Usman dan Fodio

Usman dan Fodio was a Muslim teacher who became the founder of a state. He was born in 1754 in the kingdom of Gobir, one of several Hausa kingdoms in the savanna south of the Sahara. For most of his life he was a scholar and preacher, not a soldier or a king. Yet by the time he died in 1817, the movement he led had replaced the old Hausa rulers with a network of emirates loyal to a single leader at Sokoto.

People in northern Nigeria often call him simply “the Shehu,” the Hausa form of the Arabic word shaykh, meaning an elder or respected teacher. His followers gave him the title Amīr al-Muʾminīn, “Commander of the Faithful,” an old title used by caliphs in Islamic history. Some Muslims regard him as a mujaddid, a “renewer” of the faith, because he called people back to what he saw as the true practice of Islam.

He is remembered in several ways at once: as a religious reformer, as a writer of books and poems in three languages, as a champion of education for women, and as the founder of a powerful state that fought wars and relied heavily on slave labour. A fair picture has to include all of these.

Usman came from the Toronkawa, a Fulani clan of Muslim scholars whose ancestors, according to family tradition, had moved east from Futa Toro (in the Senegal River valley) several centuries earlier and settled among the Hausa. His father, Muhammad, carried the Fulfulde title Fodiye, “the learned one,” which is where the name “dan Fodio” (son of Fodio) comes from.

Learning ran through the women of the family as well as the men. Usman’s first teacher was his mother, Hauwa, and his grandmother Ruqayya was known as a respected ascetic and teacher. Later Usman studied the Qur’an with his father and then moved on to other teachers, including relatives and the influential reformist scholar Jibril ibn Umar, who argued strongly that Muslims must oppose unjust rulers.

The family moved from Maratta, where Usman was born, to the town of Degel in Gobir. Degel would become the centre of his life and teaching for about thirty years. Around the age of twenty he began to teach while continuing to study, a pattern common among West African scholars, who often travelled from teacher to teacher to collect knowledge and certificates of learning.

From about 1774, Usman and his younger brother Abdullahi travelled through Gobir, Kebbi and Zamfara as wandering preachers. He wrote learned treatises in Arabic for other scholars and composed poems in Fulfulde and Hausa so that ordinary people could understand and memorise his message.

His message was that Muslims, and especially Muslim rulers, should live by Islamic law. He criticised rulers for heavy taxes, bribery, seizing land and cattle, unjust enslavement of Muslims, and mixing Islam with older religious rituals. He also criticised scholars who, in his view, kept knowledge to themselves or neglected half the community by refusing to teach women.

Poor farmers, herders whose cattle had been taxed or seized, runaway slaves and other people on the edges of Hausa society found hope in his preaching. Fulani pastoralists, Hausa peasants and some Tuareg joined his community, which came to be called the Jamāʿa (“the Community”). Its members could be recognised by their turbans and veils.

At first the kings of Gobir tolerated and even honoured Usman. In the late 1780s (sources give different years), Sultan Bawa summoned him and offered him gifts. According to the community’s own accounts, Usman refused the wealth and asked instead for five things: freedom to preach, freedom for people to answer his call, respect for those wearing the turban, release of prisoners, and lighter taxes for the people.

Later kings were less friendly. Nafata of Gobir banned preaching, forbade the wearing of turbans and veils and ordered converts to return to their old religion. His successor Yunfa had once been one of Usman’s students, but he turned against his teacher, attacked Muslim communities and, according to the Muslim sources, tried to kill Usman.

In February 1804 Usman led his followers out of Degel to Gudu, a place some days’ journey away. They called this move a hijra, deliberately recalling the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. At Gudu his followers swore allegiance to him as Amīr al-Muʾminīn, and Gobir declared war. Usman was about fifty and did not fight himself; the military leadership fell to his brother Abdullahi, his son Muhammad Bello and other commanders.

The war began badly for Usman’s community, which had few horses and weapons. At Tabkin Kwotto in June 1804, however, Abdullahi’s smaller force defeated the Gobir cavalry, and many waverers joined the movement. Later that year, near the Gobir capital Alkalawa, the Muslims suffered a heavy defeat at Tsuntsua; Muhammad Bello later wrote that about 2,000 of them died, 200 of whom knew the Qur’an by heart.

Hunger shaped the campaign as much as battle. The historian Murray Last argued that many of the community’s movements are explained by the search for food, water and pasture. The jihadists captured Kebbi in 1805 and established a base at Gwandu, where they survived another combined attack by Gobir, Tuareg and Kebbi forces.

Usman also appointed flag-bearers, local leaders who returned to their own regions to lead the jihad there. This turned a local conflict into a movement across Hausaland. Katsina and Kano fell in 1807, and in 1808 Alkalawa was taken and Yunfa was killed. The movement failed to conquer Bornu, whose scholar-statesman Muhammad al-Kanemi challenged the legal justification for fighting fellow Muslims in a famous exchange of letters with the Sokoto leaders.

