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

militarized nomadic clans, particularly the Banī Ḥasan Arabs who had migrated to the region. Rather than confront the Banī Ḥasan directly, Nāṣir al-Dīn launched a campaign against the states of the Senegal River valley in the 1670s, which he proclaimed was a jihād. He successfully conquered the states of Waalo, Fuuta Toro, Kajoor, and Jolof, but the movement was stopped by Nāṣir al-Dīn’s death in 1674, and the old order was virtually reestablished by 1677. Nonetheless, as Boubacar Barry has argued,

      Nāsir al-Dīn’s movement was an attempt to regulate political and social life according to the teachings of the sharī’a (Islamic law) in its purest orthodox form, by putting an end to the arbitrary power of the Hasaniyya warriors and establishing a Muslim theocracy. The proclamation of a djihād [sic] in the kingdoms of the river valley was motivated by both economic and religious considerations, to conquer the trade in grains and slaves and to convert the peoples and purify the practice of Islam.¹

      Hence the idea of jihād and revolutionary change first emerged with Nāṣir al-Dīn in the Senegal River and was associated with the religious communities that were ṣūfī and associated with the Qādiriyya brotherhood, which emphasized piety and obedience to the authority of the religious community.

      Rudolph Ware has argued that the Qurʾānic schools became striking symbols of Muslim identity and powerful channels for political expression in Senegambia. Because Muslim scholars traveled widely, Ware has characterized them as “walking Qu’rans” whose epistemological embodiment gave expression to classical Islamic frameworks of learning and knowledge.² The center of learning at the grand mosque of Pire in Saniakhor attracted many students who later went on to political careers, including Mālik Si, the founder of Fuuta Bundu, and ʿAbd Qādir Kane, who led the clerical revolution in Fuuta Toro in 1776. The descendants of Demba Fall pursued his work in propagating Islamic learning and teaching the Muslim leadership that waged jihād in Fuuta Toro and elsewhere.³ Besides the Fall family, other families, in particularly the Cisse, also studied at Pire. One of the Cisse of Pire, Tafsīr Abdou Cisse, was the muqaddam (spiritual guide) of Mālik Si. The grand mosque of Pire-Gourèye was virtually a university.⁴ Another center at Koki, also founded in the seventeenth century by clerics, had close relations with the king of Kajoor. Pire and Koki dominated Muslim intellectual life throughout the eighteenth century, as students and teachers from many clerical lineages traveled to these towns to study. Koki was in Ndiambour and even opened branch schools at Koki-Kad, Koki-Dakhar, and Koki-Gouy in the neighboring province of Mbacol. In fact, there were such centers of learning at all the major mosques in West Africa, such as the ones at Timbuktu, Agades, Katsina, Yandoto, and elsewhere. The mud-brick mosque at Jenne was particularly impressive (plate 4).

TABLE 2.1. The Jihād Movement in West Africa: Major Events, Places, and Personalities, ca. 1670–1850

      In the 1690s some refugees from Nāṣir al-Dīn’s movement settled in Gajaaga and the area further upstream along the Senegal, where under the leadership of Mālik Si they established the Muslim state of Fuuta Bundu near the gold fields of Buré; upon Mālik Si’s death, leadership passed to his son Bubu Mālik Si.⁵ Thus the idea of Islamic-inspired political reform and military conquest developed as a powerful tradition in West Africa, in particular under the leadership of the Muslim clerical class of Torodbe, whose members were of diverse origin but who identified with the Fulbe pastoralists who dominated cattle herding in the Senegal River region and elsewhere. The Torodbe clerical families inhabited their own communities, zawāyā, which were scattered along the Senegal River, especially in the central parts of the flood plain. The Torodbe had strong links with Kajoor and the religious centers of Pire and Koki, as well as other religious centers in the southern Sahara.

