The flight of the enslaved to the cause of jihād is most noticeable in the case of Ilorin, probably because of the availability of documentation. The Ilorin garrison, which consisted of Hausa and other slaves from farther north, mutinied in 1817 in a bid by its commander, Afonja, to topple the Oyo government. Afonja lost his life in 1823 when he tried to rein in the jihād.58 As ʿAlī Eisami reported from his own experience, “All the slaves who went to the war, became free; so when the slaves heard these good news, they all ran away.”59 ʿAlī, a Borno slave, was sold to merchants at the coast for sale overseas because his master feared that he would join the Muslims. The jihād continued into the 1820s, and the Muslims offered “liberty to all the Mahometen slaves, and encouraged others to kill their pagan masters and join them.”60 Ilorin became virtually autonomous, which contributed to an ongoing crisis that resulted in the eventual destruction of Oyo in the early 1830s and the incorporation of much of its territory into the caliphate as the Emirate of Ilorin.61 Similarly, in Nupe in 1831, “all runaway slaves are encouraged to join the ranks on condition of receiving their freedom; and they are joined by a vast number from the surrounding country.”62
From the perspective of the caliphate’s leadership, slavery was closely associated with issues of religion and required the recognition of Islamic law. Muslim forces were supposed to inquire into the religious status of slaves; those who had been born free were usually allowed to contact relatives in order to arrange ransom.63 Muslims who owned slaves were supposed to instruct their slaves in matters of religion, and hence the ideal master-slave relationship involved a Muslim master whose trusted slave was committed to Islam, whether recently acquired or not.64 The predominant reason for restricting the sale of slaves was to assure their inevitable conversion to Islam. Procedures for emancipation, including self-purchase and redemption by third parties, allowed for the integration of individuals, as Muslims, into free society.65
As far as Sokoto was concerned, enslaving free Muslims was not acceptable, although attacking enemy countries opposed to the imposition of Sokoto’s authority was sanctioned. In Sirāj al-ikhwān, ʿUthmān dan Fodio justified “the legality of fighting those among the learned, the students, and the masses who aid the Unbelievers and the legality of fighting those who neglect to put themselves under the authority of a Muslim ruler.”66 At this time the status of Muslims in neighboring Borno was specifically in dispute. When the supporters of the jihād destroyed the Borno capital at Ngazargamu and laid waste a considerable district around the capital, they also enslaved many people who could not flee. The experience of ʿAlī Eisami reveals the extent of destruction at this time. Son of a Muslim cleric, ʿAlī attended Qurʾānic school until he was eleven, but he was enslaved in 1808 when the jihād forces sacked the Borno capital.67
Shehu Muhammad al-Kānimī, who rallied Borno against the jihād after 1808, accused the Sokoto leadership of hypocrisy on the slavery issue, elaborating on the arguments of Islamic scholarship, including the views of ʿUthmān dan Fodio himself, to demonstrate the illegality of enslaving the inhabitants of a Muslim country.68 Since Borno was a Muslim country, al-Kānimī asked Bello, “Tell us therefore why you are fighting us and enslaving our free people?”69 Between 1808 and 1812 al-Kānimī staged a series of counterattacks on Sokoto territory that delivered a punch in the diplomatic offensive against the jihād regime. Thereafter strained relations prevailed between Borno and Sokoto, and open war erupted again in 1826–27. The various letters between Bello and al-Kānimī, the paramount rulers of the two major states in the region, confront the issue of who was a Muslim and therefore should not be enslaved and who were opponents of the jihād and thereby were classified among those who could be enslaved. The biographical accounts of Muslims who were enslaved during the jihād demonstrate that many Muslims were in fact enslaved despite the intentions of the jihād leadership.70
Al-Kānimī’s position on jihād provides the most serious critique of the necessity for jihād. According to his interpretation, there were four types of people in every state, namely, unbelievers, apostates, Muslims who cared little about the requirements of religion, and Muslims who “are completely immovable in their faith.”71 Brenner quotes al-Kānimī as saying that “every country in this region contains these four types. Anyone who gains control over them by aggression will inevitably have the difficulty of discrimination. And whenever the difficulty of discrimination has made all injury general, then the abandonment of the unbeliever is more acceptable than the killing of a Muslim.”72 In pursuing the jihād in Borno, Goni Mukhtār argued that Borno could be attacked for five reasons: sacrificing for alms was common at certain places, free women were failing to cover their heads, bribe taking was prevalent, money set aside for orphans was being squandered, and false judgments were being rendered in law courts. Al-Kānimī refused to accept these as constituting unbelief, although he considered these practices reprehensible. According to al-Kānimī, all countries suffered from the presence of sinful actions, but that did not constitute unbelief and warrant jihād.73 The correspondence between Bello and al-Kānimī lasted from 1808 to 1812 and failed to resolve the differences in interpretation.
Predominance of Fulbe (Fulani) in the Jihād
The problem of succession to leadership upon the death of ʿUthmān dan Fodio was well understood and virtually arranged in 1813, four years before the Shehu’s dealth. It was decided to govern through two spheres, one headed by the Shehu’s brother Abdullahi and the other by his son, Muhammad Bello. There seems to have been no question about the continuation of the dominance of Fulbe intellectuals. Abdullahi was stationed at Gwandu, in the heart of the Hausa state of Kebbi, and intended to preside over the western emirates, which at the time may have appeared to be the most likely areas of political expansion. As things turned out, many small emirates were established, and although it could not have been known at the time the decision was made for the division, Ilorin would emerge as an important emirate, and Nupe would continue to struggle for stability until the establishment of Bida in 1857. Muhammad Bello officially resided in Sokoto, which was not far from the former Gobir capital of Alkalawa, now deserted, but in fact spent most of his years as caliph in his ribāṭ at Wurno, to the north of Sokoto. Bello’s sway was over the principal Hausa states that had paid allegiance to Borno, and hence he continued the jihād against Borno and spawned emirates that derived from that campaign, the most important of which, as it happened, was the vast territory of Adamawa with its plethora of subemirates. Bello thereby gained responsibility for the most productive and extensive parts of the caliphate.
The year of dan Fodio’s death marked the emergence of Masina in the far west as the independent state of Hamdullahi, which probably would have pledged its allegiance to the Shehu but chose not to recognize either Abdullahi or Muhammad Bello as its overlord. Equally significant, the Muslim uprising in Ilorin in 1817 undermined Oyo as a principal source of slaves in West Africa and began the migration of enslaved Yoruba to the Americas. Hence as Europe and the Americas were adjusting to the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the British were intensifying antislave patrols on the West African coast and eliminating Muslim corsairs in the Mediterranean, the jihād movement expanded in West Africa through the agency of the dan Fodio family. The final benchmark of 1837 was the death of Muhammad Bello and hence the end of the first generation of the jihād leadership; Abdullahi had died two years earlier and was succeeded by his son. Bello was succeeded by his brother. Bello’s death occurred a year after the final collapse of Oyo, whose capital, along with the region around it, was abandoned in 1836, within a year of the Malês uprising in Bahia and various conspiracies in Cuba that were attributed to the Yoruba and only a few years after British emancipation of slaves in its colonies in 1834. In the interior of the Bight of Benin, the jihād undermined the stability of the whole of Yorubaland. The result was the massive flight of Yoruba to the south and the steady departure of enslaved Yoruba for Brazil, Cuba, and, because of British naval patrols, Sierra Leone.74