Usman’s supporters described the war as a defensive struggle and a religious duty against rulers they considered unbelievers despite professing Islam. Their opponents saw it as rebellion and conquest. Modern historians also debate how far it was a religious movement, a Fulani ethnic uprising, or a revolt of the over-taxed and oppressed; most now stress the religious leadership while recognising the social and economic grievances that gave it mass support.

In 1809 Muhammad Bello turned the camp at Sokoto into a walled city, which became the capital. The new state was not a single tightly run kingdom but a confederation of emirates. Each emir received a flag from the Commander of the Faithful and governed his territory with considerable independence, while sending tribute and recognising Sokoto’s spiritual and political authority.

Usman soon withdrew from day-to-day government. Around 1809–1812 the administration was divided: Abdullahi supervised the western emirates from Gwandu, and Muhammad Bello the eastern ones from Sokoto. Usman lived for some years at Sifawa, teaching and writing, and in 1815 moved to Sokoto, where Bello built him a house. He died there on 20 April 1817, and Bello succeeded him.

In principle, officials were to be chosen for learning and piety rather than by hereditary succession, and the state appointed Muslim judges, market inspectors and prayer leaders. All land was declared waqf, held for the whole community; rulers allocated land to families, who could inherit but not sell it. Taxes were reorganised according to Islamic legal categories.

The caliphate kept expanding for decades after Usman’s death. By the mid-nineteenth century it stretched from present-day Burkina Faso to Cameroon and included more than thirty emirates, with a population often estimated at ten to twenty million people.

Usman’s thought combined Maliki legal scholarship with Sufi spirituality. He belonged to the Qadiriyya order, and he reported mystical visions: in 1789 a vision led him to believe he had been granted special spiritual gifts, and in the 1790s he described a vision of ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the order’s founder. His litanies (wird) are still recited.

Justice was his central political theme. A saying associated with his writing, drawing on earlier Muslim political thought, holds that a kingdom can endure with unbelief but not with injustice. He condemned oppression, bribery, unfair taxes, seizure of land and imprisonment on false charges, and argued for institutions such as the public treasury (bayt al-māl), market supervision (ḥisba), zakat and endowments.

He also drew a sharp line between Muslim and non-Muslim government. In Tanbīh al-ikhwān he argued that the status of a land follows its ruler: a land ruled by an unbeliever is a land of unbelief, which a Muslim may be obliged to leave. Combined with his judgement that the Hausa kings were unbelievers in practice, this argument justified both the hijra and the jihad.

Education was the third theme. He criticised scholars who left women “abandoned like beasts” in ignorance, taught women and men, and educated his daughters alongside his sons. This made him controversial among some scholars of his day, and it shaped a family tradition of women’s learning.

Usman wrote in Arabic for scholars and in Fulfulde and Hausa, written in Arabic script (ʿAjamī), for wider audiences. Estimates of his output differ: modern scholars list more than a hundred prose works, and counts of his poems range widely depending on what is included. The Nigerian scholar Ismail Balogun compiled a list of 115 works.

Among the best-known are Iḥyāʾ al-sunna wa-ikhmād al-bidʿa (The Revival of the Sunna and the Extinguishing of Innovation), a guide to correct practice; Kitāb al-farq (The Book of the Difference), contrasting just Muslim government with the ways of the Hausa kings; Bayān wujūb al-hijra ʿalā al-ʿibād (Explanation of the Obligation of Migration), a legal treatise on hijra, jihad and government; Tanbīh al-ikhwān; Nūr al-albāb; and the circular letter known as Wathīqat ahl al-Sūdān.

His brother Abdullahi and his son Muhammad Bello were also prolific authors, and their accounts of the jihad, such as Abdullahi’s Tazyīn al-waraqāt and Bello’s Infāq al-maysūr, are key historical sources. Together with the writings of Nana Asma’u, they make the Sokoto movement one of the best-documented episodes of precolonial African history from the inside.

Usman’s daughter Nana Asma’u (1793–1864) became one of the most celebrated writers of the Sokoto Caliphate. Born at Degel, she lived through the jihad as a child, wrote more than sixty surviving works in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa, and advised her brother Muhammad Bello and later rulers.

In 1838 she organised the ʿYan Taru (“those who gather together”), a network of women teachers who travelled to teach rural women, many of them newly incorporated into the caliphate. She translated and adapted her father’s works into local languages, spreading his ideas far beyond Arabic-reading elites.

Her career shows how Usman’s emphasis on women’s education worked in practice: within the norms of a society that expected veiling and separation of the sexes, women of his family studied, taught and wrote as recognised scholars.

The jihad and the later expansion of the caliphate caused great suffering. Villages were raided, cities were sacked, and many people were killed or captured. Communities that refused to submit, including many non-Muslim peoples on the caliphate’s frontiers, experienced the state mainly as a source of slave raids.

