, against the combined forces of his entire society. In 1804, in what is today Nigeria, one such exception rose to the challenge, and like the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in medieval Arabia, would transform his world forever.
Shaykh Usman dan Fodio was a scholar, a saint, a warrior and a mujaddid (one who renews Islam), who in early 19 th century northern Nigeria established a vast empire known as the Sokoto Caliphate. Like the Prophet, the Shaykh (known in Nigeria as Shehu) was inspired with a divine mission to reform the religious practices of his society, preached tirelessly for years, was forced into exile for his message, and finally a military struggle.
As a young man, dan Fodio was distressed by the lax practice of Islam in early-modern Hausaland, a region today divided between Nigeria and Niger, and even the persecution Muslims faced from their ostensibly Muslim rulers. Muslims were forbidden from dressing according to the dictates of their faith, and conversion to Islam made a crime. Even for non-Muslims, the kings of the fractious cities of Hausaland levied agonizing taxes on their subjects, and brutalized their population in ways still recounted by Nigerians today.
Dan Fodio preached reform, a return to the true and full practice of Islam, for nearly thirty years, beginning while he was only a student. His message attracted a popular following, and concern from the Hausa kings. In 1804 the dam broke; the King of Gobir, Yunfa, attempted to assassinate dan Fodio with a flintlock pistol, which miraculously backfired in his own hand. Dan Fodio and his followers fled the cities, persecuted by an alliance of rulers determined to put down the Islamic revival. Against all odds, dan Fodio’s mass movement of Hausa peasants, dissident Islamic scholars, and Fulani Muslim nomads who had long suffered under the reigning system, built their new base in the city of Sokoto, fought a series of pitched battles against the combined armies of Gobir, Kano and Katsina, and finally triumphed over them all, building the largest state the region had ever seen.
The Sokoto Caliphate provoked a religious revival, and an explosion of Islamic literature in the country. Dan Fodio’s brother Muhammadu Bello, his son Abdullahi of Gwandu, and daughter Nana Asma’u, along with dan Fodio himself, are collectively known as the Fodiawa, a group of scholars and writers who collectively authored hundreds of works in Islamic law, theology, history, political theory, Sufism and poetry.
Society changed dramatically under the Caliphate. Where Islamic practice had previously been lax, the shari’a was now stringently observed. The state, although previously ruled by Muslim kings, was now explicitly legitimated by its implementation of Islamic law. The deposed pre-jihad Hausa nobility was replaced with a new Fulani aristocracy, who maintain their titles and leading roles in Nigerian politics today.
The unification of Hausaland, plus the vast new emirates of Ilorin and Adamawa, provided the basis for major economic expansion, attracting more foreigners to settle in Hausaland than ever before.
In the Caliphate period, the Tijani Sufi order also spread in the region, in competition with the Qadiri order followed by dan Fodio and the whole Sokoto leadership.
The 19th century also provides interesting accounts of travelers to and from the Sokoto Caliphate. Western explorers penetrated the country on trade and scientific expeditions, most notably the German Heinrich Barth. Barth is a remarkable exception from most explorers of the period in that he does not look down on the people whose lands he explores as inferior. His book, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, names and describes the personality and views of individual African Muslims whom Barth met on his journey, as opposed to other contemporary accounts which speak of “the natives” collectively, negating their individuality and humanity.
Barth’s account is also peppered with tantalizing details about incredible Muslim travelers he met in Africa: a Moroccan nobleman who had fought the French in Algeria and now worked as vizier to the Sultan of Zinder; a remarkable man in Bornu who had wandered from western Mali to northeast Iran, and from Morocco to the equatorial jungles of Africa; an old, blind Fulani named Faki Sambo who had traveled the breadth of Africa and West Asia, studied Aristotle and Plato in Egypt, and reminisced to Barth about the splendors of Muslim Andalusia.1 It is truly a shame that we cannot hear their voices for ourselves.
Northern Nigeria came under colonial domination in 1903, when the British Empire invaded from its colony of Lagos and defeated the Caliphal armies at the Second Battle of Burmi. Although colonisation restricted the country’s ancient connections with other regions of the Muslim world, the system of indirect rule imposed by the British made the impact of colonialism on northern Nigeria relatively light, and the Islamic tradition of the country, its Maliki legal school, its Qadiri and Tijani Sufi orders, and its emirs and Caliph, all live on today in continuity with nearly a millennium of history.
Although dan Fodio’s Caliphate is celebrated as reviving Islam in the country, the religion first came across the Sahara and established deep roots in northern Nigeria centuries before.
The Origins of Islam in Northern Nigeria
The northern, Hausa-speaking half of Nigeria lies in the region which stretches through half a dozen Muslim countries, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, known as the Sahel (from the Arabic saḥl, meaning ‘coast’). Rather than considering the Sahara Desert as a barrier as it is today, divided by colonial-era borders, ancient peoples and medieval Muslims considered it not so different from the sea–a space of travel and connection between its distant ‘coasts’.
