Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions. Paul E. Lovejoy

broaden interpretations to take into account new sources, innovative uses of new knowledge, and the inevitably widening circles of inclusion. A methodology of designed ignorance is prevalent in certain studies and historical approaches, in my opinion, and this is the case with an understanding of the jihād of West Africa. In Latin America, this approach of privileging some scholarship by subjecting that of others to silence and nonrecognition is sometimes referred to, informally, as the “methodology of the gringos,” in which North American scholars blitz local archives and subsequently claim to have made intellectual and scholarly breakthroughs that completely bypass the research of scholars in Latin America, especially if scholars write only in Portuguese or Spanish and hence conveniently can be ignored, or if it might require too much extra work and interaction to uncover what is often a wealth of research that has previously been completed or is currently under way. The same observation applies to scholars in Nigeria, such as Yusuf Bala Usman, H. Bobboyi, and A. M. Yakubu.⁵³ These scholars are often ignored in “western” scholarship. The same curtain of silence through nonrecognition is lowered on the intellectual contributions of scholars in Africa and indeed even on scholars who focus on Africa but who are not at universities in Africa. The avoidance of the rich documentation on the jihād movement is even more glaring than I am suggesting, since I have specifically not referred to many of the primary source materials that are readily available in published form, let alone the enormous amount of relevant material that is to be found in archives in Nigeria, Mali, Morocco, France, England, the United States, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is central to the argument of this book that a fuller understanding of the age of revolutions requires a revolution in the application of historical methodology that seeks out sources and interpretations that can test conceptual hypotheses and intellectual insights. The question that has to be addressed is whether it is possible to ignore Africa, in this case West Africa, in the reconstruction of history during this period.

      Despite the increasingly detailed research on African cultural and social impact in the Americas, the focus on slave resistance and revolution still omits the important components of the period that derive from the African background of the enslaved. I am arguing that the historical trends in the consolidation of Islam in Africa favored the emergence of west central Africa as the dominant region of origins of enslaved Africans, even though it will seem to some scholars that West Africa was a major source of slaves. In fact, hundreds of thousands of enslaved African did come from West Africa, but relatively few came from the Muslim regions of the interior. There is an apparent contradiction, therefore, that has to be explained. Most of the deported enslaved population from West Africa came from near the coast, and hence the region as a whole was underrepresented as a source of slaves.

      I contend that the regional origins of Africa have to be contextualized within Africa, just as the destination of slaves and the resulting slave societies in the Americas and within Africa have to be understood in the context of the specificities of the Americas and influences that originated in Europe, particularly western Europe, as well as the historical context of West Africa. The forces that were unleashed in Africa were global, shaped to various degrees by events outside Africa as well as regional and local conditions therein. Theoretically, in terms of demography, I contend, West Africa could have supplied all the slaves that went to the Americas during the age of revolutions, but this did not happen, even though many slaves did come from there. Moreover, just as events in the Americas reveal a struggle between resistance to slavery and efforts to sustain what some had thought a dying institution, events in Africa reflect the great expansion in slavery, not its demise, so that the focus on revolutionary change in relation to resistance to slavery has to take into account the destination of the enslaved population, whether that population remained in Africa or went to the Americas. The West African experience has a bearing on another important debate. Sociologist and historian Dale Tomich has suggested the concept of “second slavery,” in which slavery in the Americas was not a dying institution.⁵⁴ Rather, in Tomich’s view, slavery was increasing in the early nineteenth century thanks to a new political order imposed by the British after the fall of Napoleon. Hence the parallel to the great expansion of slavery as a result of the jihād in West Africa should be noted.

      As Murray Last has suggested, the Sokoto jihād was analogous to the French Revolution and just as the French Revolution had a sweeping impact in Europe and the Americas, the Sokoto jihād had repercussions across West Africa as far as the Nile River.⁵⁵ Sokoto was preoccupied with spreading the jihād and providing the intellectual inspiration and tactical training for future jihād participants, many of whom came to Sokoto for training and education. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one such cleric, who joined the Tījāniyya brotherhood in Mecca when he was on pilgrimage and subsequently returned to sub-Saharan Africa via Borno and then settled in Sokoto as the leader of the Tījāniyya.⁵⁶ Hence, there was a strong tradition of such learned leadership. As the book market of the Sahel shows, scholars in the western Bilād al-Sūdān would have read some of Sokoto’s works just as the dan Fodios read Algerian and Songhai texts.⁵⁷ The book trade establishes clearly the intellectual background of the jihād movement, which involves a long written debate, just as the age of revolutions did in Europe and the Americas.

      According to Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, at the time of the consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate, west central Africa was already a dominant source of slaves for the Americas. This fact is crucial in recognizing the caliphate’s self-imposed withdrawal and failure to participate in the transatlantic slave trade, despite price incentives in the interior of West Africa that could have resulted in the supply of many more slaves than was the case. The relatively high rate of slave resistance near and onboard slave ships in the Senegambia ports in the eighteenth century may have had an influence on the reluctance of European slave ships to visit the area.⁵⁸ Such resistance reinforces the argument here with respect to the influence of Islam on commercial patterns. The consolidation of Islam, ironically, at first increased the number of enslaved West Africans sent to the Americas, especially to Bahia and Cuba. These conclusions confirm some of the arguments suggested in this book that the history of the diaspora has to start in Africa, not in the Americas, especially with regard to resistance and efforts to establish reconstituted social, religious, and cultural manifestations.

       2

      THE ORIGINS OF JIHĀD IN WEST AFRICA

      The chronology of the jihād movement spans a period of almost two hundred years, from the end of the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. Although the focus of this book is on the same era as the age of revolutions from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, this chapter provides an overview of the main events of the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century. The idea of jihād was rooted in the confrontation of established political authority through the purification of Islamic practice and the imposition of governments that were forcefully committed to governance on the basis of Islamic law and tradition. Dedication to holy war and adherence to orthodoxy were not new, but the pattern of change that was determined through self-proclaimed jihād and the ways in which orthodoxy was interpreted through allegiance to the ṣūfī brotherhood of the Qādiriyya were unique and hence the reason that it is possible to refer to a jihād movement.

      The major features of the historical trajectory of jihād are well established and are outlined in table 2.1, which is included here for purposes of reference and as a means of guiding readers through the necessary detail that has to be included as one means of demonstrating that the jihād movement was comparable in scale and impact to the age of revolutions of Europe and the Americas. The spread of jihād in West Africa occurred well after the collapse of the Muslim empire of Songhay in 1591–92 and the subsequent period that was perceived by many Muslim scholars as a century of political decadence and the emergence of military elites that dominated the numerous small states of the western Bilād al-Sūdān. The dispersed commercial diaspora of Muslim merchants and various centers of Islamic learning across West Africa sustained a vision of a more unified community, however. That vision ultimately brought forth a political movement.

      The jihād movement can be traced to the campaigns of Awbek Ashfaga, better known as Nāṣir