      In the eighteenth century and even earlier, many Muslims in West Africa lived peacefully among non-Muslims. The followers of al-Ḥājj Sālim Suwari from Ja in Masina, in the middle Niger delta, who had settled at Jahaba in the gold fields of Bambuhu in the late fifteenth century, were also associated with advocacy of nonconfrontation. On similar lines, Suwari’s disciples, namely, Muhammad al-Būnī and Yūsuf Kasama, spread his ideas among the Juula and Jakhanke merchant communities, respectively, while another follower, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Zaghaite, did the same in the Hausa cities. As Ivor Wilks has argued, this Suwarian tradition openly rejected the idea of jihād: “The principal dicta of al-Ḥājj Sālim had to do with relations with unbelievers,” and jihād was “permissible only in self-defense should the very existence of the community be threatened by unbelievers.”⁶ Adherents of the Qādiriyya brotherhood, especially the Kunta clerics under al-Mukhtār, were particularly noted for their advocacy of peaceful integration and toleration and respect for multicultural settings, which was the basic premise for commercial interaction across West Africa. In the second half of the eighteenth century the clerics in the caravan towns (qṣar) of Walāta, Tichitt, Timbuktu, Wadan, Asawan, and Shinqīt, which were located in the Sahel and the southern Sahara, concentrated on teaching jurisprudence and syntax, not the promotion of jihād.⁷ Timbuktu stands out in the popular imagination as both a mysterious and distant place and a great center of learning with its Sankore mosque (plate 5), but it was only one of many such centers.

      Over time, however, many Muslims came to believe that their community was being threatened and began to advocate jihād, the implications of which started to become apparent in West Africa in the form of opposition to the transatlantic slave trade. In general, Muslim principles condemned the enslavement of freeborn Muslims and the sale of slaves to non-Muslims; however, this prohibition failed to address slavery as an institution. For instance, there were no attempts to prevent domestic slavery; quite the contrary, the appeal to jihād transformed the appeal to Islam, as Barry has argued, “from the religion of a minority caste of merchants and courtiers in the royal courts [to] . . . a ​popular resistance movement against the arbitrary power of the ruling aristocracies and against the noxious effects of the Atlantic trade.”⁸ This popular resistance led to the call for jihād in Senegambia, which was a reaction to the consolidation of military regimes in the various states of the region that were considered oppressive because they were supplying slaves as part of the transatlantic slave trade. The military elite, ceddo, were preoccupied with slave raiding and expressed disdain for Muslim scholarship and the status of freeborn Muslims. The memory of Nāṣir al-Dīn’s movement and the survival of the idea of jihād in Fuuta Bundu presaged a far more significant movement.

      In 1727–28 jihād spread to the highlands of Fuuta Jalon, from where the Senegal and Gambia Rivers flowed, and where Karamokho Alfa established an imamate that was also connected with Fulbe pastoralists and Muslim clerics (see Map 2.1).⁹ As the head of the Sediyanke lineage of the Barry family of Timbo, Karamokho Alfa formed a confederation that initiated jihād, earning the title almami. The confederation was divided into nine provinces or diwal (sing. dime), whose chiefs bore the title of alfa and were appointed from among the leaders of the jihād. From the beginning, the power of the almami, with his seat at Timbo, was limited by the wide autonomy assumed by the chiefs of the provinces of Labe, Buriya, Timbi, Kebaali, Kollade, Koyin, Fugumba, and Fode Haaji. The almami governed through a council of elders acting as a legislature at Fugumba, the religious capital. With the death of Karamokho Alfa about 1751, jihād entered a new phase that affected trade along the coast. Ibrahima Sori became almami and subsequently instituted an aggressive policy against neighboring countries under the pretext of waging jihād. According to Barry, Ibrahim Sori, in alliance with the Jalonke kingdom of Solimana, engaged in a series of wars to procure slaves and booty. The jihād was far from secure, however. In 1762 Konde Burama, king of Sankaran, was able to occupy Timbo after the defection of Solimana. Only in 1776 was Ibrahima Sori finally able to eliminate the threat, consolidate Fuuta Jalon domination of Solimana to the east of Timbo, and end the threat of Sankaran.¹⁰ Even then, a slave uprising challenged the jihād state in 1785. The enslaved populations of a number of plantations (rimaibé)