Usman condemned the enslavement of free Muslims, but Islamic law as he interpreted it allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims captured in war. Under his successors, raiding and plantation agriculture expanded enormously. Historians such as Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn estimate that by 1900 the caliphate held at least one million and perhaps as many as two and a half million enslaved people, making it one of the largest slave societies of the modern world.

Remembering this does not cancel Usman’s role as a reformer and scholar, but it explains why his legacy is read differently by different communities in Nigeria and its neighbours today, including by the descendants of those who were conquered or enslaved.

Usman’s movement belonged to a longer wave of West African Islamic reform that had already produced states in Bundu, Futa Toro and Futa Jallon. In turn it inspired later movements: Seku Amadu founded the Massina state in the inner Niger delta (which came to control Djenné), and al-Hajj Umar Tal, who spent time in Sokoto and married into Usman’s family, founded the Toucouleur empire.

The caliphate survived until 1903, when British forces under Frederick Lugard took Sokoto; German and French forces took other parts of its territory. The British abolished the caliphate’s sovereignty but kept the emirs and the Sultan of Sokoto as part of their system of indirect rule. The Sultan of Sokoto, a descendant of Usman, remains the most important traditional religious leader for many Nigerian Muslims.

In independent Nigeria, Usman is honoured in the name of Usmanu Danfodiyo University in Sokoto, and his writings and sayings are widely quoted. Politicians of Northern Nigeria, including Ahmadu Bello, the region’s first premier and a descendant of Muhammad Bello, drew on the caliphate as a model of moral government.

Our knowledge of Usman comes overwhelmingly from the writings of the movement itself: his own treatises and poems, Abdullahi’s Tazyīn al-waraqāt, Muhammad Bello’s Infāq al-maysūr, Waziri Gidado’s Rawḍ al-jinān (which lists his companions and family), and poems by Nana Asma’u. These are rich, detailed and written close to the events, but they are also apologetic: they explain why the jihad was just and why its enemies were unbelievers.

The perspective of the Hausa kings and of non-Muslim communities survives far less directly, mainly through oral traditions, the counter-arguments of Bornu’s al-Kanemi, and later colonial ethnography. Historians therefore read the Sokoto sources against their grain, asking, for example, whether the account of Yunfa’s assassination attempt or of the Gobir kings’ ‘paganism’ reflects polemic as well as fact.

Dates are another problem. Sources give different years for Usman’s audience with Sultan Bawa (1780s), the start of his studies with Jibril ibn Umar, the succession of Yunfa (1801–1803), and his withdrawal from government (1809–1812). Conversion between the Islamic and Gregorian calendars adds further uncertainty. This page gives ranges where the sources disagree.

Colonial British writers usually called the state the “Fulani Empire,” implying the rule of one ethnic group over others. In the 1960s, at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Abdullahi Smith and his student Murray Last promoted the name “Sokoto Caliphate”; Last’s 1966 doctoral thesis and his 1967 book of that name made the term standard. Last later explained that the choice was partly intellectual, to use a properly Islamic category, and partly political, since the new government of Northern Nigeria sought a moral model in the caliphate. Some scholars, especially in French (l’empire peul), still prefer the older labels.

Interpretations differ accordingly. One line, strong in Mervyn Hiskett’s biography The Sword of Truth, reads Usman primarily as a religious reformer within the Islamic tradition of renewal (tajdīd). Another stresses social revolution: peasants and pastoralists rising against predatory taxation and slave raiding. A third emphasises Fulani ethnic solidarity, noting that nearly all the new emirs were Fulani. Most recent work treats these as intertwined rather than exclusive.

Paul Lovejoy has placed the jihad within a global “Age of Revolutions,” alongside the American, French and Haitian revolutions, arguing that West African jihads were among the era’s great political upheavals and that their captives carried their experience across the Atlantic, for example into slave revolts in Bahia, Brazil. This comparative framing is influential but debated, since the jihad’s goals were not those of secular republicanism.

The most contested intellectual issue was takfīr, declaring nominal Muslims to be unbelievers. Usman’s teacher Jibril ibn Umar took a hard line, holding that serious sins could place a person outside Islam; Usman later disagreed with him and adopted a more cautious position for ordinary believers. For rulers, however, he argued that practices such as sacrifices to spirits, unjust confiscation and protecting un-Islamic customs made the Hausa sultans unbelievers “even though they may profess the religion of Islam.”

From this followed a chain of legal reasoning found in works such as Bayān wujūb al-hijra: Muslims living under an unbelieving ruler must emigrate if they can; the community that emigrates must choose an imam; and that imam may lawfully wage jihad. The Sokoto leaders drew heavily on earlier Maliki and North African authorities, including the fifteenth-century scholar Muhammad al-Maghili’s replies to the ruler of Songhay, and on al-Mawardi’s theory of government.

Al-Kanemi of Bornu challenged precisely this reasoning, arguing that Bornu was a Muslim land whose rulers’ faults did not justify war. The correspondence between him and Muhammad Bello is a major document of Islamic political debate in Africa, and it shows that the legitimacy of the jihad was disputed by Muslim scholars at the time, not only by later critics.