The story of Islam in any region – from Persia to Punjab, Sumatra to the Sahel – is unique, each with its own share of heroes and notable figures, who selflessly propagate the way of the Final Messenger of God ﷺ. Yoruba Muslims of southwestern Nigeria and Benin — an ethnic group of 25 million— boast a tale that spans five centuries. Their story is one of preachers and kings, slaves and scholars – and some who defied these labels. It is one of generous benefactors who funded da’wah efforts, courageous souls martyred for preaching Islam – even in living memory, and famous visitors such as the Victorian English convert, Abdullah Quilliam. This is the story of Islam, through some of its most notable figures, in Yorubaland.
The Beginnings of Islam in Yorubaland
Yorubaland, spread across southwestern Nigeria and Benin, is a land of tropical forests and stunning coastlines that have been inhabited since ancient times by the Yoruba people. The introduction of Islam to the region occurred through intrepid Malian traders, who were subjects of a vast and wealthy empire situated far to the northwest. Like so many Muslim merchants across history, these traders seamlessly combined commerce with da’wah. Islam became known in Yoruba as Esin Imale (“the Malian religion”) for its inextricable association with the exotic foreigners. Conversions remained rare for centuries, but seeds were planted.
In 1550, the first mosque in Oyo-Ile, capital of the Oyo Empire, was established by Shaykh
Muhammad al-Nufawi, who became notorious for his uncompromising commitment to justice and public criticism of the king’s cruelty. In 1700, a Muslim commune known as Okesuna (“the hill of Sunna” in Yoruba) was founded outside Ilorin. Over the following century, dozens of shaykhs and pious merchants, both natives and foreigners, carried the message of Islam across Yorubaland, quietly weaving the faith into the fabric of Yoruba society in every major city. By 1775, Friday Prayers were held in Lagos, which has since grown to become the largest city in Africa.
But not all was well. As Islam grew in popularity and the people began to doubt the myths which legitimated the cults and kingdoms of Yorubaland, Yoruba rulers and priests began to suppress the religion, pushing Muslims into ghettos, publicly humiliating them and restricting the practice of their faith. It was onto this stage that Yorubaland’s first truly great Islamic leader walked: a humble man named Salih bin Janta.
The Founding of the Emirate of Ilorin
Shaykh Salih, known to Yorubas as Shehu Alimi (d. 1820), was a Fulani scholar of Sokoto— the beating heart of Shaykh Usman Dan Fodio’s Islamic revival movement, which he witnessed with his own eyes. The turning point in the history of Islam in Yorubaland, the establishment of the Emirate of Ilorin in the early 19th century, owed its success in large part to his piety and determination.
Shehu Alimi settled in Oyo-Ile to preach Islam, and many embraced his message. As time passed, however, he faced opposition and oppression from local leaders of the traditional Yoruba cults, and was forced to flee. Shehu Alimi led his community of Yoruba converts in an exodus from Oyo-Ile, seeking refuge in a nearby city known as Ilorin.
The 20th-century Yoruba scholar Adam Abdullah al-Ilori writes that the the triumph of Islam in Ilorin at the hands of Shehu Alimi was decreed by God, and He arranged all of Yorubaland like a stage on which this drama was to play out. Muslims had lived in Yorubaland for centuries but languished in ghettos, were denied privileges, and were humiliated by pagan rulers. Indeed, just as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ emigrated from polytheist oppression in Mecca to establish an Islamic community in Medina, Shehu Alimi fled Oyo-Ile and built his own Medina in the storied city of Ilorin, now famous as the Islamic heart of Yorubaland.
In Ilorin, a cosmopolitan trading hub populated by Yorubas, Fulanis, Hausas and Kanuris, Shehu Alimi and the Muslim community allied with the renegade forces of an Oyo general named Afonja, as both groups sought to escape the wrath of Oyo. Shehu Alimi sent a plea for help to his home in Sokoto, now the capital of a vast caliphate headed by Usman Dan Fodio. Dan Fodio’s Muslim community had also faced destruction at the hands of pagan kingdoms just years before, so the Caliph sympathised with Shehu Alimi’s plight and dispatched an army to the south.
With their combined forces, the armies of Sokoto, Afonja and the followers of Shehu Alimi
fended off the forces of Oyo outside Ilorin. Before giving them a chance to regroup, Dan Fodio’s jihadists launched a lightning strike on the Oyo capital and destroyed the dominion of Oyo-Ile over Ilorin forever.
Now independent, the city of Ilorin fell under the joint administration of Afonja, an Oyo warlord, and Shehu Alimi, a Muslim scholar. The shaykh rejected formalising his position and all ceremonial honors; he refused crowns, rituals and formalities, satisfied with his role as a teacher of Islam. He was more interested in teaching than ruling, and wanted to see Ilorin become a just Islamic society above all else. He devoted himself to da’wah, teaching the Qur’an, and Arabic literacy. This suited Afonja, who had never even been a Muslim in the first place and was driven purely by worldly power.
After Alimi’s death in 1820, the delicate balance of power between the ulama and military classes collapsed. The city’s Muslims acclaimed Alimi’s eldest son, Abdussalam, as the inaugural Emir of Ilorin. Abdussalam assumed the role of the official ruler of Yorubaland’s first Islamic government, pledging allegiance to the Sokoto Caliphate. This declaration proved unacceptable to Afonja and his supporters. Aligning himself with former adversaries among the pagan Yoruba cities, Afonja contested the new emir’s authority over Ilorin.
In a dramatic turn of events, Afonja met his demise at the hands of Ilorin’s Muslims while participating in a traditional Egungun masquerade. However, his death did not occur before he thrust Ilorin into decades-long conflict with the other cities of Yorubaland.
