the Mahometans are forbidden to make slaves of those of their own faith, and when any of their people are concerned in this traffic, they believe their religion requires them to put a stop to it by force. It was for this purpose a war was commenced by the Fullahs against these other tribes, and in this war Samba was taken prisoner and sold as a slave.33
Samba, who was sixty in 1841, observed that “he belonged to the tribe Fullah Tauro [Fuuta Toro], which engaged in a war with six other tribes in Africa to prevent them, as he said, from carrying on the slave trade.” Ṣāliḥ Bilali of Timbuktu, who was born in Masina around 1770, had been enslaved by Bambara and sold from Segu to Asante; subsequently, from Anamobu he went to the Bahamas before arriving finally in South Carolina.34 Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” which indicates that she was Fulbe, is another example of a Muslim who was enslaved in this period.35 According to Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard, she was probably born around 1767 and enslaved sometime after 1780. Rosalie was unusual in being one of the very few Fulbe females reported to have been enslaved. It is also possible that she was actually enslaved as early as 1775 or 1776, when the Moors invaded Waalo and enslaved many people, and when the jihād state of Fuuta Toro was being founded.36 Although there were Fulbe women reported in the Americas, they represent only a small portion, except in Louisiana, where they constituted about 25 percent, and in Maranhão, where they were about half the total.37
In the case of Fuuta Jalon, the Islamic state attempted to control the course and direction of the slave trade, not only because it dominated the highlands inland from the coast but also because it forced trade to flow to the north via the Gambia River or southward toward the Sierra Leone River. The relatively few Muslims who reached the Americas included those from Fuuta Jalon, but overall, the Muslim interior of West Africa was underrepresented in terms of the numbers of slaves who moved as part of the transatlantic migration. In fact, Zachary Macaulay reported in 1793 that there was strong opposition in Fuuta Jalon to involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that the succession crisis after the death of Almami Sori was a consequence of this opposition, which is probably an exaggeration but is nonetheless significant as an indication of attitudes toward the enslavement of Muslims.38 With the onslaught of jihād, there were attempts to suppress the sale of slaves who might be Muslims to non-Muslims. Fulbe clans established their political dominance over the Jalonke population in the highlands to which the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger Rivers trace their origins. Centered at Labe and Timbo, the Fulbe developed a vibrant plantation economy based on slave labor and otherwise maintained commercial links with the Muslim interior through connections with the Mandinka towns, such as Dinguiraye, Kankan, Sikasso, and others that were on the route to the inner Niger basin. In Fuuta Toro, Almami Abdul Kader reached an accord with the French at St. Louis in 1785 that allowed French merchants to pass up the Senegal River to obtain gum arabic and slaves upon payment of a tax but prohibited the purchase of slaves in Fuuta Toro itself.39
The jihād leadership was conscious of tradition and hence was preoccupied with analyzing whether the conditions for jihād were present. The signs were discussed, events and motives were justified through reference to tradition, and a template for jihād was mythologized. There were recognizable building blocks that had to be in place, most especially conditions in which Muslims were being oppressed and were forced into a retreat where war was initially justified as defensive and unavoidable. Indeed, when such conditions prevailed in the Hausa state of Gobir and elsewhere, Muslims flocked to the camp of ʿUthmān dan Fodio and his supporters, which was established at Degel in the 1790s. By following the events and statements of the jihād leadership, it is possible to discern what it took to undertake a jihād and how the movement benefited from an association with earlier jihāds, particularly in West Africa, that led to the establishment of three Muslim states, all dominated by Muslims who were also considered to be ethnically Fulbe. The tradition of jihād as developed in West Africa from Fuuta Bundu to Sokoto had a common feature in that the leadership was Fulbe, and this tradition continued. The same was true in the establishment of the Hamdullahi Caliphate, which initially was under Sokoto. Al-Ḥājj ‘Umar himself, being Fulbe, had pretensions to succeed Muhammad Bello as caliph of Sokoto upon Bello’s death. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was married to Bello’s daughter, but the succession went to Bello’s brother. Even the Mahdist state of the Nilotic Sudan relied heavily on the Fulbe, who were known in the Nilotic Sudan as Fellata and formed the backbone of the Mahdist military. With the assassination of the Mahdi, the succession passed to Abdallahi, who was the head of the military.
This ethnic compatibility between the Fulbe leadership and the Muslim intellectuals of diverse backgrounds, combined with the success of jihād across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, facilitated the spread of ideas and justification through the rigors of Islamic scholarship. Indeed, the migration of young men who wished to be employed in armies or to study under teachers who were attached to the mosques of the principal towns was a major factor in consolidating the appeal of jihād and reform. This movement of students overlapped with commercial travel, and the distribution of slaves through long-distance trade meant that all the Muslim regions of sub-Saharan Africa were well integrated. This can be seen in the surviving biographical accounts of Muslims who somehow ended up in slavery despite the efforts to prevent such fateful loss of freedom. In general, trade and marketing were organized in a way that promoted regional integration. In the western parts of West Africa, Muslims who were identified as Juula and who spoke the same language (Malinke) were closely linked to the Qādiriyya. They controlled long-distance trade, with outposts from Senegambia as far east as the Hausa cities and Borno. A similar Hausa commercial diaspora radiated outward from the central cities of the Hausa states and later the Sokoto Caliphate, particularly Kano, Zaria, and Katsina, but in the case of this commercial system, the language of trade was Hausa. The network extended to the middle Volta basin and Asante, to the Yoruba coast of the Bight of Benin, and eastward as far as Wadai. Both Juula and Hausa merchant networks were linked across the Sahara and hence were tied to the extensions of trade from Morocco, whose immigrants to sub-Saharan Africa known as shurfa (Hausa: Sharifai) claimed to be direct descendants of the Prophet, whether or not the reality substantiated their claims. This overlapping series of networks also connected with the Ottoman domains from Algiers to the Hijaz and even the Jellaba merchants of the Nile River valley and the trade of Wadai and Darfur.
Specifically, the commercial interior of West Africa was controlled by Muslim merchants who operated along trade routes between dispersed towns where there were communities with which they identified.40 These dispersed networks have sometimes been referred to as “commercial diasporas,” following the lead of Philip Curtin and Abner Cohen.41 The concept of diaspora is used to describe the social organization of the merchants who formed the layers of commercial networks that dominated the trade from the interior to the coast of West Africa. Traders operated over considerable distances and relied on agents and partners who were resident in towns and cities along the trade routes that were often far from the homelands of the merchants. The two principal diasporas included the “Juula” (also Dyula), which means “merchant” in the languages of the Manding, and the “Hausa,” which was centered in the central Bilād al-Sūdān. Both ethnic terms reflected the use of a common commercial language, either the Juula dialect of Malinke or Hausa, as well as identification with Islam. This structure of trade became particularly significant after the Moroccan invasion of the Songhay Empire in 1591–92 and the ending of the hegemonic Muslim state that encompassed much of West Africa from Senegambia to the Hausa cities of the central Bilād al-Sūdān. In the absence of a centralized state, these commercial networks, which constituted a complex diaspora, assumed the function of connecting the many towns and cities into an interlocking grid that relied on Islam as a unifying ideology.
The