Islam first came to Nigeria across this sand-sea in the earliest decades of the Caliphate, when the Companion ‘Uqba ibn Nafi’ al-Fihri, one of the revered conquerors of the Maghreb, brought under Muslim control key Sahara oases, all situated on lucrative trade routes to the Sahel. Over succeeding centuries, Arab and Berber Muslims traded and settled along these desert trails, terminating at the kingdom of Kanem (present day northeast Nigeria and Chad), slowly converting the local population before the Muslim Kanem-Bornu Sultanate was established in 1075.2
Since then, Bornu has been a centre of Islamic scholarship and culture in the wider Sahel region. For example, it was in Kanem-Bornu that the unique Burnawi style of Arabic calligraphy used across West Africa was developed.3 The country also became a base from which Islam spread into Hausaland, as is recorded in local legends.
The Hausas’ national origin story prefigures their later connections with the Muslim world: legend has it that in ancient times, an exiled prince known by the name of his magnificent home city, Baghdad (Bayajidda in Hausa) travelled across the desert to seek his fortune. He came first to Bornu, where he married a princess, then moved on to the city of Daura in Hausaland, which was terrorised by a giant serpent named Sarki (meaning ‘king’ in Hausa) which lived in a well and prevented anyone from drawing water. Bayajidda decapitated the serpent, and as a reward was married to the Queen of Daura. Bayajidda’s seven sons with the princess and the queen became the rulers of what are known as the Seven Hausa Cities, the core of Hausaland.
The Hausa were famous in the medieval world for their textiles and dyes, exported across Eurasia, and to this day indulge, men and women both, in complex and colorful clothes. On festival days, such as Eid ( Sallah in Hausa) or Mawlid al-Nabawi, parades of armed horsemen garbed in luxuriant flowing robes, turbans and translucent veils, flow through the cities of Hausaland to pay homage to their sarki.
Hausaland has for most of its history been a patchwork of rival city-states. Kano, Katsina, Daura, Zazzau; these small pagan kingdoms competed for influence and trade routes, fielding large armies drawn from the region’s dense population. The trade networks of the Hausa kingdoms came to connect them with Muslims in Kanem-Bornu, the Maghreb region, and the famous empires of Mali to the West. From Mali came the Wangara scholar-traders: Soninke Muslims spreading their religion as well as their business. Many of these settled in northern Nigeria, and to this day the lineages of venerable Nigerian scholarly families can be traced back to Islamic centres in Mali, such as Timbuktu and Kabara.4
The Islamization of Hausaland also came directly from North Africa in the 15th century, through Shaykh Muhammad al-Maghili, a Berber from Tlemcen. In his travels through the Songhai Empire of Mali, and the Hausa states of Nigeria, he propagated the Maliki school of Islamic law, and the Qadiri Sufi order. Upon his advice, King Muhammad Rumfa of Kano undertook widespread efforts to convert his subjects to Islam, and build a genuinely Islamic kingdom in Hausaland.
Thus Islam was established in northern Nigeria. Hausaland and Bornu became new, natural extensions of the medieval Islamic world, engaged in a common intellectual discourse, linked by trade, and bound by ties of marriage and kinship. Traces of these connections linger today: in Kano, the mass grave of Tunisian Sufis martyred in a 16th century pagan invasion; in Katsina, the 14th century Gobarau mosque-university staffed by scholars from Timbuktu and Bornu, teaching texts from the golden age of Islamic Spain;5 in Cairo, where a students’ hostel for Bornuese students at al-Azhar was endowed by the Sultan of Bornu in 1258, and where West African scholars came to teach through to the 18th century.6
This proud tradition, treasured by Nigeria’s Muslims then and now, is what Shaykh dan Fodio sought to protect and extend in the 19th century. His vision of revival and reform was consciously inspired by the great Muslims of his country’s past, and the example of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, for whom no closer model exists in the hearts of Nigerian Muslims than dan Fodio himself.
Footnotes
1 Kemper, Steve, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa, New York,
NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012, 146, 196. 2 Muḥammad, Ibrāhīm, Al-Islām wa ’l-Ḥarakat al-ʿIlmiyya fī Imbiraṭuriya Kānim Burnū, first
printing, Kano, Nigeria: Dar al-Ummah, 2009, 49.
3 Kurfi, Mustapha Hashim, “Hausa Calligraphic and Decorative Traditions of Northern Nigeria:
From the Sacred to the Social,” Islamic Africa 8, no. 1–2 (October 17, 2017): 13–42.
4 Kane, Ousmane Oumar, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa, first
printing, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016, 67. 5 Lugga, Sani Abubakar, The Twin Universities, Katsina, Nigeria: Lugga Press, 2005, 31.
6 Kane, Ousmane Oumar, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa, first
printing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016, 44.
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- Kemper, Steve. A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012.
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- Last, Murray. The Sokoto Caliphate. Ibadan History Series. London, England: Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, 1967.
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- Sulaiman, Ibraheem. The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman Dan Fodio (1754–1817). 2020/1441 reprint. Bradford, UK: Diwan Press, 2009.
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