An Illustrious History
The Islamic revolution in Ilorin threatened pagan rulers across Yorubaland, prompting them to intensify their oppression against Muslims in their territory over the following decades. During the reign of Bashorun Oluyole (1836–1850), Islam was harshly suppressed in Ibadan, the leading city of the anti-Ilorin coalition. Every mosque in the city was demolished. Many Muslims fled to Ilorin, as well as a second Yoruba Muslim state established in this period, the Ado-Ekiti kingdom, ruled by King Ali Atewogboye (1836–1886). He transformed his kingdom a safe haven for Muslim refugees fleeing religious persecution.
By the 1850s, anti-Islamic prejudice in Yorubaland had largely died down, although it would return periodically for generations to come. Mosques were built across the country once again, even in Ibadan, and more Yorubas were slowly won over to the Islamic faith. With more time, it might have been imagined that the entire Yoruba nation would have embraced Islam, just as Hausas, Malians, and countless other nations had before them—but it was not to be.
In an 1851 event known as the ‘Reduction of Lagos’, the British Royal Navy bombarded Lagos, deposed its Muslim ruler Oba Kosoko, and installed a puppet in his place who ruled the city for over a century to come. Over subsequent decades, all of Yorubaland, even Ilorin, fell to British imperialism and was consolidated with other conquests into the united colony of Nigeria.
Although ruled by a colonial regime and prohibited from practicing Islamic law, Yoruba Muslims in Lagos and across their homeland continued to struggle for the Islamic cause. They continued building, teaching, preaching, ruling, and seeking salvation, as evidenced in the lives of exceptional individuals.
Among these individuals was Mohammed Shitta-Bey (d. 1895), a Yoruba Muslim businessman and philanthropist born in Sierra Leone. Shitta funded countless efforts to spread Islam in West Africa, and financed the construction of the Shitta-Bey Mosque in Lagos—a unique landmark of the city’s Muslim community built in Afro-Brazilian architectural style. The mosque’s inauguration in 1894 was attended by the prominent English Muslim convert Abdullah Quilliam (d. 1932) in his capacity as Shaykh al-Islam of the British Isles and on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, who honored Shitta with the Ottoman title ‘Bey’.
Another champion of Islam in Yorubaland was King Amodu Adewumi Agunsoye I (r.1910–1937), a Muslim ex-slave from Lagos who acceded to the throne of Ado-Ekiti and restored it as a haven for Yoruba Muslims after it had reverted to oppressive and aggressive paganism. Under his rule, Muslims across the country settled in the area, including more slaves from Lagos, and those who had most zealously opposed the faith in earlier decades converted in waves.
Local Yoruba ulama also undertook efforts across the generations to teach and embody Islam in their communities. In 1874, Shaykh Abdussalam Arugbo Oniwiridi established the Tijani Sufi brotherhood in Yorubaland and in Ilorin, joining the Qadiri brotherhood present in the country since the days of Shehu Alimi. Shaykh Adam Abdullah al-Ilori spent his life trying to elevate the Arabic and Islamic scholarly culture of his country, founding Yorubaland’s first Arabic printing press, and an Arabic school in Lagos in 1952. He also wrote a detailed Arabic history of Islam among the Yoruba, which was the source for much of the present article.
Opposition to Islam among pagan Yorubas has endured through the ages, making martyrs of the country’s most outspoken voices, such as Alfa Bisiriyu Apalara (d. 1953). As a young man in Lagos, Apalara had been involved in organized crime, which in Nigeria is often in turn connected with occult activities, pagan rituals and secret cults. After being imprisoned in 1945, he experienced a religious epiphany and dedicated his life to preaching Islam and destroying the occult gangs which terrorized Lagos.
Once released, he garnered widespread attention, delivering relentless sermons against pagan beliefs, Yoruba rituals, and criminal activities. He became famous for his polemics, and his success in drawing large numbers of converts to Islam. Despite being repeatedly threatened by pagan cultists, and even suffering an assassination attempt, he continued with his mission undeterred. In 1953, while preaching Islam in the cultist stronghold Oko Baba neighbourhood of Lagos, Apalara was murdered by pagans, dying a martyr for his faith and an inspiration for his fellow believers.
Decades later, another Yoruba Muslim leader, Shaykh Safwan Ibikunle Bello Akodo (d.2003), took up Apalara’s cause and met a similar end. A native of Epe, near Lagos, he preached against the participation of Yoruba Muslims in pagan cult practices, such as the Oro cult and the Egungun masquerade. He was famous for attacking the worship of the traditional Yoruba gods and goddesses in every Friday sermon. Like Apalara, he was threatened and saw his property vandalized. Finally, a group of cultists attacked him in the street with swords, beheading him and carving out his beating heart. This brutal ending marked him as a martyr against polytheism, reminiscent of the Companion Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib at the Battle of Badr.
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When criminals murder Muslim preachers like Apalara and Akodo, they win only fleeting victories – the bigger war is already lost. All through Islam’s history in Yorubaland, neither pagan kings, Christian missionaries, nor vigilante thugs have been able to arrest the slow and steady progress of Islam in this corner of Africa. While in the age of Oyo, Islam was a foreign and alien religion, today it is an integral fixture of life. Islam is irreversibly rooted in Yoruba culture; it is an accomplishment of centuries, built painstakingly through every mosque, institution, town, family, and individual soul.
The history of Islam in Yorubaland has been a struggle against oppression, ignorance, and, above all, disbelief. From the earliest preachers and ulama to statesmen, philanthropists and even slaves, Yoruba Muslims have made their contribution of saints and martyrs to the human tapestry that is the Muslim Ummah. Their mission continues today.
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Edited by: Leila Khansa
